Rants Within the Undead God

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Rants Within the Undead God

Benjamin Cain

RantsWithinTheUndeadGod.blogspot.ca
Copyright © 2011 Benjamin Cain
Dedicated to the omegas
Chapters
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Prologue i
The Rant Within the Undead God i
Introduction 1
Happiness is Unbecoming 1
Part One: Religion 15

Theism
The Theism vs Atheism Farce 16
The Psychedelic Basis of Theism 19
Theism: Does its Irrationality Matter? 31
Life of Pi’s Argument for Theism 46
The Helpful Strangeness of Fundamentalism 57
Does God Write Books? 69
Christian Chutzpah: Why Christianity is the Worst Religion 78
Christian Crudities: Aesthetic Condemnation of Christian Myths 94
Atheism
The Curse of Reason 111
Should Atheists Mourn the Death of God? 123
Hyper-Rationality and the Two Cultures 130
 Scientism: Modern Pagan Religion 136
Untangling Scientific and Philosophical Atheism 152
Sam Harris’s Scientific Morality 169
Jerry Coyne on Scientism and Freewill 182
Can Evil Derive from Atheism? 195
Existential Cosmicism
Nietzsche and Secular Liberalism 206
From Theism to Cosmicism 215
Lovecraftian Horror and Pragmatism 228
Inkling of an Unembarrassing Postmodern Religion 234
The World’s Creation as God’s Self-Destruction 248
Varieties of Mysticism 256
Darwinism and Nature’s Undeadness 266
Science and the Matrix Metaphor 278
Science and God: The Ironic Theophany 286
New Atheist and Spiritual Atheist in Dialogue 298
Buddhism and Existential Angst 316
Part Two: Politics 327

Liberalism and Conservatism

Liberalism: From Scientism to Nihilism 328
Should Liberals Try to Win More Elections by being Less
Rational? 338
Existential Grimness and Cornel West’s Catastrophic Love 353
Atheism Plus and the Liberal Conceit of Hyper-Rationality 367
Conservatism: Myth-Making for Oligarchy 372
Oligarchy
Oligarchy: Nature’s Inhumanity to Humans 387
How Godlike Oligarchs Train Consumers by Eliminating Babies
and Old People from Pop Culture 404
Untangling Liberalism and Libertarianism 417
 Political Correctness: Spellbinding the Masses 427
American Politics
Obama or Romney? 441
The Subtext of the First Romney-Obama Debate 452
The Closely-Divided US: A Case Study of the Matrix 456
Part Three: Sexuality 460
Is Love the Meaning of Life? 461
Embarrassment by Sexual Ecstasy 473
The Perversity of the Sexual Norm 485
Sex is Violent: Why the F-Word is Taboo 491
Individualism and the Sexual Attraction of Opposites 498
Should We Procreate to Honour our Ancestors? 508
Part Four: Pop Culture 517
Ethics and Culture
Modernism and Postmodernism 518
The Philosophy of Existential Cosmicism 524
Morality and the Aesthetic Conception of Life 538
Case Studies of Aesthetic Morality: Abortion and Gay Marriage 548
Comedy and Existential Cosmicism 561
Philosophy and Social Engineering 566
Existential Cosmicism and Technology 579
Entertainment
Games, Sports, and Mixed Martial Arts 584
The Emptiness of Postmodern Art (and of its Consumers) 594
Male-bashing in Advertising: A Sordid Business 604
Sheldon Cooper: The Nerd’s Paradox 607
The Abuse of Light in the Films of Spielberg and Michael Bay 614
Woody Allen’s Curious Intellectualism 620
Sacrificial Offering to Our Lord, The Dentist 628
 Mental Health
Mental Disorder as Monstrosity 633
The Question of Antinatalism 642
Revenge of the Omega Men 656
Defending Existential Cosmicism 665
Afterward 676
We’re the Squishy Monsters! 676
Dirge in the Undead God 681
 i

Prologue:
The Rant within the Undead God
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Some centuries before the Common Era, in a sweltering outskirt of the ancient Roman
Empire, a nameless wanderer, unkempt and covered in rags, climbed atop a boulder in
the midst of a bustling market, cleared his throat and began shouting for no apparent
reason:

“Mark my harangue, monstrous abode of the damned and you denizens of this
godforsaken place! I have only my stern words to give you, though most of you don’t
recognize the existential struggle you’re in; so I’ll cry foul, slink off into the approaching
night, and we’ll see if my rant festers in your mind, clearing the way for alien flowers to
bloom. How many poor outcasts, deranged victims of heredity, and forlorn drifters have
shouted doom from the rooftops? In how many lands and ages have fools kept the faith
from the sidelines of decadent courts, the aristocrats mocking us as we point our finger
at a thousand vices and leave no stone unturned? And centuries from now, many more
artists, outsiders, and mystics will make their chorus heard in barely imaginable ways,
sending their subversive message, I foresee, from one land to the next in an instant,
through a vast ethereal web called the internet. Those philosophers will look like me,
unwashed and ill-fed, but they’ll rant from the privacy of their lairs or from public
terminals linked by the invisible information highway. Instead of glaring at the accused
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in person, they’ll mock in secret, parasitically turning the technological power of a global
empire against itself.

“But how else shall we resist in this world in which we’re thrown? No one was there to
hurl us here where as a species we’re born, where we pass our days and lay down to
die--not we, who might have been asked and might have refused the offer of
incarnation, and not a personal God who might be blamed. Nevertheless, we’re thrown
here, because the world isn’t idle; natural forces stir, they complexify and evolve; this
mindless cosmos is neither living nor dead, but undead, a monstrous abomination that
mocks the comforting myths we take for granted, about our supernatural inner essence.
No spirit is needed to make a trillion worlds and creatures; the undead forces of the
cosmos do so daily, creating and destroying with no rational plan, but still manifesting a
natural pattern. What is this pattern, sewn into the fabric of reality? What is the
simulated agenda of this headless horseman that drags us behind the mud-soaked
hooves of its prancing beast? Just this: to create everything and then to destroy
everything! Let that sink in, gentle folk. The universe opens up the book of all
possibilities, has a glance at every page with its undead, glazed-over eyes, and
assembles miniscule machines--atoms and molecules--to make each possibility an
actuality somewhere in space and time, in this universe or the next, until each
configuration is exhausted and then all will fly apart until not one iota of reality remains
to carry out such blasphemous work. How many ways can a nonexistent God be shown
up, I ask you? Everything a loving God might have made, the undead leviathan creates
instead, demonstrating spirit’s superfluity, and then that monster, the magically
animated carcass we inhabit will finally reveal its headlessness, the void at the center of
all things, and nothing shall be left after the Big Rip.

“I ask again, how else to resist the abominable inhumanity of our world, but to make a
show of detaching from some natural processes of cosmic putrefaction, to register our
denunciation in all existential authenticity, and yet to cling to the bowels of this beast like
the parasites we nonetheless are? And how else to rebel against our false humanity,
against our comforting delusions, other than by replacing old, worn-out myths with new
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ones? For ours is a war on two fronts: we’re faced with a horrifying natural reality, which
causes us to flee like children into a world of make-believe, whereupon we outgrow
some bedtime stories and need others to help us sleep.

“We conquered masses in what will one day be called the ancient world have become
disenchanted with Roman myths, as the cynicism of the elites who expect us to honour
the self-serving Roman spin on local fables infects the whole Roman world. Now that
Alexander the Great has opened the West to the East, we long for revitalization from the
fountain of exotic Eastern mysticism, just as millennia from now I foresee that the
wisdom of our time will inspire those who will call themselves modern, liberal, and
progressive. And just as our experiments with Eastern ideas will afford our descendants
a hiding place in Christian fantasies, which will distract Europeans from their Dark Age
after the fall of Rome, so too the modern Renaissance will bear tainted fruit, as
technoscientific optimism will give way to the postmodern malaise.

“Our wizards and craftsmen are dunces compared to the scientists and engineers to
come. Romans believe they’ve mastered the forces of nature, and indeed their
monuments and military power are staggering. But skeptics and rationalists will
eventually peer into the heart of matter and into the furthest reaches of the universe,
and so shall confirm once and for all the horrifying fact that nature is the undead, self-
shaping god. The modernists will pretend to be unfazed by that revelation as they
exploit natural processes to build wonders that will encourage the masses: diseases will
be cured and food will be plentiful; all races, creeds, and sexes will be made legally
equal; and--lowly mammals that they are--the future folk will personally venture into
outer space! Alas, though, I discern another motif in reality’s weave, besides the undead
behemoth’s implicit mockery of God: civilizations rise and fall according to the logic of
the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Take any group of animals that need to live together to
survive, and they will spontaneously form a power hierarchy, as the group is stabilized
by a concentration of power that enables the weaker members to be most efficiently
managed. Power corrupts, of course, and so leaders become decadent and their social
hierarchy eventually implodes. The Roman elite that now rules most of the known world
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will overreach in their arrogance and will face the wrath of the hitherto conquered
hordes. As above, so below: the universe actualizes each possibility only to extinguish it
in favour of the next cosmic fad.

“And so likewise in the American civilization to come, plutocrats will reign from their
golden toilets, but their vanity will undo their economic hegemony as they’ll take more
and more of the nation’s wealth while the masses of consumers stagnate like neglected
cattle, again laying the groundwork for social implosion. For a time, that future world I
foresee will trust in the ideal of each person’s liberty, without appreciating the irony that
when we remove the social constraints on freedom of expression, we clear the way for
the more indifferent natural constraint of the Iron Law to take effect, and so we establish
a more grotesque rule of the few over the many. Thus, American government will be
structured to prevent an artificial tyranny, by establishing a conflict between its branches
and by limiting the leader’s terms of office, but this hamstringing of government will
create a power vacuum that will be filled by the selfish interests of the mightiest private
citizens. In whichever time or place they’re found, those glorious, sociopathic few are
avatars of undead nature, ruling without conscience or plan for the future; they build
economic or military empires only to bring them crashing down as their animal instincts
prove incapable of withstanding temptation. Conservatives excel at devising
propaganda to rationalize oligarchy; modern liberals will experiment with progressive
socialism only to inadvertently confirm the Iron Law, and so liberalism will give way to
postmodern technocracy, to the dreary pragmatism of maintaining the oligarchic status
quo while the hollow liberals pretend to offer a genuine political alternative to
conservatism.

“What myths we live by to avoid facing the horror of our existential predicament! We
personify the sun and the moon the way a child makes toys even out of rocks and twigs.
The scientists of the far future, though, will investigate not just the outer mechanisms,
but will master the workings of human thought. They’ll learn that our folk tales about the
majesty of human nature are at best legends: we are not as conscious, rational, or free
as we typically assume. Our ridiculous lust for sex proves this all by itself. We have
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contempt for older virgins who fail to attract a mate, even though almost everyone would
be mortified to be caught in the sex act; at least no one remains to pity the throngs of
copulating human animals, save the marginalized drifters who detach from the
monstrous world. Psychologists will discover that while we can deliberate and attend to
formal logic, we also make snap, holistic judgments, which is to say associative,
emotional and intuitive leaps. Most of our mind is unconscious and reason is largely a
means of manipulating others for social advantage. But even as modern rationalists will
learn as much, rushing to exploit human weaknesses for profit, they will praise
ultraconsciousness, ultrarationality and ultrafreedom. These secular humanists will
worship their machines and a character named Spock, and they’ll assume that if only
society were properly managed, progress would ensue. Thus, Reason shall render all
premodern delusions obsolete, but that last, modern delusion of rationalism will be
overcome only through postmodern weariness from all ideologies.

“The curse of reason is that thinking enough to discover the appalling truth of natural life
prevents the thinker from being happy. That curse might be mitigated, though, if we
recognize that the irrational part of our mind has its own standards. We crave stories to
live by, models to admire, and artworks to inspire us. Our philosophical task as
accursed animals is to assemble all that we learn into a coherent worldview, reconciling
the world’s impersonality with our crude and short-sighted preferences. Happiness is for
the ignorant or the deluded sleep-walkers; those who are kept awake by the ghost story
of unpopular knowledge are too melancholy and disgusted by what they see to take
much joy. When you face the facts that there is no God, no afterlife, no immortal soul,
no transcendent human right, no perfect justice, no absolute morality, no nonhuman
meaning of life, and no ultimate hope for the universe, you’ll understand that a happy
life is the most farcical one. We sentient, intelligent mammals are cursed to be alienated
from the impersonal world and from the myths we trust to personalize our thought
processes. We are instinctive story-tellers: our inner voice narrates our deeds as we
come to remember them, and we naturally gossip and anthropomorphize, evolved as
we are to negotiate a social hierarchy. But how do we cope with the fact that the truest
known narrative belongs to the horror genre? How shall we sleep at night, relative
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children that we all are, preoccupied with the urges of our illusory ego, when we’re
destined to look askance at optimistic myths, inheriting the postmodern horror show?

“Shall I proceed to the final shocker of this woeful tale that enervates those with the
treacherous luxury of freedom of thought? Given that nature is the undead self-creator
of its forms, what is the last word, the climax of this rant within the undead god? While
there’s no good reason to believe there is or ever was a transcendent, personal deity,
we instinctively understand things by relating them to what’s most familiar, which is us;
thus, we personify the unknown, fearing unseen monsters in the dark, and so even
atheists are compelled to blame their misfortune on some deity, crying out to no one
when they accidentally injure themselves. But if there’s no room in nature for this
personal God whose possible existence we’re biologically compelled to contemplate,
and there’s nothing for this God to do in the universe that shapes itself, the supreme
theology is the most dire one, namely the speculation that Philipp Mainlander will one
day formulate before promptly going insane and killing himself: God is literally dead.
God committed elaborate suicide by transforming himself into something that could be
perfectly destroyed, which is the material universe. God became corrupted by his
omnipotence and insane by his alienation, and so the creativity of his ultimate act is an
illusion: the world’s evolution is the process of God’s self-destruction, and we are vermin
feeding off of God’s undying corpse. Sure, this is just a fiction, but it’s the most plausible
way of fitting God--and so also our instinctive, irrational theistic inclination--into the rest
of the ghastly postmodern worldview to come.

“Is there a third pattern manifesting throughout the cosmos, one of resistance and
redemption? Do intelligent life forms evolve everywhere only to discover the tragedy of
their existential situation, to succumb to madness or else to respond somehow with
honour and grace? Perhaps we’ll learn to re-engineer ourselves by merging with our
machines so that we no longer seek a higher purpose and we’ll reconcile ourselves to
our role as agents of the universe’s decay and ultimate demise. Maybe an artistic
genius will emerge who will enchant us with a stirring vision of how we might make the
best of our predicament. From the skeptical, pessimistic viewpoint, which will be so
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easily justified in that sorrowful postmodern time, even our noblest effort to overcome
our absurd plight will seem just another twist in the sickening melodrama, yet another
stage of cosmic collapse; a cynic can afford to scoff at anything when his well of disgust
is bottomless. But there’s a wide variety of human characters, as befits our position in a
universe that tries out and discards all possibilities. I rant to the void until my throat
aches and my eyes water. The undead god has no ears to hear, no eyes to behold its
hideous reflection, and no voice with which to apologize or to instruct--unless you count
the faculties of the stowaway creatures that are left alone to make sense of where they
stand. So may some of you grow magnificent flowers from the soil of my words!”

The sun had set and most of the townsfolk had long since returned to their homes,
having ignored or taken the opportunity to spit upon the doomsayer. A few remained
until the end of his diatribe, their mouths hanging open in dismay and when they
glanced at each other, asking what should be done, they lost sight of the preacher as he
had indeed scurried away as promised, homeless, into the dark.
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Introduction:
Happiness is Unbecoming
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Many people profess to be confused about the question of life’s meaning, of whether
there’s a best way of life: the question is a philosophical one, and since philosophy has
so little cultural prestige, people suspect that the question is idle. These people are
doubly mistaken, since their behaviours if not their words indicate that they typically
accept not just the question, but the hedonist’s answer to it. The best way of life is
assumed to be the one filled with the most happiness, which is to say the most
contentment and pleasure.

But should happiness be the ultimate goal of a person’s life? There’s a clue in the fact
that people are widely thought to be perfectly happy only in heaven, when God shows
his face and directly rules over creation. The myth of heaven, in which disembodied
people feel ultimate joy on a spiritual plane, implies, of course, that there are presently
obstacles to feeling happy. In theistic terms, the main obstacle is God’s remoteness
from the world, which permits the inhumane forces of nature to dictate the course of our
lives. Some people win the lottery, others get hit by lightning, while nothing of lasting
significance happens to the majority.
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In nontheistic terms, there’s no God and there’s just the frigid, impersonal universe,
evolving along its alien trajectory. Far from being at home in nature, we live in one of the
few, relatively miniscule spots that aren’t perfectly lethal to us; were we to try to explore
the outer reaches, we’d be snuffed out. We can take pockets of the Earth with us in
spaceships, but we’d die within them before passing much beyond merely the
neighbourhood of our own solar system. Most of the universe is thus effectively hostile
towards us, has no mind that can be changed on the subject, and seems far beyond our
power to modify to our benefit. Even on Earth, our oasis, the universe rears its alien
head in the frugality of natural selection, which equips species with barely enough
adaptations to survive, if even with those, so that shortages of resources are
commonplace and many people suffer rather than flourish. A meteor could destroy us
all as one wiped out the dinosaurs, making nonsense of any pretension to our cosmic
importance. I’ll call the set of such obstacles to our happiness, whether they be
characterized theistically or nontheistically, Our Existential Situation (OES).

OES, then, necessitates the myth of heaven in an afterlife, on the assumption that
happiness is the ultimate good in life. We can’t be perfectly happy here and now, and
some of us are prevented from being even remotely happy, but there will be a time and
a place in which everything will change for the better. I’d add, though, that when our
response to OES is weighed by an ethical standard, we’re left with the normative
implication that happiness should not be our ultimate goal in the first place.

Kinds of Happiness Despite OES

To see this, consider the spectrum of possible relations between happiness and OES.
At one extreme, in heaven, there’s an ontological split between the two. The situation
becomes ideal for happiness, because the natural barriers are obliterated by God at a
metaphysical, supernatural level. Next, the philosopher, Robert Nozick, conceived of a
thought experiment in which there’s only a physical split between the two: imagine
there’s a virtual reality machine that makes the user happy in a simulated world, as the
machine prevents the real world from impinging on the user. In this case, the person’s
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happiness would be more fragile than the supernaturally-guaranteed sort in heaven,

because the machine, being just another part of nature, could break down, interfering
with the virtual paradise. Then there’s the case in which there’s only a psychological
split between them: a happy person may be ignorant of the facts of OES or else may
pretend that there’s no such thing, subscribing to myths or fairy tales so that the
individual effectively lives in a make-believe world without the need of an external
happiness machine. Finally, there’s the case in which there’s no split between them, in
which OES thus prevents someone from being happy. This prevention can be physical,
as in the case of a natural disaster or a genetic deformity, or psychological, as in the
case of the melancholic pessimist or ascetic who becomes morbidly fixated on the facts
of OES and feels that contentment is unseemly under those circumstances.

Let’s consider the positions in this spectrum from an ethical standpoint. Details are
sketchy about heaven, and not just because no one’s been there and back; as
Christopher Hitchens likes to say, heaven represents a “celestial dictatorship” in which
we’re swept up in God’s arms and forced to have our minds blown by the infinite
majesty of his presence. The fact that theists are more scared of hell than of heaven
shows that they still operate with a childishly anthropomorphic view of God. Being
hugged by a human parent may be comforting, but the prospect of being “hugged” by
the necessarily alien source of all creation, and thus of OES, should terrify us, which is
why “fear of God” is a proper synonym for “faith in God.” Ethically speaking, then, a
finite creature’s endurance of heaven should be heroic. But of course, this esoteric,
mystical understanding of what theism amounts to undermines the exoteric promise that
people are happy in heaven. Anyone who would be so happy must have access to a
psychological means of keeping the terror at bay, which reduces this position in the
spectrum to the case of the psychological split between OES and happiness. I’ll reserve
judgment, then, until I come to that position.

What of the ethics of entering the happiness machine? According to Nozick, were we
given the option, most would choose to remain in the real world despite the loss of
perfect feelings of happiness, which suggests that happiness isn’t a matter of mere
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feelings. Regardless, the ethical failing of opting for the machine would seem to be
cowardice, since the machine would provide an escape hatch from earthly troubles. The
nobler, heroic choice would be to face those troubles regardless of the cost to one’s
feelings. As for the psychological split, the ethical judgment seems similar. The mental
walls have the same effect as the machine’s physical walls that prevent harsh reality
from intruding on a dream world. It’s hard to believe anyone could be ignorant of any
aspect of OES, but even were this possible, such a person would be either mentally
incompetent and thus incapable of human levels of happiness, or else guilty of the vice
of incuriosity if not that of cowardice. Lastly, there’s the tragic hero who carries on with
no illusions, whose confrontation with the facts of OES takes its toll on his or her
capacity for pleasure. Such a person could be expected to lose in life’s races, because
the pessimist tends to be shunned and social connections are needed for success as
well as for happiness. Now, the person who is physically prevented from being happy
may be just a victim with no special virtue, unless she stands up to the alien face of
nature despite the personal cost, as in the case of someone who chooses to go on
living with a severe physical deformity. In any case, ethically speaking, the tragic hero
shines.

Assuming, then, that we should be ethical and that OES is a fact, we shouldn’t seek to
be happy. That’s my unsettling conclusion. Note that the ancient Greek philosopher,
Aristotle, could take the primary ethical goal, on the contrary, to be happiness, because
he anthropomorphized nature instead of knowing about the stomach-churning reality of
OES. Aristotle viewed all of nature as imbued with purpose, so that rocks literally
succeed when they move downward to their natural home, while air succeeds when it
rises, and all of nature works towards The Good. We could feel at home amidst so
much teleology, so many human values possessed animistically by everything in the
universe. But scientists have shown that that’s not our existential situation. And so
happiness, contentment, or joy makes sense in some situations but not in others: in our
actual situation, happiness is not just often mixed with anxiety, sorrow, or pain, but is
always awkward and guilt-producing as soon as we step back and appreciate OES.
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Knowledge versus Happiness

Take, for example, a child who begs his mother for a lollipop, is awarded the treat and is
overjoyed, slurping the sugar out of it. This is an uncontroversial, perhaps even
archetypal case of joyous contentment. We praise the boy for enjoying his treat, for
“taking life easy” while he can (assuming the boy doesn’t have excessive access to
candy, causing obesity). We smile and perhaps feel a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia,
longing to relive our own such carefree moments.

But widen your perspective to encompass the child’s existential predicament, his
inhumane physical environment that makes possible his pain just as much as his
pleasure. We then see that his pleasure is due partly to his ignorance of the scope of
OES, to his disinterest in planning obsessively for the future in which the indifferent
world will threaten to crush his dreams. The child doesn’t know the evolutionary reason
why he loves the taste of sugar despite its ruinous effect on the body when consumed in
abundance. Moreover, the child lacks self-control and his parents have to restrain his
self-destructive impulses. Mother Nature thus created this grotesque relationship
between the infant or child, on the one hand, and the parent on the other, betting that
the parent’s pity for the former’s helplessness will cause the adult to care for the little
one. And does Mother Nature do this for the child’s benefit? No, nature selects the
genes, and the parent’s pity is a mechanism for propagating them. What good are the
genes by themselves? What’s their value without the travails of their host organisms? If
none, then those travails are absurd. When viewed in this broader context, it becomes
harder to smile innocently at the child’s beaming face as he stuffs his gullet with candy,
harder to excuse his moment of joy as a respite from OES: there is no escape from the
fact that sensitive, sentient beings don’t belong in brutal nature.

This problem with happiness is a very old one. In one of the founding myths of western
cultures, the story of the Garden of Eden, Life is divided from Knowledge, our human
representatives eat from the Tree of Knowledge, but before they can eat from the other
tree, they’re cast out of the garden and condemned to years of toil and misery. The Tree
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of Knowledge symbolizes, in part, an appreciation of OES, a god’s eye view of what’s

outside the garden, such as the fact that God sent a serpent to test his human
creations, and the Tree of Life symbolizes not just immortality but the capacity to live
well, as a god in heaven. From the beginning of recorded history, then, we’ve suspected
that consciousness of our surroundings may be a curse, or at least that it’s comparable
to a two-sided sword. There’s a conflict between understanding what’s actually
going on in the natural world, and being able to feel good about being in that
world.

The monotheist tends to whitewash this conflict by blaming us for it: we simply suffer
from original sin which prevents us from seeing that this is the best of all possible
worlds, that there’s good in everything and that God who is the ultimate good sustains
the universe for a higher reason which makes sense of the suffering and of the
universe’s apparent indifference to life. Thus the monotheist blames the messenger. We
don’t make the world as it is, nor are we responsible for our manifestly dark existential
situation; we just discover that the enchanted perspective enjoyed by people who lived
prior to modern science is like the ignorance of Adam and Eve before they ate from the
Tree of Knowledge. Even as they frolicked in the garden, blissfully unaware of the
serpent (i.e. God’s higher plan for humans) or of their capacity for tragic knowledge, the
serpent and the tree existed in the garden, according to the myth. Likewise, the natural
properties of the universe, which are quantified by exotic mathematical languages and
explained by mind-blowing scientific theories, and which alienate animals with
anthropocentric instincts like us, have always been objectively there, the causes of all of
our potential pains.

My point, then, isn’t that pleasure of any kind is always wrong; rather, my point is that
ethical pleasure must somehow overcome knowledge of OES. What counts as
happiness is typically pleasure that derives from luck, ignorance, or vices such as
cowardice or self-absorption, and is thus condemnable. What’s the ethical alternative to
this pleasure that’s artificially walled off from knowledge of OES? Pleasure tainted by a
tragic sensibility, joy periodically cut short by an internal reminder of the terrifying
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broader context of all human affairs, and a heroic commitment never to feel perfectly
comfortable in nature, a place which can no longer be our home. Science shows that
we’re effectively stranded in hostile territory, and that our activities are irrelevant to
cosmic processes that are beyond our control and that impinge on us in many ways.
Ethical pleasure must therefore be felt by a tragic, Nietzschean hero, someone who
understands OES and has the will to creatively overcome it.

Instrumentalism and Consumerism

There’s a liberal gambit for avoiding the thrust of this conclusion, which is to identify
happiness with success in attaining any goal at all. Thus, the serial killer who succeeds
at murdering is “happy” and the tragic hero who successfully overcomes OES is simply
“happy.” What makes this response a liberal one is its telltale avoidance of evaluating
goals, its scientistic, systems managerial focus on the abstract efficiency of means. The
liberal thus misses the difference between the positions in the spectrum, considered
above. The persons in heaven, in a happiness machine, in psychological denial of OES,
and tragically at one with OES may all be abstractly successful in achieving some goal
or other, but the difference between their goals makes for different kinds of life, and
those differences have ethical consequences.

The liberal’s notion of happiness is individualistic and subjective, and thus facilitates
consumption-driven societies in which mental states are sold along with material goods,
by associative advertising. As I say in my rant on liberalism, the liberal’s anachronistic
faith is that everyone is equal, as rational beings who have sovereign authority over
themselves. If people come to different conclusions about what makes them happy, so
be it: the world is ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. This Kantian
individualism collapses into postmodern nihilism, into a power vacuum occupied in
capitalistic democracies by demagogues who tell so-called autonomous moral ends
unto themselves (i.e. rational persons) what to think, feel, and consume.
 8

Then there’s the positive psychologist who explains the mechanisms associated with
happiness as opposed to those that cause mental illness. For example, one aspect of
happiness is thought to be a feeling of flow, rather than of anxiety, while at work. As with
the liberal, the positive psychologist can’t address the normative question of whether
happiness should be a person’s ultimate goal, and still claim to be practicing science.
Just as a psychologist can only presuppose the badness of quantitatively abnormal
mental states, or risk committing the naturalistic fallacy of attempting to derive
normative statement from scientific factual ones, the psychologist can only presuppose
the rightness of the most desired goal, for the same reason.

Liberalism and positive psychology, then, are accomplices to the double failure of the
pursuit of materialistic happiness. The first ethical failure is the foolhardy plan to be
happy in spite of our existential predicament. In the long run, OES won’t let us be happy
unless happiness is understood as something tragic. The second such failure is our
settling for the lowest kinds of pleasure and for fleeting moments of contentment, which
are all that a capitalistic, materialistic culture can afford us. After all, the reason pleasure
is our highest goal in the west is that capitalism is driven by our weaknesses, such as
our egoism and greed. As I explain in “Conservatism,” the idea is that human society
should be just as wild as the jungle, since competition compels the environment to pick
out novel forms of complexity, and according to libertarian conservatism, this natural
selection is the most divine creative force. So instead of trying to out-think nature, we
should unleash our primitive impulses, thinking only of short-term, personal profit and
giving in to fallacious associative advertisements; thus, we let nature take its course and
separate successes from failures. When reduced to pleasure-seeking animals, we feel
that happiness, rather than some more ascetic duty, is our life’s purpose.

But this social Darwinism backfires. Even were happiness our ultimate good, capitalism
tends to make the majority miserable. Businesses churn out an endless stream of
services and toys to play with, but in a free market in which the government is naturally
corrupted, the predators at the top devise Ponzi schemes to siphon money from the
bottom and--thinking only of their own short-term, personal profit--restrict the wages of
 9

the middle class so that eventually they can’t afford most products. In this way, the holy
pecking order is safeguarded. And instead of living like hedonic kings enjoying a feast in
our mansions, we often eat fast food and live in houses we can’t afford, but we’re
manipulated into believing that we’re living the good life. Ronald McDonald is always
smiling, so a flash of base pleasure from consuming fatty food must be the very stuff of
happiness; like that clown, we wear painted-on smiles.

On top of the pressure on us from wall-to-wall advertising, cognitive psychologists have

experimentally confirmed that we’re prone to a host of fallacies and biases, called
“heuristics,” most of which have the evolutionary function of inuring us to unpleasant
facts by papering over them. Our thought processes are evidently adapted to distort the
truth to make us feel comfortable in what would otherwise seem a terrifying alien
environment, to distract us from OES so that we can conduct our sexual transactions
and preserve the genes.

Again, liberal and psychological instrumentalism complement this charade, since these
cheerleaders for happiness can’t challenge the society’s underlying normative
assumptions and can speak only to how we might more efficiently succeed at being
happy, within the status quo parameters. If we want, above all, to be happy, despite the
facts of OES that make our world horribly absurd, and we delude ourselves into feeling
happy when we’re really victimized and bewildered, that’s because our cultural
standards have been so lowered to make way for oligarchic capitalism, for the reduction
of high renaissance culture--the product of religious rationalizations of monarchy, the
rise of scientific reason, and godlike artistry--to a beastly struggle for survival so that a
new class of more nihilistic predatorial oligarchs can lord it over the rest of us from their
perches in the natural pecking order. Given this calamity, the liberal and the positive
psychologist accept its underlying causes and, respectively, merely fine-tune the system
like a wannabe engineer or investigate the more nitty gritty, proximal causes of the most
desired mental state.
 10

Conclusion

Most people want to be happy; if they can’t be rich or famous, at least they can still be
content with what little they have. But an appreciation of OES turns everything on its
head. The rich and the famous are ethically worse off than the poor, not because the
poor inherit the kingdom of God, but because the poor can’t build such elaborate
fantasy worlds to protect them from that which makes their life absurd: their alienation
from the natural world. Human life does have a meaning, in the sense of a value, and
that value is, as Kurtz says in Apocalypse Now, “the horror, the horror.” Our life also has
an ethical purpose, which is to deal heroically with that horror, not to try to escape from
it by fleeing to transitory, base pleasures that aren’t earned by confronting our
predicament which is the fact that we’re fragile, sentient beings in an alien cosmos that
destroys as freely as it creates. Precisely because we are so fragile, because we
evolved not to ethically challenge the cosmos but to be preoccupied with a social game
that mixes the gene pool so that Mother Nature can keep her options open to fill some
future niche with a fresh species, we succumb to vainglorious myths and to the
temptation to follow our instincts and submit to religious or to capitalistic dominance
hierarchies.

One of these myths is that we ought to be pleased when we succeed in our work so that
we can rest contented, with no regrets. This myth fails to take into account the fact that
the more knowledge we acquire, the more we must regret having been born at all in the
nightmare of our dependence on the practices of an inhumane cosmos for our very
survival, let alone our happiness. No amount of hard work can obviate that regret,
unless it’s the work of suicide which is itself cowardly. That regret is just the anxiety of a
hapless animal that’s cursed to have discovered its existential plight. Pure happiness,
joy or contentment is a nonstarter for such a tragic creature. Ethically speaking,
anyone’s happiness on Earth is as obscene as any immaterial spirit’s bliss in heaven
while knowing about the everlasting holocaust in hell. So if we must smile when the
natural cycle spins to our benefit, let’s smile half-heartedly, sparing some revulsion for
 11

the fact that for sentient beings alone, that cycle, spinning mindlessly, uplifting and
crushing each of us in turn, might as well be a torture device.

Appendix: The Rich, Full Life

Among the throngs of shiny, happy people, there’s an upper tier in which are seated
those renowned for their more monumental contentment: not only are these blessed few
pleased with their lot and so unmoved by empathy for the suffering masses and
undisturbed by knowledge of our existential predicament, but they’ve managed to
accrue for themselves what we dub a Rich, Full Life (RFL). These champions of
egotism are personally fulfilled, to be sure, but that understates the completeness of
their triumph, since they’re happy many times over, as it were. The happiness of a
hundred ordinary folks doesn’t equal that of a single hero who’s blessed with an RFL,
who has traveled the whole world, garnered a bewildering variety of experiences,
succeeded in numerous fields, loved and been loved by countless life partners.

Enduring their torments far beyond that upper tier and the herd of cheerful consumers
and pragmatists, the inured losers moan in agony, crying in despair, trembling in horror.
The worst of these are said to be cursed with the opposite of the RFL, namely with an
Empty, Wasted one (EWL). Sometimes intentionally withdrawing from the race to
flourish, these self-tortured existentialists, mystical ascetics, and assorted omega men
and women are unhappy, to be sure; but time also passes them by, as do opportunities
for advancement, and so their mind comes to resemble a barren echo chamber filled by
their harping inner voice, bereft of memories of mountains climbed, friends and lovers
enjoyed, conventional challenges met, or luxuries consumed. All the struggles of their
ancestors have led, pitifully and tragically, to their withdrawal, to their dropping of the
torch.

Such is my dramatic way of drawing the politically correct distinction between the
happiest and unhappiest people. But let’s look closer at this pair of categories. Much of
the meaning of an RFL and of an EWL is relative: the person with a wide variety of
 12

enjoyments and successes is deemed all the happier by comparison with the person
with few if any of them. An RFL is praised and an EWL is pitied because they’re so far
apart from each other: the happiest people have won the race only by leaving far behind
the losers, and the unhappiest are those who can regret that they haven’t seen or done
as much as the winners. Another way to frame the distinction is to rank each life next to
the plethora of potential experiences that humans can have, in which case the happiest
are those who have at least a representative sample of those total experiences, while
the unhappiest are subhuman in that their accomplishments fall below that threshold.

However, if we broaden our perspective, we can compare the total number of types of
experience for humans to the number of potential experiences of more powerful
creatures who might roam solar systems or whole galaxies. Simplifying, we can
stipulate that there are, say, a million types of experiences for humans, confined as we
are to Earth and its near orbits, and that a person with an RFL accumulates a
representative sample of that total, say, ten thousand types of experience (including
pleasures and successes but also sorrows and character-building failures, of course). In
that case, there must be, say, a trillion potential experiences for organisms throughout
the natural universe.

With that bigger picture in mind, we can compare even the human RFL to the cosmic
RFL and argue by way of analogy that just as the human RFL is supposed to render
someone with less depth contemptible, by comparison, the human RFL must be
likewise contemptibly vacuous and provincial compared to the cosmic RFL. Compared
to British magnate Richard Branson, for example, the life of an omega man living in his
mother’s basement or a poor farmer scraping by in Haiti is a void perhaps not even
worth enduring. Likewise, though, compared to the manifold perceptions and challenges
of a member of a technoscientifically advanced spacefaring species, Branson might as
well be a hermit, since neither the human RFL nor the human EWL includes a
representative sample of the total number of potential macrocosmic experiences.
 13

Thus, we’re faced with a dilemma: either we follow the broader comparison which
belittles the accomplishment of the human RFL, in which case praise of the latter is
optional, at best, or else we spare the human RFL’s dignity and decline to engage in
that cosmic comparison or in the analogous one, with the human EWL, in which case
we should no longer despise the latter by its failure to measure up to the human RFL.

An objection should immediately come to mind: the analogy afforded by the so-called
broader perspective is weak, because the human RFL is possible for all humans
whereas the cosmic RFL is impossible for any of us. But the analogy appears strong
after all, because the human RFL is actually impossible or at least highly unlikely for
most unhappy people, whether because of their less fortunate outer circumstances or
because of their inner character which lacks the arrogance, egoism, sadism, narrow-
mindedness, or whatever conglomeration of vices is required to out-compete the hordes
of human beasts. Of course, no human can presently journey to other planets, let alone
galaxies or dimensions. But likewise, most people can’t afford a life as rich as
Branson’s: they lack the drive, the resources, and the opportunities. True, many
unhappy people likely have the chance to lead richer, fuller lives, thus approaching at
least a few steps toward the human RFL; but likewise, there must be some potential
even for present oligarchs to make great strides in space exploration. (See, for
example, Branson’s Virgin Airlines which takes customers into suborbital space, and
Planetary Resources Inc, the new business backed in part by James Cameron and
Google founder Larry Page, which will attempt to mine nearby asteroids for precious
metals and water.)

Suppose, though, my response to that objection doesn’t work and the analogy is weak
in that sense, because the cosmic RFL is much less possible for any of us than is the
human RFL. Still, the comparison that’s relevant to the normative difference between
the happiest and the unhappiest humans may be between only the conceptual
possibilities, not the practical ones. Intergalactic travel may be wildly impractical for any
of us, but we can all still imagine the grandeur of such a macrocosmic life (the longer life
span, the power of controlling whole worlds, the fellowship with other intelligent species,
 14

and so on). Likewise, unhappy people tend to be practically incapable of experiencing

much more of the world’s copious offerings, but they can still be tortured by the
knowledge of what they might have been and indeed--now that the internet has made
the planet much smaller, in a sense--of how happier people actually live. We don’t yet
know of actual extraterrestrials, but thanks to science fiction we can all imagine the
cosmic RFL and thus compare such a life to the human RFL. That conceptual
comparison still plucks the happiest humans, with their relative RFL, out of their
heavenly tier and hurls them into the ranks of human sufferers, since next to even the
imaginary cosmic RFL, a human RFL seems parochial and pathetic.

Of course, a human with an RFL can’t be morally blamed for failing to achieve what’s
actually impossible, a cosmic RFL. But the conceptual possibility of the cosmic RFL
should provoke us to think twice before pitying the unhappy person with an EWL. When
we broaden our perspective, we all tend to become more pitiful, tragic, and absurd.
 15

Part One: Religion

____________________________________________________

Theism
Atheism
Existential Cosmicism
 16

The Theism vs New Atheism Farce

____________________________________________________

The current incarnation of the dispute about whether there’s a god is a perfect storm of
confusion.

The Players

On one side, there are the New Atheists, those who see themselves as zealous
defenders of reason and of liberal values against fundamentalist religion and terrorism.
Atheists proclaim that religion is thoroughly irrational and dangerous.

On the opposing side, there are the literalistic monotheists, sometimes called
fundamentalists, who see themselves as conserving revealed transcendent truth
against the demonic distractions of science and of liberal society. They maintain that
faith or intuition accesses deeper truth than does reason, and that the liberal’s so-called
defense of liberty is actually an excuse to sin. The literalists are joined by religious
moderates who see no conflict between reason and faith, science and revelation, or
liberalism and theism.

Then there’s the public’s misunderstanding of this controversy, as caused by the old
media that profit by entertaining consumers with stories of sensational, ideally-endless
 17

conflicts. Journalists tend to report the social and political battles between atheists and
theists, and also the latest scientific finding that has only ambiguous or tangential
consequences for religion. Rarely do journalists investigate what’s really at stake in the
controversy.

Finally, there are the cloistered professional philosophers who have lost credibility with
the anti-philosophic public. Despite frightening signs of civilization’s collapse and
despite their being equipped to shed light on issues that concern everyone, these
philosophers prefer to practice a pseudoscience that’s equivalent to the counting of
angels on a pinhead. They thus cede the floor to ideological partisans, to New Age
hangers-on, and to profit-driven, bar-lowering journalists.

The Muddle

The result is a colossal muddle. The New Atheists pretend to be more rational than
anyone can be. Only the narrowest, quantified questions can be answered purely with
logic or with empirical evidence. The broader questions that people care most about
and fight over divide us because of differences in our values, character, life experience,
and power.

Religious people who affirm some myth or other in answer to the grand question of
whether the whole universe has a purpose, are bound to express their personal biases,
commit numerous logical fallacies, and cherry-pick the data. The New Atheist is surely
correct to that extent, but is wrong to think he or she is in a different boat, sailed by Star
Trek’s Vulcans with no values, character, or other nonrational factors that determine
their fundamental beliefs.

Theists personalize the cause of the universe, but New Atheists likewise treat their
loved ones as though their mere organic bodies were made precious by some
attachment of theirs to an immaterial spirit. Theists don’t exercise cold, calculating
reason when they bow their knees and pray to an invisible cosmic parent, but neither do
 18

atheists when they make love. We are all of us animals, after all. There's not much of a
defense in saying that romantic love is private, since like religious faith, an emotional
bond has public consequences.

The Cause

The real problem isn’t just that there’s a clash of cultures; rather, it’s that the cultures at
stake, secular liberalism and religious conservatism, are both so decrepit that their
adherents forget that a cultural commitment ought to be personal. Only when a culture
lives and breathes do its people appreciate the importance of being enchanted by a
myth.

Our problem is the postmodern one that there’s no suitable myth to guide us: the
Enlightenment myths of progress through reason and democratic capitalism led to the
world wars and to a host of current oligarchic injustices, while the anachronistic myths of
monotheism can only mislead us to squabble over stale metaphors. When our
interaction is driven by those moribund narratives, we defend them like zombies,
unaware of what we are, what we’re doing, or why our culture war seems both endless
and meaningless.

Were a suitable myth for our time found, an atheist would quit reducing religious and
philosophical questions to logical or to empirical ones, while the monotheist would leave
behind the old myths that were forced on her as a child and that an adult can support
only with techniques of gross mental compartmentalization.
 19

The Psychedelic Basis of Theism

____________________________________________________

Why is there now, just as there has always been, anything as outlandish as a theistic
religion? Why have most people always believed there are immaterial spirits and a
perfect mind at the root of reality? Why the angels and demons and the all-importance
of morality as the condition of an afterlife in heaven or in hell? How did our species
become sidetracked with such apparently crazy beliefs? The lazy answer is that most
people are not so smart and are prone to fallacies and superstitions and are themselves
lazy, which is to say gullible; thus, the bigger the lie, such as the one told by corrupt
rulers throughout the ages, the more likely the masses will believe it. But there’s a more
interesting answer, one that addresses the fact of religious experience which indirectly
challenges the alternative, nontheistic worldview.

From the Brain to the Immortal Spirit

Let’s begin with some elementary facts of the human brain and its thought processes.
The higher-level thinking that distinguishes us as a species takes place in the cerebral
cortex which is our brain’s thin outer layer and most recent evolutionary addition. This
part of our brain is responsible for our special, top-down control over our internal
processes, which we take for free-will and which is in some ways illusory but which is
nevertheless more pronounced in our species than in others. Instead of always acting
 20

automatically on instinct, we can search our memories and evaluate our abilities,
concocting elaborate plans to succeed in our environment. Because the brain evolved
largely by natural selection, though, there were severe constraints on how the brain
developed, so that the central nervous system we inherit is inevitably flawed, from a
design viewpoint. For example, our top-down access to our mental states and thus to
the brain activity that generates them is limited by our finite memory; thus, we can’t
access all our brain activities at once. Moreover, since the brain was an adaptation that
enabled us to survive in the wild, we evolved skills at making snap judgments, based on
intuitions as opposed to exhaustive considerations of evidence. Thus again, instead of
having total access to our thought processes, we think in highly simplified ways, relative
to the amount of brain activity associated with each thought. These simplifications take
the form of biases, heuristics (mental shortcuts based on rules of thumb rather than
logic or all available evidence), stereotypes, or models of our environment. There’s a
sort of competition between neurons as they transmit information across their synapses
in response to some internal or external stimuli, and we become aware only of the
winners so that our conscious self can be compared to the top of an iceberg that pokes
out of the water of our unconsciousness.

Additionally, our thinking is distinguished by our sophisticated form of communication,

by language, which is processed in the cerebral cortex (in Wernicke’s and Broca’s
areas). We think largely in words which we use as labels for concepts, allowing us to
organize and search for our ideas as though we were thumbing through a labeled file
system. Just as we have a simplified way of thinking about everything, thanks to our
abstract concepts and top-down self-control, we have a commonsense, simplistic feel
for how language works. We think of language as consisting of systematic relationships
(syntax) between meaningful units (symbols). Words bear intentional relations to what
they’re about, and so we map the world in our head. This linguistic nature of our thinking
further sets the stage for human misery, as will become clear in a moment.

To the extent that we identify ourselves with our stream of consciousness and with the
linguistic thoughts that sail that stream, as it were, our selves become vanishingly small
 21

compared to what we perceive in our external environment. We become what Sartre

calls nothingness and what Thomas Nagel describes as the view from nowhere. As
David Hume said, there is no self but only a bundle of transitory mental states. What
happens is that we identify with our thoughts and feelings, not with the objects to which
those mental states are assumed to be intentionally directed. So if you have a thought
about trees, you’re on the side of the concept TREE, which is in your head, of course,
and a thought is always insubstantial compared to what it’s about. When a mental state
represents something in our outer environment, all of our senses may be feeding our
brain information pertaining to what we represent, whether directly in an act of
perception or through our memory or imagination. Even the senses themselves only
model the outer world for us, abstracting from or filtering out the noise, presenting us
with just a slice of reality; still, we have much more input from the outer world than we
do from inner ourselves, and this is surely for the evolutionary reason that our brain
evolved as a control system to deal with external threats to the genes we carry.

Now, when we do think about ourselves, forming a higher-level thought, for example,
about our concept of trees, we again identify more with the subject of that mental act,
not with its object. That is, we’d think of ourselves more as the conscious processes
involved in having that higher-order thought than as the part of our mind that becomes
an object of our attention. When we contemplate our belief, desires, or dispositions, we
divide those parts of ourselves from the active part that’s currently doing the
contemplating. Thus, we reestablish the dichotomy between subject and objective
environment--within our mind. But because we also personally (and vainly) identify with
the most conscious and rational part of our mind, which has top-down control over our
inner world, thanks to the cerebral cortex’s implementation of this part of ourselves, the
most active and subjective part of ourselves is also the most abstract and simplified.
Thus, the more abstract and higher-order our thinking when we’re self-conscious,
the more we identify with an increasingly insubstantial self: a self which we neither
see nor hear nor smell nor taste nor touch; a self which we thus have less diverse
information about than we do about anything in the outer, sensible world; and a self
 22

which is closer to the top of the pyramid of mental associations/neuronal connections

and is thus all the more isolated and detached.

These facts of human nature--the cerebral cortex and its top-down, pyramidal and thus
highly simplified view of the labyrinthine connections throughout the rest of the brain,
wandering the maze whistling linguistically-filtered thoughts to keep our spirits up--
naturally give rise to what was only in the last century called the existential problem, but
is actually a problem that goes back at least to the ancient Gnostics. Descartes later
took up this problem in its modern, rationalistic guise, and the existentialists made a fad
of it which faded away some decades ago. The problem is universal because it arises
from the brain’s structure and from the intuitive picture of language, one of our two most
crucial instruments, the other being our opposable thumb. The elementary human
problem is that our default feeling is one of alienation from the world. This is the
price the human brain pays for developing the ego, which is the relatively conscious,
free, and rational part of the self: while the ego has those advantages, which we apply
in our body’s dealings with the outer world, the ego can also turn them loose on the
mind, producing an ever more abstract personal identity which is subjectively all the
more removed from the rest of the world. This primordial separation between the self-
aware person and the sensible world is the source of all our existential woe, of the fear
that we don’t belong in nature and thus have to transform the world to suit the alienated
self, literally putting technological images and extensions of us all over the globe so that
we feel more at home. As a consequence, we’re faced with the tragically heroic task of
finding meaning in our absurd life as ultraconscious animals inhabiting a mindless
cosmos.

In so far as a person is identified roughly with the mental work of the cerebral cortex,
which Freud called the ego, a person is an invisible stream of fleeting abstract mental
states, and this ghost haunts the planet, literally seeming to float above it somehow
from its perch at the top of the head; as a matter of fact, that’s exactly where the inner
person exists, in the cerebral cortex. But the point is that when this part of the brain tries
to access itself, to acquire a clue as to its inner identity, the brain finds mental states
 23

that compensate for their height in the pyramid of neuronal connections by offering up a
correspondingly simplified view of the blizzard of synaptic information, which can’t be
cognized all at once. The result is the narrowly focused conscious self that lumbers from
one thought to the next. Thus, the more we know of ourselves through
introspection, the more ghostly or vacuous we seem, and thus the less we seem
to belong in the material world that the five senses present to us as so much
richer. Our plight then becomes the absurd one of feeling homesick while being
deprived of any ordinary knowledge that we even have a proper home. We’re like a
prisoner born in a prison cell, realizing eventually that she doesn’t belong there, but able
only to hope that there’s anything at all outside the prison, let alone some more
welcoming place.

There are three main solutions to this existential predicament, only one of which is ideal.
The ideal one is tragic heroism, based on existential, aesthetic, and ascetic virtues. I’ve
sketched this ideal elsewhere and I’ll explore it further in later writings. The two inferior
answers are secular and religious, respectively, and I want to focus on the religious one
here. Briefly, though, the dubious secular answer begins with ignorance or denial of our
existential situation and so proceeds to foolish, dehumanizing distractions. Fascist and
communist political projects are examples, since those secularists trust in progressive
myths without first recognizing the philosophical implications of where we stand in
nature. All political arrangements degenerate into corrupt, self-destructive oligarchies
unless some heroic effort is made to overcome our basic absurdities and tragedies.

The dubious religious answer begins with the naïve view of the self as an alienated,
immaterial spirit in a material world, but then codifies this intuition, adding baroque
speculations about the spirit world which is supposed to be our true home, about other
invisible entities such as angels, arc angels, and fallen angels, and a mind-first ontology
centered around God.
 24

Religious Experience is Psychedelic

What generates the shameless range of theistic speculations? Not just gullibility or other
such cognitive vices. There’s a telling fact of all religions, which is that they begin with
visions due to altered states of consciousness. The earliest religions were shamanic
rather than organized, meaning that they were led by solitary figures who acted as
magicians and doctors and whose power was thought to derive from their special
relationship with the spirit world. The shaman delves into that world by ingesting
psychoactive drugs or by fasting, rhythmic chanting, or hyperactive dancing to bring on
visionary states of consciousness. Shamanism dates back at least to the Neolithic
period and was present all over the world. There’s even a special name for a visionary
plant that’s used for religious purposes: “entheogen.” Thus, Egyptian religion was
inspired by Psilocybe cubensis (a magic mushroom), Hinduism by soma, native
American myths by peyote and ayahuasca, the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries by kykeon;
ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, was either the fly agaric mushroom or fermented
honey, which was an early entheogen; ancient Jews may have used cannabis in their
holy anointing oil, while early Christian art depicts mushroom trees.

As Graham Hancock argues in Supernatural, there are patterns throughout the major
religions, in prehistoric cave paintings, and even in faerie folklore and modern alien
abduction narratives that attest to the same altered states of consciousness. Terence
McKenna advocated the use of entheogens and mesmerized audiences with his
descriptions of DMT trips. Even my meager experience with cannabis confirms what
everyone knows, which is that if you take a psychoactive substance, you will assume
you’re sensing things that aren’t apparent to normal consciousness: you may hear a
voice that seems omniscient and perfectly trustworthy, and you may see an alternate
world made of lights and populated by strange beings. The question of whether the
visions are hallucinations or higher realities I leave aside for the moment. My point here
is just that there’s abundant evidence that religions all over the world have historically
been based on the shamanic, prophetic, or mad ravings of stoned individuals. As a
religious institution naturally degenerates into a corrupt oligarchy, the religious
 25

structures are bureaucratized and the entheogens are outlawed or reserved for the elite,
to prevent challenges to the leader’s power. This secularization of religions is typically a
stage in the conflict between the two ignoble responses to our existential problem, with
secular distractions replacing theistic ones.

And what religious distractions entheogens bring! Not only the litany of spirits, monsters,
faeries, and aliens, but whole theologies and the general religious outlook can be
ascribed to the culture that springs up around the use of visionary plants. Monotheism
and Eastern monism derive from the inner authoritative voice you may hear when in a
state of deep relaxation, when your inhibitions are stripped away, while tripping on a
psychoactive substance. One part of your mind asks the more authoritative part a
question and you receive an answer which seems revelatory. Moreover and notoriously,
there are good and bad trips, depending on whether you come to the drug with a clear
conscience. If you hide from unpleasant personal truths, your ego defenses will be
annihilated in the visionary experience and your consequent terror seems projected in
the visions of demons or of other evil spirits you’ll see; hence, the religious idea that
morality is a precondition of living peacefully among the spirits. The speculation that
consciousness is immortal and thus that it lives on after the physical body’s death
follows from the common experience of self-consciousness and alienation, explained
above. But now the myth arises that your condition in the afterlife depends on how you
lived while embodied: as the Egyptian myth has it, your heart (mind) will be weighed
against the Feather of Truth, and if you’re lighter than the feather, you’ll be admitted into
heaven.

Even the physical highness of heaven and of the spirit world is actually felt while on
something even as relatively weak as cannabis: you feel your mind shooting upward
into a realm of hypercognition; hence, the phrase “getting high.” The emphasis on
authority in religion derives from trust in the shamans or in other ancient hippies who
were brave enough to put their sanity at risk when they confronted the very apparent
and alien spirit world. Moreover, the call for faith to override reason when dealing with
ultimate questions is likewise an artifact of psychedelic experience, since while tripping
 26

you’re overwhelmed by the vision’s strangeness and by emotion which breaks down
your ego and forces you to question your presuppositions. Afterward, when you “come
down,” the challenge is to assimilate the seemingly profound revealed truths into the
worldview of your waking consciousness. Moreover, DMT, the most powerful
hallucinogenic, is naturally produced in the brain, and the release of that chemical
during sleep seems responsible for our surrealistic dream imagery. Likewise, as
consciousness fades in a near-death experience, it’s reasonable to assume that the
dying person experiences a DMT flash and the associated dreamlike imagery; thus the
reports of travelling down a tunnel towards a bright light that feels warm and inviting,
and the conviction that the spirit world is real and awaits us all after we die. In fact, the
process of dying may be like falling asleep and dreaming until we become so
unconscious that we don’t notice the dream’s end; nature may pay us the courtesy of
singing us each a bizarre lullaby before she turns out the light. The moral is that if you
don't learn in life to surrender your pride and detach from your ego, you'll have a bad
trip when you're nearing brain death, just as those who take DMT often wish their ego
wasn't along for the terrifying, mind-shattering ride.

Two Forms of Personal Inauthenticity

What’s wrong with this psychedelic basis of religion? Well, while the ancient or genuine
theist, as opposed to the modern, secularized one, needn’t be wholly blind to our
existential condition and may even evince courage in facing it head-on with an
entheogen, theistic speculations tempt us to ignore our fundamental plight and to lose
ourselves in the fantasy world of the speculations we tell to make sense of weird
visions. The social aspect of religion, too, provides the familiar temptation to lose
ourselves in tribalism, as we come to identify with one herd of followers rather than
another, worshipping idols which are mere images of the unknowable that derive
ultimately from someone’s psychedelic experience.

In any case, my goal here isn’t to argue for theism’s failure as a solution to our
existential problem. I’m interested, instead, in theism’s challenge to philosophical
 27

naturalism, which is the main alternative to the theistic worldview held or presupposed
by the bulk of humankind. The point is that most people have been and still are
theists because of genuine religious experiences. That’s why religions are universal:
they arise, first of all, from the brain’s capacity for self-awareness, which generates the
impression of the alienated, ghostly self. This impression is then elaborated by our
imagination which duly speculates on the nature of the spirit world to make sense of our
absurd homesickness. Religions persist not because most people are stupid, but
because religions are grounded in observation, in genuine, albeit highly ambiguous
data. Daniel Dennett’s explanation of how we overuse our mind-reading capacity,
projecting personal qualities onto inanimate objects, is only part of the story. We do
personify nature, but those projections are encouraged by what we seem to perceive
when stoned--which is indeed an enchanted world.

To make my point plain, consider this typical refutation of theism: “There’s no evidence
of God or of any reality that transcends the material world. You’re just making it all up
because you’d prefer to think you're going to live forever in paradise. Atheistic
naturalism, by contrast, is based on ordinary evidence derived from the senses, and the
theories that explain that evidence are tested by scientific experiments. Moreover,
naturalism is simpler than theism since theism posits two substances, spirit and matter,
whereas naturalism is materialistic. Also, naturalism is more fruitful since it’s been
successfully applied countless times in the technologies we take for granted. Thus, the
atheistic worldview is more rational than the theistic one.”

Notice that when we consider the actual primary cause of religion, which is the visionary
experience due to entheogen use or to other forms of altered consciousness, this
standard dismissal of theism seems weak. True, the content of naturalism derives from
ordinary perception of material objects, but the content of theism seems to derive from
extraordinary perception. If we’re not to beg the question in favour of materialism, it’s all
just input to consciousness, right? The brain receives signals that contain information
which the brain must process and interpret. So the assertion that theism is simply made
 28

up or based on loose analogies between, say, a human king and the supposed ruler of
the universe, is mistaken.

The question is how empirical data should be explained and interpreted. The choice of
epistemic standards rules out certain hypotheses as crazy or as otherwise not worth
investigating. Occam’s Razor, for example, which says that we shouldn’t multiply kinds
of theoretical entities beyond necessity, isn’t neutrally rational but is pragmatic in a
conservative sense, and pragmatism is normative, presupposing some values rather
than others. Just ask yourself: “beyond necessity” for what purpose? Conservatism
makes sense as a form of caution which serves the genes, the point being that we
evolved to survive in the immediately apparent environment and so we risk our safety
when we ponder matters that are far removed from that primal task. This epistemic
principle ultimately validates the state of nature that’s intolerable as it stands, whereas
we might just as well prefer an aesthetic standard of originality and a creative rather
than a conservative worldview. Again, fruitfulness makes sense if you’re interested in
elevating the materialistic standard of living, with technoscience, but what if you’re
interested in ascetically detaching from that world by way of facing our existential
situation and discovering a heroic way out of it? In fact, the mystical traditions are
psychologically fruitful in transforming the ego into an ascetic rebel with a taste for
subversive wisdom. Naturalism or secular humanism may well be more useful to
modern mainstream society that teems with the unenlightened herds, but who says that
materialistic developments are more important than psychological ones, without
begging the question? Likewise, calling naturalism more rational than theistic
supernaturalism begs the question, assuming reason is defined by such biased
epistemic values.

Now, I’m not arguing that entheogens present us, indeed, with a supernatural reality. I’m
interested in the prior ethical and aesthetic question of which values should guide the
pursuit of knowledge. I assume that these values are seldom chosen. Instead, the main
camps are split into those who temperamentally prefer secular distractions and those
who prefer religious ones. Some want to be rational, to defend the modern enterprise of
 29

using science to neutralize natural processes, and the relatively conservative, nature-
centric worldview effectively enforces our biological “function” as vessels for genes.
Meanwhile, others prefer to shirk our ethical and aesthetic responsibilities, by losing
themselves not in a surreal world they personally create, but in one that was clichéd
thousands of years ago and is all the more so today, and in myths that few theists test
for themselves by personally confronting the supposed spirit world.

It goes without saying that if you load the dice by presupposing or prioritizing
rationalistic values, you’ll conclude that psychedelic visions are just hallucinations that
tell us nothing about reality. As in The Life of Pi, if you insist on a philosophy that’s
concerned with just the flat facts, you’ll naturalize weirdness, exercising the caution that
our biomechanical overlords would surely welcome if only they weren’t just undead
molecules. By contrast, if your scheme for evading your obligation as a potentially
heroic creature leads you to open the floodgates of speculation, denigrating reason to
allow yourself the freedom to imagine an escape hatch into a fantasy world, you’ll
downgrade the metaphysical category of facts and interpret psychedelic visions as
illustrative of a deeper, mental reality. In short, metaphysical realists and idealists
have rival explanations of religious experience, because they have opposing
epistemic values.

You might think that metaphysical idealists are rare nowadays and aren’t worth
discussing, but that’s because you’re likely reading this on the internet and are thus a
full participant in the postmodern secular monoculture. Never forget that most members
of our species have been theists and thus metaphysical idealists who believed that mind
(God) is ontologically deeper than matter; moreover, most people currently alive are
likewise theists. Instead of dismissing theism as based on trivial fallacies and small-
mindedness, we should be aware of the power of theism that derives from the very real
religious experience. If you think the experience is bogus, just take up Terence
McKenna’s challenge and smoke some DMT; as he says, the only long-term danger of
doing so is the risk of death by astonishment. The psychiatrist Rick Strassman
conducted a clinical study of DMT trips and the participants reported having life-altering
 30

experiences. The religious/psychedelic experience is no joke: if you drastically alter your

consciousness you’ll naturally interpret the world very differently. This is, of course, why
visionary plants tend to be banned in secular societies, since religious experiences are
bad for business.

It’s worth recognizing, though, that the dubious secular answer to the existential
question likewise transforms the self: instead of becoming a flaky theist, the alienated
ghostly ego can take on the role of the obsessed consumer, throwing herself so far into
the material world, which she longs to possess, that she willingly dehumanizes herself
to become just another material object--typically one owned effectively by the
corporations that brand her. Whether we merge with organic biotechnologies, such as
entheogens (or inherit our compromised religion from the ravings of those who so
merged), or with the lifeless technologies that depend on applied rationality, we
transform ourselves in the process: we spare our detached consciousness the horror of
being estranged from the sensible world and we preoccupy ourselves with one dubious
mission or another. While the religious delusion seems to end in fundamentalism and
zealotry, the secular one seems headed for so-called posthumanity, for our complete
takeover by technoscience and by the sociopathic oligarchs who profit most from the
science-centered industries. We should hope that there’s a third path.
 31

Theism: Does its Irrationality Matter?

____________________________________________________

Theism is the belief that there is at least one supernatural god, a perfect (all-powerful,
all-knowing) person who created the natural universe and who intervenes in that
universe, particularly in human affairs. Theism is the philosophical content of religions
which is almost never discussed in mainstream journalistic coverage of religions,
whether on the radio or TV, in newspapers or magazines. In the West, addressing the
philosophical merits of theism would inevitably call the monotheistic religions into
question and alienate consumers of news, most of whom pretend to follow a traditional
religion without actually doing so. In short, monotheistic religions are currently farcical.

The farce begins with the theist’s erroneous notion that theism can and should be
rationally supported, as though theism were something like a scientific theory. The
scientistic blunder here is monumental and often motivated by comically misplaced
arrogance, as in the case of Catholic pomposity or the militant Islamist’s woefully
perverse delusions of grandeur. A monotheist’s condescension towards a nontheist or
an Eastern mystic is like an ant’s deeming itself to be taller than a giraffe. (I’ll speak of
nontheism rather than atheism, because “atheism” has negative social connotations
which are irrelevant to the core issue I mean to address.) However, the farce ends when
we see that theism’s irrationality may not matter and that the theist may have the last
laugh. The rational case against theism may itself rest on a category error. Indeed, the
 32

rational ideal that our philosophical beliefs be logical and attuned to the evidence
conflicts with the more Humean reality confirmed by cognitive scientists, that humans
are not as rational as we might prefer to think. I’ll provide an overview here of why
theism is indeed irrational, but then I’ll turn to what I’ll call the existentialist’s nonrational
case for theism.

Mysticism and Literalism

First of all, we need to observe the split in all religions between their mystical and
exoteric traditions. The mystic seeks transcendent experience of the divine, not a
rational justification for intellectual beliefs. She understands that language and logic
simplify and thus to some extent falsify reality as they map it, and that in any case those
tools evolved to provide us with practical knowledge of how to get by in the natural
world, not to contact anything that might lie beyond that world. The mystic prefers a
direct, intuitive grasp of supernatural reality, but if she’s forced to speak of what she
thereby grasps, she often resorts to myths and metaphors which she knows shouldn’t
be taken seriously.

Mysticism is central to Eastern religions but marginalized in Western, monotheistic

ones. What replaces mysticism at the heart of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a
colossal misunderstanding, called literalism, which is the mistaking of exoteric
knowledge for the esoteric, mystical kind. Literalists err in literalizing the mystic’s
metaphors. So while a mystic may compare God, that which transcends nature, to a
loving parent, the literalist falls in love not with God but with the image, succumbing to
our primitive, tribal inclination to worship an idol. From the mystic’s viewpoint, the
literalist’s ego gets the better of her; like Narcissus she’s captivated by her own
reflection, in this case by an image poured out of a mystic’s mind to provide a sketchy
map of what transcends our rational comprehension. So one of the initial mistakes
made by Western theists, at least, is the elevation of their anti-mystical tradition. Thus,
Christians persecuted their Gnostics and Muslim jurists have a strained relationship with
Sufis.
 33

Indeed, when theism is reduced to literalistic idolatry, the contents of theistic beliefs
become ridiculous. The images contradict each other or are otherwise preposterous,
leading the indignant literalist into a web of falsehoods as she has to rationalize the
absurdities that inevitably follow when she naturalizes and anthropomorphizes
something that’s supposed to be supernatural. For example, how could God literally
have thoughts and feelings with no physical brain or other substrate? If a substrate is
needed for psychological states, who made God’s? Needless to say, if God evolved,
he’s not the creator of everything. Literalists have traveled far, looking for Eden or
Noah’s ark, always ready with a spurious explanation when they fail to find any
archeological evidence for the biblical tale’s historicity. And literalistic theology becomes
the proverbial tennis match played without a net. So-called systematic theology tomes
are written to map every nuance of theistic imagery, arriving at creeds that purportedly
specify God’s attributes--including, no doubt, what God had for breakfast the other day.

Divine Revelation

To return to my narrative, though, the mystic’s metaphors are eventually written down,
and literalists come to write their own teachings in response or to misinterpret the
mystic’s texts. Thus we have the spectacle of so-called divine revelation, as though that
which begat the universe would write a book or create more or less free creatures and
then turn some of them into puppets, “inspiring” them to read God’s mind and translate
his commandments for everyone else’s benefit. Why wouldn’t God inspire everyone at
once and for all time? That would interfere with our freedom and God cherishes humans
above everything else in Creation. Why then would God still inspire a handful of
prophets? Because God has a soft spot for the odd human sacrifice. That’s just one out
of a million contradictions in literalistic theology.

At any rate, we’re then faced with the impossible task of correctly interpreting Holy
Scripture. This is the hermeneutic problem that besets all religions, because the
symbols in natural languages are ambiguous: the words have multiple meanings and
this ambiguity ramifies when the text is translated into other languages. The ambiguity is
 34

ramified even further, since there are multiple scriptures, leading to many sects and
religions, and the adherents of each monotheistic group claim exclusive divine
authorship for their religious texts. So which meaning or text is the divinely intended
one? We must all be ignorant of God’s intentions or else God wouldn’t have stooped to
writing out his manifesto for us in the first place, but God leaves us to squabble over
how to interpret our preferred manifesto and over which manifesto is the genuine article.
Inevitably, interpretation of religious texts becomes an exercise in cherry-picking: we
ignore some passages and highlight others, usually to suit our own preconceptions.

As for which religion we adopt, despite the competing religions available, that’s decided
in almost every case simply by where we happen to be born and by the religion of our
parents. For evolutionary reasons, children are highly gullible, having to learn quickly in
their formative years, so when parents fill their child’s head full of nonsense, as was
done to them by their own parents, the child's theistically prejudiced for life and the
religion recycles itself through the ages. Of course, the theist who regards her religion
as exclusively correct needs to explain why God would create people who are so
influenced by their parents and their geographical location and time period, that most
would thus be innocently misled to adopt a different, false religion, and why God would
then punish those people, in effect, for being born to the wrong parents or in the wrong
place or time.

Incidentally, another fact that should unsettle a theist is that our brain is adapted to read
each other’s mind, giving us an instinctive grasp of human motivations. As the
philosopher Daniel Dennett argues in Breaking the Spell, we often overuse this capacity
for mind-reading, viewing just about any pattern in the world as susceptible of a
psychological interpretation, and so we anthropomorphize everything from clouds to
automobiles to what we suppose must be the ultimate reality. Here’s why this sort of
evolutionary fact should worry the theist: it’s much more likely that we overuse our
innate capacity for mind-reading and anthropomorphize the ultimate reality, arriving at
theism, than that that reality is actually a person.
 35

Now, in the case of Christian revelation, haughty Catholic priests come to the rescue,
alleging that they’ve been given the authority by God to provide Christians with the
orthodox interpretation of the Bible and with infallible guidance on moral matters.
Indeed, Christianity is the most literalistic, and thus the most absurd, of all the major
religions. Official Christianity started in the fourth century CE as a gambit by the Roman
Emperor Constantine to unite the far-flung and religiously-divided regions of his
collapsing empire. Whereas in earlier years the Roman military achieved that goal by
quashing rebellions, the fading empire could no longer employ that blunt instrument, so
Constantine turned to a subtler approach. What better way to unite than to temper
Roman polytheism with at least the appearance of monotheism? Were there only one
God, there’d be only one correct way to live (assuming God doesn’t have multiple
personalities and chooses to issue logically consistent commandments). So the
Romans adopted Judaism as the basic ingredient in their recipe. Of course, Judaism
would hardly suffice since Jews are famously antisocial, distinguishing themselves from
everyone else with their peculiar observances and ceremonies, including circumcision
and arbitrary restrictions on diet.

So the Romans opted for an offshoot of Judaism, for a literalistic Jewish cult that
promised to combine Jewish monotheism with Roman polytheism, yielding the best of
both worlds. That cult became Christianity, and so the one immaterial Jewish god,
Yahweh, became a Trinity which included--of all things--a man named Jesus who
served as the equivalent of a Roman demigod. And whereas Jews were more
interested in how humans can live well by following God’s orders, than in speculating on
how God might otherwise be acting throughout the world, Christianity doubles down on
the literalistic confusion, adding that God, the Holy Spirit, not only speaks through the
odd prophet, but passes its power through the greatest prophet, Jesus--just don’t say so
to a Muslim--to Peter, the first Pope, thus adding the Catholic institution to the list of
Christian idols.
 36

Secular Christianity

Ironically, a secular critic of Christianity who points to these historical facts should feel a
little guilty. Being first and foremost a secular ploy to preserve the Roman Empire,
institutional Christianity has greatly served the purposes of secularization, furthering
what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature. By bringing God so far within
nature, actually identifying a single man as equal to the universe’s creator, Christianity
degrades God, preparing the way for nontheism when scientists explain more and more
of nature, leaving nowhere for the literalized God to hide. In this way, Judaism’s relation
to Christianity is like that between the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Plato posited
abstract, immaterial Forms or Ideals which account for natural categories. Aristotle
brought these Forms down to earth, identifying them with material processes. Just as
Aristotle naturalized Platonism, Christians naturalize monotheism--and do so only
sometimes unwittingly.

Christianity’s covert disservice to theism is seen most strikingly in the way most
Americans can pretend to be followers of Jesus even though their behaviour attests to
their worship of money and worldly pleasure. Mind you, all these Christian consumers
do is substitute one idol (Jesus) for another (Mammon). From a mystical viewpoint,
there’s surely a slippery slope here: once you initially mistake a symbol for the terrain
which the symbol imperfectly maps, you’re led further into carnality, egoism, and
rationally conceptualized nature, and away from the mystic’s experience of the world’s
transcendent unity. Thus, an American can identify herself to a pollster as a Christian,
implying that she wants to be like Jesus who was, roughly speaking, a hippie pacifist
and communist who cared nothing for worldly conventions, and then hang up the phone
in her mansion and drive her kids to school in her Mercedes--all without feeling guilt for
any hypocrisy or fear that perhaps a spiritual life is antithetical to a comfortable secular
one. The point is that this materialistic Christian isn’t really so hypocritical; she goes
where the Roman handlers of Christianity wanted the religion to go. Coincidentally, this
utterly compromised Christianity is practiced in a country whose founders explicitly took
 37

themselves to be re-instituting a Roman social order. (See, for example, the Roman
style architecture of Washington’s government buildings.)

Theistic Proofs

How about the philosophical arguments for theism? As Kierkegaard said, none turns a
nontheist into a theist. Take the First Cause Argument, which is that everything in the
universe has a natural cause, and since there can’t be an infinite series of natural
causes and the first natural cause can’t cause itself, the first cause of everything has to
be supernatural. But who says there can’t be such an infinite series? Also, things in
nature are organically rather than mechanically connected, and so rather than being
separate from its effects, the first natural cause, that is, the Big Bang singularity or
quantum fluctuation, is more like the whole of nature in seed form that evolves into more
and more complex forms. And if God can be an exception to this principle about what
can or can’t cause itself, why can’t that singularity somehow be another exception that
causes itself, in which case the supernatural cause would be superfluous?

As for the Design Argument, that the universe is like a human artifact, which implies that
the universe was intelligently designed, this argument was more compelling prior to
Darwin’s naturalistic explanation of biological design. Also, for everything in the universe
to be comparable to human artifacts, everything would have to have a function. What’s
the function of the moon, of an asteroid, or of dark matter? Certainly, we can imagine
functions, but those would be what biologists call Just So Stories, meaning ad hoc
speculations that may be more or less plausible but that are unsupported by
independent pieces of evidence. The notion that the universe is God’s designed artifact
makes sense only from an anthropocentric standpoint that’s long been rendered quaint,
from Copernicus onward.

Then there’s Pascal’s Wager, according to which no one knows whether there’s a God
or what God would be like, because by definition God is infinite and transcendent, but
it’s prudent for the agnostic to gamble that a divine Judge exists, because a person
making that bet has the most to gain (heaven) and the least to lose (the relatively little
 38

effort of going to Church, etc). This argument has many problems, one of which is that
the chance that God would appreciate such a gamble and reward the gambler are
surely very low. Indeed, who would want to worship such a utilitarian god? Moreover, if
God is infinite and transcendent, as the argument assumes, the correct position would
be the mystic’s, in which case the image of God as a casino operator who cares about
our utilitarian calculations should be discarded as a gross oversimplification.

Next, there’s the Moral Argument, according to which morality is impossible on the
assumption of nontheistic naturalism, and so the existence of morality requires the
supernatural, which includes God. The shortest answer here is that there is a complete
evolutionary explanation of morality, after all. As I’ve been saying in my other rants,
though, any complete, scientific explanation of morality will commit the naturalistic
fallacy. Science might explain how morality originated and how it works, but this
explanation won’t justify any moral prescription, which is a philosophical matter. The
better response to the Moral Argument is just to point out that the anthropomorphic
notion of God that this argument presupposes is so parochial as to be a nonstarter.
When the universe was believed to be a relatively small place, with Earth at its center
and all the stars forming meaningful patterns for our benefit, it must have seemed
obvious that God is like a human king or judge who attends to our behaviour and
readies himself for the day when he’ll render his final verdict. This image is simply no
longer credible to any scientifically-informed person. No such person can sanely
suppose that the creator of black holes, dark matter, supernovas, and of all the
galaxies, stars, planets, and probably other species thinks just like a human. That
anthropomorphic image of God has been suspiciously self-serving for monarchs
throughout history, who have used it to glorify themselves and pacify the masses. The
image no longer has the same power and so it’s no longer sensible to thank God for
human morality.

A recent and popular theistic argument goes by the name of Presuppositionalism,

according to which not just morality but logic and even science presuppose theism. For
example, scientists posit natural laws and thus they assume nature is intelligible, but
 39

only a mind could cause that intelligibility. (You can find this argument in Dinesh
D’Souza’s book, What’s so Great about Christianity?) Again, there are many problems
with this argument. First, natural laws are descriptions, not prescriptions, although early
Western scientists muddied these waters with their deism. Second, cognitive scientists
explain what human reason is, and they show that we’re not so rational, which is just
what we’d expect if our cognitive faculties were products of natural selection. Third, who
says nature is fundamentally intelligible? Quantum mechanics is paradoxical even to the
few who’ve accomplished the superhuman feats of study to master the mathematics
needed even to begin to describe what goes on at that level of reality.

Christians in particular like to say their religion is unique for its abundance of historical
evidence in favour of their theistic claims. So there’s supposed to be adequate
evidence, for example, that Jesus miraculously rose from the dead. This is simply not
so, given standard inductive rules of evidence. In a court of law, of course, the historical
evidence of the New Testament narratives couldn’t even be entered into the record as
having any value, because the narratives are now hearsay; indeed, they’re hearsay not
just because they’re one or two steps removed from the present, but because they’re
hundreds of steps so removed. (The anonymous Gospel texts have been copied and
recopied for centuries.) Would the earliest Christians have died for their religion if their
belief that Jesus rose bodily from the dead wasn’t well-justified? Sure they could have,
since people can be very deluded or desperate. Look at the radical Muslim terrorists
who even today throw away their lives believing they’ll enjoy seventy-two virgins in
heaven. If Jesus wasn’t raised, why was his tomb empty? Lots of possible reasons,
each of which is more likely than that a violation of natural law occurred. Jesus might
have been put in the wrong tomb or thrown into a lime pit to rot with other bodies, and in
the panic caused by Rome’s unwanted attention to Jesus, his followers could have
scattered and confabulated all sorts of stories to rationalize their loss. In fact, from
where we stand with the limited evidence we have, it’s much more likely that there was
no historical Jesus in the first place, and that the whole religion is the result of confusion
and fraud than that Jesus rose miraculously from the dead.
 40

Again, the Christian’s penchant for idolatry has served the cause of secularism well,
since it’s drawn theism into the realm of inductive reasoning, which works entirely to that
religion’s detriment. Thus, objective Bible scholars and archeologists have duly
investigated the biblical claims and found them wanting in most instances. But after
nearly eliminating the supernatural, by identifying what would be a transcendent entity,
God, with a Jewish Middle Eastern guy and with a human institution or two, thus
betraying perennial mystical traditions--for a Christian then to turn around and pretend
that there’s a rational case for Christian supernaturalism takes some chutzpah.
Christians need to sleep in the bed they’ve made: they’ve gone along with secular
Rome’s subversion of Jewish anti-idolatry, so they have to live with the fact that, as
mystics have always understood, secular reason works against belief in the
supernatural. Christians can’t have it both ways. If God was actually a man and we want
to know what we’re rationally entitled to believe about that man, standard inductive
methods apply. As it happens, the scientific historian subscribes to methodological
naturalism, which pragmatically assumes there are no miracles. So much for inductive
reasons to be a Christian!

Finally, I’ll say something about the Problem of Evil, which has made theism dubious for
millennia. The deductive problem isn’t as powerful as the probabilistic one. If you define
God as being all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent, and you grant that there’s evil
(unnecessary suffering) in the world, you have to give up one or more of those divine
attributes. For example, God might have preferred that there be no such suffering but
lacked the power to create a perfectly good world. This argument is weak, because the
theist is free to modify the list of divine attributes. (Remember that theology is like a
tennis match with no net.)

The real thrust of the problem comes from our having to face the question of which
explanation of the apparent world is best, the theist’s or the nontheistic naturalist’s.
Were life an accident of natural evolution, unnecessary suffering would be easily
explained in terms of the impersonality of the forces that sustain life. But the odds seem
low that the deity that most theists actually think about would create just the natural
 41

world that actually exists. In fact, monotheists concede as much, which is why they
blame nature on our Fall from God’s grace and expect that the intended world of
heaven or of God’s kingdom will eventually replace this imperfect world. This just
pushes the problem back a step, since now the theist must consider the probability that
God could be responsible for such a rigmarole. Sure, God could have an unknown
reason why he allowed the Fall to happen or why he created Satan to tempt humankind
into sin, thus somehow corrupting all of God’s creation. Again: tennis without a net.
Likewise, an insane person, locked away in a mental institution, can explain away any
piece of evidence that conflicts with her elaborate fantasy. But such a person will not be
thinking properly. At some point, a decision has to be made about whether a certain
explanation is the best available and is accepted for impersonal reasons or whether,
instead, the explanation is an all-too comforting, ad hoc rationalization, protecting a
tradition that’s cherished for its ability to unify a family or a society. After all, the root
meaning of “religion” is “to bind.”

The Existential Argument against Nontheism

In summary, theism isn’t rational. Especially after the start of modern science, there’s
just a wealth of reasons not to believe that a perfect person created the universe and
works miraculously in our favour. In the first place, literalistic theism is a childish
confusion next to mysticism. Literalistic theists hardly agree on the details of their
religion, because of their insuperable problem of interpreting scriptures. The
anthropocentric assumptions that historically have lent theism whatever rational
credibility it may once had had have been thoroughly undermined by scientific
discoveries of the universe’s inhuman scale. Scientific standards of explanation count
against theism and are especially damaging to the historicity of the Christian narrative.
None of the classic theistic proofs is rationally persuasive in itself, and none of the
modern proofs improves significantly on the older ones.

Luckily for the theist, none of this should matter. The notion that theism needs to be
rational is a piece of scientism, which can be discredited. Humans may be the best
thinkers around, but we’re still animals and few if any of our important decisions are
 42

rational. We choose our deepest beliefs not because we calculate the odds or look over
a set of arguments, but because of our experiences, feelings, and character. Once that
nonrational work is done, we look for reasons to add to the cognitive edifice, but even
here we seldom exercise pure logic; instead, we incline to the many biases and fallacies
that our genes have built into our brains, upholding, for example, confirmatory evidence
and passing over evidence that counts against our assumptions.

With this in mind, I want to discuss what I think is the best argument against nontheism,
which I call the Existential Argument because it focuses on the nonrational nature of our
major decisions. I begin by describing the typical nontheist’s attitude towards theism.
Most nontheists are highly interested not just in the content of modern scientific
theories, but in the scientific method of inquiry, which is currently the Western paradigm
of objectivity. Religious people fail, therefore, not just because their supernaturalism is
incompatible with scientific ontology, but because they elevate faith above reason. The
nontheist assumes that metaphysical and empirical questions should both be addressed
from an impersonal, objective frame of mind, using rigorous modes of reasoning,
avoiding fallacies wherever possible, and paying careful attention to the data. From that
frame of mind, nontheism becomes the only viable option. Presumably, theists have
roughly the same capacity to reason as the average nontheist, so the nontheist goes on
to diagnose the theist as suffering from delusion, brainwashing, superstition, wishful
thinking, dogmatism, social pressure, or a mind virus. At any rate, some such
nonrational power overcomes the theist’s capacity to reason, while the nontheist is
liberated from such forces, seeing the situation clearly and going where pure reason
takes her, to the rejection of theistic beliefs.

This may all well be so as far as it goes, but the nontheist has to face the question of
whether she deems herself to be so rational with regard to all issues of such personal
importance as whether there’s a god who will take care of us when we die and whether
the universe is fundamentally good. The nontheist often boasts that he or she deals with
the theistic issue in a rational fashion, discarding theism for reasons like the ones I give
above. Is the nontheist hyper-rational, though? Does the nontheist consistently side with
 43

reason rather than with some nonrational factor, like feeling, intuition, or institutional
power?

Take, for example, the issue of sexual relations, which is just as personally important to
almost everyone as the question of whether to be a theist or a nontheist. Should the
nontheist find a mate and have an intimate relationship, and if so, with whom? Most
nontheists do have intimate relationships. But note that were they to adopt the same
attitude towards intimacy as they do towards nontheism, their efforts in dealing with the
former would surely end in abject failure. Unless you’re living on planet Vulcan, you
can’t expect to attract a mate and have a successful intimate relationship if you
scrutinize every detail of the partner with cold, hard logic and adjust your behaviour
based strictly on impersonal observation of the evidence. To take a commonplace
example, many people form bonds of intimacy by dancing, which is a ritual that tests a
person’s ability to let go of reason and to literally go with the flow of the music. In
addition, dancing is often a prelude to the sexual act itself, the whole point of which
clearly is to bond emotionally with the partner rather than to overanalyze the situation or
conduct anything like a scientific experiment.

To put the upshot as bluntly as I can, I ask you to compare the nontheist’s image of the
theist in the grip of her delusion or mind virus, loudly protesting that God does exist and
making a fool of herself in the process, to the image from, say, a hidden camera, of the
nontheist in the throes of passionate sex with his or her life partner. Reason clearly has
little to do with ensuring the success of either way of dealing with a personally crucial
decision. The nontheist puts reason aside when bonding with a significant other,
submitting to a cocktail of sex hormones. And the theist puts reason aside both in that
situation and when confronting the big philosophical questions of whether there’s
anything beyond nature and whether that transcendent reality is personal. Why trust
science and logic to deal with one decisive personal issue but not with another? Does
the nontheist’s failure to be hyper-rational, to decide all personal matters using pure
reason, undermine nontheism, making the rejection of theism a case of special
pleading? If the wisest course is to put our best foot forward when searching for a mate,
 44

for example, doing what’s practically necessary to be as happy as possible, why not be
equally as pragmatic in our choice of what to think about God?

Note that the existentialist’s point here isn’t quite the same as Pascal’s. Pascal
advocates a cynical calculation, whereas the existentialist says we should go with our
gut: if our temperament and experience happen to direct us towards nontheism, then
nontheism will make us happy, and the existentialist concludes that such people have
an ethical or aesthetic obligation to be nontheists. Most people, though, clearly find
theism more palatable than nontheism. Now, Richard Dawkins likes to emphasize the
perfectly logical point that something isn’t true just because we want it to be so: even
were theism ethically or otherwise practically preferable to nontheism--for most people,
at least--that fact wouldn’t indicate that God actually exists. But this is just to repeat the
category mistake. Granting that theism isn’t rational, should everyone reject theism
purely for that reason? If you can’t bear to live without assuming that you’ll see your
loved ones again in heaven after you physically die, is the wisest option nevertheless to
side with reason and science, to condemn yourself to angst? Again, the nontheist surely
agrees we should adopt a less-than-fully-rational attitude with respect to our love life,
since rigorous analysis and skepticism are counterproductive in that endeavour. So why
doesn’t the ethical goal of happiness trump the dictates of reason and science in
answering transcendent philosophical questions? The point isn’t that emotion or
character logically or scientifically proves anything; instead, the question is whether
ethical standards should override rational ones in dealing with matters of existential
importance.

For the sake of argument, I’ll assume that nontheism is indeed in some trouble here.
What conclusion should be drawn? What conclusion should be drawn? Not, of course,
that theism is rationally justified. What we need are nonrational criteria, such as ethical
or aesthetic ones, for evaluating both how people fall in love, including the partner they
choose for themselves and their subsequent behaviour, and their decision to be a theist
or a nontheist. Which life decision in either context is superior in terms of character
 45

development and the quality of life experience? I leave this question for my fellow
nontheists to ponder.
 46

The Life of Pi’s Argument for Theism

____________________________________________________

The story in the novel The Life of Pi (LP) is framed as an argument for God’s existence.
The argument is made explicit near the novel’s end and it can be paraphrased as
follows. In our postmodern time, we’re properly skeptical of appeals to absolute truth;
instead of grand theories or systematic treatises, we’re left with stories. With regard to
philosophical as opposed to scientific matters, at least, reason is not the final arbiter.
The question of whether God exists is such a philosophical matter, and atheism and
theism tell us different stories. Theism is the better story and so we postmodernists
should be theists.

This argument is a postmodernist mix of William James’ pragmatic argument about the
will to believe, Kierkegaard’s argument about the need for an irrational leap of faith, and
Pascal’s Wager. I’ll outline these prior arguments here. James assumes a pragmatic
theory of truth, according to which truth is what’s useful to believe, given a conceptual
scheme. James then argues that some beliefs are more useful than others; in particular,
theistic belief would be useful in that, according to the belief, sufficient evidence in its
favour is granted only to those who first accept the belief without that evidence. On
pragmatic grounds, then, theism would be epistemically justified. One problem with this
argument is that it doesn’t discount the possibility of self-reinforcing delusion. Once you
entertain certain dangerous beliefs, you change your conceptual scheme until you
 47

acquire the ability to interpret all conceivable countervailing evidence in a way that
favours your new way of thinking. Thus, instead of finding evidence that really points to
God’s existence, after you choose to believe, you might gain instead an invincible
hermeneutic facility, a sort of infinite creativity in interpreting evidence, so that you read
theism into everything with which you’re confronted.

Kierkegaard emphasized the need for passion in theistic faith. Contrary to the
philosopher Hegel, who thought we could reason our way to theism by means of an
elaborate metaphysical system, Kierkegaard took a more mystical position, according to
which God, as far as atheists and theists alike are concerned, is the possibility of a
transcendent mystery at the heart of reality. The Christian God, at least, is the absurdity
and the paradox of God made into a human or of the deity that commanded Abraham to
kill his son. The theistic argument that’s implicit in Kierkegaard’s writings is that we
ought to be existentially authentic, and that an authentic Christian who has blind theistic
faith exhibits virtues of an inner struggle, indicated by bouts of angst and dread.
Likewise, Pascal assumed the mystical premise that God is rationally unknowable, or
infinite. Thus, reason won’t settle the issue since the evidence and the arguments will
be ambiguous. Nevertheless, because the question of theism is so philosophically
important, we must choose what to believe, and since we can gain more by choosing
theism than we can by choosing atheism, and we can lose more by choosing atheism
than we can by choosing theism, we should choose theism.

The LP argument for theism also assumes that atheistic naturalism and theism both can
account for the facts at hand, for life, the universe, and everything, as it were, and that
reason alone doesn’t dictate which worldview is best. Thus, these worldviews become
mere stories and we need to evaluate them in aesthetic terms. Given that theism is the
better story, or as LP says, that theism surprises us, makes us see higher, further, and
differently, as opposed to being a flat, dry story of mere factuality (336), we should
prefer theism to atheism on aesthetic grounds--which are the only remaining grounds. In
this respect, LP avoids the crassness of Pascal’s Wager, since LP equates religion with
the enjoyment of literature rather than with a selfish calculation. Of course, the novel
 48

illustrates LP’s argument by contrasting two narratives of how a boy survives disaster at
sea. On the one hand, there’s the horrendous story of the mere facts, which are that
after his ship sinks, the boy, Pi, winds up in a lifeboat with his mother, a sailor, and an
evil chef, and the chef kills his mother, Pi kills the chef and survives alone in the lifeboat,
facing starvation and despair of never being rescued, of being eaten alive by sharks,
and so forth. But then there’s the fantastic and uplifting story, that Pi gets stuck in the
lifeboat instead with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a tiger, eventually befriends
the tiger, and the pair survive against all odds.

There are many technical objections that can be raised against this argument. For one
thing, there’s the matter of a story’s coherence as opposed to its correspondence with
the facts. Even if theism and atheistic naturalism were indistinguishable with respect to
their ability to explain all of the empirical evidence, one story’s explanation might be
superior in light of epistemic values: theism might be less fruitful or logically consistent;
for example, the definition of “God” might be self-contradictory and semantically empty.
Moreover, far from expanding our minds, theism “explains” the world by appealing to a
miracle. For these sorts of reasons, a theory can be distinguished from a story,
postmodern relativism notwithstanding.

But these objections miss the point. Granted, scientific theories are not mere stories
when applied to everyday practical matters; even Pi relies on his understanding of tigers
to tame the one in his lifeboat. But scientific theories are ambiguous when applied to the
philosophical question of whether ultimate reality is personal or impersonal. Theism
appeals to a miracle, but so does the Big Bang. Even though theism doesn’t enlighten
us regarding how the universe would have been created by God, science-centered
epistemic values beg the question in favour of atheism, by presupposing methodological
naturalism.
 49

Philosophy and Religion as Fiction

In any case, I’m not interested in a technical assessment of that argument’s merit.
Instead, I’d like to address two questions. First, what would it even mean to speak of
entertaining a philosophy or a religion as a mere story, letting aesthetic standards
govern our preference? Second, is theism aesthetically superior to atheism, as LP
contends?

So what could be involved in accepting a worldview as a mere story? In some ways,

treating philosophy as fiction would be a step up for philosophy, since fiction can matter
more than a dry, abstract philosophical argument. Scientistic philosophy, which needs
to appear as rigorous as physics to earn respect within the Ivory Tower, has ceded the
traditional philosophical problems, of how to find meaning in life and of what sort of
person we should be, to such ghouls as self-help gurus, televangelists, New Age
whitewashers, and happy-talking psychiatrists who are funded by pharmaceutical
companies. Even when we know a story is just fiction, the story can shape our character
by giving us a model (the protagonist) and a warning (the antagonist). So were an
answer to a philosophical question regarded as a “mere fiction,” the answer might then
be more widely understood and easily applied.

But wouldn’t the philosophy then be just a game, an entertainment? In the back of your
mind, you’d know that were theism just a story, you wouldn’t believe that God is real;
you’d just be pretending, suspending disbelief for the sake of enjoying the narrative.
However, we can see the more serious role fiction might have if we look at another kind
of art, such as music. Many people keep music on in the background, while they’re
driving or taking the bus, while they’re at work or eating or having sex. Music consists of
sounds that have metaphorical significance and so can trigger our emotions and affect
our mood. Music thus has an implicit narrative, in the highs and lows of the rhythm, in
the pregnant pauses between the sounds, and so on, and this narrative can be made
explicit if the music has lyrics. Chanting of mantras can alter your state of
consciousness, producing hallucinations or deep meditation. And so art more generally
 50

can be used as an instrument to achieve a certain goal. Note that tools can be very
serious business. In war, weapons are hardly taken lightly, the Mars rover shows us the
surface of another planet, and oil refineries and nuclear power plants produce the
energy that’s the lifeblood of modern civilization. Likewise, one goal that fiction used to
serve for children was to scare the daylights out of them, to warn them that the world is
a dangerous place. Catholic religion still has this effect in its private schools, when nuns
teach children about hell and God’s bloody death on the cross.

So what’s it like to accept a philosophy as a mere story? Well, it could be a matter of

keeping a story in mind, to brainwash yourself, as it were, or to affect your mood to
achieve a certain goal. This seems to have been William James’ point. Whether the
story is factual or not is irrelevant if the story is used as a tool to get a job done; instead,
the issue is whether the story is effective. Music can calm your nerves, inspire your
painting, or give you courage before battle. Likewise, theism or atheistic naturalism can
serve as a metaphor that teaches us about ourselves or establishes a cultural mindset,
standing by in our memory of first encountering the worldview, as a continuing source of
inspiration or fear. Stories can offer powerful models that we try to emulate or ideals that
we want to achieve.

The main reason many atheists and theists alike will scoff at the notion that their
philosophy may best be understood as a powerful story, which is to say as a myth, is
that postmodern culture is frankly scientistic. We think art is dead, because we’re too
busy enjoying the fruits of science to notice that we’ve become Philistines. Even when
science is put to use in technology, we contrast the colossal institutions of capitalism
and of applied science with the humble, private use of art to change your life, and we
can’t help but dismiss the latter as relatively insignificant. This in turn I take to be our
animalistic response to a display of overwhelming power. We’re cowed and mesmerized
by technoscience, and so we settle for the low-brow, mainstream culture, time and
again preferring mass-produced consumer kitsch and hackneyed excretions of
corporate cynicism.
 51

A corporation is, in fact, a system that squeezes the humanity out of its members and
transmogrifies that humanity into forces of cynicism and misanthropy; this is achieved
when the members of the corporate body are forced to see themselves as functionaries
playing a role or “just doing their job,” as the meme would have it. Put differently, a
corporation provides legal cover for its members to set aside their altruistic impulses
and to regress to a precivilized state of animal narrow-mindedness; the corporate
system functions, then, as a smokescreen that allows its members to betray their
principles and to escape unscathed by pangs of conscience. When you enter the
corporate world, you lose sight of the humanity not just of your competitors or of your
target consumers, but of yourself. You get lost in something akin to the fog of war and
so blindly oppose any elevation of cultural standards. You become antihuman in your
subservience to the corporate collective, which collective itself is a fiction, the proverbial
curtain behind which sits the overwhelming beneficiary of free enterprise, the oligarch.
And that power which corporations (oligarchs) now wield over democratic and dictatorial
governments and over the global economy flows from technological applications of
science. We increase our power by learning how things work and science discovers
those mechanisms. Thus, like deer frozen in the headlights, we witness corporate and
other technoscientific displays of superhuman power, and we naturally dismiss anything
that would seek to challenge them. The only valid role of art, we presume, is as a
means of corporate control of our mindset. Art becomes serious and respectable only
when it’s blessed by corporations and by their zombie functionaries, as indicated by that
art’s mainstream status, or else when art is used cleverly in postmodernist cons.

But the prospect of philosophy or of religion serving as art, as an instrument of self-

improvement or of social evolution, threatens that social order because the Socratic and
esoteric mystical traditions present rival forms of psychological and social subversion.
That is to say, the use of scientific knowledge in a “free,” naturally oligarchic society
subverts our potential for spiritual/existential advancement; corporate art, the dreck that
slithers and slimes its way out of mainstream TV, movie, music, and publishing studios
preoccupies us with fantasies. To take an obvious example, the American corporate
media present democratic politics as a conflict between democrats and conservatives,
 52

whereas the true political conflict, between the American oligarchs and the rest of the
population, ended in the 1970s after Ralph Nader’s consumer advocacy sparked the
corporate takeover of the US government by means of lobbying power. (See the terrific
TVO documentary, Park Avenue.) Socratic philosophy threatens that corporate abuse of
technoscience--polling, marketing, public relations, infotainment, and other forms of
media manipulation--by offering the ideal of obsessive self-knowledge; were we to think
more like Socrates, taking him as our model protagonist, we’d be compelled to watch
ourselves as we consume corporate media, to recognize how mainstream messages
distract or numb us, exploiting our sex instinct, for example, to sell everything. With its
cosmicist implications, mystical religion, too, challenges the delusions that tend to hold
societies together, such as the ideal of personal happiness.

My point, then, is that were a philosophical argument or religious creed treated as a

story, which is to say as an instrument that has practical relevance as opposed to being
merely academic, the science-centered institutions would have rivals. To the extent that
our culture is scientistic, we dismiss the very possibility of such a rivalry, and so we
oversimplify the postmodern reduction of philosophy and of religion to art. We assume
that any piece of art is as good as any other, that art must be dead because artists tend
to be impoverished and thus can pose no threat to the established order. And we say
this even as we consume the very-much-alive art that serves those ruling powers. The
fact that dehumanizing, corporate art--advertisements, infotainment, and various
mainstream spectacles and diversions--is mass-produced by Serious businesspeople
proves that art has the potential to modulate our consciousness and character. We
forget, too, that Socrates and the character Jesus were hardly wealthy when they
inspired their revolutionaries.

As a philosophical viewpoint, atheistic naturalism, then, would be a myth to the extent

that the viewpoint engages our emotions, moving us to act, as an artwork that illustrates
its message with a narrative of struggling, concrete characters (protagonists and
antagonists). The practical aspect of this viewpoint is better known as secular
humanism, although it’s been corrupted now for mass consumption, in New Atheism,
 53

becoming the scientism I’ve described in this section and elsewhere. The atheistic
naturalist’s implicit protagonists are the scientist, the engineer, and the businessperson
(especially the oligarch, as Ayn Rand appreciated), who are agents of progress, while
the antagonists are the ignorant, superstitious savage and the dogmatic, armchair
philosopher or theologian who arrogantly presumes to tell us what to think without first
doing the hard scientific work to discover what’s what.

Atheism’s Aesthetic Virtue

So much for the preliminary question of what it could mean to speak of theism and
atheism as mere stories. Which is the better story, then? LP implies that the deciding
factor is theism’s optimism compared to atheism’s pessimism. Theism is uplifting with its
fantastic characters of gods, angels, demons, and even human immortal souls, while
atheism is depressing with its sober, fact-confined view of reality as the series of
accidents that form patterns within the impersonal dimensions of space and time.
Theism affords us the satisfaction of believing that, despite the inevitability of biological
death, ultimately people win since deep reality for the theist is personal. But this
shouldn’t be the deciding factor, since many great stories are tragic. Another basis for
deciding would be to compare the richness of the characters in the two stories. Theism
has extremely colourful antagonists and protagonists, such as God and the devil;
indeed, these characters have influenced most Western art. Meanwhile, atheistic
naturalism has, at best, the implicit and mere mortal heroes and villains I referred to
above. How can even Newton, Einstein, or Tesla compare to God, and how can a
prescientific tribesperson, a religious fundamentalist or an upstart academic philosopher
compare to a demon, even assuming you’re in the throes of scientism? Moreover, this
second worldview can be construed as having no explicit characters to speak of, since
science reduces subjects to objects. Assuming a good story requires characters in the
first place, not to mention compelling ones, theism would be aesthetically superior to the
alternative.
 54

But this raises what to me is a crucial meta question about the nature of fiction.
Classically, fiction’s role is to give the reader or viewer the experience of catharsis,
which requires that she identify with the hero and live vicariously through that character.
In effect, fiction appeals to our social predilection, by introducing a virtual social network
which we can negotiate and in which we can enhance our status. The more fiction we
consume, the more characters we become acquainted with, the larger our circle of
virtual friends and enemies. We feel we come to know those characters, admiring some
and condemning others. To this extent, fiction can be compared to comedy: both
reinforce our comforting anthropocentrism which shields us from the alien wilderness.
The wider our social circle, the less alone we feel and the more we can occupy our
minds with thoughts of personal matters, of our real or virtual friends’ choices, deeds,
physical appearance, and so forth. Fiction thus has social utility, in that a good story
helps unify society by adding more characters with whom we can mentally interact.
Luckily, our hunger for social interaction and for discerning mental patterns is so
boundless that we can be just as emotionally affected by tales of unreal characters as
by those of nonfictional ones.

Again, to this extent, theism may well have an aesthetic advantage over atheism. But
perhaps we need a new kind of fiction after the Scientific Revolution, just as we might
now require a grimmer, genuinely subversive kind of comedy. Perhaps the most
authentic kind of postmodern fiction belongs to the horror genre, since a story should
address the cosmicist implications of what we now know scientifically about our natural
position. Instead of reinforcing our social instincts, fiction can challenge them and drive
us to become transhuman, something that has a chance of thriving in our newly
perceived environment. One way this new fiction might work is by following the
existentialist’s advice and forcing us to look into the void, to accept reality as it is instead
of hiding in the alternate, artificial reality that we substitute for nature. Only when we’ve
first wrestled with the dire philosophical implications of science can our cultural
creations be existentially authentic, since only then can they express our virtues rather
than our vices. Mental projections aren’t always bad, but anthropocentric ones that
depend on our preoccupation with personal or social matters at the expense of our
 55

understanding what the cosmos is really like seem to me detrimental. As Thomas

Homer-Dixon says in his book, The Ingenuity Gap, technology is advancing much more
rapidly than society, so that we become less and less able to solve the problems in our
increasingly fast-paced, technological environment. I’d add that one such hindrance is a
vestige of theism, which is the sort of art that preserves a personal mindset and a
culture that distract us from our existential obligation to confront the cosmic reality in
which such distractions are pitifully absurd. At any rate, to show that atheistic naturalism
is aesthetically superior to theism, we may first have to question fiction’s traditional role.
You see, if we should tell stories to reinforce anthropocentrism and to maintain
widespread ignorance of science’s cosmicist implications, then of course theism will
make for the better story. But if anthropocentrism is obsolete, so is traditional fiction and
thus so may be the aesthetic judgment in theism’s favour.

I should add that this is so only for those born into theistic as opposed to cosmicist
societies. What I mean is that when theism rather than cosmicism is socially taken for
granted, theism contributes to existential inauthenticity since that default culture
prevents a sober assessment of cosmic reality. And yet imagine what life must have
been like for prehumans many thousands of years ago, prior to the advent of religion.
Those ancestors would have faced cosmic horror at every turn. Granted, they wouldn’t
have known how impersonal nature is, since they wouldn’t have thought about the size
of the universe or about the lack of our centrality in it. But neither would those
prehumans have had the comfort of living in an animistic world, which is to say a world
animated by their imagination. Life would have been nasty, brutish, and short, with
some pleasure and wonder mixed in. Now, after those millennia of facing nature as it is,
without its being clothed to look like a camouflaged person, the invention of religion may
initially have been a virtuous creation of our species, an existentially valid way of
overcoming the ugly facts of life, with honour and grace. In the early part of religion’s
history, religious people could still be said to have come to religion without having taken
a shortcut to escape from their existential predicament. But now, even after science has
rediscovered the basis for cosmic horror, when we Westerners have an extensive track
record of religious decadence and dogmatism, religious people no longer have
 56

ownership of what was likely some such primordial horror in our prehistoric ancestors’
confrontation with wild nature. So in our postmodern time, certainly, theism would be
aesthetically inferior to atheistic, cosmicist naturalism, given what should be the new
function of fiction. This would be because theism now doesn’t deal nobly with
cosmicism, whereas theistic myths may once, long ago indeed have been ethically
respectable acts of existential rebellion.
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The Helpful Strangeness of Religious Fundamentalism

____________________________________________________

How should the atheist respond to the religious fundamentalist? The atheist’s inclination
is to flood the theist with arguments proving the manifest irrationality of that worldview.
I’ve attempted to do this many times over the years, entering into long debates and
dialogues especially with committed Christians. Moreover, I believe that all forms of
exoteric (literalistic, inerrantist) theism are in fact irrational. The problem is that this
irrationality is all too obvious; atheists miss the point when we prepare an exhaustive
treatment of the theist’s fallacies, and indeed when we pretend that philosophical
naturalism or secular humanism is a matter purely of observation and logic. We forget
that a rationalist too has certain epistemic values that mark even the secular worldview
as partly a matter of choice, of artistry. I’ll show what I mean by considering the rational
and the existential responses to a particular Evangelical Christian’s sermon.

The True Believer Speaks!

Joel C. Rosenberg is an Evangelical Christian and author of several novels about how
modern terrorism is prophesied in the Bible. In one of his recent blog posts, he offers his
readers insight into why there’s so much gun violence in the US:
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‘How is it possible,’ he asks, “that violent crime in the United States has surged by more
than 460 percent since 1960?

‘The answer is as painful as it is simple: the further we turn away from God in our
nation--the further we drive Him out of our society, out of our schools and courts, and
out of our media, and out of our homes; or the more we give mere lip service to religion;
the more men are ”holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power”
(2 Timothy 3:5)--the worse things are getting….

‘The Lord God Almighty is a gentleman. He won’t force us to accept His great love and
many blessings. If a nation tells Him to leave, He will leave. But what are we reaping as
a result of a society that increasingly ignores God and hates or dismisses Jesus Christ?
We are witnessing a horrifying explosion of murder. We are witnessing a gruesome
crime wave unprecedented in American history….

‘What is the future of America? Is America in a “Jonah” moment, or a “Nahum”

moment? Will we hear the word of the Lord that we have strayed far from the teachings
of the Bible and allowed our land to become polluted with abortions and pornography
and violence and wickedness of all kinds? Will we admit how far we are from God’s plan
and purpose for our lives? Will we confess that our hearts are far from Jesus Christ and
plead with the Lord for His mercy and grace and forgiveness? Will we fast and pray and
earnestly seek God’s face, and implore Christ to give us a Third Great Awakening? Or
will we ignore the word of the Lord and continue in our sins and watch our nation
continue to decline, or even implode?

‘There is a point of no return--a point at which God removes His hand of grace and
mercy and turns to the judgment of America. If we don’t repent for our sins, we are
going to face that judgment…perhaps sooner than we think….

‘Where are you today? Have you received Christ as your Savior and Lord? Are you
absolutely certain that if you were to die today that you would spend eternity in heaven
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with the Lord? Are you leaning on Christ’s everlasting arms for complete forgiveness for
your sins, for hope, for peace, for comfort, for wisdom and direction in this life, and in
the life to come? If not, let this be the day of salvation for you.’

Fundamentalism’s Flagrant Irrationality

I trust that any atheist or even Christian with an insider’s grasp of the metaphorical
nature of myths, who reads Rosenberg’s explanation will be able to think of a thousand
reasons why it’s grossly, obviously, embarrassingly wrong. From a rational point of
view, the faults of literalistic theism are endless; whenever a true-believing theist speaks
about her religion, she commits a dozen more fallacies, gets numerous facts wrong, and
betrays her ignorance of one whopping irony after another. You could fill a library with
texts demonstrating just a single religious fundamentalist’s errors, illogic, and
characteristic vices.

I’ll just rattle off some examples before I turn to a more interesting question. Rosenberg
feels--I won’t say “thinks”--that the cause of Americans’ troubles is secularism and that if
only Americans were more authentically Christian, they wouldn’t now suffer so much.
For example, they’d have less gun violence. Indeed, he says, the rise of gun violence is
a sign that God is losing patience with the US and will eventually destroy that nation.
How do you live as an authentic Christian? By following (parts of) the Bible and by
paying heed to (some of) your inner voices, which are actually God’s.

Rosenberg thus oscillates between Jewish and Christian theologies, equivocating to suit
the facts that authentic Christianity is untenable and compromised by its history, and
that Americans can afford to adopt only what’s effectively secularized Judaism even
while they blather on about Jesus. The New Testament sets out an antireligion of
radical otherworldliness. To be sure, there probably was no historical Jesus or if there
was, his exploits are irrelevant to the NT’s thorough mythologization of his life. In any
case, the character Jesus was obviously opposed to natural life, because he had his
eyes set on the spirit world, having likely hallucinated the holy shape of that world
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during his years in the desert as an ascetic. The forces of nature were thought to be
those of what Paul calls “powers and principalities,” the fallen angels who have taken
over the cosmos while--as every mystic and Platonist appreciates--the true,
transcendent god can’t directly be found anywhere in nature. Thus, Jesus taught an
ethical system so extreme as to be practically unworkable in secular terms; that is, any
society on Earth that would apply Jesus’ principles would collapse. This is because
Jesus’ ethics were intended as means by which we could renounce the whole
world and so save our immortal souls.

For example, in an authentically Christian “society,” there would be no biological

families, since those depend on fallen instincts that distract us from the transcendent
God. Also, there would be no capitalism since that form of business is premised on
egoism. Oh, and politics, which reduces to the Iron Law of Oligarchy, would likewise fall
by the wayside. Thus, such a society would boast the anarchy of the 1960s hippie
movement. Everyone would live as if the present life were insignificant; they’d give away
all their possessions, ignore their sexual instinct, be willing to sacrifice their personal
welfare at every turn, and think about God more than anything else. That is, they’d live
exactly as the character Jesus lived: they’d sacrifice their earthly life because they’d
trust that another one is in store for them in the afterlife, that once their corporeal body
gives way due to all of their anarchic, altruistic, and ascetic practices, they’d be reborn
in the spirit world and live with God for eternity. Jesus was a Gnostic hippie, a radical
anarchist, pacifist, and socialist who was opposed to natural life. That’s Jesus’ message
and that’s the New Testament; that’s authentic Christianity.

Of course, this mystical asceticism is quite counterproductive if you’re interested in

establishing a religious institution in the here and now. The Church that pretended to
represent Jesus naturally degenerated into a corrupt secular oligarchy. This is true of
the Catholic Church and of the Protestant fiefdoms led by an assortment of
megalomaniacs (televangelists, street preachers, cult gurus, and so forth). The Church
literally merged with the secular Roman Empire and then with many more such empires,
including the present American one. The upshot is that when Rosenberg speaks of
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authentic Christianity, he really means secularized Judaism. The Old Testament has
much more balanced and realistic ethics than does the New, because the Jews were
preoccupied with furthering the political lot of their particular tribe. God for them was
their God, a God who favoured the Jews, who would commit genocide to make room for
Jewish prosperity, who would punish the Egyptians for abusing God’s chosen people
and promise the Jews earthly happiness if only they’d follow their covenant with the
Lord and obey his practical, this-worldly laws. And indeed, Jews have followed that
ancient regime, with its dietary and other social rules, and are still with us today. But the
point is that Rosenberg is a closet Jew, substituting Americans for Jews and the Old
Testament for the New one, while throwing around the name “Jesus” every once in a
while to make his readers think his savage tribalism has something to do with Jesus’
Gnostic asceticism. Indeed, Rosenberg happens literally to be a Jew for Jesus, but
there are many evangelical Christians who likewise blend American nationalism with
childish, literalistic theism, thus practicing a religion that has much more in common with
Judaism than with Jesus’ mysticism.

Rosenberg feels that God cares especially about Christians and thus about Americans.
This requires that Rosenberg substitute an idol for the transcendent deity of
monotheism, that he project an image onto the divine to flatter his ego. Rosenberg is
the biased one with nationalistic pride, not the Creator of the universe. How can God
choose favourites if choice requires a mind which in turn requires a brain? How could an
omnipotent being limit itself to a brain that would exist in space and time? Even if Jesus
represented God, the Christian gives a nod to the mystic by speaking of God the Father
as transcending human categories (even while contradicting herself by calling that deity
male). Why would God care more about Americans than about North Koreans?
Because Americans worship God? Why would God need to be worshipped? Why would
he want us to pray to him? Why would he care to save us from hell? God can have no
desires, no character, and no personhood while also being the precondition of such
particularities. Rosenberg feels that God can literally lose his patience, that God’s
gracious only for so long before he turns to judgment and punishes the wicked. This is
simply, obviously idolatry. God can’t literally be a person with such a thing as patience
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or an interest in morality or justice, without rendering theology absurd. If God has

desires, he automatically has limitations, meaning that he has some desires but not
others; thus, he becomes a contingent, particular thing rather than the source and
precondition of all things. God becomes a created being rather than the ground of all
beings. This is the point of mystical, esoteric theism which escapes the Evangelical
Christian. When we try to understand something, we apply categories to it and so what
we comprehend is always limited, meaning that it can so fit into our conceptual boxes.
Thus, we cannot understand that which is supposed to be unlimited, infinite, and
eternal, which is God.

So Rosenberg must be very proud of his insight into God’s nature and purpose.
Perhaps he should be canonized. Sure, he attributes this understanding to God’s
revelation, but many people have read the Bible and disagree with Rosenberg’s
interpretation of it, just as many have claimed to speak directly with God through the
inner promptings of their conscience, but have come away with an altogether different
message than Rosenberg’s. Nevertheless, Rosenberg can write with a straight face that
he effectively represents God, that his advice on how to fix American culture correctly
interprets and applies God's revealed wisdom, as though the creator of the universe
would also write books and would need a human interpreter.

Rosenberg feels that if we don’t want God around, God will leave us since he’s a
“gentleman.” God won’t force his love on those who don’t want it, like a Catholic priest;
instead, God loves us from a distance like a dirty old man spying on children. God
makes himself present only to those who invite him in, because the presence of God is
identical with the fiction you imagine as soon as you begin to seal your mind within a
self-reinforcing delusion, with that initial insane act of faith in an absurdity. The creator
of black holes and dark matter, of quantum mechanics and a multiverse of universes
also wants a loving relationship with some clever mammals who happened to evolve by
natural selection? No, that tall tale isn’t fit even for children. And Americans don’t turn
God away with their secularism; instead, they embrace a Jewish-Christian hybrid form
of idolatry and equate God with the anthropomorphic fiction they create in their image.
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Instead of worshipping a supernatural source of every particular thing in the universe,

American exoteric theists and all religious fundamentalists worship a mental projection
of themselves. They prefer worldly freedom to sin and then they betray their prophets,
debase mystical wisdom, and redefine God to suit their sinful lifestyles. Thus, they
invent theological justifications of war, sex, family, business, and all manner of vices.
Rosenberg merely uses his idol to condemn those sins to which he’s personally
opposed, while some other fundamentalist will condemn the secular habits that
Rosenberg cherishes.

Rosenberg implies that he’s “absolutely certain” that when he dies he’ll spend eternity
with God. But perfect certainty is cheap. Plenty of insane people in mental institutions
are absolutely certain that they’re Napoleon Bonaparte or an alien from another galaxy.
If you bid farewell to the rules of evidence, to the standards of rational thought, you can
cheaply build up invincible confidence in any outlandish proclamation. That’s
unimpressive; on the contrary, the spectacle of an adult so belittling himself is
grotesque. Rosenberg should reflect on the fact that critical thinking has been
instrumental to billions of heroic acts, stretching back thousands of years to our
prehistory when our ancestors had to decipher environmental clues in their hunt for
food, in their farming, and in their evasion of predators. How many billions of times have
human children been saved by their parents’ rational thinking, by their commitment to
think responsibly, to base their beliefs on the evidence and not to get caught up in
foolish games? What’s the comparable track record of blind faith in some patent
absurdity peddled by simpletons and charlatans?

Of course, it goes without saying that the more religious society is hardly the more
peaceful one. Organized religion is an expression of the tribal instinct to preserve one
dominance hierarchy at the expense of another. No more proof of this is needed than
the fact that the American religious right has replaced gentle Jesus’s message of
extreme self-sacrifice with a xenophobic, warmongering cult of infinite consumption.
Instead of denying themselves for the sake of helping others, rightwing Americans
demonize all foreigners and worship an extension of themselves in the form of their
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tribal God who blesses social Darwinian capitalism and American military hegemony.
They select an already-mutilated religion to rationalize their woeful predilections. And so
rightwing Americans, who make up the bulk of evangelical Christians and who live in
southern states that are by far the most violent, love guns, because they celebrate wild
western individualism. That is, because the American religion is more Jewish than
Christian, the most religious Americans are also the most nationalistic, and because
guns were so instrumental in forging the American identity, through its War of
Independence, its Civil War, and its experience of anarchy as a colonial society lacking
a long monarchical history, the most religious Americans are also the most steadfast
supporters of guns. Hence the egregious gun violence in the US. The problem is hardly
American godlessness; rather, it’s that the most passionate American theists derive
their absolute certainty from the childishness of their theology, and pretend to be
concerned with God at the very moment they reveal that they’re blatant narcissists.
There’s far too much exoteric theism in the US for that to be a relatively peaceful
country.

The Irrelevance of that Irrationality

I could go on and on and on, and I’m not just saying so. But notice that a rational take-
down of some pitiful theistic assertions makes no difference. It solves nothing. Reason
has no pride of place in religious fundamentalism. Moreover, most logical and empirical
refutations of theism are hackneyed and so uninspiring. All of the crucial New Atheistic
arguments were made by the old atheists a few centuries ago. Thus, I think the above
sort of refutation is a distraction (as fun as it can be to formulate). Instead, we should
ask ourselves what we can learn from religious fundamentalism. When I read
Rosenberg’s nauseating sermon or when I see a self-righteous Christian or Muslim on
TV or harassing bystanders on the street, I’m struck most of all by a feeling of
alienation. Here, you see, we have a real sense of strangeness: between the minds of a
philosophical naturalist/cosmicist and of, say, an Evangelical Christian, there’s an abyss
that can’t be bridged. Rosenberg might as well literally be an alien from another world,
or at least an alien pod that’s invaded a human body, and I’m sure the feeling’s mutual,
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which is to say that New Atheists, for example, must seem just as bizarre to born-again
Christians or to militant Muslims.

This leads to the postmodern sense of vertigo, of inescapable relativism, as we come to

view our way of thinking more objectively and to wonder whether we could likely be in
the right when we atheists are also the bizarre, foolish aliens according to some
opposing perspective. Every culture is preposterously arbitrary from an outsider’s
viewpoint. However natural and thus caused our beliefs may be, we are also cursed
with limited freedom to create our worldview, to assign meaning and to prefer some
mental associations to others; we sculpt our memories, surrender to cognitive biases,
and otherwise personalize our mindspace, to feel at home in the cosmic wilderness.
The result is that whereas our biological body is mostly forced on us, our mind is more
artificial just to the extent that our philosophy is a matter of taste and subject, properly
speaking, to aesthetic evaluation. Even the ultrarationality of a Sherlock Holmes, a
Spock, or a Sheldon Cooper is a lifestyle, a work of art in which the rationalist lives.

Again, then, when I read Rosenberg, I don’t feel proud that I think I can eviscerate his
toy religion. In the last section, I meant to present such a refutation only to set it aside,
to show that someone who can think in that way also appreciates the futility of those
criticisms. Instead, what interests me is the opportunity for self-knowledge afforded by
the experience of such palpable strangeness. The religious fundamentalist is weirdly
foolish to the secular humanist, and the feeling is mutual, and we’re all weirdly foolish
next to the undead flow of natural processes. The universe continues to evolve and to
complexify regardless of our awareness of what the universe is doing or of our ability to
call processes by some names. There’s enough strangeness to go around, so we
should be more impressed by displays of genuine humility.

The next time we come across some theistic prattle, maybe we should be less quick to
attack and more prone to reflect on the existential significance of such a meeting. Read
the deranged diatribe and astound yourself by reflecting on the fact that if a mighty
human body can choose to be so wrongheaded, there is no hope for anyone’s perfect
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rightheadedness. Our worldviews are largely works of art and we are all silly little artists,
with our pretentious berets and oversized palettes, vainly preferring to live among our
self-portraits. This is not to say, with the lazy postmodernist, that all worldviews are
equally meritorious, but only that we need to appeal to aesthetic and ethical standards
when we judge between them. As I argue elsewhere, Christianity is currently the most
hideous major religion, so it badly fails a worldview’s existential test. Secular humanism
is superior but still not to my taste, and I’m trying to create a more aesthetically
appealing worldview, which is to say an emotionally moving and rationally powerful one,
sharing the results in these rants within the undead god.

Appendix: The Definition of “Prayer”

Prayer: obviously among the top five most embarrassingly asinine acts a person can
undertake while clothed. (The top five such acts done while unclothed are all sexual in
nature.)

To begin briefly to count the ways (and to paraphrase Wittgenstein), prayer is as

pointless as a widget attached to nothing: either the outcome you ask God for comes to
pass and would have happened anyway or it doesn’t because God knows better.

Then there’s the blatant contradiction of assuming that God is knowledgeable and
powerful enough to be listening to all prayers and able to fulfill them, not to mention to
have created the universe in the first place, but also dimwitted and pliable enough to
need a lowly human’s advice on how to run things or to be the least bit pressured by our
entreaties.

Next, there’s another contradiction. Whoever prays is sure to clasp her hands together
and close her eyes, thus signifying that she poses no threat, that she comes to God
humbly and doesn’t demand anything with a threat of laughably inadequate force.
Moreover, prayers are generally sprinkled with self-deprecating qualifications, with
incantations designed seemingly to assure any god who’s listening that here’s someone
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hard done by who could use a favour. However, all of this clearly amounts to the falsest
humility, since the very notion of prayer presupposes that the creature can influence or
control the Creator. As is apparent from so-called primitive, shamanic religions, the
medicine man goes as far as to explicitly cast spells on divine forces, as though gods
could be hypnotized by magic formulas.

Thus, the contradictions of modern prayer betray the origin of that form of
pseudocommunication. Evidently, religions began with visionary states of
consciousness caused by psychedelic drugs or trance states, in which an authoritative,
seemingly all-knowing voice is heard from within. In Hinduism this gave rise to mystical
monism, to the view that there’s only one true consciousness and that our minds and all
material forms are mere disguises worn by God. To that extent, then, prayer has at least
a modicum of logic behind it: even we can influence God because we’re really identical
with God; moreover, we can communicate with God by closing our eyes, turning
inwards or perhaps whispering, since as indicated by the psychedelic voice, God
resides within as pure consciousness.

But western religions are individualistic, holding such monism as blasphemy. Thus, the
modern prayerful theist must play an awkward charade, attesting to her profound
humility while acting like she has power over God. She’s superficially passive and
pleasant when she prays, since there’s no point in getting mad at herself; after all,
religions are based on the misinterpreted experience of being identical with God. But
she nevertheless means to cast her more sophisticated magic spell, to enchant God to
do her bidding, since her modernist religion elevates the individual human as the one
who Nietzsche will later call the god killer.

It goes without saying that every such act of prayer is a grotesque fiasco. At best,
prayer distracts and comforts the one who prays, but so do a million less preposterous
pastimes, like taking a long walk or reading a good book.
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The final absurdity of prayer, though, befalls those who ridicule prayer, like the present
writer, but who nevertheless find themselves instinctively calling out to no one when
scared or angry. Prayer thus avenges itself on those who know better than to try to
converse with an invisible person, since prayer apparently has some genetic support
which drives even the most self-conscious atheist to debase herself in that fashion.
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Does God Write Books?

____________________________________________________

The three main monotheistic religions each appeal to the divine authority of their
exclusive religious texts. Jews, Christians, and Muslims assume that God used human
authors to reveal certain moral and metaphysical teachings, which these authors wrote
down to form the scriptures. Jews believe that God dictated the Torah to Moses,
Christians that the Holy Spirit inspired either the overarching themes or every word of
the New Testament, and Muslims that an angel dictated the Quran to Muhammad. With
these farfetched presumptions in place, officials use those scriptures to command the
consent of the religion’s members.

The Necessary Ambiguity of Revelation

There are numerous problems with the notion of a text’s divine inspiration. First, there’s
a slippery slope here, since there would be no point of transmitting the divine message
were that text to be buried in competition with mere human works and lost forever to
posterity. God’s intervention, then, must extend from inspiring or dictating the text itself
to manipulating social and political forces so that the text becomes popular and
accepted, and even to ensuring that the divine message is properly interpreted by its
millions of readers or listeners. The prospect of that degree of miraculous intervention
becomes especially dubious when we appreciate that there’s a multiplicity of religions,
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each with its own holy book that conflicts with the others. Assuming God is behind only
one or perhaps some of those works, God must ensure that the true divine wisdom out-
competes the pretenders. Since God is omnipotent, we might expect the most
successful religion to possess the most authentic revelation.

But two factors count against this assumption, both having to do with God’s interest in
preserving our freewill. First, according to the theistic worldview, God doesn’t want to
force anyone to accept his message, and thus even though he might intervene in the
world to give his message a fighting chance of being heard, God wouldn’t prevent false,
seductive messages from surfacing. Second, because we’re free we can sin and be led
astray by those false teachings and even by demonic counterfeits of divine revelation.
Thus, the most popular religion in any time or place needn’t be one initiated by God.

This raises another problem, however, which is that given this context within which God
would be operating, God would had to have foreseen the near futility of his endeavour
of sending us his message. The root of the problem is that there’s a conflict between
God’s supposed interests in preserving our freedom and in successfully informing us
about how he wants us to live. On the one hand, God can’t force us to listen or to
understand his message; on the other, God believes that our listening and our
understanding are crucial to our afterlife status. Thus, divine revelation is supposed to
be a compromise: instead of speaking directly to everyone, laying out the facts about
heaven and hell, angels and demons, and so on, God only imperfectly transmits his
wisdom, perhaps manipulating history so that his message doesn’t disappear entirely,
but allowing geographical, cultural, and biological factors to take their toll on the
scripture’s fate.

For example, God would have to concede to rationally-inclined individuals that the
whole business of divine revelation is, at best, highly ambiguous. God’s hand in the
revelation is so indirect that anyone should be forgiven for regarding the religion and its
sacred text as entirely human-made. The multiplicity of religions, the contradictions or
errors in the scriptures, the exploitation of the scriptures by unscrupulous religious
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officials, the availability of infinite interpretations of such poetic statements as are

typically found in the sacred books--all such facts add up to reasonable doubt as to
whether a deity is remotely responsible for any scripture. To repeat, the only way God
can allow us to choose whether to accept his advice on how to live, to render his moral
judgment of our lives relevant, is for God to present his advice to us with great
ambiguity, leaving room for our reasonable doubt. This means God couldn’t just tell us
all directly, in person, what we’re supposed to do. Thus, God would have to rely on
human intermediaries, sacrificing their freedom by forcing them to physically write his
message down and then to edit, copy, and advocate for it. But this means that those
intermediaries would get to inject their biases into the work, giving the text the
appearance of having no divine inspiration at all.

Grotesque Anthropomorphism

Faith is supposed to be required to look past the human context in which a scripture is
actually authored, proliferated, and interpreted, and this faith is a choice. You can go
with your reason which tells you to err on the side of caution and to favour the
naturalistic explanation as the most likely one, this being that God would have obviously
nothing to do with any of the messages spread in his name. Alternatively, you can side
with your hope that the meaning of life is indeed so nicely packaged in one or another
holy book. Assuming the rational path leads to damnation and the wild hope to heavenly
bliss, this sort of theistic narrative is appropriately preposterous, which is to say that this
tall tale is just the sort you’d expect to be favoured by clueless souls trapped in the
decaying corpse of the actual god who is altogether undead.

To believe that there’s a living God who creates the universe and gives us the capacity
to reason, but sets up life as an elaborate test to see whether we’d submit to absurdity
in an act of reckless faith, against the overwhelming force of logic and evidence, is to
fade into the ludicrous background of the natural order instead of heroically and
creatively resisting that order. What I mean is that all natural, which is to say mindless,
patterns are tragic and absurd, and that when you take a leap of faith that the creator of
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dark matter, black holes, and trillions of stupendously huge nuclear fusion infernos
stoops to tell us a story about which foods we should eat, who we should have sex with,
and how many times a day we should pray, you participate all too closely in the ebb and
flow of natural processes: you adopt nature’s inhumane hallmarks and make yourself
horrible to look upon; you become a true child of the cosmos, a plaything of natural
forces which create and destroy with no rhyme or reason, a fittingly ridiculous splatter of
paint thrown up by a mad and blind artist; you make your life as preposterous and as
inexplicable as the natural creation of anything from nothing.

Need anyone be reminded that even were there in fact a personal God who indirectly
publishes works of nonfiction for our edification, we’d each have separate rational,
moral, and aesthetic duties to utterly reject that theistic hypothesis, to live as though
there were no such abomination? Rationally speaking, it goes without saying, all
scriptures are written entirely by certain clever mammals; there is no extraordinary
evidence warranting the extraordinary judgment that the universe’s creator had a hand
in any of them: no miraculous foreknowledge, no superhuman writing skill or method of
transmission, and so on. (Again, any such miracle would interfere with our free choice to
reject God.) Morally, we’re each obligated to overcome the rank cowardice and vanity
that take hold of all those theists who project an image of themselves onto the patently
inhuman cosmos, when they speculate that the First Cause of quantum fluctuations, of
supernovas, and of hurricanes also writes books for our benefit. That very notion is so
monstrous that every time a pitifully desperate Jew, a comically hypocritical
televangelist, a pompous and self-righteous Catholic, or an ignorant Muslim fanatic
parades his or her odious drivel, which humanizes and so trivializes the mystery of
god’s undeadness, dignified people everywhere should shun those beasts, refusing
even to look at them for fear of being turned to stone by their hideousness.
Aesthetically, then, we should strive to beautify the entropically decaying corpse in
which we’ve “evolved”; for example, we should rebel against the natural forces that
exploit us, which entails abandoning childish hope, taking a more accurate measure of
our existential predicament, and creatively expressing that grim awareness.
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Revelation, Evil, and Freewill

However divine revelation is thought to happen, the theist is left also with a problem of
freewill. Whether God or an angel would dictate a book to an author or manipulate the
human author’s natural faculties to write the text, thus remaining more behind the
scenes, supernatural agents would thereby possess the human to some extent, turning
him into a puppet. Yet the most common theistic solution to the problem of evil is that
God allows us to act evilly as a result of our freewill, since our freedom is a greater
good. Why, then, would God make an exception for the sake of revelation? Why would
God care more about revealing certain messages to us than about the authors’ freewill,
but more about freewill than preventing all the suffering caused by our evil acts? The
clearest answer is that our suffering in this life is insignificant compared to our status in
the next, and that God’s revelation is intended to inform us of that lopsidedness. That is,
whether we’re happy or miserable in our present, earthly life makes no difference in the
grand scheme, because our souls are immortal, and so God isn’t much concerned with
the plethora of pains to which we’re subject in our natural bodies. Thus, God isn’t
motivated to correct natural injustices, by interfering with evil people’s freewill. God’s
much more concerned with our eternal destination in the afterlife, and so he’s motivated
to interfere with some people’s freewill to reveal the path to the best such destination.

This solution, however, should be unacceptable to the theist, since it renders theism
nihilistic and incoherent. Even were there a supernatural heaven and a hell which are
vastly more important than planet Earth, this wouldn’t mean the events in the afterlife
must be all-important whereas earthly events are completely insignificant. Surely, if God
created the natural universe, that fact alone would dignify nature and indeed Genesis
says that God called his Creation not just good but very good. So what happens in
nature must interest God to some extent, which means it should interest us. But as long
as what allegedly happens to us in the afterlife matters more than what happens here
and now, the theist has reason to treat everything in nature as having merely
instrumental rather than inherent value. Moreover, our supernatural destinations are
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ineffable, or at best understood imperfectly with religious metaphors, and these two
facts together would seem to deprive the theist of any well-grounded values at all.

In other words, the theist believes she has a divine promise of ultimate goodness or
suffering in another life, an eternal destination for the spirit which requires faith here and
now, because we can’t rationally understand anything so disconnected from nature. The
theist trusts that that promise is contingent on what we do in the present life, but
because the next world is more important than the present one, all earthly events can
have only secondary importance. In particular, the theist must regard them as means to
achieving her ultimate end of reaching her best endpoint in the next life. Since the theist
would thereby credit all natural events with mere instrumental value, and must confess
that she can’t understand her ultimate values of heaven and hell, the theist would be left
without any tangible value to speak of. She should be hopelessly adrift, blindly following
religious orders like a robot with little or no conception of their meaning.

Moreover, if natural life has only instrumental value compared to the supernatural kind,
but the latter depends on a divine judgment of the former, which sends us either to
heaven or to hell, the relative unimportance of natural life saps the ultimate value of our
supernatural destination. Here’s an analogy: an Olympian athlete trains for months to
run a race, she wins and is awarded a gold medal. Her training and the race itself have
entirely instrumental value to her, meaning that her ultimate goal is to win the medal.
Now the medal is made of gold, which gives it an independent, albeit not an inherent
value, since the demand for gold is greater than the metal’s supply. But suppose the
medal were made of paper so that the medal’s only value is its abstract representation
of the fact that its wearer comes in first place in the race. And suppose also what
happens to be counterfactual, which is that the training has no purpose other than to
win the competition, that the athletes lose their added muscles and skills after the race,
for example. In that case, I submit, the goal of being such an athlete and of winning the
race would be arbitrary, which is to say, pretty much pointless. If the value of the
journey is solely to reach a certain destination, and the destination is nothing but the
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outcome of that journey, both the journey and the destination are vacuous. The
meaning of the whole affair becomes stipulated and arbitrary.

Now, just as the medal is actually made of gold, which has independent value, heaven
and hell are supposed to include great pleasure or pain, which should be independently
reckoned with. But because where we end up would depend crucially on God’s
judgment of what we do in our natural life (whether we follow God’s laws, accept Jesus
as our savior, and so on), and that natural life would be a game to test where we belong
in the next life, the gravity of heaven and of hell would be lost, as it were. Those in
heaven would suffer from the anticlimax that their great joy rests on something as
comparatively trivial as what they did in a world that would have passed away, fulfilling
its purpose as a mere cocoon for their benefit. Meanwhile, those in hell could content
themselves with knowing that although they suffer horribly, their misdeeds must have
been relatively insignificant in the first place, since they would have affected only
embodied spirits in a game of natural life, and so the divine judgment of sinners must be
farcical.

If this is the case, though, theism becomes incoherent, since now the supernatural
destination loses its ultimate value and the choice of whether to construe natural events
as mere means to achieving a supernatural end becomes the choice of whether to play
a certain game. Granted, the game in question would be God’s, but it would be a mere
game nonetheless, with arbitrary rules and an end state with ultimately artificial,
stipulated significance. God would declare those in heaven to be good and those in hell
to be bad, but the value of the earthly actions that land those spirits where they end up
would be instrumental, which is to say that the only reason to care about earthly
happiness or suffering would be because either is a means to our supposedly much
more important placement in the afterlife. Remember that were earthly suffering to have
some independent value, God would have reason to value that suffering more than the
freewill of evil people, so that he might prevent the former by interfering with the latter.
Only were the importance of natural events trumped by that of the afterlife, because the
former are the means by which we achieve our status in the latter, would God clearly
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have reason to value our freewill more than our corporeal happiness or suffering. But
the mere instrumentality and thus game-like quality of natural life would deprive life's
conclusion of its ultimate significance, rendering heaven and hell absurd.

Comic Relief

The notion of divine revelation through scripture is one of the more prevalent but
nonetheless loathsome features of exoteric theism. Luckily, critics of theism can spare
themselves the physiological damage of apoplexy from contemplating these religions,
by paying attention to the comedic value which lies safe and secure in the fact that
though most theists claim to have in their possession some such God-written text, they
typically either ignore each and every one of its teachings or else substitute their
laughably primitive perceptions for what would be God’s, by cherry-picking the parts of
their scripture which they deem relevant or plausible. Needless to say, the magnitude of
this theistic hypocrisy is beyond measure. Again, when anyone subscribes to such
extravagant balderdash in the first place, she dehumanizes herself and submits to
natural processes of complexification; thus, the pattern of her daily activities becomes
as monstrous as the universe’s scale, her hypocrisy as grotesque as the imbalance
between the evolution of a galaxy and its being swallowed by a black hole.

That is to say, believing that God writes books is bad enough, but because the cosmos
is a perverse cornucopia, spouting endless tragedies and absurdities, the theist must go
one step beyond even that foolish affirmation; she must cast aside all pretense of being
a dignified, sentient rebel against the cosmic horrors, and perpetrate a bonus bit of
nonsense: she must pretend to care about her manifestly fictional deity while actively
ignoring most of what this deity is supposed to have miraculously penetrated the
present world to tell her. Having resigned herself to the undead god’s tyranny, with no
thought of resistance, the theist utterly abandons herself to the sway of mindless forces,
heaping one absurdity upon another until the local process of complexification is
complete: natural forces, including the biases and fallacies to which we’re prone,
produce a fantasy world in the theist’s mind, a mental map that bears as little relation to
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natural reality as one cosmos would bear to another in the multiverse. The theist’s
worldview, complete with anthropomorphisms, delusions, fallacies, and so forth, stands
as an emergent level of reality, like scum floating to the surface which nevertheless
boasts patterns of putrefaction that can be divined by an intrepid anthropologist.

The fortunate point, though, is that this abyss between the theistic worldview and the
reality of nature, between the theist’s self-indulgent conception of the First Cause and
her vice-driven, beastly lifestyle which reveals the vaingloriousness of theistic religion as
efficiently as any atheistic counterargument, is enormously funny! Instead of criticizing
the theistic notion of divine revelation, which after all requires little more than stating the
obvious, enlightened individuals might choose instead to allow this corner of the cosmic
drama to unfold like a devastating but still existentially arresting train wreck. The evident
contrast between our godlike technoscience and our savage or petty confusions is the
stuff of classic tragicomedy. Indeed, the spectacle of American culture, in particular, in
which those two opposites flourish, will be as universally laughable centuries from now
as are the backwards aspects of premodern cultures to the modern mindset.
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Christian Chutzpah: Why Christianity is the Worst Religion

____________________________________________________

Even though Islam is arguably now a much more dangerous religion, the favourite
target of Anglo-American so-called New Atheists, inspired by writers like Dawkins,
Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne, is Christianity. One obvious
reason for this is that Christianity is the predominant western religion, especially in the
US which is the most religious western nation. Many Christian commentators complain
on places like Fox News, Christian Broadcasting Network, talk radio programs, and (in
Canada) on Michael Coren’s shows, that Christians are thus persecuted, that
secularists have a double standard, professing to be tolerant and respectful of personal
liberties, but waging a bitter campaign against Christianity, a religion that’s
conspicuously the greatest force for good in the world. The implication, of course, for
the Christians who keep one eye on such media and the other on the Bible, is that New
Atheists are literally in league with the devil and therefore beneath contempt.

The typical New Atheist response is to produce a hackneyed list of grievances with
Christianity, including crass statistics on the numbers of people historically killed in the
religion’s name; the religion’s failure to measure up to scientistic standards of evidence;
and the religion’s opposition to politically correct liberal views on social issues like
abortion, gay rights, and science education. Regardless of the status of those issues,
Christianity is indeed supremely worthy of criticism--but for another reason entirely, and
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so I’ll lay aside the standard New Atheistic arguments. (For a summary of general
arguments against theism, see Theism.) A sufficient reason why Christianity is the worst
religion is aesthetic in flavour, picking up on Nietzsche’s psychological critique of
Christian resentment. Nietzsche wasn’t interested in whether Christian beliefs are true,
since for him all truth is subjective, reflecting the will to power. So instead of tediously
pointing out biblical contradictions, the absurdity of miracle claims, or the fallacies in
arguments for God’s existence, he focused on tracing the character of Christian
theology back to its psychological origins in the experience of the earliest Christians.
Somewhat in that spirit, I want to highlight an aesthetic reason why nontheists ought to
be critical especially of Christianity.

The most unforgivable fault of mainstream and elite Christians--and it’s unforgivable
because the fault offends good taste, and the taste of something is visceral and thus
highly memorable--is their chutzpah, their sheer audacity, their shameless participation
in historical reversals that pile irony on top of irony until today the whole grotesque
Christian edifice--what Kierkegaard called Christendom--is a glaring sign of the
universe’s absurdity and perhaps the clearest proof of God’s nonexistence. Tertullian is
infamous for saying that he believes the Christian message because of the message’s
shamefulness, silliness, and impossibility, but Christianity’s absurdity is much deeper
than the content of its creeds. Again, I’m not interested here in the epistemic status of
Christian theology. I stress instead that when you compare the content of early Christian
documents, including the New Testament and extracanonical, Gnostic scriptures, with
the thrust of the Church’s historical development, you’re bound to be repulsed by the
gall of so-called Christians simply for their association with the oldest, most hypocritical
institution which is the Christian Church.

Jesus’ Repudiation of the World

I begin by summarizing Jesus’ ethics as found in the gospels and as highlighted by

liberal Bible scholars such as those who formed the Jesus Seminar. If we look at the
Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ other teachings, we find that, regardless of whether
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he existed in history, the character of Jesus was an iconoclast. He railed against the
Pharisees for their legalistic aloofness and he sided with the suffering poor, with the
outsiders and outcasts. Not only did Jesus heal people like prostitutes and lepers, but
he prophesied that the poor will inherit the earth, that the kingdom of God will undo the
perversions of secular kingdoms in which a minority of privileged elites rule over the
starving, impoverished masses. His parables and aphorisms reverse expectations by
comparing heaven to a leavening agent in bread (leaven being symbolic of a corrupting
influence), and by declaring that the first will be last and the last first: that a rich man will
have as easy a time getting into heaven as would a camel of going through the eye of a
needle; that earthly standards of ethics are meaningless in God’s eyes, and that
therefore instead of following your gut and seeking revenge against someone who’s
wronged you, say, by striking your face, you should turn the other cheek; that your
earthly family is inconsequential compared to the bonds between everyone as God’s
children, and that therefore you should give away all your possessions to the poor and
follow God instead of pursuing a comfortable life here and now; that good deeds are of
minor importance compared to the intention which must be pure, since God judges even
our thoughts and feelings.

In short, Jesus was a radical socialist and ascetic who condemned all expressions of
human pride, from power imbalances, to war, to the narrowly-defined human family, to
hypocritical shows of piety. All such natural excesses are preposterous given the
nearness of God’s kingdom, whether this nearness is understood in temporal or in
metaphysical terms. That is, regardless of whether Jesus assumed that God would
soon terminate the natural course of things for everyone at once and personally reign
after an imminent Judgment Day or that God’s reign is near for each individual who,
after all, lives for only several decades before dying and waking to God’s judgment,
Jesus’ main point was surely that we’d agree that radical changes are needed in all of
our lives if only we could appreciate the spiritual context. Like horses with blinders on
their eyes, we see only the present world, with all of its temptations and injustices, but
Jesus claimed to be intimate with a spiritual source of nature, with divine creativity that
renders the whole of creation comparatively insignificant.
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All of this can be gleaned from the apparent influence of Essenian Judaism on Jesus,
perhaps through John the Baptist. According to Josephus, Philo, and the Dead Sea
Scrolls, the Essenes, who lived from the second century BCE to the first century CE
and, as Josephus says, were present in large numbers in every town, were also
dedicated to voluntary poverty, baptism, and the ascetic renunciation of worldly
pleasures. Moreover, as I said, the radical nature of Jesus’ ethics is evident even in the
New Testament which--aside from Paul’s portion--contains the mere exoteric Christian
documents from the Church’s earliest period (although forgeries and obfuscating
English translations render Paul’s letters orthodox).

But by a wild improbability, an esoteric Christian library survived over the centuries and
was discovered in Egypt in 1945. The Gnostic Christians were persecuted as heretics
by the orthodox, literalistic Christians, but some of the Gnostic texts, such as the Gospel
of Thomas, are as early as the canonical ones, especially since they effectively include
Paul’s authentic letters which are the earliest Christian texts. Moreover, the Gnostic
texts make sense of clues in the canonical gospels regarding the basis of Jesus’
radicalism. When we put together the cosmologies implicit in the Gnostic gospels with
Jesus’ ethical teachings in the canonical gospels, we’re forced to regard early
Christianity as a God-intoxicated, and thus anarchical, antisocial, ascetic, utterly
unworkable rebellion against the natural world. As Nietzsche put it, Christianity was
otherworldly to the point of being antinatural and nihilistic in the sense that the earliest
Christians valued only a ghostly world beyond the present one.

The fact that many of the earliest Christians were Gnostics means that Christianity was
continuous with the perennial wisdom traditions that gave rise to eastern religions such
as Hinduism and Buddhism. Indeed, as the mystic Manly Hall says in Lectures on
Ancient Philosophy, the entirety of the Christian good news is easily interpreted as an
allegory of the spiritual enlightenment that each individual ought to experience, of the
need to renounce the standards fit for our natural bodies and to identify instead with the
divinity within, which is our own conscious self. The good news, for those with esoteric
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insight, wouldn’t be that one particular man named Jesus rescued us all from the
cosmos in which we’re trapped by the evil lord of this world, by being crucified at the
start of the first century CE. Instead, according to the insider’s version of Christianity,
the mystical, psychological truth is that we each have our own “power of Christ” within
us because, as Plato said, we can remember our higher, spiritual home; that is, we
have an innate conscience, or sense of the good, which forces everyone eventually to
condemn the physical cosmos in favour of our ideals. In Christian terms, we each
already have the power of self-transformation, of sacrificing the life of our natural
bodies, which are sources of sin and suffering, casting off those shells to free our true
“spiritual” or conscious self. Again, according to this view, the crucifixion of Christ isn’t a
unique historical event that happened only to one person, but an obligation for each
suffering individual, who’s trapped in God’s spoiled creation and forced to sin just by
being born into this world with a distracting animalistic body, to realize that this world is
a sham compared to our true home with God.

The point is that many early Christians carried Jesus’ radical viewpoint from ethics to
metaphysics and cosmology, condemning not just imperial Rome but the whole natural
order as monstrously unjust, as a prison for spirit (consciousness). As the scholar of
Gnosticism, Hans Jonas, points out in The Gnostic Religion, the Gnostic Christian
shares the modern existentialist’s feelings of alienation, and I’d add that Lovecraft’s
science-centered cosmicism is consistent with this antinatural viewpoint. Indeed,
contrary to Nietzsche, Jesus’ hostility to nature is admirable as far as it goes, since it
presupposes an appreciation of what I call our grim existential situation, or what
Christians call our fallen state. Both Jesus and Nietzsche appreciate the horrors of
nature, although they disagree on the virtues needed for the best response. But whether
Jesus was himself a Gnostic or even whether he lived at all as an historical figure who
preached and was crucified, as stated in the canonical gospels, is irrelevant for the
purpose of my aesthetic case against Christianity. The unavoidable conclusion, though,
is that earliest Christianity was astonishingly radical. We know this now not just from
Jesus’ ethical teachings in the New Testament (NT), which for many centuries were
available only to Christian elites who spoke Latin, but from the Gnostic gospels, which
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again were unavailable for many centuries, because most Gnostic texts were burned
along with the Gnostics themselves by literalistic Christians.

Jesus versus the Imperial Church

And so we approach the first absurd, stomach-churning turning point, the first
indisputable moment of irony in Christian history, which was the Constantinian shift in
the fourth century when Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, introducing state
involvement in the religion and beginning the long process of making Christianity the
empire’s official religion. Max Weber called this “caesaropapism,” the “complete
subordination of priests to secular power.” No words can adequately characterize the
chutzpah of those so-called Christians who went along with that imperial use of what
was once indisputably an iconoclastic, anti-imperial, indeed antinatural cult of rebellion.
Just try to imagine: you’re an early Christian who claims to follow the teachings of a
Jewish radical who was crucified by the imperial powers of Rome in league with Jewish
elites who rejected Jesus’ preaching. (We can now surmise that what many Jews
rejected in Jesus was the Greco-Roman syncretism with Judaism, which formed a
Jewish brand of Gnosticism called Christianity). Now Christianity is embraced by Rome,
and you decide to curry favour with the empire by representing your local church in the
Ecumenical Councils, to produce a version of Christianity that might be graced by
Rome’s stamp of approval. Jesus loathed and was killed by Rome, you claim to follow
Jesus, and now you align yourself with Rome in Jesus’ name? The irony is
breathtaking!

However, not all Christians went along with Rome. The Gnostics didn’t attend the
Rome-sponsored councils that hammered out Christian orthodoxy, remaining true to the
otherworldly spirit of Jesus’ message. The Donatist Christians as well went as far as to
reject the authority of priests who thrived under Constantine but who had betrayed
fellow Christians to save themselves, during the earlier Roman persecution of Christians
by the emperor Diocletian. At the Council of Arles in 314 CE, the Donatists were
condemned as heretics, while for obvious Christian reasons the Donatists in turn
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condemned the Roman Empire as evil due, for example, to its wealth which went hand
in hand with sin. In 317 Constantine sent troops to kill or banish the Donatists,
withdrawing the troops in 321. Donatist opposition to Rome-backed Churches persisted
until the seventh century when the Muslim conquests rendered the inter-Christian
conflicts moot.

Why many Christians went along with pro-Christian emperors is easy to understand.
Rome had destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE; moreover, according to Christian beliefs,
Rome had slain Jesus himself as well as other Christian martyrs. Although Rome was
tolerant of and often indifferent to the religious practices of the cultures it ruled, the
empire smashed anti-Roman uprisings with an iron fist, which indicates again how
radical Jesus would had to have been to be executed. On top of that understandable
fear, there’s the passage of centuries between Jesus and Rome’s conversion to
Christianity, which means that the memory of Jesus’ intentions would have faded even
for the Gnostics, Donatists, and others who best understood what Jesus was up to, let
alone for the fair-weather followers who might have come and gone with not even an
indirect connection to Jesus himself. Just as pedophiles presently exploit Catholic
Church policies, many Jews and gentiles would have joined a movement that
synthesized Judaism with Hellenism--but in pursuit of their own agenda, especially once
Rome stopped persecuting Christians and favoured the religion.

Still, the effrontery of those later Christians is repellent. There was sufficient evidence of
what the religion’s founder would have said and done, in those myriad gospel narratives
and other Christian scriptures. Although those texts conflicted with each other, which is
why the Ecumenical Councils were needed to unify the Christian Roman Empire,
something like the summary I give above must nevertheless have shone through.
Indeed, the audacity of those Christians who betrayed what they must have regarded as
their founder’s clear message, by accepting state power to establish Christianity as an
imperial religion, is matched only by the Romans’ cynicism. Granted, the gospel
narratives that were selected for inclusion in the Christian canon whitewashed any
Roman involvement in Jesus’ death and scapegoated the Jews. But Jesus’ radical
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message remains even in those sanitized texts, and that message is at least implicitly
opposed to all grand secular endeavours, including political ones. (Presumably, the
gospels couldn’t have been entirely rewritten for the purpose of Roman propaganda,
because they’d already become popular, thanks to their mystical and thus implicitly anti-
Roman message.) For example, Jesus was evidently opposed to war and family, which
were bedrocks for Rome. Nevertheless, Constantine and later emperors chose to help
unify their failing empire by converting to a religion founded by a Jewish radical
anarchist, socialist and antinaturalist, which made Jesus at least implicitly an anti-
imperialist.

Partly, the emperors must have grown comfortable with Christianity because Roman
religion already had its own plethora of rising and dying demigods. Also, their familiarity
with the Roman versions of the perennial wisdom traditions, such as in the mystery
cults, would have made the emperors privy to the esoteric view, according to which the
story of any dying and rising god-man is allegorical, and thus the emperors would have
realized that Rome didn’t actually kill “the Son of God.” Yet another reason for Rome’s
eventual use of Christianity, to which I’ll return in the next section, is that the subtext of
the Christian message actually favours secularization, a point which opens the way for a
second level of Christian chutzpah. If Rome could assimilate even Jesus’ radicalism, the
Empire could stamp out any anti-Imperial sentiment.

As Elaine Pagels points out in The Gnostic Gospels, literalistic Christianity was
embraced by Rome as orthodox because it empowered a hierarchy of Church officials
(Jesus had to personally confer power to Peter, the first Pope), whereas the Gnostic
Christian was more like the Protestant in his or her pursuit of individual salvation without
the need of any connection to a religious institution. Gnostic Christianity was thus
useless to the emperors in their attempt to revive their empire by unifying its culture.
Rome needed a bureaucracy to exercise top-down control of mass religion. Ultimately,
the reason for the split between the hierarchical, literalistic Church and the
individualistic, Gnostic one is the exoteric-esoteric divide in any mass movement in
which the masses have unequal cognitive capacities. Just as gifted children in private
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schools are given the freedom to pursue their own interests, whereas less intelligent
children are forced to follow a technocratic curriculum, the more sophisticated Christians
were attracted to the philosophical character of Gnosticism, to the idea that salvation
requires secret knowledge of the grim reality of nature, whereas the poorer, illiterate, or
less intellectually-curious Christians had to be led, and that demand for leadership was
naturally met by a supply of Christian leaders, who became the Catholic priests, bishops
and popes.

Catholics will respond that the state involvement in the Church benefited both sides,
that the Christian Church obviously flourished thanks to its access to secular power. But
this response misses the point: the Church’s flourishing in the evil, fallen world,
governed by what Paul called powers and principalities, is a bad thing from Jesus’
radical, antinatural perspective. Authentic Christians want to escape the prison of
nature, not build an empire within that prison. The audacity of early Catholics was
their pretense to be followers of both Jesus and the Roman emperor. As Jesus said,
you can’t serve two masters, God and money.

The fallout from the decline of Jesus’ ideological influence on the Church is well-known.
Just compare Jesus’ anarchic, socialist, pacifistic, otherworldly rhetoric to the language
used in the Roman Edict of Thessalonica in 380, given by emperors Theodosius,
Gratian, and Valentinian II, which formally established the Catholic Church as the
exclusive religion of the Roman Empire:

We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians;
but as for the others, since in our judgment they are foolish madmen, we decree
that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not
presume to give to their conventicles the name of churches. They will suffer in
the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the
punishment of our authority which in accordance with the will of Heaven we shall
decide to inflict.
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We’re looking here at the difference between day and night. That the one should turn
into the other requires a revolution, which is to say that the Church that was established
in Jesus’ name betrayed the heart of his message, the spirit of his rebellion. The ironies
are many and palpable. And so for centuries, Christians acquired secular power by
persecuting other Christians and then non-Christians, leading to the destruction of
pagan society; to the imprisonment, torture, or burning of heretics including Gnostics,
Jews, pagans, witches, and scientists; to the pogroms and inquisitions against thought
crimes; to the crusades against the Muslim Empire; to the European wars between
Catholics and Protestants; and to the genocide against Native Americans and the
enslavement of Africans. Again, my point isn’t to judge Church history from a modern,
secular perspective, but to condemn the cognitive dissonance and audacity of at least
the educated and non-monastic Christians, which enabled them to call themselves
followers of Jesus even while their lifestyle seldom had anything to do with his
otherworldly renunciation of natural life. Their chutzpah is appalling.

Sure, Jesus vehemently condemned people to hellfire, but the type that he condemned
would have included the exclusivist and hypocritical friends of secular power who came
to run the Church. And granted, the Catholic Church also fed and clothed the poor,
through its monasteries and missions, and a minority of Christians lived ascetically as
monks, nuns, and mystics. Catholic history is mixed from a Christian perspective. But in
the first place, the standard of living might not have been so low that there arose such a
demand for Church charity, had the Church not destroyed pagan society and stifled
intellectual progress, holding medieval Europe in a dark age while the more rational
Muslim society prospered. Secondly, the extent to which the Catholic Church cared for
the poor and advocated asceticism, thus staying true to its founder, is outweighed by
the magnitude of its betrayal of Jesus, especially since, as in today’s Christian charities,
the assistance was rendered with secular as well as spiritual intentions: the poor were
helped as long as they supported the Christian institution which empowered and
enriched the elites in the Church hierarchy. Still, the charge of unbearable chutzpah
doesn’t apply to those Christians who actually tried to live like Jesus.
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Secular Christianity: a Second Level of Chutzpah

Catholics will reply that the Church isn’t like a constitutional democracy which is tied
mainly to its founding documents: the Church ought to evolve wherever the Holy Spirit
takes it. This brings me to the deeper level of Christian audacity. The first level is the
most obvious one, which I’ve been highlighting: Jesus was an iconoclastic and
otherworldly anarchist, socialist, pacifist, and ascetic, whereas the institution that arose
to spread his message clearly betrayed his ideals by joining with the secular power of
the Roman Empire. As indicated by the Gnostic gospels, Paul’s letters, and the NT
gospels, Jesus was opposed to all of Creation in so far as Creation was governed by
natural rather than divine powers. Jesus was a dualist who didn’t assume that God
works through all natural forces, such as the Roman Empire. On the contrary, as Jesus
reportedly said, we should render unto Caesar what’s his and unto God the things that
are God’s. From the original Christian perspective, those two allotments differ from each
other, because God’s will is opposed by demons that enslave God’s children by
distracting us with secular goals of money, power, and pleasure that are
inconsequential in the divine scheme. (The NT gospels even depict Jesus resisting the
devil's temptations in a face-to-face confrontation with the devil.) That’s why Jesus’
ethics seem to us so radical and impractical: we’ve fallen far short of divine standards
because we’ve lost sight of the big picture; we’re so distant from God that we can’t save
ourselves and so God needed to leave his heavenly abode and be incarnated in the
midst of evil, in the natural world of darkness, and die on the cross as our sacrifice.

But the Catholic is a monist who shares the Jewish belief that Creation is good, that
God isn’t alienated from nature but works within it in the form of the Holy Spirit which
guides the Church, animating the “body of Christ.” So the Catholic can say that there
was no Christian audacity, because Christians aren’t bound even by the New
Testament, but must attend to the ever-developing Christian message as it’s revealed
especially to the Catholic hierarchy which was empowered to be God’s chief instrument
for our salvation, next to Jesus. Thus, in effect, the Catholic can move the goal
posts to justify the secularization of Christianity. After all, the subtext of Jesus’
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message, as it’s presented in the NT, is found in the prevailing interpretation of the
Pauline gospel, according to which Jesus’ ethical standards are impossible for fallen
humans to adopt and so all that should be expected of us is that we claim Jesus’
excellence as our own, by proclaiming him our lord and savior. That is, the orthodox
view of Paul’s formulation of the gospel came to dominate Christian thought, but that
view effectively undermines Jesus’ antinatural radicalism and excuses bad, secular
behaviour on the part of Christians.

Note the order in which the NT texts are presented in the Bible: the gospels come first
even though Paul’s letters, which barely mention the historical Jesus, are older. The
resulting impression on the reader is that Paul implicitly criticizes Jesus for being
unrealistic. The gospels tell of Jesus’ harangues against humanity for being so impure,
and then of his being executed for his trouble. The subtext is one of realism: in the fallen
world that’s distant from God and at best indirectly controlled by heavenly forces,
humans will either fail miserably to live up to God’s standards and save ourselves from
the hell which is our lot or else the forces of evil will avenge themselves on those saints
who reveal an escape hatch in the form of an ascetic life. Then comes the real good
news in spite of the apparent bad news of Jesus’ lofty standards and ignominious death:
as Paul seems to say, there’s a short cut, an easy way out for even the greatest sinner,
which is that we simply need to confess our sins and call upon Jesus to save us, in
which case the credit Jesus earned for himself will be transferred to us without our
having to personally live like Jesus and earn our own way. (As indicated in the
previous section, that latter point is one where Gnostics and Catholics differ in their
reading of Paul. Gnostics believed we each have our own power of Christ to overcome
ignorance and liberate our state of mind, whereas Catholics contend that we acquire
that power only from external sources of salvation, namely from the concrete event of
Jesus’ sacrifice and from the Catholic institution.)

On this realistic, quasi-Pauline subtext of the NT, then, there are two Christian excuses
for sin and thus for a rejection of Jesus’ ethics. First, contrary to Gnostic Christianity,
God works throughout the imperfect natural universe and so God’s representatives in
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the Catholic and Protestant Churches need offer no apology for allying with such
secular forces as the Roman, Russian, Spanish, French, British, and American
Empires. But compromises are needed because we do live in a fallen world, just as God
limits himself by achieving his goals for Creation by mysterious and convoluted means.
Second and contrary to Judaism and Gnosticism, God expects very little from us in our
fallen state (we’re fallen in that we’re spirits which have lost our unity with God and been
imprisoned in matter); we can’t save ourselves and so we’re bound to sin even after we
become Christian.

With these two assumptions in mind, the full meaning of Church history comes into
view. On a naïve level, discussed in the last section, the Church repulses me with its
wholesale treachery against its own scriptural ideals. But when we interpret those
scriptures like a jesuitic Christian, we discover that most Christian leaders haven’t
shared Jesus’ radical ideals since perhaps the second century. Instead, these leaders
embrace the secular world and its natural ideals of wealth, power, and pleasure, viewing
them as they think God views them, as instruments that ultimately serve God’s will even
if only God knows how. By incarnating on Earth, God conquered and sanctified fallen
nature, and so God blesses secular powers as long as we inevitable sinners follow
God’s path through the wilderness. By severing the Church from Jesus’ otherworldly
radicalism and worshipping God the Holy Spirit as it historically preserves the Church by
adapting it to changing circumstances, Catholics effectively deify the natural forces of
time and of social evolution, including all of the biological and psychological factors that
determine how Christians respond to events and how Catholic officials make pivotal
decisions for the Church. In this sense, Christianity brings God down to Earth just as
Aristotle reduced Plato’s transcendent Forms to natural processes. The upshot is that
Christianity reduces to a kind of pantheism. Far from undermining pagan secularism,
the Church merely renames some gods and prunes the over-abundant mythical
celebrations of mystical experience by focusing on a Jewish version of the pre-existing
myth of the dying and rising god. From the elite Christian perspective, Christianity is just
as this-worldly or practically secular as Judaism and Roman religion, which means that
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Christianity is ultimately just another ideology in the service of secular powers, similar
even to the most primitive form of tribal idolatry.

Again, where Christians distinguish themselves is their monumental audacity, their

delusion that their religion differs from a garden-variety rationalization of secular
injustices and dominance hierarchies. The deeper level of Christian chutzpah, then, is
that Christians typically assume a self-righteous posture, paying lip service to Jesus’
ascetic ravings but practicing a religion that effectively justifies any secular activity, no
matter how counter-productive or even abominable from a spiritual, antinatural
viewpoint. To be sure, this audacity would be impossible without their uniquely radical
scripture that speaks of Jesus’ ethics, since that scripture serves as a fig leaf concealing
the shame of Christians’ secular preoccupations. The most familiar case of Christianity
as a handmaiden of secular powers is the American conservative’s brand of the religion,
which very obviously bears not the slightest resemblance to anything that Jesus would
have welcomed. From the warmongering to the fetishes for guns, violent sporting
events, and Ken and Barbie doll-like nuclear families; and from the greed for money and
material goods to the seamless union between religious and Machiavellian schemes in
the Republican party, conservative “Christianity” in the US is a farcical charade, a
preposterous amalgamation of opposites that brings shame to all its informed
participants.

By contrast, Jewish and Islamic scriptures openly sanctify secular forces, including war,
as long as the participants compensate by chanting some magic words, eating select
foods, and performing other comparatively meaningless rituals. This is why whatever
excesses the Israeli military or the mujahedin may be guilty of and however complicated
their scriptures may be which allow for moderate and liberal interpretations, their killing
for the secular purposes of protecting land, exacting vengeance and so forth are never
obviously wrong from a Jewish or Islamic frame of reference, respectively. Sure, Jews
have their Ten Commandments, but they also have volume upon volume of rabbinical
commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures, making every manner of legalistic distinction
which effectively justifies any conceivable action a person might take. Thus are Jews
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secular survivors above all else, which is why they're not hypocritical when they reject
mystical ideals.

The Worst Religion in the World

With regard to the major extant religions, only Christianity begins with the preaching of
so uncompromising a form of antinatural dualism, wearing the record of that preaching
like an albatross, and double-crosses that radicalism so quickly and fully while
Christians so blithely attempt to have it both ways. No other religion can tempt its
practitioners to exhibit such disdain for what the religion itself proclaims is the ultimate
truth. That sin against its own stated principles, that forced hypocrisy makes Christianity
the ugliest religion, the one that’s most embarrassing to people of good taste.

Christians ought to be the most confused members of a major religion, because their
scripture is so utterly opposed to their religion’s history. That conflict isn’t accidental.
Jesus’ radicalism was unworkable from the outset, because Jesus condemned all
natural works, all natural forces, all our thoughts and inclinations that aren’t God-
soaked. Jesus was opposed to this whole world, to this “kingdom” not yet ruled by God.
The very notion that a religious institution, such as the Church, should be erected in his
name is grotesque. Evidently, Jesus didn’t take matters into his own hands and write an
account of what sort of institution he wanted to create. As the Gnostics understood,
Jesus wanted to create no institution at all, since he didn’t want to add one more natural
burden to distract us from what he regarded as the ultimate, harrowing truth, that we
need to abandon this present world entirely by way of loving God alone with all our
emotions, intellect, and consciousness.

Naturally, no sooner had the Church gained a sizeable following so that it became
useful to the local secular power, than that leviathan, the Roman Empire, swallowed the
Church whole. The fact that the Church promptly dropped all pretense of following
Jesus’ contempt for natural life and united not with God but with one hotbed of natural
vice after another, from one secular empire to the next, earns Christianity the title of
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Worst Religion in the World, aesthetically speaking. Moreover, the Christian religion is
thus the most richly deserving of philosophical and scientific criticisms, if only because
those intellectual criticisms prettify the more gut-level but nevertheless warranted
response, which is just that of vomiting in the presence of any educated, non-ascetic
Christian. For centuries, these lapsed Christians have had the habit of wearing precious
metal crosses around their neck, ostensibly to remind themselves of Jesus’ crucifixion.
What they should at least subconsciously appreciate, though, is that they themselves
symbolically condemn Jesus just by owning those crosses instead of giving them to the
poor, not to mention by betraying their so-called Lord in a thousand other ways. Their
audacity knows no bounds when they feign to follow Jesus the ascetic, the socialist, the
pacifist, and the anarchist, even as they belong to a treacherous Church and live as
hedonists, war supporters, and eager members of secular institutions while wearing
about their neck a perfect symbol of their own apparent contempt for Jesus.
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Christian Crudities: An Aesthetic Condemnation of Christian

Myths
____________________________________________________

Christian theological assertions are illogical and highly improbable, but those faults have
almost no place in a proper denial of them. Religion is the irrational core of every
worldview, of every belief system, mindset or way of looking at the world. It’s currently
fashionable for so-called New Atheists to castigate mainly Christians and Muslims for
the palpable irrationality of their religious beliefs, as though the issue that separates so-
called secularists and theists were the Manichean conflict of Faith versus Reason. No
non-autistic or otherwise sane atheist is a hyper-rationalist, a Data-like figure who turns
solely to reason in all her affairs, never speculating, feeling, intuiting, trusting, or caving
to higher powers. A viable defense of atheism doesn’t reduce to the following argument:
(1) A worldview should be fully rational; (2) Theism is irrational; (3) Therefore our
worldview shouldn’t be theistic. A person does not live by Reason alone. As the
sociologist Durkheim explained, you’re bound to form a religion around what you hold to
be of ultimate importance. I’d add that only a machine truly cares about nothing, which
implies that all people, all clever animals with primitive emotions and instincts, are
religious.

Indeed, those atheists who rest their case by showing that theists commit various
fallacies and that their key assumptions are preposterous, reveal their irrational
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commitment to certain unexamined philosophical assumptions of their own, be they

pragmatic, positivistic, or scientistic. The issue, then, isn’t whether a person should
reject all religions as foolish, but rather which religion should be discarded. When you
appreciate that logic and science stop short of fully justifying a worldview, that a human
brain’s perspective on the world should be coherent, which means, in effect, that it
should satisfy all of our cognitive faculties, including the rational and irrational parts of
our mind, you should find yourself adopting subtler criteria in choosing what to believe
at the philosophical or religious level. (For more along these lines, see Theism,
Scientism, and Scientific and Philosophical Atheism.)

Now, Christianity happens to be execrable, but the pseudo-rationalist underestimates

the religion’s inadequacies, by banally demonstrating that Christianity isn’t perfectly
logical or scientific because, after all, the Bible contradicts itself and Jesus allegedly
performed miracles. Proving as much shows only that Christianity fails as a
mathematical proof or as a scientific theory, and such a demonstration would thereby in
turn amount to a category error. Christianity contends for people’s religious
commitment, and thus the religion’s inconsistencies and improbabilities are relatively
insignificant.

The more loathsome aspects of the religion, to my mind, are ethical and aesthetic. What
I mean is that the religion fails now, in modern and postmodern times, to uplift as a work
of imagination; on the contrary, in the present context, Christian belief degrades a
person’s character. When combined with modern myths and values--as every current,
responsibly-held worldview must be--Christianity’s shortcomings are outrageous. The
point, though, isn’t just that Christianity contradicts modern truths that should be taken
for granted, which it obviously does, but that a synthesis of Christianity and modernism
would make for an atrocious, wildly incoherent work of art that disappoints rather than
fortifies. This is, of course, the Nietzschean point. What appalled Nietzsche wasn’t some
assortment of petty cognitive defects of the religion, but the anachronism of Christian
values, the anticlimax of the Christian narrative, the unethical effect of the religion which
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is to reconcile the gullible masses to secular excesses rather than energizing people
with stories (myths) worth trusting.

In Christian Chutzpah, I develop this aesthetic case against the religion, focusing on the
historical context, the main point being that Christianity dulls the senses and redirects
the crucial capacity for shame, because the religion reconciles the believer to the most
egregious betrayals which are the Church’s compromises with secular powers. The
Christian feels only the inconsequential shame of failing to suffer like Jesus, and is
relieved by Paul’s assurance that faith is much more important than works, that a
Christian needn’t be even slightly Jewish, let alone ascetic, because Jesus already
carried out on our behalf all the good deeds we could hope to accomplish. Historically,
this theology plays out as a rationalization of the Church’s betrayal of Jesus’ Gnostic
rebellion against the natural world, and so associating with the religion’s present
grotesque shell has all the charm of bullying a child with a machine gun.

Now I want to expand on the criticism by contrasting the content of Christian theology
not with Church history but with modern ideals. I’ll emphasize the monstrous Christian
deformities that emerge from that contrast and that repulse from an aesthetic viewpoint.

The Essence of Christian Theology

But first I’ll summarize the narrative in question, the so-called “good news,” as I
understand it. The problem that this religion is meant to solve is our inability to relate
properly to God. Most religions codify means of pleasing God, holding out
commandments to obey and rituals to perform, such as animal sacrifices. These
religions perpetuate injustice and keep God and his children at a distance, because they
fail to deal with the fact that God is holy whereas we are inherently imperfect and thus
sinful. Even those religions which catch a glimmer of divine truth end up as human
schemes, corrupted by their sinful practitioners and heaping useless burdens on their
followers. This was the New Testament’s point about the Pharisees (not the actual
Pharisees but the characters in the Christian legend): the Jewish officials aligned
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themselves with Rome and kept the letter of revealed Jewish law while ignoring the
spiritual intention behind the law. Instead of building the kingdom of God on Earth, the
bureaucratic Pharisees supported oppressive political systems that kept people apart
from God. The problem was that humans are inherently corrupt and liable to sin, that
because we’re not gods, we can’t possibly live up to God’s standards. Even when God
reveals his plan for us, inspiring prophets and lawmakers, people ignore or misinterpret
the revelation. In modern terms, a Christian would say, this is because of our animal
nature, which causes us to act as desperate, selfish beasts, not as the supernatural,
altruistic beings we’re designed to be.

Christianity is supposed to have solved this problem. Instead of relying on human

initiative, God came to our planet and paid the price of our sin, sacrificing himself and
thus both extricating us from the burden of wrongheaded religious hierarchies and
further revealing the thrilling truth of God’s benevolence. The Creator of the universe
isn’t just perfectly powerful and knowledgeable, but he’s a loving parent who cares
about his creatures and mercifully fulfills the requirements of justice by undergoing the
punishment we deserve for the myriad ways we fall short of God’s glory. Indeed,
according to Christian theology, Jesus was the only begotten Son of God, which means
that he was both God and a man. Thus, when Jesus was crucified by some of the very
beings he was trying to save from eternal agony in hell, his intentions were God’s and
so we can praise God for his mercy, and his sacrifice was meaningful because Jesus’
human body permitted him to genuinely suffer.

Just as a human ruler can be surrounded by sycophants in a bubble of affluence and

thus lose touch with his people’s miseries, God and humans had become estranged,
and just as a king can reacquaint himself with his subjects by disguising himself and
traveling among them, God dressed up as a human and lived amongst us. God literally
walked a mile in our shoes, breaking bread with ordinary humans, to show us not just
how an ideal human lives, but how much God empathizes with our plight. God’s Son, or
human incarnation, felt our pain; however, instead of merely telling us so, he showed us
by demonstrating both his divinity and his wretched sharing in the worst that the human
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condition has to offer. Jesus was shown to have been divine, by the wisdom of his
parables and by the supernatural power of his miraculous prophecies and healings. But
Jesus’ humanity was apparent in his poverty, his humility, and especially in his mortality,
which is to say his capacity to suffer while being tortured and executed by the Romans.

The horrible irony of the Christian message is that God’s incarnation as a human
revealed not just God’s identity but ours. God arrived to save us from divine retribution
for our beastliness, and humans welcomed him largely by rejecting him as a foreign
body. God’s creatures tortured and killed their creator, but this was God’s plan: knowing
what he was getting into and how his created world would devolve, he used our
wickedness to devise a way for us to be reborn: God means to shame us by
demonstrating our moral failings. The Jewish and Roman authorities dutifully, if
unknowingly, played their part by showing why we’re so helpless, because they couldn’t
recognize holiness when it literally stared them in the face; on the contrary, they went to
war against what’s most sacred, against the fleshly incarnation of the Master of the
cosmos. They double-crossed noble, loving, and wise Jesus, turning him over to the
cruel Roman Empire; they stripped and beat him, nailing his wrists to a wooden cross
like an insect specimen in a museum--and just as biologists thereby exhibit the
arrogance of the technocratic mindset that uses our capacity for quantification to exploit
other species, the Jews and Romans showed why Jesus had to live in the first place,
why they needed a saviour, because left to their own devices they’re forlorn, headed for
the agony of everlasting separation from God.

The good news is that the human reaction to God’s incarnation wasn’t one-sided, since
some people recognized Jesus’ divinity and saw the potential for a divine arrangement
of human interrelations. Some Jews and gentiles followed Jesus even at the cost of
their lives, giving up their livelihoods, their possessions, and their dignity in the sight of
their ignorant neighbours and Roman occupiers. They fled after Jesus was executed,
but continued to meet out of remembrance of what Jesus taught and what they came to
understand that he represented. They formed small churches, they were persecuted by
Rome, but a few centuries later the empire that had crushed Jesus was itself overcome
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by a wave of Christians; Constantine legalized the religion and so Christianity continued

to spread. Christianity became not just the world’s most powerful religion, but the only
one that deals head-on with the fundamental conflict that motivates all religions: we
profane beings glimpse the sacred in nature, but are unable to live in harmony with it
because, after all, the sacred and the profane are so contrary to each other. On its own,
the profane can’t reach a state of perfection, but a perfect being can degrade itself, just
as a fast car can travel also at a slow speed; thus, God took on a profane form so that
he could save us from ourselves, from our estrangement from him and from our inability
to satisfy his holy ideal.

The Need for an Aesthetic Appraisal of Christian Myths

So much for my most charitable presentation of the Christian message. Now, the typical
New Atheist would recite a litany of Christian howlers: Jesus probably didn’t live even as
an historical figure, let alone as an incarnation of the ultimate creative power; the notion
of a god-man is incoherent; the Bible is quite errant, so it doesn't adequately support
any of Christianity's extraordinary claims; there are no supernatural events, as the
philosopher Hume showed, so Jesus’ miracles never happened; there’s no original sin,
so there would have been no need for God’s self-sacrifice; the notion of an
anthropomorphic deity is preposterously vain for anyone to take seriously; a deity who
prepares the punishment of hellfire so liberally is a demon deserving of scorn rather
than worship; Jesus’ and Paul's ethical teachings are inferior to those of the ancient
Greeks, so Christianity fails even to uphold human wisdom. All of these criticisms are
reasonable, but none is decisive. When the New Atheist finishes arguing those cases,
the edifice of Christian theology will remain as influential as before, and this isn’t just
because Christianity has grown powerful, thanks to its long history. The underlying
reason a religion becomes so powerful, in the first place, is that it satisfies a demand,
and this isn’t the demand for a logically airtight belief system or for a reliable hypothesis
about how a natural process works.
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To see the futility of pretending to dismiss Christianity solely on rational grounds, you
need to appreciate the depth of our irrationality, what Hume called Reason’s slavery to
the passions (emotions). Observe how even the average scientist, engineer,
mathematician, or analytic philosopher, let alone someone who’s less likely to uphold
the Enlightenment creed of hyper-rationalism, can be brought to tears after her reading
of a craftily-written sad novel. Again, notice how virtually anyone can be terrified by a
sufficiently scary movie or be compelled to pump his fist in the air when watching his
favourite sports team score the winning goal. As cognitive scientists have shown, what
happens is that our instinct to read each other’s minds and navigate our social
environments can spill over, causing us to anthropomorphize everything from words on
a page, to images on a movie screen, to groups of people like sports teams or political
Parties. We cope with the inhumanity of natural patterns by humanizing them. Sure, we
have the rational capacity to abstract from our preference for a human-centered world,
for a heaven in which everyone gets what she wants. But again, no sane person is both
fully and constantly rational, that is, hyper-rational.

And so my point is that if we cherish arts and sports, for example, so we can vent our
emotions or hone our skills at social interaction, we can also feel strongly about a
theological narrative, whether it’s that of Jesus’ salvation of humanity by his sacrificial
death or of humanity’s utopian triumph over natural forces by the power of
technoscience. Thus, even if Christian theology fails utterly in rational terms, even if
Jesus never lived at all, there is no personal God, and the Christian creed is full of
holes, the theological narrative can persuade on the level of metaphor, as an
emotionally satisfying story like any other powerful work of fiction. Millions of
Christians believe, at the very least, that even if their religious creed were literally false,
humans are so tragically misguided that we would slay God in the flesh were there a
personal Creator and were he to so manifest himself. And that counterfactual contention
is plausible and indeed sobering. Besides the Church’s earlier power over people’s
bodies, which was lamentable, here then is the heart of the religion’s power over
people’s hearts and minds: the Christian narrative has undeniably succeeded as a work
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of fiction that rose to the level of myth, taking hold of people’s imaginations and stirring
their emotions.

The irrational commitment to Christianity--which is of apiece with our attachment to our

favourite novels, movies, sports teams, political Parties, or anything else we
anthropomorphize and irrationally celebrate--can withstand every logical refutation,
every disconfirming experiment. After all, even the cognitive scientists who understand
how and why our capacity for anthropomorphic projections works, engage in the
practice, emotionally identifying with their favourite fictional characters. Even a physicist
who speaks the mathematical language of nature can use pornographic images for
sexual gratification, and even a biologist who understands the chemical properties of
love hormones can find herself falling in love. Likewise, a theist who suspects that her
theology would fail as a mathematical demonstration or as a scientific argument, can
have what’s commonly called religious faith. Understanding the truth obscured by an
illusion won’t immunize a brain that’s less than fully rational.

This is why we should examine the aesthetic merit of Christianity, treating its theology
as a story told in the context of the modern narrative of reason, freedom, and progress.
(For more on the modern narrative, see Modernism and Postmodernism.) Can Christian
theology now sit well with those who have had modern values thrust on them in the
wake of the Age of Reason? Does the creed inspire and uplift, engaging with our
emotions in a way that helps us cope with modern challenges? In other words, does
Christianity make us better human beings in the modern context? I emphasize the latter
because art and other outlets for our irrational side aren’t used in a vacuum: what
engaged the imagination of someone two millennia ago in Palestine might be passé
today in Europe or North America; what myths were naturally regarded as sacred in one
culture may be alien and ridiculous to another.
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Christian Misanthropy versus Modern Progressivism

I’ll illustrate with an aesthetic evaluation of some key elements of Christian theology.
Take, for example, the part of the story which Christians seem to care about most, the
idea that the Almighty degraded himself by living as a mortal man and suffering out of
compassion for us. The subtext of the Christian story of God’s self-sacrifice is that God
offers us a backhanded compliment. On the one hand, we’re supposed to be worth
saving, but on the other we’re supposed to be incapable of saving ourselves. The New
Testament tells only half the story when it says that God so loved the world that he gave
his only begotten son, that whoever believes in the power of his sacrifice should have
everlasting life (John 3:16). Anyone who could love a depraved world’s potential to be
good must loathe its actual depravity. The unstated corollary, then, is that God must
have contempt for our choice to sin so abominably that we become unable to save
ourselves from everlasting punishment. Jesus’ sacrificial death symbolizes not just
God’s mercy but his contempt for what his prized creatures have become. After all, God
could have paid the penalty for sin in private, without shaming us with a public
demonstration of his moral superiority. By transforming himself into a human and living
the perfect life, according to the Christian story, God effectively humiliates us, showing
that we all along had the power to live well but always choose not to do so. With his
supposedly sinless life as Jesus, God is like a business manager who, frustrated by his
receptionist’s poor typing skills, shoves her out of her chair and types his own memos at
record speed and with no errors, publicly shaming her while assuring everyone that he
acts only to edify.

To preserve God’s underlying benevolence, the Christian apologist (in both senses of
the word) typically distinguishes between God’s love for the sinner and his hatred for the
sin. It takes no more than a moment’s reflection now, though, to see why this distinction
has never made the least bit of sense and is thus a ham-fisted attempt to sell the
Christian narrative. A sinner is a person and sin is ungodly action. The sinner chooses
to act well or badly and the action is the result of that choice, the mental command that
causes the hand to feed the poor or to steal someone’s wallet. Thus, hating a sin is like
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hating the rock you trip over. We anthropomorphize and emotionally react to inanimate
objects or events because we have primitive programs running on our naturally selected
brains. God would have no such excuse. If someone chooses to sin so abundantly that
the person deserves everlasting torture, the proper target of hatred for those offenses is
the sinner, not the offenses themselves which after all are just mental images, bodily
movements, and their effects. So if we’re so wicked that we’re unable to please God
and we’d torture and execute our saviour, God must be much more ambivalent about us
than the orthodox summary of the Christian narrative suggests. The only way God could
love us in spite of our original sin is if we’re not responsible for our imperfect nature
since, after all, God would have made us that way. Of course, with that assumption in
place, the whole Christian story would unravel since then we wouldn’t deserve
punishment in hell or need Jesus’ sacrificial death. (As everyone knows who’s raised a
child or owned a pet, when a creature develops from an early age into a monster, that
does speak badly of the creature’s parent or owner. Our tendency to sin might thus
indicate that God has been the quintessential absentee dad.)

Again, priests and preachers like to emphasize our worthlessness by saying that God’s
self-sacrifice was done out of “grace,” meaning that we do nothing to earn a way out of
perdition, but that God chose freely to intervene out of compassion. This formulation
likewise assumes both that we could be so wicked as to deserve hell and that God
punished himself in front of us purely out of unconditional love. But love for whom? For
the unrepentant sinners who arrogantly live by our own lights instead of praising our
Creator at every opportunity, who are so corrupted that we’d each kill or at least shun
that Creator if only we were given the chance? No, in terms of narrative logic, that story
makes no sense, meaning that it can’t grip our imagination or stir our emotions. God’s
boundless love must be for himself, for his greatness which he demonstrates by
doing our job for us, by showing us how it’s done and then taking the high road,
pretending that he doesn’t act out of jealousy for our pride. This interpretation is
consistent with the rest of the abysmal story, that for Jesus’ sacrifice to work, we have
to confess God’s greatness and our worthlessness, we have to attribute all good things
to God, avoiding pride like the plague, in which case we’re reborn as proper children of
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God and Jesus’ heavenly Father comes to resemble nothing as much as a typical
human despot who’s naturally been corrupted by his absolute power.

The Christian subtext of God’s misanthropy is unappealing in its own right. Mind you,
misanthropy within reason is thoroughly justified, since we are appalling creatures, but
Christian misanthropy is absolute. According to the Christian story, God sacrificed
himself because we suffer from original sin, which means that even though we
somehow have the freedom to be as sinless as Jesus, we’ll always choose to sin if left
to our own devices. In practice, we never redeem ourselves, and our only hope to avoid
God’s wrath was the miracle of divine intervention. This implies not just that we’re
miserable sinners, but that as far as the natural world is concerned we’re hopeless; at
best, we have the metaphysical potential to save ourselves, thanks to our alleged
supernatural capacity for self-control (our freewill), but naturally we’ll always disappoint.
What’s aesthetically unappealing about this is that it renders the Christian narrative
anticlimactic. As Christopher Hitchens would say, if the character of God the Father is
that of a duplicitous egomaniac who intends to save worthless, wicked creatures mainly
to demonstrate his superiority and to remake us into slaves after we’re chastened, the
promise of Christian salvation becomes exactly as tempting as the offer to be a citizen
of totalitarian North Korea.

More importantly, this absolute pessimism about human nature conflicts with modern
optimism about human progress. With no help from divine revelation, modernists during
the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment surely proved that
we can create exciting new cultures and can learn how the world actually works and
gain more control over threatening natural forces. But the aesthetic point is just that
there’s no compelling story to be told that combines the modern narrative of human-
centered progress with the Christian story of how God decided one day to humiliate us
so that we might be transformed into obedient children obsessed with singing God’s
praises.
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The root of the conflict is that Christianity assumes a static view of human nature,
whereas modernism assumes an evolutionary one. Again, according to Christianity, we
can’t improve our situation except in some abstract metaphysical sense (without
supernatural freewill, the Christian narrative doesn’t even get off the ground); that is,
human nature is completely corrupt, but we have an immaterial spirit that technically
has power over that nature (over our mind and body), even though we never choose to
live in a spiritually laudable fashion. This is why Jesus was supposedly the only human
who perfectly followed the spirit of God’s law with no help from God (of course, Jesus
was God, but no matter...). Ancient Christians took not just human nature but the whole
universe to be static: the outer, heavenly realm was one in which the stars or gods
never waver in their orbits, because they’re perfect and thus changeless.

The modern view of nature is, of course, very different. Nature evolves: stars are
created in nebulae and eventually they’re destroyed, as are whole galaxies; the physical
laws of nature may be mere environmental properties in an evolving multiverse, as
opposed to timeless dictates; biological species change into each other over time, as
Darwin explained; and human history can evidently progress on its own at least in
certain respects. So a modernist would say that our capacity for change and indeed for
progress rests not on something as remote as a ghostly spirit, but on our connection to
the natural world. Because we’re naturally selected, we acquired the power to
understand how many things work, and because the forces of natural selection are
blind, they have to live with the consequences of their handiwork, as it were. Those
forces endowed us with some freedom from our basic genetic programming, which is
how the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution were possible. Were we governed
by a jealous god who prefers us to be humble rather than proud of our
accomplishments, he could change his mind about having given us Reason and
lobotomize us. Alternatively, he could wait until we’re all dead and surprise us with his
displeasure by consigning most of us to hell, like a jerk.

Whatever those facts may be, the aesthetic point is that modernists (liberals in the
authentic, non-corrupted sense) trust in the natural potential of human progress,
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whereas there’s no room in the Christian narrative for the practicality of that potential.
The Christian story is presently told with modernism in the background for all people
educated in industrial or postindustrial societies. The prospect of combining modern and
Christian myths, to forge a coherent, presently-viable Christian worldview is so daunting
that few even try to harmonize them. Modernists tend, then, to be lukewarm,
secularized Christians, if not atheists or more philosophical mystics in some Eastern
tradition. When Christianity and modernism are combined, the result is a hideous
bastard tale, like Joel Osteen’s prosperity gospel. Osteen concedes the benefit of what
human greed can produce, namely material wealth, while he disingenuously attributes
that success entirely to God--as though Jesus’ perfect Christian morality lay in anything
other than his renunciation of natural possessions, let alone wealth, so that he could
dedicate himself to altruistic endeavours.

Theistic Anthropomorphism as Childish Twaddle

For another example, take the bedrock theistic assumption that there’s a personal god
who therefore could expect us to live well, sympathize with our inability to do so, and
sacrifice himself for our benefit. Even were there such a god, only a Philistine could
presently be moved by a theistic tale of his exploits, just as an adult must revert to a
very silly frame of mind to enjoy playing with her children’s toys. As I said, we all
irrationally anthropomorphize the outer world, personalizing the patterns we detect.
Spiders spin webs, birds fly, fish swim, and humans over-socialize. But no bit of
anthropomorphism is as conspicuous as the theist’s, especially when judged in the
modern context in which the world has been remade by the application of rational
methods. Infants look all the more childish when their behaviour is compared to an
adult’s, and so theistic anthropomorphism is all the more clearly an over-extension of
our drive to socialize, when we indulge in such obsolete metaphors even in the Age of
Reason.

Of course, this means we’re much more likely now to regard theistic statements as
wildly false. But the aesthetic point is that these statements about God’s personality, his
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moral deeds, his war with demons, and so on, really do become as emotionally
compelling as a tale intended for children. Because of the unavoidable modern context,
there’s an unfortunate parallel juxtaposition established between the child’s unlimited
anthropomorphic projections and the adult’s partial rationality, on the one hand, and the
theist’s personalization of nature’s ultimate creativity and the modernist’s ideal of hyper-
rationality, on the other. The New Testament does modern theists no favour by
accentuating this conflict, with its prescription of childlike qualities: Jesus says that
those who inherit the kingdom of God are like children (Matt.18:3) and Paul repudiates
the natural wisdom of the world, comparing it with God’s spiritual wisdom which seems
foolish to arrogant pagans (who we’d now call secularists) (1 Cor.2:13-14).

Likewise, the sort of Christian paternalism I criticize in the previous section exacerbates
the current tone deafness of Christian theology. In the present individualistic era, when
we’re fed a steady diet of capitalistic propaganda, promising happiness if only we
consume enough products, we’re not going to be genuinely moved by the deeply
misanthropic idea that we’re all hopelessly headed for hell unless we abase ourselves
before the egotist who made the universe and who rubbed our noses in our wickedness
a couple millennia back. Sure, consumerism is grotesque and the masses cry out for an
alternative, for a postmodern myth that can guide us in spite of our rampant skepticism.
Fundamentalist religions and New Age cults can fill the void, but no postmodern religion
has emerged which truly ennobles its followers, in my view. Certainly, the orthodox
Christian story can teach us nothing about our predicament.

Children live in a fantasy world that they haven’t yet learned to distinguish from reality,
regarding everything they encounter as extensions of themselves. This is because their
evolutionary task is to passively download information from their parents; instead of
being fully-formed individuals, they have a window opened in their minds, as it were, so
that they can be trained. But that window allows not just for unimpeded parental input,
since the child’s personality, too, spills out into her experience of the outer world so that
everything seems to her magically imbued with life. We can’t say in a positivist spirit that
the ancients generally were more childlike than modernists, that history recapitulates
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the developmental arc from human infancy to adulthood. The ancient Greeks as well as
the Hindus, for example, were skeptical of theistic anthropomorphism; Hindus used
theistic metaphors purely for the utilitarian purpose of developing certain emotions. Still,
our irrational drive to socialize tends to be given free reign when unchecked by the well-
motivated use of a competing mental capacity. The Scientific Revolution gave a boost to
Reason, picking up where the ancient Greeks left off, and technoscientific progress now
dignifies the sort of objectivity that’s anathema to childlike personifications of the
environment.

What this all means, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, is that theistic narratives feel
embarrassingly retrograde and even dehumanizing. Even though it’s fallacious to
automatically attribute value to natural developments, including the child’s physical and
mental growth into an adult, we all surely believe, for one reason or another, that that
growth is necessary and ultimately for the best. Granted, we can suffer nostalgia for
childhood innocence, but we tend to share the modern faith in the benefits of godlike
human creativity, which requires the power that comes with understanding how the
world works. When an adult regresses to an infantile state, acting severely ignorant or
even wearing a diaper, whether because of a mental illness or a sexual kink, the adult’s
behaviour is invariably kept secret--partly out of the embarrassment felt for what looks
like the ultimate cowardice. So when the theist becomes engrossed in tales of a
personal hero who acts throughout nature for the greater good, what looks like the
shameful abandonment of adult sensibilities is off-putting. We’re all irrational at times,
but we also have the capacity to think objectively, and when theists brazenly feed their
inner child with the most extreme anthropomorphisms even in the shadows of the most
stunning edifices of Reason, the gut reactions should be feelings of shame and disgust.
Theistic myths just feel misplaced and artificial, even though they inherit the illusion of
still possessing the power to exhilarate, from their glory days of yore. Instead, these
myths no longer uplift as much as they stultify and then require elaborate
rationalizations to preserve the theist’s dignity in the modern world.
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Conclusion

The upshot is that Christianity isn’t just absurd, from a modern, rational viewpoint; the
religion’s creed also makes for a bad story when told in the context of the modern one
of how Reason empowers us. Instead of being encouraged by a coherent worldview,
modern Christians are forced to create mental compartments, awkwardly abandoning
one story for the next as the situation dictates, moving from Church to the workplace, for
example. Never mind that Christianity fails utterly to meet modern epistemic standards;
as far as our irrational side is concerned, Christian metaphors are stale and ineffective,
as Bishop Spong said. A religion that’s long overstayed its welcome, Christianity runs
up against the modern and postmodern zeitgeists. But like Muzak spilling out of
speakers everywhere, the Christian narrative is still told and retold, enchanting hardly
anyone. To be sure, there are still so-called Christian missionaries and other altruists
who feed and clothe the poor, but who is to say whether they’re inspired now by the
Christian message or by the modern story of human-created progress? Both are in the
atmosphere and only the latter is supported by recent history. The Church and its myths
remain, but Christian institutions have lost their political power and so they must
compete with the modern myths that serve the dominant social classes and that best
explain recent historical upheavals. That competition is devastating to the current
literary value of Christian stories.

Just as many early movies are historically great, in the sense that they’re highly
influential for later filmmakers, Christian myths should obviously be appreciated for their
historical importance. But the fact that an artwork once had the power to move people
for the better, to speak to their sensibilities and reassure them or broaden their
perspective, doesn’t mean the art retains that power under all circumstances. Indeed,
the books or movies that move you when you’re young often seem crude and paltry
when you later encounter them. For many sociological reasons, there are currently
around two billion Christians. But the most popular art is seldom the most tasteful.
Kitsch, for example, is highly popular. And the current aesthetic value of Christian
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fictions is less than nil: in their exoteric formulation, at least, Christian stories are
embarrassingly irrelevant, besides being obviously false.

Now I don’t expect that anyone will abandon Christianity after reading this aesthetic
condemnation of the religion. My aim is only to identify the queasiness that I assume
virtually every educated person feels when contemplating the Christian narrative. That
suspicion that the gospel is vacuous, that the Church is like a colossal used car lot, that
Christians are literally kidding themselves? That’s your good taste telling you to
appreciate worthy art instead.
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The Curse of Reason

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Reason is a double-edged sword. Our abilities to model reality in our minds, to detach
from our immediate sensations and experiment on mental representations, to apply
abstract categories with language, and to think logically or holistically and so discover
how our environment works, are largely why humans presently flourish. We’ve mastered
much of the world because of our cognitive powers; indeed, the wonder of reason is the
godlike power it places in a beast’s paws. But knowledge can be a blessing or a curse,
depending on what there is to be known. As it turns out, we’ve learned that our naïve,
anthropocentric preferences are mostly false. The universe doesn’t care about us; we’re
not at the center of things; our ideals count for nothing in the cosmic cycles; we’re not
immortal, nor as conscious, free, or even as rational as we assume when we childishly
compare ourselves to a divine source of the whole natural universe. Reason makes us
godlike but only compared to the unknowing beasts that struggle alongside us; we’re
still beastly, given the potential for evolution of intelligent species over millions of years.

How Reason makes Human Life Absurd

As the philosopher Thomas Nagel pointed out, reason makes life absurd in other ways.
When we think objectively, seeing things as they are and not as we might wish them to
be, we take up what he called a “view from nowhere.” We can view a situation more or
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less impersonally, ignoring our feelings and following the data or the logic wherever they
lead. The danger in this is that we can view ourselves objectively as well, and when we
do so it’s hard to avoid a destructive sense of irony. Take any highly specialized form of
complexity, like a biological adaptation. The giraffe’s long neck makes sense from the
giraffe’s limited perspective, but were the giraffe able to view itself dispassionately, from
a neutral, non-giraffe viewpoint, it would surely regard its specialized neck as a
ridiculous albatross. Granted, the adaptation enables the giraffe to survive by affording it
access to highly-placed food, but the narrowness of that way of life simultaneously
takes the giraffe out of countless other races. The further a species evolves in a single
direction, the less flexible its members become and the more absurd their behaviour
when they’re removed from their comfort zone.

Language and culture, too, become absurd when viewed by an outsider. The symbols
that carry meaning to a language speaker are so many noises or curious squiggles to
anyone else. Taboos, rituals, and social conventions can appear as extravagant follies
to anyone who isn’t invested in the culture. The rules of games or sports are relatively
arbitrary and thus the player’s strenuous exertions to follow them are comical: were the
rules changed, the player would have to play the new game instead, rendering his or
her earlier efforts meaningless. Relative to the perspective in which a set of rules
matters, the game makes sense, and fans can even become obsessed with a game’s
vicissitudes. But someone who views a game objectively, from the position of nowhere
in particular, thereby prevents herself from identifying with its dynamics or its symbols.
Instead of personal involvement, then, there’s ironic detachment and a sense of the
futility of complex developments due to their narrowness and thus their transience.
Complex forms are often inflexible and thus unstable.

In so far as you depersonalize yourself and view something critically or scientifically,

you cease to care about it and are bent on understanding the mechanisms that make
the thing work. The more you understand, the more power you have over the thing, and
that power further deprives the thing of its dignity. Reason transforms the natural into
the artificial, making nature our playpen. We turn members of other species into toys,
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domesticating or consuming artistically-prepared portions of them. We use what we

understand to our benefit, and just as a god’s might is presumed to give the god the
right to treat its creation as a means to the god’s end, we convert whatever we
understand into instruments that lose any inherent worth. Because we’re beasts rather
than gods, the power we acquire from reason corrupts us, and so reason lands us in a
quagmire of nihilism and decadence.

Thus, we share with the giraffe the embarrassment of overspecialization. While reason
obviously makes us much more flexible than the giraffe, our evolutionary gift becomes
just as much of a curse when certain circumstances change. In the giraffe’s case, tall
trees can become scarce, leaving the giraffe ill-equipped to compete for low-hanging
fare. In our case, we change our own environment, creating a feedback loop as we use
technology to customize natural processes, and as we adapt to the newly-created
artificial environment, thanks to our ever-flexible capacity for reason, we become
alienated from the way of life that insulated most of our ancestors. To wit, we become
postmodern, mythless cynics or arrogant, reactionary zealots. Just as an adult may long
to recapture a state of childlike innocence, a technoscientifically advanced society can
only yearn for the naivety of a blindly anthropocentric culture that hasn’t discovered
nature’s impersonal processes. Having lost touch with a childlike perception of nature
and been corrupted by the technological prison with which we surround ourselves, we
exacerbate our beastly instincts and head out on a path towards inevitable cultural
implosion. Replacing childlike creativity and optimism with cold, calculating reason, with
impersonal instrumentalism and materialistic consumerism, we build a high-tech society
but strip ourselves of the innocence and the passion that might fruitfully direct our
godlike power. Ironically, then, the society that becomes outwardly godlike, using
science and other modern institutions to acquire power over nature, also becomes
inwardly more beastly so that the godlike shell, consisting of the military-financial-
industrial-governmental complex and the postmodern lifestyle of disenfranchisement,
suffocates the beast within.
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(This isn’t to contradict Steven Pinker’s recent thesis that modern people are less
violent than the ancients. Our greater beastliness lies not in a penchant for brute force,
but in our greater corruption, nihilism, and decadence; in our servitude to the
overwhelming systems we create; in the sociopathic rationalism we adopt to master
natural forces and to compete with the machines we build; and in the scientistic idolatry
that co-opts the religious impulse. Of course the ancients resorted more to brute force:
they lacked the infrastructure to punish their enemies and victims in a safer, more
sophisticated fashion, with advanced legal regimes and mass-produced, maximum
security prisons; with engineered propaganda for social conditioning; and with
economic, cyber, and drone warfare. We channel our aggression with more
sophisticated instruments, but the use of those instruments doesn’t ennoble us.)

As an example of the curse of reason, consider the mundane task of editing a piece of
writing. While in the midst of constructing sentences, a writer feels emotionally
connected to the words as brainchildren, and editing them is more difficult. Only when
the text is “cold” to the writer, after several days during which the text is forgotten, can
the author objectively assess the writing’s strengths and weaknesses, and modify it as
needed. The objective criticism can improve the writing, but the distance needed to view
the text from nowhere precludes an emotional connection to it. Now, the value of
something is more felt than puzzled out by logic, experiment, or any cognitive algorithm.
We value what we care about, and objectivity is the opposite of caring. Thus, we care
less about what we most understand.

Another example is found in a comparison of sociological criticism of one’s own culture

with that of a culture that no longer exists. In the former case, passions arise more
easily, because more is at stake and the critics may be emotionally invested participants
in the society in question. With regard to ancient societies, historians and social
scientists more readily dehumanize their subject matter, offering mechanistic, reductive
explanations of our ancestors’ behaviour which mock the way the ancients would have
understood themselves. However much historians may care about past societies, they
can’t be as emotionally tied to them as they are to their own society. Just as the
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emotional bonds to something must be at least temporarily severed to take up a

detached perspective and to master the thing, the lack of such bonds invites objectivity
which establishes a master-slave relationship between the objective observer and the
passive subject matter.

There are, after all, roughly two levels of explanation that can be given of human
behaviour, the commonsense and the scientific ones. We naive folk think instinctively or
in ways we inherit from our amateur training. Thus, we explain people’s behaviour by
positing such familiar entities as beliefs and desires, and we assume the person has
consciousness, freedom, and perhaps an immaterial soul that makes her sacred. This
level of explanation is drenched in normativity, since the talk of beliefs, desires and of
much of the rest presupposes standards of behaviour and the special value of human
beings. And so we establish the famous Cartesian divide between humans and the rest
of nature, since while we may still animistically import psychological categories to the
nonhuman world, we more readily take up a scientific attitude in our dealings with that
world. The wilderness of impersonal natural forces falls outside the scope of modern
social laws, and since we’ve evolved to be social we naturally care most about persons
and our pets.

Scientists ignore these considerations and use impersonal and more precise,
mathematical language to understand nature, on the pragmatic assumption that nature
ultimately consists of impersonal entities and processes. Of course, psychologists,
economists, anthropologists, and other social scientists have turned their attention to
human beings and so have undermined the traditional, commonsense level of
explanation. While the latter presupposes moral bonds and capacities such as
autonomy, which dignify us, a scientific explanation reduces a person to much more
abstract categories. When we understand human behaviour in terms of causes, whether
these causes are found in physics, the brain, the genes, the environment, or in
evolutionary history, we inevitably dehumanize the person and think of her, in effect, as
a ridiculous puppet. Even if we retain some form of dualistic worldview, according to
which the levels of explanation are all valid because reality can be understood in many
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ways, depending on our interests, the Scientific Revolution compels us to assume that
some levels are deeper than others. In nature, as objectively understood by scientists,
minds are not fundamental, meaning that while beliefs, desires, and some degree of
consciousness, freedom, and reason may be real, it’s more accurate to speak in
scientific terms that disenchant human nature and posit a more deterministic, generally
inhuman world.

This leads to postmodern irony and cynicism, since while we naturally fall back on our
naïve picture of ourselves in polite society, in the back of our minds we simultaneously
know about genes, hormones, the brain in general, and the whole atheistic panoply of
impersonal causes and effects that operates throughout the universe, including in our
own bodies. Reason is thus the messenger that reports our foolishness, our ridiculous
existential predicament. There’s a genre of comedy in which a character pursues silly
goals using serious, highly logical means. This is human life in a nutshell: our naïve,
commonsense goals are delusions sustained by our ignorance of more fundamental
causes, and when we apply reason to understand those causes, we eventually destroy
ourselves if only to avoid laughing at our own expense for all eternity. What’s so
amusing isn’t just the gap between what we think we’re doing at the naïve level and
what’s really happening as understood best by scientists; rather, the point is that the
familiar social world in which we’re most comfortable is an illusion compared to the
deeper reality of natural processes.

Our actions are as absurd as a puppet’s flailing: the puppet is an unknowing actor,
following a script and wholly controlled by a puppeteer who looms off-stage. Were the
puppet somehow to come alive and learn of the disparity between its naïve self-
conception as an agent in its own puppet-centered world, and its deeper reality as a
stooge on a stage within a much larger, puppet-indifferent world, the puppet would
surely be afflicted with angst. In the film, The Truman Show, the protagonist learns
[Warning: spoilers ahead] that his whole life has been staged for a television show in
which he’s the star, and in the end he chooses to leave the show and enter the real
world. But we have no exit, no means of cutting the puppet strings that incarnate us as
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natural beings. The Truman character leaves one stage only to step onto another, that
of naïve human society the dignity of which is undermined by rationally-obtained
knowledge.

Dawkins on Scientific Wonder

The biologist Richard Dawkins responds to this sort of criticism of reason, in his book
Unweaving the Rainbow. More specifically, he responds to the charge that science
takes the wonder out of life and provides little material for great poetry. On the contrary,
he says, poets waste their gifts on romantic fantasies that spring from their imagination
and if only they’d stop ignoring scientific discoveries, they’d find a wealth of inspiration.
By explaining how light works, for example, Newton spoiled only the fairytale of
rainbows and leprechauns, but allowed us to learn about electromagnetism, special
relativity, and the immense size of the universe and the properties of other star systems.
Science thus replaces minor wonders with major ones. “What is so threatening about
reason?” Dawkins asks. “Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the
contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case,
when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater
poetry” (41).

In the first place, Dawkins’ talk of mysteries and puzzles personifies nature and thus
whitewashes the damage science does to the naïve, exoteric worldview. To have a
mystery, properly speaking, you need a secret and thus a mind that sets the mystery in
motion for others to solve (from the Greek “mysterion,” meaning secret rite). Scientists
are not like Sherlock Holmes in that respect. Much of nature is unexplained prior to
scientific investigation, but the metaphor of the intrepid British detective who tracks a
murderer by following clues left unwittingly behind, is as anthropocentric as any
monotheistic fairytale. The philosophical upshot of scientific theories is the Nietzschean
and Lovecraftian one, that no one else cares whether humans explain and master
natural processes or succumb to them. There is no Mother Nature who hides from the
scientist like a guilt-ridden temptress.
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As to whether disenchanted nature is beautiful, the question is trivial since beauty is

subjective. Anything can seem beautiful or ugly depending on the viewer’s criteria.
Since aesthetic criteria are normative, there is no factually correct set of them. Even if
natural selection biases us to prefer symmetrical faces and hourglass figures, for
example, no judgment of beauty is proven correct or incorrect just by citing that
evolutionary fact. Normative judgments aren’t justified by force; instead, they flow from
values. Biologists can explain why certain aesthetic judgments are normal, in the sense
of being prevalent, but not why anyone ought to favour a prevalent standard. Scientific
theories have no normative implications. Thus, biologists may find insects beautiful,
while others may have a different opinion.

Scientific wonder is also normative and thus subjective. There is no error made if
someone doesn’t agree with a scientist that electromagnetism is wonderful. Moreover, if
we define “wonder” as astonishment mixed with admiration, we’re surely speaking of the
initial shock from being surprised by a natural phenomenon that isn’t yet understood,
and then of the dawning admiration as the phenomenon is explained and eventually
tamed by technological applications. This sort of wonder is harmless, because it’s
analogous to a god’s bemusement by its controlled creation. A patron of a zoo feels this
wonder, this delightful mixture of shock and admiration, when beholding a caged lion.
But place this admirer of lions in the African Savannah, alone, unarmed, and staring into
the eyes of a hungry pride of the beasts, and we’d likely have on our hands a different
kind of wonder. Here, you see, we’d have that same initial shock and surprise, but
instead of admiration from a position of safety, we must assume the admirer of zoo-
bound lions would suffer from raw fear due to the reversal of power. We can call this
second kind of wonder “awe”, and it includes the idea of respect or reverence due to
fear from a lack of control. In this sense, a religious person is said to fear God, because
God would have power over us and not the other way around.

With this distinction in mind, we can see that Dawkins is right to some extent: scientific
wonder can be felt towards nature in so far as nature doesn’t threaten us, whether
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because the phenomenon is too far removed from us or because we control it with
technology. But in so far as science alerts us to some natural phenomenon that does
threaten us, whether because we don’t yet or can never control it, awe is more
appropriate than admiration-filled wonder. And, of course, scientific theories are filled
with information that should terrify us. For example, scientists learned that the dinosaurs
were probably wiped out by a meteor, and nothing prevents the same from happening
to us except chance. Obviously, leaving aside our own self-destructive use of science,
scientists are just the messengers and shouldn’t be blamed for discovering, in effect,
our grim existential situation (the surprising degrees of our irrationality,
unconsciousness, and lack of freedom; and our manipulability, mortality, and aloneness
in the universe). But the dire existential implications of scientific theories are surely why
people don’t rush to science for poetic inspiration.

Even were a poet interested in writing a tragedy or a dirge, for which science could
indeed provide abundant material, most people prefer the comfort of their naïve
anthropocentric worldview and so don’t even want to know the details of our existential
predicament. In his book, Dawkins criticizes astrology and talk of psychic and other
paranormal phenomena for encouraging people to indulge themselves in unscientific
wonder, but for most people these are at best entertainments. Their deeper quarrel with
the rationally-understood world lies not in any such unfulfilled New Age interests, but in
their suspicion that reason makes a mockery of our whole commonsense self-image,
that the most rational philosophical position begins, in effect, with Nietzsche’s atheism
and Lovecraft’s cosmicism. And the problem with that philosophy is that it conflicts not
just with frivolous supernaturalism, but with the socially-necessary assumption that
humans have dignity as rational, free, elevated beings.

Dawkins distinguishes between the mystic and the scientist. Without analyzing these
three synonyms, he says that both feel “awe, reverence, and wonder,” but that “The
mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not ‘meant’
to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content;
recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, ‘But we’re working on it’” (17).
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These caricatures of mystics and of scientists follow from scientistic mythology, but are
embarrassing when read outside of that context. Was Joan of Arc “content” rather than
“restless”? Does the Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire to protest a dictatorship
“bask” and “revel” in wonder? What Dawkins misses is that while mystical
consciousness alienates the mystic from secular society, the peace felt in meditation is
spoiled as soon as the mystic is forced to confront the unenlightened masses. Far from
being complacent, the mystic often leaves the cave or monastery and works tirelessly in
the pursuit of moral aims. Moreover, the mystic claims not that we can’t understand
ultimate reality, but that reason and science are the wrong methods. Not only can we
understand that reality with disciplined consciousness, but that’s our highest purpose,
says the mystic, to escape from the world of illusions by recognizing our divine nature
and the oneness of what seems a multiplicity.

Also, as I’ve pointed out, the scientist doesn’t feel the very same wonder as the mystic.
Scientific wonder is tinged with patronizing admiration, stemming as it does from our
scientific power advantage. The mystic regards as absurd the egoism at the root of
power games. While the enlightened mystic doesn’t fear the absolute oneness of
everything, existential angst and the detachment of a merely semi-enlightened mind
aren’t so far apart.

Finally, there’s Dawkins’ arrogant assurance that the scientist works to dispel profound
mysteries instead of leaving them unexplained and untamed. The idea here is that the
scientist doesn’t fear even those parts of nature that aren’t yet subdued, since the
scientist assumes that because science has worked in so many cases, it will probably
work in all cases, leaving no unknowns to fear and no powers too great to harness. This
optimism is like the subtle anthropocentrism in regarding nature as a keeper of
mysteries/secrets. Why assume that some mammals with an accidental capacity for
reason are equipped to understand everything that exists or that we’re sufficiently
ingenious to overcome all obstacles with technology? The pragmatic position may be
that defeatism with regard to those two issues is counterproductive, and so scientists
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are actually open-minded even while they’re professionally optimistic for the sake of
their work. But Dawkins goes further when he speaks of the “restless” character of
scientists.

Here Dawkins is speaking of what I’ve called scientistic faith, or of what’s typically called
secular humanism. In this case, the anthropocentrism consists in a glorification of
human nature rather than in a projection of human categories onto the nonhuman. This
scientistic quasi-religious confidence in technoscience is ironic, since Dawkins means to
oppose secular confidence to mysticism. Scientism is insidious, since it’s effectively a
religion whose practitioners dare not recognize it as such, since they pretend to be
hyper-rationalists who condemn religious impulses. Dawkins condemns trust in
astrology, UFOs, psychic predictions, and the Loch Ness monster, but not in secular
humanistic ideology, not in the philosophical conviction that we should bravely face the
unknown with science rather than shrink in fear.

Part of this science-centered optimism is what the political philosopher Leo Strauss calls
the modern conceit that everyone can handle the unvarnished truth. Without this added
assumption, the scientist’s business-oriented hunt for the truth might be
counterproductive, after all, since were natural facts unpleasant enough and were the
report of them shouted from the rooftops, they might upset society and ruin the scientific
enterprise itself. But the secular humanist’s lack of self-awareness indicates that there’s
no such widespread appetite or tolerance. Dawkins chastises theists for their irrational
religious faith, but trust in humans and in secular institutions like science, democracy,
and capitalism is no less irrational. More precisely, reason is insufficient in deciding
what to believe about such philosophical issues. There is no calculation proving that
humans potentially can understand everything, nor is there an experiment
demonstrating that capitalism is ultimately constructive rather than destructive. To be
sure, there are relevant data that should be weighed, but these aren’t purely empirical
matters. For example, whether capitalism is destructive depends on what’s valued, and
this is yet another normative issue.
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However much evidence there is of science’s success and of technology’s power, faith
is needed to bridge the gap between what logic implies or the data indicate, on the one
hand, and what the secular humanist philosophically declares, on the other. The reason
the secular humanist denies that she’s beholden to a science-centered religion is that
the philosophical tenets of her faith are anthropocentric reactions to the grim reality
unveiled by science. Just as the masses flee from the horrors of the Lovecraftian gods,
into the arms of New Age phonies, so too the more sophisticated “secularists” seek
religious comfort in a science-centered, partly-irrational ideology. So instead of holding
up the scientist as a heroic model next to the mystical defeatist, the secular humanist
should look in the mirror and appreciate the extent to which we’re all animals and thus
ill-equipped to defend against a flood of harsh truths.

A secular humanist like Dawkins would insist that reason is far from a curse, since
reason allows us to pacify natural forces so that we can safely marvel at their beauty.
By contrast, a cosmicist points at the abyss between what we naively prefer to think of
ourselves and what reason shows us to be, and suspects that without an infinite
capacity for mental compartmentalization, which evolved animals aren't likely to
possess, we can expect that reason will drive us ultimately to insanity and to social
collapse; thus, reason is accursed.
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Should Atheists Mourn the Death of God?

____________________________________________________

Recently, a Catholic priest, Robert Barron, criticized the exuberance of New Atheists,
contrasting the New Atheist’s slogan, “There’s probably no God; now stop worrying and
enjoy your life,” with the dark existentialism of earlier atheists like Nietzsche and
Camus. According to Barron, only the existential atheists follow atheism to its logical
conclusions, that life is meaningless, that there’s no hope, and as Dostoevsky implied,
that everything is permitted. The biologist and New Atheistic blogger Jerry Coyne
replies as follows:

The answer of course, is that we, not a sky-father, give life its meaning, and can
find joy and fulfillment in the limited time we have. Is that “frivolous”? I don’t think
so. Given our finite span, why spend our time being dolorous, weighed down by
the supposed futility of life? There is so much beauty and love to be had, not to
mention friendship, books, music, food, drink, and cats; and I for one am happy
to be happy about these things.

I think most New Atheists would agree with Coyne. And of course, as a practical,
political matter, the bus slogan is fine because it militates against the theist’s conviction
that atheism is a highway to hell. In that theological context, exaggerated cheeriness in
New Atheism is defensible on political, or what Dawkins calls strategic grounds.
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New Atheism’s Naturalization of Values

But as to the substance of the disagreement between existential and New Atheists, the
memes (prepackaged platitudes) contained in Coyne’s response hardly settle the
matter. The theist contends that if atheism is true, life has no meaning and therefore the
atheist has no right to be merry. The New Atheist replies that while there may be no
higher, transcendent meaning, value or purpose of our life, there are still local,
subjective meanings relative to our interests. Thus, Coyne finds meaning in books, cats,
and so forth, and that’s why he’s happy. The theist can then say that this merely raises
the further question of whether the atheist’s particular interests ought to be pursued, or
whether her values are justifiable. If there’s no higher authority, why isn’t everything
permitted? Coyne values music, food, and cats, while a serial killer enjoys killing
children. If there’s no God, is this all just a matter of taste?

Suppose reason shows that killing children is illogical or impractical (risky). To infer from
this that such killing is wrong and ought not to be valued would be fallacious, since
illogicality and impracticality are matters of fact which have no normative entailments.
What’s needed to save atheism from giving a license to chaos, then, is the axiom that
all human life is precious, in which case killing children would be wrong. Ideally, this
normative assumption shouldn’t itself turn out to be subjective or relative, since
otherwise atheism would imply just that most people feel that children are nice to have
around, and that were you to happen to lack that feeling, there would be nothing
fundamentally wrong with pursuing your murderous inclinations. Like all values, morality
would run only as deep as our personal preferences.

The atheist seems faced, then, with the worry at least that for anyone who understands
that right and wrong are matters merely of personal interest, like taste in art, life
becomes a game or a joke. Our normative opinions become arbitrary, not because
they’re uncaused or unmotivated, but because, despite our bias in their favour, they’re
ultimately inconsequential. Fashions go in and out of style, rendering the fashion
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industry absurdly comical because of the discrepancy between fashion’s transience and
the intensity of some people’s interest in personal style. During the 1980s, Westerners
preferred brass furniture, cheesy digital music, and spiky hairdos. Now, those fashions
appear ridiculous, and decades from now our tastes will certainly seem foolish to our
descendants. Likewise, some ancient cultures were centered on human sacrifice or
gladiatorial combat, while today many Western liberals regard life as so precious that
they protect their children even from playing outdoors.

According to the New Atheist’s egocentric notion of value, all of culture is more or less
like fashion and other matters of taste. Unlike in science, where facts in the outer world
make scientific statements true or false, there are no correct or incorrect value
judgments, given the typical New Atheist’s notion that morality is entirely a matter of
personal, subjective opinion, which is to say, roughly, taste. The question is then
whether the atheist can hold onto her private interests with a straight face. Due to peer
pressure, you may adopt your culture’s attitude toward clothing, food, pets, and so on,
but can you take pride in those values when you also understand the transitory and
arbitrary nature of all values?

Can a New Atheist be nationalistic and patriotic, for example, given the atheist’s
objective, cynical perspective on value judgments? Were a liberal secular humanist to
confront a serial killer, the emotions associated with her moral opinions would likely
compel her to forget her postmodern, positivistic belittling of normative questions, in
which case she’d vociferously condemn the murderer’s evil and rush to subdue him. But
in the atheist’s bigger picture, in which human value is naturalized, secularists’
celebration of their way of life when they form a mob, hold up signs, and cheer at the
murderer’s execution must be similar to the stampede to buy the latest Apple device. In
both cases, values derive solely from our interests, and interests change and come in a
variety of forms like everything else in nature. Perhaps there are some universal
features of human morality, due to our brain structures and common evolutionary origin.
But again, no normative statements follow from a recognition of the fact of such
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universality. Just because humans tend to think the same about stealing, murder, and
so on, doesn’t mean we ought to do so.

The atheist who appreciates that our morality is just a natural process is forced to
experience a sort of vertigo, a feeling of alienation, of standing outside yourself and
looking in with an objective viewpoint. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel explains in The
View from Nowhere, there’s a double life in which you have your private attitudes and
opinions but also the ability to detach yourself from them when you think rationally about
their natural causes. What the existentialist calls angst, alienation, and horror follow
from the combination of the atheist’s naturalistic understanding of her values and her
inevitable concern for only a partial set of issues. Can she still care about her fellow
humans, let alone her favourite foods, authors, and shoe styles, when nothing but
ignoble distractions or mental disorders could prevent her at any moment from rationally
detaching from those concerns as she comprehends the atheist’s naturalization of moral
and other values? Likewise, while the atheist may be biologically driven at times to feel
sexually excited, can she surrender to her feelings and her experience, given her
knowledge of the biochemical basis of romantic love? More relevantly, can she do so
when acting with what the existentialist calls authenticity or must she fool herself,
suppressing her rationality so that she can enjoy her life?

The New Atheist’s Religion

Indeed, there’s one giant atheistic distraction, which I take to be the primary source of
the New Atheist’s lightheartedness. This distraction is the atheist’s substitute religion of
secular humanism, or what I call, somewhat idiosyncratically, Scientism. Just as theists
are spared the horror of rationally dissecting the intimate details of their life, because
they’re preoccupied with matters of irrational religious faith, the typical New Atheist has
quasi-religious faith in democracy, capitalism, reason, and the beauty and majesty of
natural creations. That is, not only does the secular humanist rationally defend these
elements of her worldview, but she feels strongly about them--indeed, so strongly that
they’re of ultimate value to her, in which case, as the theologian Paul Tillich says, her
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modern ideology passes beyond an idle, academic pursuit, becoming a matter of

personal faith. Any such faith is irrational in that feelings and personal character rather
than just logic or science account for why that ideology is upheld.

You can see an indication of this paradoxical secular faith in Coyne’s pragmatic
preoccupation with time in his response to the priest. Given our “finite span,” he says,
we shouldn’t waste time being weighed down with philosophical worries about life’s
futility--as though the efficient use of time were an end in itself. Indeed, this value of
efficiency is commonplace now because of the monoculture of capitalism. The idea is to
work hard and earn as much money as possible, to ignore the social and environmental
consequences of most lines of work, since modern workers should be instrumentalists,
being instruments of oligarchs who set the social agenda and determine much of the
culture by their control over the mass media. This pragmatism derives also from the
consumer’s ideal of the so-called rich, full life, of having a maximally wide variety of
socially acceptable experiences, which motivates the consumption of the ever-shifting
array of mass-produced products.

So the New Atheist can afford to overlook atheism’s existential implications, because
this carefree modernist is beholden to her own quasi-religious faith of secular
humanism/Scientism. She’s caught up in the wonders of life, swept away by the power
of technoscience, and generally mesmerized by the modern Enlightenment ideology
even though this ideology has now imploded. The New Atheist’s cheerful disposition, as
she lists her personal matters of taste as being sufficient to assuage anyone’s fear that
she’s liable to commit suicide, is thus comparable to the Jehovah’s Witness’s glee as he
knocks on your door and rattles off the benefits of being a Christian.

As the existential atheists point out, unchecked reason, or what Enlightenment thinkers
called freethinking, causes angst, horror, and alienation, which do in turn sap the joy
from life. However, New Atheists are happy rather than despairing not just because they
have some personal preferences which inspire them to pass the time in some pleasing
way, but because those preferences are grounded in deeper, faith-based convictions.
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Their emotional commitment to the modern, atheistic religion (lifestyle or worldview--call

it what you like) prevents them from pursuing naturalistic atheism not to its logical
conclusion but to its psychological nadir. The existential atheists who are melancholy
rather than content are just those who are so paranoid or otherwise considered mentally
ill that they truly lack faith in anything: not in a life partner, nor in themselves, nor in
government, technology, art, celebrity, or anything else. To borrow a cliché from the
Matrix movies, these melancholy atheists know the path but can’t walk it; they can’t fully
identify with their preferences, because they lack mental checks on their capacity to
philosophically question their values, to remind themselves that in the bigger picture,
supplied by rational detachment, those values are foreign, arbitrary, and ridiculous.
These rarer atheists sabotage their happiness by their compulsion to live in a self-
alienated, vacillating condition.

The problem, then, isn’t with atheism so much as with the modern naturalistic
humanist’s ideal of hyper-rationality. A wannabe hyper-rationalist, who despises faith,
superstition, and all manner of irrationalism will still have emotional and religious
impulses but will disown or rationalize them. This lack of self-awareness produces the
scientistic, positivistic aspect of the subculture of New Atheism. Meanwhile, those who
fulfill the ideal of being passionless are the autistic, paranoid, introverted, skeptical, or
philosophically-inclined atheists, the point being not that the latter are omniscient but
that they constantly step outside their parochial viewpoint, second-guessing themselves
at every turn so that they can’t relax and enjoy themselves, like the over-analytical
“mouse” in Dostoevsky’s Underground Man or like the character Woody Allen plays in
his films.

Conclusion

So should atheists mourn God’s demise? Not exactly, since the transparent folly of
theism makes for a more degrading replacement for the nobler reaction to our
existential predicament than does the New Atheist’s convoluted modern faith. But
should the atheist be happy, lighthearted, and cheery rather than melancholy, dour, and
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wistful? In effect, I answer this in “Happiness” and in “Postmodern Religion.” Happiness

is unbecoming to anyone in our tragic existential situation, but especially to naturalists
and secular humanists who pretend to care more about truth than fantasy. The facts of
our condition are much worse than what anthropocentric theists proclaim, but they’re
worse also than what’s accounted for in the modern glorification of the rational, free,
conscious individual. Moreover, however much pleasure, wealth, and fame an atheist
may enjoy, those facts--of our mortality, our animal nature, our aloneness and alienation
from the undead (mindlessly creative) cosmos, of the ultimate futility of our endeavours
and the comical narrowness of our everyday vision--remain to haunt her.
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Hyper-Rationality and the Two Cultures

____________________________________________________

The physicist and novelist C. P. Snow is famous in academic circles for distinguishing
between the cultures of the arts and sciences. When he wrote on the two cultures in
Britain, in 1959, academic scientists lacked the prestige of those in the arts or
humanities, whereas now the situation is reversed, with English, philosophy, and other
arts programs closing down in North American business-oriented colleges, and
economists and other social scientists emulating physicists by attempting to quantify
their subject matters. During the Scientific Revolution, Newton, Galileo, and other great
scientists had to glorify reason in their war with the faith-governed Church, which was
dominant at the time in Europe. Thus, as mathematician Mike Alder points out in his
recent article, “Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword,” Newton laid out an austere scientific
method according to which no statement should be accepted unless it’s directly testable
or it follows logically from a testable statement. The skeptical philosopher David Hume
zealously defended this empiricism, for the sake of his assault on intellectual elitism,
going as far as to say that if a book contains statements that aren’t based either on
observation or on logic, the book should be tossed into the flames. The philosopher Karl
Popper took the main point of empiricism to be a falsification criterion of meaning: if
there’s no way of showing how a statement could be proven false, the statement is at
best pseudoscientific and cognitively worthless. Thus, all knowledge is derived from this
broad scientific method.
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To clarify some terms, empiricism is hyper-rational compared to rationalism, or to the

claim that reason arrives at fundamental truths without the use of observation or of
logic, because the so-called rationalist contends that reason processes other inputs
besides sensations, such as those from “intuition” or faith. According to the empiricist,
intuitions and leaps of faith are unreliable, to say the least, and deductions on their
basis, such as those in systematic theology, are pseudoscientific and ultimately
irrational.

The Empiricist’s Disdain for Philosophy

Midway through twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy, this extreme empiricism

was rejected as self-refuting. After all, the definition of empiricism itself is philosophical,
not scientific or meaningful in the empiricist’s own terms. In their zest to champion
science against the forces of irrationality, empiricists put forward an anti-philosophical
philosophy so worshipful of science that it destroys itself, like Douglas Adams’ god that
proves its own nonexistence and "promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.” But as Mike
Alder points out, mathematicians and scientists still adhere to the spirit of empiricism
and for that reason they loathe philosophy in particular. The problem with recent, so-
called analytic philosophers, from this viewpoint, is that they pretend their discipline is
serious and rational, whereas their philosophizing consists of time-wasting, fruitless
word games that go nowhere. So-called postmodern philosophers merely waste time
with word games as well, although instead of pretending to analyze concepts, they
obfuscate with pompous rhetoric. At least the theologian openly declares her irrationality
when she speaks of the need for faith and revelation, but the philosopher pretends to
possess a form of rationality that stands apart from scientific methods. According to
friends of empiricism, modern scientists showed what the rational search for knowledge
is, so there is no rationality apart from gathering data from the senses, testing
hypotheses to explain the data, and following the implications with mathematical logic.
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Thus, as Alder says, “When you ask of a scientist if we have free will, or only think we
have, he would ask in turn: ‘What measurements or observations would, in your view,
settle the matter?’ If your reply is ‘Thinking deeply about it’, he will smile pityingly and
pass you by. He would be unwilling to join you in playing what he sees as a rather silly
game.” Again, as to whether a computer program “could ‘really’ be intelligent or thinking,
or only able to simulate it, the scientist asks ‘What procedures would you use for
distinguishing these cases?’ Again, the answer ‘Thinking hard’ would earn a tired smile
and a quick exit.”

According to Alder, “most scientists are essentially Popperian positivists [that is,
empiricists]... The idea that one can arrive at reliable truths by pure reason [without
input from the five senses] is simply obsolete...Such is the conventional wisdom among
scientists, and it would be wrong of me to attempt to conceal that this is, broadly, my
position too.” Thus, Alder takes care “not to be caught doing philosophy,” preferring to
wrap his philosophy magazine “in a brown paper bag in the hope that it will be mistaken
for a girly-mag.”

At the end of his article, though, Alder points out that Newton’s empiricism is
impractical. Only a Vulcan or an artificial person like Data from Star Trek could so
rigorously restrict his beliefs to what logic and the evidence support, without
speculating, expressing feelings, going with a hunch, or taking a leap of faith. As he
puts it, such a genuine empiricist “would be a notably poor conversationalist.” But Alder
maintains that the use of the testability criterion as a weapon against philosophy is still
justified when the philosopher “meddles in science which he does not understand.
When he asks questions and is willing to learn, I have no quarrel with him. When he is
merely trying to lure you into a word game which has no prospect of leading anywhere,
you really have to decide if you like playing that sort of game.”
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The Absurdity of Antiphilosophical Philosophy

There’s a great deal of confusion here on the part of the wannabe hyper-rationalist. You
can spy a clue to the confusion in that hostility to philosophy, by reminding yourself that
the supreme scientist and arch empiricist, Isaac Newton, was also a thoroughgoing
occultist, Rosicrucian, and Christian theologian, a proponent of alchemy and an
interpreter of Biblical prophecies and codes. This pseudoscientific side of his work has
been expunged from the record, as far as current students of physics are concerned.
Notice, though, how much more impressive empiricism seems when the method is
attributed to a nonexistent hyper-rational version of Newton. The weakness of
empiricism isn’t just that’s its absurd as a piece of antiphilosophical philosophy, but that
the nonrational side of this philosophy is cognitively necessary. Even Star Trek’s
Vulcans idolize and spiritualize logic! Intuition, insight, vision, and imagination are
needed to bridge the gaps between the instinctive, emotional, and logical parts of the
brain. Knowledge isn’t just a matter of having a set of beliefs that maps onto the facts. In
addition, the beliefs must relate well to each other, and for human animals these
interrelations aren’t merely logical. Instead, as epistemologists say, our beliefs should
form a coherent worldview. What counts as coherence is a matter of philosophical,
theological, or otherwise normative debate.

To see an example of a presupposed principle of coherence, on the part of an

antiphilosophical philosopher, notice how Alder speaks of the need to arrive at “reliable
truths.” Have scientists proven that reliability ought to be the mark of knowledge? Does
that pragmatic principle follow logically from testable statements? Of course not, since
this is a philosophical, normative principle that derives from intuition, faith, or some
other nonrational factor. Indeed, the notion of reliability here presupposes the secular
humanist’s instrumentalism, the Baconian use of science in a struggle with inhumane
natural forces. In my view, this presupposition is part of the modern religion of what I’ve
called Scientism in a broad sense.
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Now, if philosophical statements aren’t as reliable as scientific ones, in that philosophy

is less cumulative or technologically fruitful, this is because both western and eastern
philosophies are traditionally concerned with self-knowledge and ultimately with
mystical, cosmicist self-realization that destabilizes the ego and so obviates power
games. Philosophy thus makes for a poor weapon in a struggle for “progress,” to use
the euphemism for our war with nature. Ultimately, the intellectual culture war between
the sciences and the humanities is a conflict between pragmatism and mysticism.
Instead of confronting that meta-issue, Adler presupposes that knowledge ought to be
reliable, or sufficiently stable to produce technologies that empower us. But the point I
want to stress here is that this normative presupposition is quite unjustified, from an
empiricist perspective, and yet some such principle of cognitive coherence is needed for
human animals, with our self-conflicted biological nature. Data from Star Trek has no
emotions, so he needn’t worry about nonrational ideals to guide his beliefs. Empiricism
is a hyper-rational philosophy fit for machines, not for animals like human beings.

Another lacuna in Alder’s defense of empiricist antiphilosophy: he speaks to the

scientist’s condescension towards the childish, game-playing philosopher, when the
scientist offers the philosopher a tired, pitying smile and quickly exits instead of publicly
philosophizing. The conceit in this case is the presupposition that scientists earn their
prestige strictly because of the cognitive progress in science. As obvious as that
progress is, it’s not why empiricist scientists can now get away with condescension to
philosophers and indeed to all academics in the humanities. The crucial factor is the
scientist’s enjoyment of power that the philosopher lacks; more precisely, the scientist is
credited for empowering technoscientifically advanced societies and the philosopher is
blamed for doing nothing of the kind.

But power is yet another nonrational interest that directs the search for knowledge. The
postmodernist says that knowledge is nothing but the expression of some such
nonrational interest, as though there were no scientific methods that can be followed
more or less without bias or other interference. However, my point is just that
empiricism is flawed in its disregard for the extent to which we are animals, after all,
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who often survive by struggling for power, expressing our feelings, or acting on instinct.
If the philosopher’s pretensions are unbearable, so too must be the empiricist’s disdain
for philosophy’s inferior use of reason, given that modern science is hardly just an
algorithm fit for computers. Scientists are animals driven by a tribal instinct to espouse
what’s effectively a religious faith (secular humanism or scientism), and scientists
provide pivotal aid in humanity’s war with those forces of nature that could potentially
extinguish us. Hence the philosophical, relatively nonrational nature of empiricism,
presupposed by presumed anti-philosophical scientists and mathematicians; hence also
their coherence ideal of knowledge’s reliability; and hence their power-based
condescension towards relatively powerless philosophers and other nonscientific
academics.
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Scientism: Modern Pagan Religion

____________________________________________________

Traditional religions were holistic, uniting normative and empirical speculations in a

mytho-poetic vision of the world. Eastern religious philosophies are still holistic, whereas
dualism dominates in the West, and not just because of Descartes’ attempt to reconcile
the scientific picture of nature with the intuitive picture of ourselves. Monotheism itself
has contributed to Western dualism. By centralizing divine power and elevating God
above all conceivable forms, the monotheist effectively kicks God out of the rationally
explainable domain, which is the domain of nature or the cosmos, the order of which
corresponds to our conceptual grid. The supreme form of rational understanding is the
modern scientific kind, but precisely because science is supremely impersonal and
objective, its methods don’t provide direct answers to normative or subjective questions.

But ethical and aesthetic values, intuitions, and the subjective appearances of things
have been central to the human experience. And so rather than giving them up, despite
the lack of forthcoming answers to those questions from science, which reigns supreme
only in a limited field of inquiry, religious people externalized those ghostly intangibles
along with God. God is supposed to sustain everything, and while scientists have
discovered more and more of how the physical world sustains itself, dualistic
monotheism saves the subjective, intuitive, value-laden, faith-based appearance of the
world, by locating this in the deity’s supernatural domain and in the earthly fragments of
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that domain, in our so-called immaterial spirits. After all, according to monotheists, God
originated our moral perspective, by inspiring prophets to gain insights into divine
commandments, and we’re able to think in terms of what ought to be done, instead of
slavishly following natural law, because our immaterial spirits are supernaturally free.

Skeptics would contend, though, that the true originators of official moral laws were the
human rulers who codified our instinctive sentiments, to hold social groups together,
maintaining their elevated position in the pecking order by attributing society’s laws to
gods who are just grandiose versions of those human rulers. Far from being
supernaturally free, we’re just social animals who are subject to natural control systems,
such as the system of monotheism. And of course, the more scientists have been able
to explain empirical facts without appealing to God or to the supernatural, the more
theism has declined in most informed parts of the world. Many early Western scientists
inhabited the halfway house of deism, and most educated people currently living in
relatively wealthy countries in Europe and Asia are nontheistic in both word and deed.
Even in the US, which is an exception to that rule, nontheism has grown more popular
due to the so-called New Atheist movement.

Such is a common way of contrasting traditional Western monotheism with modern

secularism. But I want to consider another interpretation, according to which nontheistic
naturalism has itself developed into a religion that can be called scientism. Narrowly
speaking, scientism is the belief that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge,
that if a question can’t be answered using scientific methods, the question is
meaningless or otherwise illegitimate. In this respect, scientism is just radical
empiricism, or positivism, deriving from the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, and David
Hume. While positivism has since been mostly rejected in academic philosophy, for
being self-refuting and for ignoring studies of how the sciences are actually practiced,
most analytic philosophers still subscribe to naturalism. Naturalists assume that even if
some legitimate questions can’t be identified with scientific ones, everything that exists
depends on things that are scientifically explainable.
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That's how scientism has played out in rarified academic circles and it's the meaning
I've had in mind in these rants, such as when I referred to "scientistic liberals," in
“Liberalism.” But there's also a more popular form of scientism, which has to do with the
way technoscientific progress has shaped the capitalistic social order. The main social
effects of that progress are anti-philosophical pragmatism and the ideology of
materialistic consumerism. In this broader sense of the centrality of science, scientism
serves as a religion that we dare not name.

The Capitalistic Reduction of People to Machines

As I point out in “Theism,” traditional religions have insiders and outsiders, mystics and
literalists. Mystics are supposed to have direct, rationally incomprehensible experience
of transcendent reality, and for the most part the price of that experience is ascetic
withdrawal from secular life. Literalists have no such mystical experience, and their
adherence to secular conventions and their submergence in what mystics call the world
of illusions (maya, samsara, etc) bring them suffering. In the purportedly secular West,
there are also insiders and outsiders: the wealthy or well-connected oligarchs and the
poor, weak, misinformed masses of consumers. Whereas the nonrational component of
theistic religion is the mode of access to allegedly supernatural reality (faith, intuition,
mystical experience), what’s nonrational about scientism, despite the paradigmatic
rationality of science itself, is the behaviour of people who have been systematically
reduced to machines.

To spell this out, consider that in the British Industrial Revolution, labourers--including
children--were dehumanized and treated as mechanical components of a system
managed for the owner’s profit. Frederick Taylor streamlined the process, creating the
influential field of scientific management, which again turns employees into functional
parts of a system while the managers seek ways to cut costs and maximize profits. The
goal was simply for businesses to run as efficiently as possible, and since a machine is
better at following orders than a human, human labourers compete in the marketplace
by becoming more like machines. These workers need to slavishly follow the
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corporation’s rules, ignoring any compunctions they might have about the dehumanizing
effects of a capitalistic economy, and they must work longer hours for as little pay as
possible, often with no union to represent their interests. In short, business became
operationalized, which is to say that sociopathic theories of exploiting a labour force for
maximal profit were applied within corporations, forcing the workers literally to play the
role of machines. While on the job, a worker in a systematically managed business
environment must perform a certain function, just as a component of a machine has its
function as dictated by the machine’s design.

Beginning with Edward Bernays’ work on how the human unconscious can be exploited
for government purposes or for profit, by propaganda that links the propagandist’s
esoteric objective with the fulfillment of the consumer’s craving, the dehumanization
within corporations was extended to people’s private lives in their capitalistic role as
consumers. Prior to public relations and the near-perfection of mass propaganda
through television, people could leave their offices and resume their personal activities
that they defined for themselves. But because human greed is a bottomless pit, the
corporate techniques of converting a person into a functional component of an artificial
construct had to be extended to those personal activities. Now there is, in theory, no
time at which a participant in a capitalistic economy is off the job, since as soon as a
person stops being an employee, she becomes a potential consumer and the scope of
consumable goods is as wide as the scope of what can be attached to our unconscious
desires. Thus, instead of selling only those products that people objectively need,
businesses learned to manufacture conscious desires along with their products, by
associating the use of the product with the fulfillment of an unconscious wish. And while
this science of mass market propaganda hasn’t yet been perfected--after all, a
consumer can still watch an ad on TV and choose not to buy the product--the effect of
watching so many ads from such a young age is that a person comes to accept the
principles of a consumer culture, which are that our ultimate goal in life is to be happy
and that this goal is achieved mainly by consuming material products.
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The Nonrationality of Consumerism

So to return to the comparison with theistic religion, while the nonrationality of theism is
due to its attempt to address normative questions head-on, by nonrational means, the
nonrationality of exoteric scientism is a consequence of its reduction of people to
machines, by way of indirectly addressing normative questions. What I mean is that
scientism is minimally an anti-philosophical philosophy. Scientism’s exoteric message is
that there is no progress outside of science, technology, and the free market, and that
philosophy and religion are therefore illegitimate in secular society. But scientism’s
esoteric agenda is that of erecting, roughly speaking, what Lewis Mumford calls the
megamachine and what I’ve been calling in these rants an oligarchy, a social order run
by a minority that holds ultimate political power over the majority.

How is the stealth oligarchy achieved? By presupposing answers to normative

questions, which is to say a philosophy of life, and by turning society into a machine and
assigning it the function of applying those answers. The unspoken philosophy of life in a
stealth oligarchy like the US is that we’re all mere social animals, not godlike creatures
capable of heroically confronting our dire existential predicament of being alienated from
nature by our consciousness and reason. Moreover, the ultimate meaning of life for
mere social animals depends on our position in the natural dominance hierarchy: the
aggressive sociopaths who dominate in the social order earn the right to behave as
gods, exercising power over the masses, while those in lower positions ought to be
content to live as sheep, preoccupied by consuming as much grass as possible to
inflate the minority’s profits. The masses are meant to be happy in a degraded sense,
feeling base, ephemeral pleasures that are constantly being undermined due to our
existential predicament, while the oligarchs are meant to rule and to enjoy the subtler
pleasure of schadenfreude. The meaning of life is thus a nonsexual analogue of the
sadomasochistic power dynamic.

With everyone instinctively playing this sadomasochistic game, a capitalistic economy

forms to exploit those instincts, and in the vicious competition that sacrifices the weak
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on the altar of wild, cosmic creativity, the most vicious rise to positions of power. Further
corrupted by the hunt for that power, the American oligarchs self-destructively
consolidate their control by busting unions and taking control of the government, the
economic regulators, the medical establishment (through pharmaceutical and insurance
companies), the educational system (by turning universities into businesses to pump out
drones, forcing skeptical liberal arts departments to shut down for lack of profit), the
legal establishment (by supplying an endless stream of prisons for profit), and the
military (by selling arms all round the world, including to potential enemies, and by
facilitating wars with mercenaries and cleanup services). By deregulating as much of
society as possible, the oligarchs thus forestall democratic challenges to their
dominance.

Meanwhile, those who are ruled in such a society are misled into thinking that the ability
to vote in a duopoly gives the voters ultimate political power, and that the freedom to
choose between a host of fabricated goods is the long sought-after secret of happiness.
The consumer is as confused as the literalistic theist, but for a different reason. Theism
combines intuitions and speculations to form a holistic, all-encompassing worldview, but
the literalist mistakes this worldview for something like an objective, rationally justified
theory. The consumer is proud of her secularism and of her hard work, producing
tangible results in a capitalistic economy, not playing idly with philosophical ideas or
introspection. She’s a pragmatist, not an ideologue, but unbeknownst to her,
pragmatism is, at a minimum, a philosophy or rather an ideology in the Marxist sense,
meaning a set of ideas that rationalizes an economic order which serves the interests
mainly of a small minority of the population. Pragmatism is an excuse to act like a
machine, to work hard and to be contented with the consumption of mass-produced
items.

And so this kind of secularism is a stunted way of life, leaving the handling of normative
questions to the oligarchs who most shape American culture with their billions spent on
political, corporate, and Hollywood messages over the decades. Instinctively, the
oligarchs understand that the ultimate good in life must be just what a capitalistic
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economy can deliver: shallow, fleeting moments of security and pleasure for drudges
and automatons, where these moments are surrounded by anxieties about blowback
from the oligarchy’s concomitant military occupations abroad, and by suspicions that
materialistic happy-talk whitewashes our dark existential situation. Another wondrous
coincidence: that which can fulfill the scientistic meaning of life is just what empowers
the oligarchs to consolidate their control, namely the free market economy that
efficiently rewards the vices that take the oligarchs to the top of the pecking order.

Why Call Modern Worship of Nature “Scientism”?

You might still be wondering what exactly makes consumerism and pragmatism
scientistic, or science-centered. After all, one reason Americans are so pragmatic is, as
Weber showed, that Protestantism had the unintended consequence that people
worked extra hard to prove they were elected by God to enter heaven when they died.
But what enabled Protestants to imagine they could read God’s mind is that their
Christian religion had been thoroughly secularized for centuries, being a
Frankensteinian patchwork of Jewish and Pagan elements.

No, the underlying factor seems to be that the US was established to empower
capitalists, or so-called “special interests,” meaning wealthy and well-connected
individuals who fill the power vacuum left behind by the constitutionally divided and
conquered government. And capitalism in turn empowers technoscience, which drives
innovation and economic growth with scientific discoveries and their applications. The
chief connection between modern science and capitalism is mass production, the ability
of machines to supply an abundance of products. Science thus indirectly provides the
opportunity for immense profit, and whereas in earlier centuries only the aristocracy
could take advantage of scientific advances, in the modern world the individual won the
right to own the fruits of his or her labour. The abundant supply of sellable products
requires an equal amount of demand, which in turn requires capitalistic propaganda, the
manufacturing of the consumer’s desires by advertising. The machines, of course, are
made possible by advances in scientific understanding, just as effective advertising is
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the result of advances in the soft sciences, particularly psychology. Lacking the naivety
of aristocrats or dictators who deem themselves untouchable and who rely on tradition
and counter-productive military oppression to pacify the masses of have-nots, modern
titans of industry seek to protect their wealth under the cover of democracy, and as I’ve
said, these conflicting interests gave birth to the stealth oligarchy. Like liberals inspired
by the furious pace of technoscientific advances, these modern oligarchs use
democracy as an instrument, albeit merely for their own progress.

Mesmerized by technoscientific progress, liberals used to trust that there are objective
solutions to questions even of social progress, and so they re-engineered the American
economy, adding regulations to prevent the catastrophic busts that attended the booms.
This fostered a pragmatic, can-do culture, reinforced by the academy’s positivistic and
behaviouristic hyping of science and by optimistic science fiction, which celebrated the
American military’s clean-up job in WWII and the establishment of something like an
American empire. On top of these science-driven causes of consumerism, there was
the cultural influence simply of all the technological innovation in the twentieth century,
of the frantic pace of technological progress which forced people to keep up or lose their
jobs to the machines. They say that if you can’t beat them, you should join them, which
is just what workers and consumers do in capitalistic stealth oligarchies: we pass
ourselves off as machines so our meddlesome human qualities might go unnoticed.
One such quality is our potential awareness that not only is materialistic pleasure not
genuinely fulfilling, but there’s a higher, ethical ideal to confront the fact that our
happiness is existentially absurd--even if this means sacrificing the possibility of
contentment.

So the reason I speak broadly--and somewhat idiosyncratically--of scientism, of a

science-centered modern worldview, is that science directly or indirectly causes all the
cultural elements that add up to the naturalist’s religion, including technology,
capitalism, stealth oligarchy, advertising, consumerism, and pragmatic hostility towards
philosophy.
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Case Study: Televised US Political “Debates”

An egregious example of that hostility towards philosophy in secular culture, and

especially in the US, is that which passes for public political debate. As has been
pointed out by many political commentators, television has been mostly detrimental to
political discourse. In particular, the first televised debate, between Kennedy and Nixon,
showed politicians that on TV image matters more than substance. Nixon sweated and
looked less heroic than Kennedy; therefore, Kennedy “won” the debate. That’s what
people remember about that debate, not any engagement with ideas. And in his debate
with Clinton and Ross Perot, Bush Sr. looked at his watch, revealing his boredom with a
question about how the recession affected him. Such issues of personality and of
superficial appearances are magnified by the medium of television, and so successful
politicians have to project politically correct images. Most of the time, no questioner on
television will try to look beyond the façade, because watching TV isn’t like reading a
book and TV excels at presenting disjointed representations rather than a logical,
coherent model of reality.

For those reasons alone, we should expect that the quality of political debates would
decline, but the collapse of American journalism is also to blame. Once upon a time,
people trusted journalists, such as Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow, believing that
they were tough, independent, and looking out for the citizen’s interests, speaking truth
to power. Then it became clear that journalism is a business, not a vocation, as more
and more news agencies were bought up by fewer and fewer megacorporations. As is
evident from a comparison of any American full-time TV news outlet with BBC, for
example, American journalists caved to pressures from their electronic medium and
corporate managers. Their overriding goal now is to maximize profit for those
managers, and that goal can be achieved on TV only by churning out infotainment
rather than investigative reporting. News anchors, analysts and pundits therefore put
themselves in direct competition with real entertainers, like Jon Stewart or Bill Maher, a
competition in which the journalists must sacrifice their intellectual integrity to perform
as clowns. As a result, they’ve lost not just their credibility with the viewer, but their
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leverage on politicians to appear on their programs and submit to the inquisitions they
deserve as elected officials. Journalists now need access to politicians more than
politicians need to be seen on TV, and so the confrontations between them occur on the
politicians’ terms.

Thus, during political campaigns, American politicians engage in numerous televised

political “debates” which are not debates at all. A debate requires an interrogation of
each opponent, so that the viewer can judge which side has the better arguments on
each point that arises in the interaction, and also a deeper concern about ideas than
about image or personal advantage, on the part of each speaker. The debaters must be
intellectuals in that they must engage with each other’s arguments, trusting that the truth
emerges from a Platonic form of dialogue.

None of this happens in televised American political “debates.” In the first place, the
ego-tripping journalist replaces the moderator, and instead of merely enforcing the
debate’s rules and time limits, the journalist proceeds to ask each “debater” a question,
to which the politician gives his or her canned one minute response. The journalist then
either moves on to the next question or reframes the first speaker’s answer so that if the
second speaker chooses to recite a talking point about it, he or she can at least have
the cover of engaging only with the know-nothing journalist. Thus, the interaction
between politician and journalist replaces that between politicians, and instead of a
debate what we’re shown is just an interview, or a press conference. That’s what
politicians prefer; they don’t want to rationally engage with each other’s ideas in a public
format, whether because they privately agree on the narrow set of issues that arises for
a politician in a stealth oligarchy or because they know that on TV, rational political
dialogue actually tarnishes the politician’s image. Viewers expect TV to supply them
with entertaining images, like those seen in jumbles of advertisements. They don’t want
to attempt to follow complex lines of reasoning while staring at a TV screen, knowing
that music and ads will break in at any moment and that it’s harder to go back and forth
to check the inferences on TV than it is to track the inferences written on a book’s
pages.
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So the televised political “debate” in the US has become a complete farce. The
problems aren’t just that politicians spin the issues, don’t answer the questions, and
anyway are given only seconds to answer since the viewer’s attention span is short and
time must be reserved for commercials. To be sure, these factors contribute to the
miserable state of affairs. But the primary absurdity is very simply that what the
journalists and politicians routinely call a debate isn’t close to being a debate. No
political debate has actually been seen on American television in at least several
campaign cycles. The closest thing to one recently was the vice presidential debate
between Cheney and Joe Lieberman, but of course the civility of their discussion was
due to their agreement on most issues.

The lack of actual public debate between American politicians is absurd for three
reasons. First, what are actually just journalistic interviews of politicians are
nevertheless always called “debates” by all parties responsible for them. Second, the
viewer needn’t be fooled by that misnomer, despite all the false populism and anti-
intellectualism in American political culture. This is because most Americans are still
familiar with the essence of debate, having viewed dozens of movies featuring the
Hollywood stereotype of the courtroom drama, in which a witness is vigorously
questioned and cross-examined, yielding the truth in the end. Third, Americans are free
to compare their laughable televised "debates" with the much more mature and
potentially interactive Canadian ones. The format of televised Canadian political
debates isn't as infantile as that of American ones, largely because Canadian journalists
who serve as moderators aren't as rich or successful as their American counterparts,
and so their egos aren't the size of planets. The Canadian moderators therefore tend to
do what obviously should be done and simply get out of the way and let the politicians
interact. Unfortunately, the Canadian debaters are uninspiring, because even the
conservative Canadian politicians are effectively postmodern liberals, or cynical nihilistic
pragmatists, lacking vision, values, or trust that we can improve our civilization so that it
resembles something other than a concrete jungle. These debaters, therefore, tend to
forgo the opportunity of actually interacting with each other's ideas, to help the voter
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decide which side can make the better case; instead, the politicians recite talking points,
dodge questions, take cheap shots, run out the clock, and so on and so forth.

Here, then, the unintended consequences of television on American politics are the
polarization of the citizenry and the infantilization of their discourse. Lacking evidence of
rational dialogue between their leaders, American citizens vent their frustration by
heading towards the opposite extreme when conversing with each other, resorting to
hyperpartisan shout-fests. Demagogues rush to harness the chaos much as militant
Islamists exploit the disorder in failed states. Like the medieval peasants who learned
the purpose of their society by gazing at the Church’s stained-glass windows, most
Americans learn from TV rather than books, and what they learn is that rational political
dialogue, which is rumoured to take place at the UN, is cowardly and idle. Again,
courtroom dramas provide an opposing stereotype, but the prevailing view seems to be
the anti-intellectual one. As Obama has continued rather than “changed” most of Bush’s
foreign and economic policies, despite the optimistic rationalism of Obama's campaign
speeches, his administration has effectively reinforced the American prejudice against
reason in politics.

Americans tend now to be pragmatists who worship strength. But the American citizenry
is weakened by its internal divisions and thus the citizens can take no pride in
themselves, despite the fact that, theoretically at least, the majority of them indirectly
rule as rational, autonomous and informed citizens. Instead, the majority doesn’t
actually hold ultimate political power, nor is the majority fit to do so. The citizens’
democratic control was hampered from the outset by their country’s founders who
created three separate, equal, and thus hamstrung branches of government. Just as the
medieval Church benefited from the masses’ inability to speak Latin, which gave the
Church absolute control over the Bible’s interpretation, American oligarchs benefit from
a divided, confused, and frustrated populace. These weaknesses restrict the masses to
the lower levels of the natural dominance hierarchy, ensuring and even justifying the
dominators’ power over them.
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Scientism’s Re-enchantment of Nature

The upshot is that American secular society is split into esoteric and exoteric groups,
both of which are as opposed to reason as are the insiders (mystics) and outsiders
(literalists) of theistic religion. Granted, that similarity isn’t sufficient to make scientism a
religion. What we find, though, is that a technoscientific stealth oligarchy like the US
caters to religious impulses not with mere lip service to its own theology--although it
surely does that too--but by consummating Christianity’s naturalization of monotheism.
Christianity reduced God to a mortal man, the esoteric (Gnostic) meaning of which is
the Eastern idea that human nature is fully divine and that divinity begins and ends with
sentient, intelligent life. Moreover, the theistic God’s presumed interventions in nature
have been thoroughly demystified by science, although scientists have also shown that
nature is much weirder and scarier than any anthropomorphic projection of ourselves.
But we understand now why it rains, why the earth periodically shakes, and how
diseases generally work.

What’s seldom said, though, is that this disenchantment is coupled with a secular re-
enchantment of nature, as human beings actually replace God in the myths that explain
the new wonders for which we alone are responsible. Human monarchs have always
been the models for the tyrannical god in heaven, just as their feats of social and
architectural engineering have always been the sources for the myth that the universe
was intelligently created. The difference is that in the Western imagination, today’s
oligarchs and scientific wonderworkers have replaced their supernatural counterparts,
because the re-enchantment has been preceded by such a thorough disenchantment
by Christianity, the Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment philosophy.

Thus, when corporations build shopping complexes with wall-to-wall products, the
experience of consuming them is the only feeling of being in heaven that consumers
know, deep down, they can ever enjoy, and when money separates the haves from the
have-nots, that is the only divine judgment left that divides the wheat from the chaff, the
blessed from the damned. When oligarchs now live in obscene splendour, sitting on
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golden toilets and moving from one monstrous mansion to another, those living,
breathing humans are the demigods, the angels or demons who stand above human
law, whereas hitherto people could have clung to the delusion that the myths spoke only
of supernatural beings quite removed from our earthly home. When natural selection
churns out biological designs and rewards and punishes economies, that is the divine
creative force, perhaps the very same one, at a microcosmic scale, that shapes our
whole universe as it mindlessly evolves within the multiverse. And when physicists
speak in an arcane mathematical tongue, they are literally wizards whose elite
knowledge makes possible the actual wonders of modern engineering, wonders that are
subjectively as magical to the layperson as any “miracle” of nature must have seemed
to the ancient theist.

These are the great ironies of secularism. First, by demolishing the rational basis for
theism, technoscience, capitalism, and stealth oligarchy add new dress to the primitive
social divisions that served theists as exemplars in the first place, re-creating an
ignorant mass of people (workers and consumers) over which a minority of superior
beings (oligarchs) has sovereign control. The masses are even designed, after a
fashion, by the oligarchs who dictate the acceptable social functions, effectively training
people to behave like machines. Second, those three allegedly secular forces now
stand in for what traditionally were conceived of as supernatural ones. After all, theism
has always been a coded way of speaking exclusively about nature and human beings,
and now that, in the modern world, theistic religion has been intellectually discredited,
secularists are free to openly worship the natural powers that in ancient times were
mistaken for transcendent ones.

Scientism in the wider sense is this religion that re-enchants nature--including an elite
minority of human beings--by undermining dualistic theism, which diverted attention to
what were mistaken to be denizens of an otherworldly realm. Dualism was a relatively
clumsy but necessary scheme for monarchs to preserve their power: the ancients were
much more ignorant of the workings of nonliving things than they were of themselves,
and so they anthropomorphized the causes of natural events. But since those all-
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powerful persons (gods, angels, demons, fairies) were evidently hidden from view,
ancient theists assumed they inhabited a secret, far-removed world. And to secure his
right to dominate, the human ruler had to assure the masses that he had the allegiance
of those hidden beings. In the modern world, however, when we perhaps know even
more about nonliving things than we do about ourselves, there’s no need for the
inference that natural events have supernatural causes. We’ve looked under the bed
and found no monster. But when we nevertheless behave as monstrously as any
imaginary boogeyman, we come to fear ourselves as much as any child was ever
terrified to look under the bed. And when power and knowledge are still so unevenly
distributed, the internet notwithstanding, theistic myths apply to so-called secular
societies--except that the myths openly refer to earthly beings and events.

Clarifications

My point isn’t just that this re-enchantment is a hidden message of secular society. No,
the point is that the behaviour of most so-called secularists is best explained by saying
that they’re members of a peculiar religion that goes by other names. Naturalistic
humanists worship usefulness and efficiency (machines), money and power (oligarchs
and cosmic creativity, which in microcosmic terms is the evolutionary force of a
minimally-regulated market), cognitive mastery and miracles (modern science and
engineering). We secularists won’t speak of ourselves in religious terms, since we’re
under the impression that all religions are classically theistic and we foreswear any
theistic belief in the supernatural. But so-called secular culture isn’t a hyper-rational
alternative to faith-based religion. As social animals, members of a pseudodemocratic,
capitalistic society tend to be mostly nonrational, which in our case means deluded,
confused, and frustrated. We literally buy into hedonistic and dehumanizing myths that
crop up around a stealth oligarchy to keep the money flowing mostly to the top through
self-destructive consumption. We’re often aware of our society’s grotesqueness, but we
trust in the superiority of our way of life, just as members of one monotheistic religion
may be aware of other such religions and can only rationalize their leap of faith.
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Nor am I saying just that scientism, including pragmatism and consumerism, is an

ideology in a Marxist sense--unless “ideology” is effectively given the same meaning as
“religion.” Scientism is at least an ideology in the Marxist sense, but so too is traditional
theology. Some belief systems tend to serve economic interests, but that’s not what
makes them religious. Am I, then, overstretching “religion” so that the word loses its
meaning? Not if by “religion” we mean a set of delusions that binds a social group
together, by sidestepping our existential predicament and rationalizing the absurdity of
the rituals that are caused by those delusions. Admittedly, that’s a pejorative, only
slightly facetious definition, but it covers the traditional religions as well as scientism.
For this definition to be meaningful, however, there must be a set of ideas that falls
outside its scope. If even naturalistic pragmatists and hedonic consumers are religious,
who isn’t? My answer: at a minimum, the mystics whose enlightenment is the esoteric
purpose of the traditional religions that outsiders grasp to reconcile their inferior lifestyle
with that mystical ideal, and the ascetic, artistic loners who are alienated from
materialistic culture. Religions are methods of mass hallucination, so naturally those
who--for one reason or another--are antisocial don’t practice religion.
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Untangling Scientific and Philosophical Atheism

____________________________________________________

New Atheism is riven by a seldom-discussed split between scientific and philosophical

atheists, which reveals some surprising relationships between scientistic atheism,
Socratic philosophical skepticism, and theism. In particular, each should be understood
as a response to the mystical perception that the reality behind the apparent natural
world is far from ideal for us. Western philosophers and Eastern mystics wrestle with
this harsh truth and its implications, sacrificing their capacity for happiness in the
process. Scientistic atheists pretend to reject all religions even as they belittle
philosophical atheism to purify the membership of their science-centered cult. Scientism
and literalistic, exoteric theism each represents a flight from the tragic implications of
mysticism, and this is the chief weakness of each of these ideologies, according to the
philosophical atheist who, unmoved by pragmatic social conventions, shares with the
Eastern mystic the burden of suffering from a confrontation with the horrible truth of our
existential predicament. In what follows, I explore these ideas with a view to clarifying
the differences between scientific and philosophical atheism.

Some Recent Historical Context

The New Atheist movement began as a counterattack against Muslim fundamentalists

who took the longstanding war between white American and European oligarchs, on the
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one hand, and the Muslim world, on the other, into the open with their 911 terrorism.
(Moderate Muslims object that there’s nothing Islamic about the members of al Qaeda,
but since theology isn’t a science, there’s no non-question-begging criterion for
distinguishing between genuine and phony Muslims. The terrorist cherry-picks some
passages from Muslim scriptures, taking them out of context, while the moderate,
secularized or reformist Muslim does the same with other scriptures.) The war between
secular civilizations and the Muslim hordes has been waged for decades via the secular
oligarchs’ proxies, that is, by the West-friendly dictators who have--until the recent Arab
Spring uprisings--kept a lid on the nationalist aspirations of the Muslim majorities in the
Middle East. Secularists hardly need to enter an intellectual war of ideas with the still-
medieval Islamic religion since, as Hitchens was fond of saying, the secularists already
humiliate Middle Eastern Muslims daily by ruling them via the US military and its
proxies. Still, New Atheists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens
took up the call for overkill, launching verbal assaults on theism with their books and in-
person debates.

Again, these verbal assaults satisfied an emotional need to deal with the trauma
inflicted by the highly successful 911 terrorist attacks. The Western secularist’s
presupposition is that Muslims are subhumans who deserve to be ruled by brutal puppet
regimes. The terrorists’ miraculous PSYOP of 911 undermined this narrative, and many
New Atheists mean to reestablish the prejudice against true-believing Muslims with a
media campaign, featuring something as dastardly as an uncompromising tone on the
part of atheist intellectuals who had for the most part hitherto declined to speak out on
any social issue, being postmodern, nihilistic liberals. Moderate religious folk, or what
atheists like Jerry Coyne and P.Z. Myers like to call “accommodationists”, object to the
“strident” tone of the New Atheistic case, as though intellectual New Atheism weren’t a
superfluous rubbing of the Middle Eastern Muslim’s nose into the excrement of his or
her premodern state of affairs. Strident words are as kisses by a spring breeze
compared to the secularist’s direct or indirect military rule of the Muslim world. (This
reminds me of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who reflexively reacts to any effective use of rhetoric
on the part of his interviewee by calling the results “strong words.” Someone should
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inform Blitzer that all words are comparatively very weak.)

Criticizing New Atheists’ harsh tone is absurd for numerous other reasons, such as the
fact that the Muslim world is hypersensitive, owing to its living under military oppression
by Western secular powers, and so those Muslims are wont to riot at the drop of a hat
or the sketching of a satirical cartoon, demonstrating both a double standard for harsh
rhetoric (their vitriol against Jews is legendary) and a very low threshold for what they
deem inappropriate rhetoric against them. Moreover, focusing on the tone of New
Atheism is boring and thus aesthetically off-putting, since as has been clear since at
least Nietzsche, the implications of atheism are rather earth-shattering.

Scientific Atheism

To paraphrase Nietzsche and to come to the point at issue, the scientific atheist
believes that science is the primary if not the only weapon that kills God, that theistic
belief is rendered irrational as a result of a wealth of modern scientific discoveries.
Science presents us with a natural world in which there’s no room for God, and so
traditional theistic religions are now backward and anachronistic. Moreover, scientific
methods of rationality amount to rationality as such, and thus religious faith is a piece of
irrationality.

Much of this is accurate, in my view, but scientific atheism is to philosophical atheism as

is literalistic religion to the esoteric, mystical kind. Scientific atheism is philosophically
primitive, and this is hardly an accident since the science-centered atheist typically
pretends to reject philosophy along with theology. And while some religious beliefs are
indeed fairly addressed by institutional science, the deepest ones are left untouched
because they’re philosophical in nature. The scientific atheist suffers from a massive
blind spot, which is the extent to which the case for atheism must be philosophical and
not just scientific. Take, for example, the truth that scientists explain the universe’s
natural processes. Does the existence of the natural cosmos entail that there’s no god?
Of course not, since God is esoterically if not exoterically defined as the supernatural
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Creator of that cosmos, as a transcendent, immaterial mind or spirit that transcends our
ken. How could a scientific experiment show that there’s no such being? Scientists
actually presuppose methodological naturalism, according to which anything studied
should be assumed to be natural and thus scientifically explainable, for the study’s
sake. This pragmatic optimism about the scope of scientific methods is justifiable as far
as it goes in science, but the methodological naturalist only thereby ignores the question
of theism.

Moreover, whereas the practice of science may indeed be quintessentially rational, the
scientist and the scientific atheist tend, as human animals, to invest their ultimate
emotional stock somewhere, and as the sociologist Emile Durkheim and the theologian
Paul Tillich said, that ultimate object of faith will serve as their god, the sacred center of
their universe. But whereas philosophical atheists like Nietzsche are free to address this
threat against the atheist's humanism, the scientific atheist tends to be blind to this
problem. Although there’s plenty of empirical evidence that humans are inherently tribal
and idolatrous, the scientific atheist prefers to ignore the normative questions of which
idol should replace the traditional God or of whether a repudiation of any sort of myth or
religious faith would be wise even were this possible.

By construing the question of God’s existence as decisively scientific, scientific atheists

play to the greatest strength of secular society, which is the power of technoscience.
But in so doing, this sort of atheist demonstrates the same warped single-mindedness
as that of the warmonger who thinks there’s a military solution to every sociopolitical
problem or of the proverbial hammer-lover who sees everything else as a nail. There
are indeed facets of religion that are susceptible to scientific testing and thus
falsification; for example, the Darwinian revolution in biology directly challenges
literalistic interpretations of monotheistic scriptures. These literalists typically do
themselves the disservice of following Thomas Aquinas in assuming that the best way
to combat heathenism is to wield the heathen’s weapon of Reason. Thus, literalists treat
their scriptures as though they were concerned primarily with empirical rather than with
normative truth, despite the fact that outside of ancient Greece and perhaps India, the
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ancients had no conception of an absolute division between fact and value. Whereas
today it’s commonplace to speak of what’s factually the case regardless of whether we
approve or even know about the matter, the ancient worldviews that gave rise to the
current monotheistic religions were anthropocentric or animistic. The natural world was
assumed to depend on divine people just as the local artificial world depends on mortal
humans. Natural facts, then, were assumed to be artificial, which is to say that
everything from the movement of the sun to the ocean’s waves were thought to be
directly intended by some deity, in which case any question of empirical fact was
inextricable from some psychological question of the deity’s purpose or from the social
question of whether some group of humans properly worships the deity to steer the
course of nature.

In short, the scientific atheist’s error is as gross as the literalistic theist’s. Science
conflicts with religion only when a religious creed is reduced to a scientific theory or
when values are reduced to facts, and prescriptions to descriptions. Granted, even if
religions deal primarily with practical questions of how we should live in the face of
death, religious statements are easily interpreted as having empirical implications.
Certainly, the theist is committed to the notions that God designed the universe to
sustain life and that God interacts with the natural order, responds to prayer, and
performs miracles--especially those miracles which are crucial to monotheistic
narratives. But refuting these notions on purely empirical grounds, amassing scientific
data to demonstrate that there’s no such interaction is a fool’s errand, since the theist is
always free to reinterpret her scripture or to rework her understanding of God’s
relationship with us.

This is largely why theology isn’t a science in the first place, because the theist
assumes that matter is everywhere dependent on some mind and not the other way
around, and that since God’s mind is much greater than ours, we have only a flawed
understanding of God’s plan. Even folk psychological interpretation of our own
intentions is endless and inexact, because our beliefs and desires all bear on each
other in a vast network of ever-changing mental states that corresponds somehow to
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the brain’s architecture, so that there’s always the possibility of explaining someone’s
behaviour by emphasizing some other relation between her beliefs and desires. But the
theologian obviously has even less reason to be fixated on a single interpretation of
God’s state of mind, since God’s mind would transcend our comprehension and so we
could never be certain we understand what God’s doing. On top of this, as I said, a
mind is concerned with normative questions of how we ought to live, which are never
answered solely by pointing to some empirical fact and which scientific methods
therefore don’t address. In this way, theism is subjective rather than objective, because
theism is distinguished by the positing of a great mind. As the philosopher of science
Karl Popper said, theology and (Freudian) psychiatry are both nonscientific in that their
statements are unfalsifiable.

Scientism’s Ironic Vindication of Philosophy

Now, the scientific atheist typically regards the unfalsifiability of theological statements
as a disastrous defect that renders religion worthless and pitiful. But this is because the
scientific atheist is plainly and quite ironically beholden to the religion I’ve called
“Scientism,” which is equivalent roughly to a combination of positivism and
Enlightenment humanism. Specifically, this atheist tends to reach the conclusion that
scientific methods are the sole providers of knowledge, and that any belief that would
fail on scientific grounds is worthless. This positivism is epistemologically primitive and
otherwise embarrassingly clueless. First of all, humans are animals, not robots, and so
we’re seldom interested just in knowledge for its own sake. Obviously, we have many
other interests, including political, personal, and aesthetic ones. When the positivistic
New Atheist pretends to be hyper-rational, like a Vulcan from Star Trek, sneering at the
theist for her ancient superstitions, wishful thinking, and other emotional weaknesses,
just ask the atheist about her sex life: request a cold-hearted computation of the range
of her sexual positions, a dissection of her perverted fantasies, and visual records of her
sexual practices. See whether that superficially hyper-rational atheist lives up to her
religion’s calling as a posthuman, abiding on a higher plane than that of our primitive
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ancestors, or whether instead she succumbs to responding like the animal she actually
is and retreats to an emotional defense of her embarrassingly primitive private life.

Second, because we’re animals and not robots in the classic SF sense, our knowledge
is value-laden, which is to say that our beliefs are intertwined with our interests so that
knowledge isn’t just a set of propositions that corresponds to some facts, with a theory
in tow that predicts and explains the evidence of why that correspondence should
obtain; in addition to that strictly rational business, there’s the need for our beliefs to
cohere with each other and with our desires and emotions. While as a matter of fact the
Earth may be approximately 12,700 km in diameter, knowing about that fact involves
assimilating the belief into a larger worldview which is informed not just by scientific
methods of evidence-gathering and testing, but by our practical concerns. A machine
can merely record a representation of the Earth’s physical characteristics, but a person
knows those characteristics by understanding their relevance, given a wider, partly
normative perspective. That perspective is always informed by disciplines other than
institutional scientific ones, even for a wannabe hyper-rational atheist.

Scientism in the wider sense accounts for the ongoing phenomenon of positivism in
science-centered culture, and thus for scientism in the narrow sense. (For clarity, I’ll
now capitalize my references to the former sort of scientism.) In the narrow sense,
scientism is just the view that all knowledge is obtained by scientific methods and that
nonscientific academic disciplines are therefore of much less importance, if not wholly
useless. In the wider sense, I define Scientism as science-centered religion that covertly
substitutes for a more traditional one and that depends on a severe lack of self-
awareness on its practitioner’s part. In particular, a Scientistic atheist notoriously
pretends that philosophy is effectively as worthless and as counterproductive as
theology, even though this atheist’s case against theism is always fundamentally
philosophical.

For example, in his blog Why Evolution is True the scientific New Atheist Jerry Coyne
cites Stephen Hawking’s appeal to the pragmatic principle that science is superior to
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philosophy because “science works” (see the entry, “How can we justify science?: Sokal
and Lynch debate epistemology.”) Theology and philosophy fail to progress, on this
view, because theologians and philosophers fail to achieve consensus on answers to
their intellectual questions, and in any case their disciplines are fruitless in that they
don’t help us control natural forces to enhance our standard of living. Again, this
positivistic, antiphilosophical philosophy is as embarrassingly juvenile as a libertarian’s
worship of Ayn Rand. For no more than a moment of thought is needed to appreciate
that pragmatic hostility to philosophy is perfectly self-destructive. Just run through the
key terms in my above summary of pragmatism in the present paragraph and ask
whether their use is scientifically or philosophically justified. Science “works” in that
science enables us to control natural processes by means of determining their causes.
In that respect, technoscience is indeed highly useful, but is it accurate to say that
neither philosophy nor theology works in its own way? Of course, to say that philosophy
needs to work exactly like science is just to beg the question in favour of scientism. No,
philosophy and theology work as cognitive disciplines that attend to the normative and
wider coherence dimensions of knowledge. Philosophy works by engendering
skepticism with regard to social conventions, while exoteric theology works by unifying
tribes around emotionally-satisfying totems or other idols.

And just as philosophy and theology nevertheless have their great weaknesses
(philosophy causes angst and alienation, while mainstream theology thrives on
gullibility, ignorance, and authoritarian impulses), technoscience clearly has its
drawbacks as well. To quote Erik Davis, in Techgnosis,

Any serious observer must find herself questioning the sustainability of our
extractive, industrial, and agricultural practices, our levels of consumption, and
our myopic insults to the biosphere. All the cool commodities in the world cannot
compensate for a future that promises a massive extinction of plants and
creatures, the devastating loss of topsoil and rain forest, a cornucopia of
pesticide-laden monocrops and lab-engineered Frankenfoods, and the climatic
instabilities of global warming. And while globalization may thrust some social
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groups and regions into relative affluence, such prosperity could prove to be an
ecological time bomb if the exuberant consumption patterns of the West are
simply replicated on a global scale. (314)

Science isn’t solely to blame for these dangers, but science nevertheless is the chief
enabler of globalization, and to the extent that globalization has a dark side, science
doesn’t simply work. But to appreciate the normative aspect of the pragmatic lauding of
science is already to enter into at least a philosophical (ethical or aesthetic) comparison
of science with other disciplines.

Likewise, to say that philosophy doesn’t progress is to issue a normative judgment that
no series of scientific tests in the world can suffice to justify. This is because what
counts as social progress depends on our interests, and institutional science can’t prove
what we should want. Is consensus or unanimity necessarily the mark of progress or of
a working rather than a dysfunctional discipline? What strictly scientific method could
demonstrate this as an empirical fact? Perhaps disagreement on largely subjective
matters has the social advantage of fostering variety and thus greater human
adaptability. Perhaps there’s more disagreement in philosophy and in religion, because
normative, highly general, and emotionally crucial questions are harder to answer than
empirically testable ones. More likely, though, perhaps answering them decisively isn’t
the point, because grappling with a philosophical question is a way of shaping a
personal outlook or a culture, without the benefit of presuppositions, whereas scientists
are free to presuppose methodological naturalism, pragmatism, platonism, or some
other philosophical stance without neglecting their duties as scientists.

Scientific, allegedly hyper-rational atheism, though, is actually a philosophical position,

and despite this atheist’s superficial hostility to philosophy as the baby in the bathwater
of theology, the oblivious worshipper of science inevitably vindicates philosophy and at
least the need for theology, albeit not any outmoded religion. The mental
compartmentalization needed by a modern monotheist to maintain a coherent worldview
despite the conflicts between any such religion and a modern mindset, is comparable to
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that needed by the Scientistic atheist who perceives the world through science-tinted
lenses, leaving the blind spot of the philosophical and theological frame that holds those
lenses in front of her eyes.

Indeed, Coyne is wont to equate science with rationality in general, to conceal the
absurdity of his antiphilosophical philosophy and his underlying religious faith in
science. (See, for example, his blog entry, “A new definition of scientism,” in which he
says, “As for me, I maintain that if you define science broadly as I have above, then yes,
plumbing is a form of science, for it uses empirical investigation and reason to do things
like locate and fix leaks.”) That is, instead of maintaining that all knowledge issues from
institutional science, Coyne and likeminded scientific atheists draw the line between
atheism and theism at the point of general rationality. But because they equate
rationality with science, by way of mere stipulation, they feel entitled to award science
and not, say, philosophy, with the credit for atheism, thus satisfying by way of
equivocation their religious and highly reductive preference for science in the narrower
sense.

By all means, let the scientific atheist tout the glories of technoscience, which are many
and awesome! But when the hubristic atheist ventures into the religious
fundamentalist’s territory, having been mesmerized by those glories so that the atheist
sees nothing of cognitive value outside of science, the scientific atheist creates a self-
destroying worldview, abandoning her philosophical allies for the sake of religious
purity.

Philosophical Atheism and Mystical Pessimism

By contrast, the philosophical atheist regards the question of theism as philosophical.

But how does this atheist preserve philosophy while rejecting theology? After all, as the
scientific atheist likes to point out, philosophy has more in common with theology than
does science. Well, on the surface, the philosophical atheist proceeds by building an a
priori case against the so-called god of the philosophers, an abstraction that’s rationally
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reconstructed from religious myths. For example, a philosopher is free to deconstruct a

definition of God, reducing the definition to absurdity by deriving contradictions from the
reconstruction of the theist’s assumptions. This is mostly a futile endeavour, since
there’s always a gap between the rational reconstruction and the God that religious
people actually worship, what with philosophy not being theology. Thus, the theist is
free to say that the god of the philosophers is a red herring, that the rational definition of
“God” would need to be altered to represent the deity figuring in a particular religion,
and that there’s no end to the needed alteration since ultimately mysticism trumps
literalism. As I’ll show in a moment, this theistic retreat to mysticism isn’t just an escape
hatch to evade criticism, but points to the crucial difference between philosophy and
theology. There are other philosophical arguments an atheist can deploy, though, in
building a nonscientific but rational case against theism, some of which I summarize in
“Theism.” Of course, a philosopher can criticize the theist’s a priori proofs of God’s
existence and in general can show that theism is fallacious. In other words, the
philosopher can construe her atheism as a moderate version of the science-centered
variety, much as American Democrats can sell themselves as moderate Republicans.

But this doesn’t reveal what’s actually at stake in the conflict between philosophical
atheists and theists. As suggested above, rational or so-called natural theology is
something of a political strategy adopted by the likes of Catholics and Muslims to
convert certain unbelievers. The idea is to show that all sacred paths lead to God, that
science and reason generally pose no challenge to religion. But this raises the question
of whether reason and science are sacred rather than profane, or God-favoured rather
than demonic. Clearly, from a Jewish, Christian, or Islamic perspective, secular powers
don’t fit well within those religious narratives, assuming the narratives haven’t been
secularized. After all, reason is a skill we’ve evolved in our “fallen” state to survive in
what the monotheist regards as our mere temporary home, while technoscience is an
elaboration on reason that enables us to re-engineer the world God would still have
created for us, forging our own path by our own intelligence and power. Clearly, the
monotheist requires no leap of imagination to label rationalism a mark of sinful
arrogance--literally a following in Satan’s path, Satan or Prometheus being the
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archetypal rebel who creates his own world rather than serving as a slave to God’s plan.
Paul of Tarsus said that natural as opposed to spiritual wisdom is folly to God, while the
New Testament has Jesus say that you can gain the whole natural world but lose
yourself on Judgment Day. Some monotheists try to co-opt secular instruments, but in
so doing they inevitably corrupt their religion. As I say in “Christian Chutzpah,” the most
appalling current case of this is the revolting spectacle of American so-called
conservative Christianity in which the religion functions purely as a political weapon
wielded by Republican demagogues, having absolutely nothing to do with the original
Christian principles.

True, in Genesis God commands that we “subdue the whole world,” but as Jack Miles
shows in God: A Biography, the character of God in the biblical narrative evolves as he
discovers his preferences by interacting with his favourite creatures, having apparently
no prior history to determine his character. Thus, God commands us to be fruitful and to
multiply only to discover later that he doesn’t really approve of that commandment,
since it has the unintended consequence that we become too powerful, and so God has
to destroy us and start again. That initial commandment to the creatures made in his
image represents only God’s most naïve conception of his purpose for us, reflecting in
turn his most superficial understanding of himself, and thus would hardly still be in-
effect. What the Bible shows God discovering along with his creatures is that the pride
needed for us to rule the world leads to wars between us and thus to the breaking of
God’s later proscription of killing, and to a demonic rebellion against God. Not content
with ruling the world, humans build the Tower of Babel to reach the heavens, and so
God has to weaken his creatures by impeding our ability to communicate. In fact, the
literalistic reading of the Bible as inerrant betrays an underlying hostility to the Bible, a
resentment that the Bible is so difficult to understand, and a confession that the literalist
lacks the patience to read the text with the eyes of a literary critic. Memorizing and
mindlessly repeating cherished quotations as relevant equally throughout all time and
space, in their most superficial guise with no need for interpretation or understanding of
historical and literary contexts, is just lazy and disrespectful to the authors and editors.
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To return to the point, though, the canonical arguments in Western philosophy of

religion are mostly unimportant, which is one reason that that philosophical field is so
marginalized even in the US despite the abundance of American interest in religion. The
rationalism implicit in the theistic proofs and secular counterarguments betrays a mere
exoteric understanding of God, and thus leaves aside the distinction between literalism
and mysticism. What theology represents is actually a call for our ultimate humility,
given faith or nonrational knowledge (direct perception) that there’s something much
greater than ourselves to which we owe our lives. Theistic religion is primarily a check
on our pride; at least, that’s an implication of the mystical heart of that sort of religion.
But the problem is that most religious people get caught up in the oversimplified
conception of God as a person--as a creator, designer, warlord, father, son, or provider
of gifts. The god of exoteric, literalistic theism may be easier to understand and to
affirm, but the drawback is that this god becomes one of us instead of a transcendent
being that renders our pride foolish. Indeed, the literalist’s analogy between God and
a human secularizes her religion, by implicitly deifying human nature. Literalistic
theism justifies humanism, whereas mystical theism condemns our nature as
illusory or as nothing compared to the transcendent oneness of ultimate reality.

Even an argument like the so-called cosmological one, that God is the First Cause,
reduces God to a natural being for the sake of our rational understanding, and thus
misses the point of mysticism that is essential to theism. So as I said above, a theist’s
appeal to mysticism is no retreat from the need for rigorous philosophizing; rather,
academic Western philosophy of religion is a study mainly of red herrings. That
philosophy is naturalistic and thus science-centered and humanistic, whereas for
thousands of years theistic religions have challenged those who are tempted to assume
that they can find their own happiness. Nonsecularized religious belief always rests on
faith, intuition, or an interpretation of experience rather than on science or logic, which
renders the belief nonrational (subjective and emotional). The theist feels convinced by
her experience that however great our knowledge and power, there are much greater
forms that humble ours; she suspects, therefore, that our pride in ourselves is a vice, a
result of short-sightedness. The mystical theist grapples with the challenge this intuition
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poses to the now-treasured secular faith in the autonomy of the human individual, in her
rights and dignity as a godlike being in her own right who subdues nature with
technoscience. Meanwhile, the literalistic theist loses sight of the intuition and becomes
an unknowing pawn of secular powers, as she embraces religious metaphors that
covertly deify human nature.

What, then, divides Western mystical theism from philosophical atheism? That’s the
deeper question. My answer is that the former is comedic whereas the latter is tragic.
Western mysticism is so marginalized compared to the West’s interest in exoteric
monotheism, that the Western mystic’s lesson is tainted by the exoteric metaphors. That
is, even the sophisticated Westerner’s God becomes all-too-human, and so Western
theism loses its potential to challenge secular humanism. Even the sophisticated liberal
Christian who professes to reject the literal meaning of most biblical passages
nevertheless identifies God with something as insipid as love or perhaps with a quasi-
natural force like the platonic Good that steers everything towards its happy destiny.
Western theism is comedic in that it’s highly optimistic about human beings.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims currently don’t fear God, because they’ve
humanized him, failing to grasp the meaning of mystical insight. Theistic
humanism, in turn, is a force for secularization. (Granted, Islam gives the appearance of
being an exception, but this is because the current dire circumstances of most Muslims
compel them to latch onto the warlord metaphor which happens to be scarier than, say,
the Christian’s metaphor of God the Father or Son.)

Now, Eastern mysticism has much more vitality and immunity from exoteric
contamination. But for just this reason, Eastern theism is revealingly regarded by
Westerners as more philosophical than religious, despite the fact that Hindus,
Buddhists, Jains, and Taoists are much more concerned with practice than with creeds.
And this brings me to the important difference between philosophical atheism and
theism: theists flee from the destructive implications of mysticism, whereas
philosophers courageously (or foolishly?) grapple with those implications.
Western theists flee to the comfort of simplistic metaphors, whereas Easterners tend to
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depart from theism itself, honouring the philosophical confrontation with mysticism and
thus effectively embracing atheism. Granted, many Hindus worship various gods and
many Buddhists worship various gurus, but mysticism is much more central to those
religions than it is to current Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

Again, by “mysticism” I mean the denunciation of natural appearances as the causes of

ignorance and thus of suffering, and the renunciation of pleasures and rational powers
that distract from that anti-natural realization. This mysticism began with Hinduism and
filtered to the West after Alexander the Great opened channels of communication
between the ends of the Old World. Eastern religions are tragic in that they regard the
spirit’s liberation as an escape from the prison of nature and thus from human
personality: we win in the end only by grasping that we’re nothing, that the notion of
bliss in a personal heaven on some ethereal plane is just a fantasy. By contrast,
Western religions are comedic: showing no mystical turning from the apparent world,
and revealing the extent of their exoteric individualism, Jews, Christians, and Muslims
envision heaven as life in a resurrected body, with Muslims even emphasizing heaven’s
physical perfection. In Western religions, our wildest dreams are ultimately fulfilled,
including the dream of perfect justice for the wicked in hell, whereas in Eastern religions
those dreams are rejected precisely as such and replaced with detachment from the
world that looks a lot like the existentialist’s alienation and angst.

And this brings me to philosophical mysticism, that is, to the Socratic philosopher’s
hostility to social conventions, which is central to the Western philosophical tradition
even if many Western philosophers aren’t Socratic. Whereas the Western mystical
theist slides into exoteric happy-talk, rendering her monotheism comedic and thus
contrary to mystical hostility to natural (samsaric) inclinations, the Socratic philosopher
shares the Eastern mystical view that the beloved wisdom destroys the ego and society
at large by undermining optimistic or pragmatic opinions, what Plato called “noble lies.”
This is why Socrates was executed. He recognized that his sole piece of wisdom was
that he knew nothing, which ironically made him the wisest person in Greece; he knew
nothing in that he stubbornly lacked faith in tradition or authority. Socratic philosophy
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is self-destructive, since this sort of philosopher is compelled to reject what

society values, which naturally alienates her. The parallels between the Socratic
philosopher and the Eastern mystic should be clear.

Now, the updated version of Socrates’ trenchant skepticism is informed, of course, by

modern science which undermines the theist’s faith that history will end in our favour.
On the contrary, implies the scientist, no one survives bodily death and since we’re
evolving animals, we’ll become extinct like any other species. No deus ex machina for
us (unless the transhumanist’s hopes for technological apotheosis are realized). But
again, the rational case against theism misses the mystical point, which is that our
reason, our power, our love, and everything else we do or possess are of no
consequence in the greater scheme. The mystic perceives miraculous potential in this
scheme--mainly the interconnectedness of everything that appears independent. What
the Socratic philosopher finds distasteful in theism, then, is the cowardly backsliding into
optimistic, humanistic, and thus secularized literalism. By contrast, the philosophical
version of mysticism looks like a synthesis of existentialism and cosmicism. Instead of
trusting that we’re each saved by a divine Son, that divine Love conquers all, that our
personal spirit is eternal, or that God is good and in control of the universe, the
philosophical mystic, or hyper-skeptic, is preoccupied with horror: horror for the
absurdity of our self-centered delusions, horror for the universe’s palpable inhumanity
which we still find ways to deny, horror that every society depends on fraud and vice,
horror that nature evolved self-aware beings who are forced to live as degraded beasts
or to torture themselves with grim knowledge.

To see this in dramatic terms, recall that the exoteric theist demonizes the character of
Satan for daring to defy God by rejecting his place in the divine plan and acting as god
in a world of his own creation, called hell. Again, on this account of the myth, secular
humanism (Scientism) becomes Satanic. But the mystical, Gnostic Christian reinterprets
the myth, casting Satan as the wise hero who escapes from the tyranny of a false God.
The literalist’s god is indeed false, a projection of her self-centeredness, motivated by
her fear of facing the horrible truths of our existential predicament that modern science
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now makes clear for all educated people. Like the Eastern mystic and the Gnostic’s
Satan, the Socratic philosopher “falls from grace,” meaning that she’s socially
ostracized for her boundless skepticism; indeed, this is the underlying reason for
academic philosophy’s wider unpopularity. As Satan was flung from a false heaven,
from participation in the Matrix of illusions which is the natural plane, the Eastern mystic
hopes to be liberated from the cycle of rebirth, to be extinguished so that her suffering
and her embarrassing incarnation as a clever ape can end. And as Satan suffers in hell,
so too the philosopher and the mystic are angst-ridden, jarringly dislocated as they
perceive irony and folly everywhere, drawn to the transcendent mystery in all things
while condemning every rational or optimistic solution.

In short, Socratic philosophy and Eastern mysticism both interpret the world as a
monstrous tragedy and as absurdly ironic. The philosopher should reject exoteric theism
not because this theist’s arguments are fallacious, which of course they are, but
because theistic literalism betrays the mysticism to which theists and atheists alike are
entitled. When the theist dresses up God to look human with anthropocentric
metaphors, she tastelessly showcases her narcissism and opts for the pragmatic,
secular humanistic lifestyle of pleasing herself with delusions. For the Socratic
philosopher, most cases of theism are insufficiently mystical (Lovecraftian or
existential), and the problem with scientific atheism is likewise that this atheist’s
Scientism amounts to another comedic, humanistic faith. The exoteric theist and the
scientific atheist both fail to appreciate the mystical, utterly tragic upshot of modern
science, of Socratic hyper-skepticism, or of Eastern traditions of enlightenment. So
while the scientific atheist properly rejects literalistic theism as fit for children, this atheist
nevertheless swears allegiance to the wrong faith, to Scientism or positivistic
humanism, which itself is preposterously anti-philosophical. In my view, the religious
faith needed in a postmodern, highly technoscientific culture looks rather like some
combination of existentialism, cosmicism, Eastern mysticism, and science fiction.
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Sam Harris’s Scientific Morality: A Case Study of Scientific

Atheism
____________________________________________________

Sam Harris’s The End of Faith was perhaps the first major book in the wave of New
Atheist books published after 911. Harris argued for the importance of challenging our
so-called private beliefs, since beliefs (mental representations) cause our behaviour and
thus have public consequences. He argued also that so-called moderate religion
shouldn’t be off-limits to nontheists, since moderates enable more dangerous,
fundamentalist religion by contending that since religion has a harmless form, religion
itself is never a primary cause of violence. That book defended a commonsense realist
philosophy, according to which beliefs are made true or false by the facts, and the facts
support atheistic naturalism.

Whatever you might think of his earlier case for a certain philosophical perspective, you
should be struck by the shift taken by his more recent book, The Moral Landscape, in
which he attempts to show that social conflicts between groups who disagree on moral
issues aren’t inevitable, because science has the potential to show us the truth about
moral values just as science has done with regard to the rest of nature. Harris uses his
case for a science of morality as a weapon against religion, since theists claim that
religion (along with philosophy) are valuable in part for providing the only conceivable
framework that justifies morality; that is, the theist means to bash science-centered
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nontheism for the latter’s inability to justify morality. In the process of countering this
moral argument for theism, however, Harris throws the baby out with the bathwater. If
morality is actually in the purview of science, then neither the philosopher nor the
theologian can have anything crucial to say about moral issues, just as a chef or a
politician has no authority to speak about biology or physics.

Unfortunately, Harris’ case for scientific morality conforms to the positivist’s pattern of
ironically celebrating science with a philosophy that must be kept in the shadows. In
Harris’ case, he should have two reasons not to call attention to the philosophical nature
of his arguments for scientific morality. First, those arguments would demonstrate that
there is a crucial philosophical debate about morality after all, namely the debate about
whether morality can be scientifically justified; the nature of this meta-debate, in turn,
prevents a fulsome, Scientistic worship of science at the expense of philosophy.
Second, his arguments happen to be badly flawed, often resting on evasive verbal tricks
or contradicting each other, due presumably to his contempt for philosophy and thus for
its ideals of clarity and rigorous logic even in discussions of nonscientific issues. Harris’
case for scientific morality, therefore, illustrates the perils of scientific, as opposed to
philosophical, atheism.

Facts and Values

Harris says that he sees no reason to pay much attention to philosophical ethics or
meta-ethics, because that philosophical work “increases the amount of boredom in the
universe” (Chapt. 1 n.1). In a talk he gave in New York about his book, he says we don’t
have to pay attention to such “intellectual backwaters” (see the YouTube video, “CFI-
NYC | Sam Harris: The Moral Landscape,” approx. 12 minutes in). His goal, he says in
his book, is to write for a wider audience, not just for academia. This complaint with
academic philosophy is all-too-convenient, though, since Harris’ book naturally contains
many references to scientific research which are surely just as boring to many people.
There are popularizers of either science or academic philosophy, who simplify the
cutting-edge research and arguments without crudely misrepresenting them or slanting
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the discussion with amateurish errors. Harris’ many, more technical footnotes at the
back of his book, not to mention his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Stanford,
show that he’s equipped to engage responsibly with the philosophy of morality. The
reason he doesn’t, therefore, may be just that even a half-way rigorous philosophical
analysis of his arguments for scientific morality reveals their egregious flaws and thus
his true technique for persuasion, which is his implicit reference to the power of
technoscience. Once Harris’ philosophical arguments are disposed of, all that remains
is the tribal expectation that science will dictate our moral beliefs just as science has
come to dictate so many of our others.

Standing in the way of this inductive inference is the philosophical distinction between
facts and values. Science is usually thought to discover what the natural facts are and
how they work, not to show how we ought to behave or to settle any other normative
matter. According to Harris, there’s no such distinction. After all, he says, science itself
rests on certain “built-in” epistemic values, such as the value of critical thinking (11). But
this postmodern observation is irrelevant to the point of the fact-value distinction, which
has to do with logical spaces of justification, or with the giving of reasons to accept a
belief, not with causal connections. Sure, a person’s values can cause her to act and
thus to bring about certain facts in the world, perhaps even to make a scientific
discovery. This doesn’t mean that the person’s values by themselves logically entail a
reference to any of those facts, or that a reason to believe some fact obtains follows just
from a belief about what ought to be the case. As the postmodern skeptic is often
reminded to her chagrin, to reason otherwise is to commit a form of the genetic fallacy,
of reducing an empirical belief’s justification to its subjective origin, such as to the
believer’s feeling, character, or some other normative factor. To take the hackneyed
example, just because Hitler was evil doesn’t mean all of his empirical beliefs were
false; again, rationally assessing whether an empirical belief is justified doesn’t end with
considering the believer’s values.

Harris commits the same error in his neurological argument against the fact-value
distinction. He points to some evidence that beliefs about facts and values respectively
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arise from similar brain processes. Again, even were this evidence strong, it would be
irrelevant to the distinction at issue since it would show only a certain causal
connection--in this case, between mere beliefs about facts or values and their neural
origins. Just because those beliefs might be processed in similar ways by the brain,
doesn’t mean there’s no logical difference between reasons in support of either kind of
belief. This is just another form of the genetic fallacy.

What about the other direction of inference, from facts to values? This is the direction
made famous by Hume’s argument that you can’t infer a normative statement merely
from factual premises. Harris gives short shrift to this, the more relevant aspect of the
fact-value distinction. His most direct response, buried in a footnote, is a citation of
Dennett’s hand-waving protest that an “ought” just has to be derivable from something
like “an appreciation of human nature” or “a sense of what a human being is or might
be” or what the person wants. According to Harris’s quotation of Dennett, there’s no
fallacy in that sort of derivation (Intro. n.13). But there obviously is. Just ask yourself
whether wanting something makes it right. If Hitler wants to kill Jews, does that mean he
ought to do so? Sure, facts about our capacities as humans informs us of our moral
limits, but this doesn’t mean that the rightness or wrongness of what we do reduces to
facts of those limits. A sociopath may be incapable of acting morally, but that limit by
itself doesn’t tell us that his actions are immoral. Perhaps his lack of a conscience is like
a gift and his manipulation of weaker people conforms to a posthuman moral standard.
And were the facts of our nature that we have no real freedom at all, values would be
illusory and thus so too would a derivation of normative from factual statements.

In his New York talk, Harris raises Hume’s point about “is” and “ought” statements, and
in the very next sentence pretends to answer it with his postmodern point about the
value-ladenness of science (see just before the 25 minute mark of the talk cited above).
It doesn’t seem to bother Harris that these points are headed in opposite directions,
inferentially speaking.
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Dennett and thus Harris (who quotes him) want to know from where moral statements
are derivable if not from factual ones. Scientistic atheists are stumped, you see,
because they’re wannabe hyper-rationalists. They assume that moral beliefs have to be
logically inferred or based on evidence. But morality, like theism, might be irrational and
thus either might be particularly fitting for us--as smart as we are compared to all other
known species--considering that we’re animals nonetheless.

Is happiness the only moral value?

So Harris hardly overcomes the philosophical distinction between facts and values. But
put that aside. According to Harris, “whatever can be known about maximizing the well-
being of conscious creatures--which is, I will argue, the only thing we can reasonably
value--must at some point translate into facts about brains and their interaction with the
world at large” (11). Harris’ main argument is that the only intelligible object of value is
the welfare or happiness of conscious beings and that morality therefore reduces to
facts about what makes those being happy, facts which scientists can discover.

(Harris emphasizes another point, about the origin of values. For example, he says,
“consciousness is the only intelligible domain of value,” “consciousness is the basis of
human values and morality,” and any other “source” would be “the least interesting thing
in the universe” (32). He speaks as if these statements were equivalent, which they’re
not, since whether something is interesting has to do with whether it’s the object of
value, not with whether it’s the source or sustaining cause of values. In any case, this
point about the source of values is once again irrelevant. You might as well say that
morality reduces to facts about our solar system, since that system produced and
sustains the conscious creatures who evaluate things. The origin or vehicle of morality
may be scientifically interesting, but it’s irrelevant to the philosophical, meta-ethical
question of whether science can tell us everything we could want to know about
morality.)
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Harris’ relevant premise, then, is that our welfare is the only possible thing we can
value. His meta-ethical defense of this statement proceeds by way of thought
experiments, not by any scientific evidence. Harris merely appeals to his reader’s
intuition, asking whether it would make any sense to call the most miserable state of
affairs morally good. He contrasts The Good Life, in which a person is successful,
emotionally fulfilled by social connections and a worthwhile job, and fortunately blessed
with a long life free from much pain, with The Bad Life in which an illiterate,
impoverished, starving, terrified woman in war-torn Africa watches as her child is raped
and killed, and is forced to flee from a gang of soldiers who rape and kill her (15-16).
Harris wants to know what someone could possibly value were the difference between
those two lives not to matter to her. If someone wanted to steer another person’s life in
one or the other direction, as it were, could we conceivably have the same moral
opinion of that controlling person, regardless of the direction? Harris wants to say that
this difference between happiness and unhappiness is all there is to moral value, that a
moral value not captured by the distinction between The Good Life and The Bad Life is
inconceivable and impossible (17). And since that distinction has to do with facts that
relate--in a scientifically explainable way--to the brains of conscious creatures, if you
share Harris’ intuition about the distinction, you’ve got to agree that there can be a
science of morality.

Clearly, there’s a difference between happiness and unhappiness and clearly most
people would rather be happy than otherwise. Most people prefer pleasure to pain, for
well-known natural reasons. The question is only whether this preference is all there is
to morality, or indeed whether it’s even relevant to the question of moral value. All that’s
logically required to refute Harris’ conceivability argument is to provide an example of a
moral value not captured by his point about the majority’s preference for happiness.
One such example is found in my existential argument for the aesthetic value of
suffering due to knowledge of our absurd and tragic plight as naturally accursed
creatures, a value that trumps the more conventional, materialistic preference for
personal fulfillment. Ask yourself not just whether we can or actually do prefer a life of
personal pleasure to one of misery, but whether we morally ought to, given our tragic
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knowledge of our animal nature, of the obviousness of atheism, and thus of the
absurdity of our theistic delusions. Instead of appealing fallaciously to an intuition’s
popularity, as does Harris, consider whether we ought to be happy on Earth even
though Earth isn’t Heaven.

Take even the fortunate soul in Harris’ example of The Good Life. In that thought
experiment, the hero’s job is actually to help other people, including children in the
developing world by means of a billion-dollar grant. So a happy person needn’t be
selfish. But notice how Harris’ own thought experiment self-destructs as soon as you
start to examine it. Anyone interested in dedicating her life to helping people much less
fortunate than her is bound to be motivated by suffering due to her knowledge of their
misery. That suffering will compete with her pleasure, tearing her away from her cocktail
parties, rendering her enjoyment of her comparative luxuries petty and awkward. How
could she enjoy her success and her friends, knowing that millions of children suffer
each moment she’s offered some pleasure or other, and knowing too the ultimate cause
and consequence of that grotesque inequality? The cause, of course, is the fact that
we’re byproducts of mindless, inhumane natural processes, and the consequence is
that we’re thoroughly natural creatures, namely animals whose fates are tied entirely to
our bodies, for whom there’s no perfect justice. Harris’ own example reveals that
happiness isn’t crucial to moral value, after all, since the morally praiseworthy person
living The Good Life is bound to be unhappy! Sure, she may be successful, wealthy,
popular, and so on, but she’ll suffer from anxiety rather than be contented. Her angst is
what will motivate her to live a more respectable, altruistic life, thus freeing Harris’
argument from the counterintuitive implication that selfish pleasure is all that’s morally
valuable.

If that hero’s happiness (in the sense of a set of higher and lower pleasures tied to her
brain states) isn’t what makes her life morally valuable, why do we morally praise her?
Surely, because she chooses to sacrifice her pleasure to help others, and she chooses
this out of a sense of duty to respond well to her suffering from the horror of our
existential predicament. Because we’re the spawn of a mindless, inhumane world and
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not children of any loving god, some people succeed in the struggle for life while others
fail, some are lucky while others are not, and many of us live effectively as subhumans
exploited by posthuman demigod overlords (globe-trotting oligarchs). The hero can’t
bear to live selfishly, because her conscience prevents her from contributing to an
aesthetically appalling pattern in which she enjoys luxuries while millions of
impoverished children starve. Again, what’s morally praiseworthy about this hero isn’t
just that she happens to succeed in helping others, but that she chooses to try even at
the inevitable cost of sacrificing her peace of mind and her enjoyment of her privileged
lifestyle. Remove this altruistic aspect from Harris’ example of The Good Life, and the
intuition is no longer triggered that there’s anything morally right about the person’s
pleasures from her fortune, social network, and her long life, that is, about her
happiness. As I say elsewhere, not only is happiness not the only morally correct goal,
but happiness in the sense of personal contentment is especially unbecoming for
creatures in our existential situation. We morally ought to be restless and angst-ridden,
given what we now know, thanks indeed largely to Harris’ cherished modern science.

I stress the aesthetic aspect of existential morality, but the philosopher Immanuel Kant
provides a third example that refutes Harris’ contention, that is, an example in addition
to my case against the moral value of happiness and to the self-destruction of Harris’
example of The Good Life. Kant famously argues for what ethicists call deontology,
which is the philosophy that morality is a matter of duty, not of happiness. Naturally,
Harris gives short shrift to Kant as well, stating in a footnote that Kant's categorical
imperative (that we have a rational duty to act as if our private reason for acting were a
universal law, so that we’d expect to reap what we sow), “amounts to a covert form of
consequentialism” (Chapt.1, n.10). This is supposedly because, as Mill allegedly
showed, Kant’s rational basis for morality works only on the assumption that rationality
is generally beneficial and thus maximizes happiness. Even were this so, which
Kantians will hardly concede, happiness might be a morally irrelevant byproduct of
rationality. In any case, as I’ve argued elsewhere, rationality rather produces angst and
alienation than contentment. Were everyone good Kantians, always worried about
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treating each other as ends rather than as means, we’d suffer from our awareness of
how often nature treats us all as means rather than as ends.

In another footnote, Harris criticizes Kant’s notion of treating people as ends, arguing
that we’re split between our present and future selves, so that when we act prudently to
benefit ourselves in the future, we abuse our present selves as means to that end
(Chapt. 2, n.45). But once again, Harris’ own philosophical assumptions undermine his
scientistic notion of morality. Harris says that morality is a concern only for conscious
creatures. According to the philosopher John Locke’s view of personal identity, a person
is essentially the interconnections between a set of mental states, especially memories.
A stream of consciousness can be interrupted without losing personal identity as long
as memories are retained of the earlier mental states. So a Kantian could reply that
present and future states of a self are united by memories. Moreover, according to Kant,
we’re ends rather than means because we have freewill in the sense of autonomy, and
without that attribute morality is nonsensical in the first place.

Note also that Harris’ example of The Bad Life is morally irrelevant. The victim’s misery
is surely not to be preferred, but this doesn’t make it morally wrong, precisely because
she’s a colossal victim who isn’t to blame for anything, and even those who immediately
persecute her aren’t to blame (the soldiers are “drug-addled” and indoctrinated as
children). The true culprits who are morally blameworthy are the oligarchs who control
the political and economic relations between countries. But the point is that immorality
isn’t just a lack of happiness; rather, it’s the cowardice or folly that causes us to ignore
our existential predicament, retreating to theistic or to other delusions, as well as the
tastelessness (unoriginality) of reinforcing that predicament by contributing to inhumane
dominance hierarchies.

Finally, a word about Harris’ dismissal of objections to his conceivability argument for
the equivalence of moral value with the welfare of conscious creatures. In talks and his
book, he often belittles his critic's objections by saying that they run up against the self-
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evidence of Harris’ arguments and therefore don’t need to be taken seriously. For
example, he says,

if we don’t want everyone to experience the worst possible misery, we shouldn’t

do X. Can we readily conceive someone who might hold altogether different
values and want all conscious beings, himself included, reduced to the state of
the worst possible misery? I don’t think so. And I don’t think we can intelligibly
ask questions like “What if the worst possible misery for everyone is actually
good?” Such questions seem analytically confused...if someone persists in
speaking this way, I see no reason to take his views seriously. (Chapt.1, n.22)

Here, Harris dismisses a strawman argument, reducing the conclusion of his own
conceivability argument to a mere analytic statement that depends on the stipulated
meaning of words. The reason it makes no sense to ask whether the worst possible
misery for everyone is good is that “worst” includes the meaning bad. But the
description of The Ultimate Bad Life, in which misery is maximized, needn’t use that
particular loaded label, “worst.” Indeed, we shouldn’t beg the moral question at issue by
initially describing this scenario as very bad, but should rather neutrally say that that
misery is complete, extreme, permanent, and so on. Then the question becomes
whether, say, complete misery for everyone is actually moral. Given existential and
Eastern philosophical traditions, this question can hardly be dismissed as easily as an
irrelevant one about the loaded use of words. The renunciation of our pleasures may
indeed be the moral choice, given our predicament that those who know too much are
condemned to live with angst, and that we can either flee to delusion or nobly persevere
as tragic heroes.

Of course, the philosophical and indeed the scientific standard is to go out of your way
to ensure that you’ve made no error, to work with the critic to formulate the best
possible objection to see whether your argument holds up. The alternative is to
dogmatically presume that you’ve got a godlike handle on the truth and to belittle
objections, like a self-righteous theist. Harris’ evident pride goes before the fall of his
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argument, and the source of his pride is his commitment to the religion of Scientism,
which assures him that somehow science has all the answers--even if you’ve got to
employ shoddy philosophical arguments to prove as much.

Just what is Harris' science of morality?

Were Harris’ conclusion just that science can show us how to be happy, assuming
happiness is sustained by certain brain states, there would be little to criticize. The
problem is that he thinks we can replace the philosophy of ethics with that sort of
science, because the equivalence of happiness with moral value is allegedly self-
evident. As I’ve shown, his argument for that equivalence is deeply flawed. But put that
aside for the moment and consider what exactly Harris wants to show. He says that his
“general thesis” isn’t merely “that science can help us get what we want out of life,” but
that, in principle, science “can help us understand what we should do and should want--
and therefore what other people should do and should want in order to live the best
lives possible” (28). But this is a slippery rather than a clarifying statement of his thesis.
The weakness in saying that science can merely “help” in this regard trivializes his
notion of scientific morality, since even his critics will agree that an “ought” can follow
from a combination of “is” and “ought” statements. The main criticism is just that a
prescription doesn’t reduce exclusively to descriptions, in the sense of being implied by
factual premises without any normative ones.

Harris proves himself to be an even slipperier fish when he compares morality to health,
pointing out that medical science proceeds regardless of philosophical worries about the
definition of “health,” but also conceding that “Science cannot tell us why, scientifically,
we should value health. But once we admit that health is the proper concern of
medicine, we can then study and promote it through science” (37). As far as I can tell,
this admission is devastating to Harris’ overall argument, since it reduces his thesis to
what he explicitly rules out as such, namely to the statement just that science can help
us get what we want (i.e. happiness). If science can’t tell us why we should value
health, and health is comparable to morality for Harris’ purposes, then science can’t tell
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us why we should value happiness (the welfare of conscious creatures). In that case,
the science of morality doesn't replace the philosophy of ethics, and that science
becomes the instrumental business of helping many people achieve their philosophical
or theological goal of being happy.

As I’ve said, Harris’ conceivability argument in support of his main premise is itself
patently philosophical rather than scientific, so his own case for scientific morality bears
out his admission that science doesn’t settle the key philosophical issue of what we
should morally value. But the slippery fish squirms yet again, adopting the same ploy as
the scientific atheist Jerry Coyne’s, of defining “science” broadly as “our best effort to
understand what is going on in this universe,” the boundary between this “science” and
“the rest of rational thought” being sometimes impossible to draw (29). With this
Quineian holistic view of the relation between rational endeavours like math, philosophy,
and science, Harris can credit “science” in the broad sense for the work of philosophy
and thus satisfy his scientistic preference for science in the narrow sense. Why not
instead use “philosophy” broadly as the name of our best effort to understand the
universe, and thus credit philosophy for the work of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein?
Again, if you hollow out “science” as a weasel word, you can have a cheap scientific
morality, but philosophy will still be needed to settle the normative questions about
morality, which are the crucial ones about what goal we ought to pursue, while science
in the proper sense will consist of discoveries and explanations that enable us more
efficiently to pursue that goal. Harris is clearly all over the map with regard to what
exactly a science of morality amounts to: because of his disdain for philosophical rigor,
and because of the conflict between his scientism and his philosophical method, Harris
is unsure of how he’s entitled to state his conclusion. Thus he equivocates, backslides,
and contradicts himself.

There’s more in The Moral Landscape than what I’ve discussed here, but I think the
above demolishes Harris’ main argument and exposes the amusing ironies of scientific
atheism. The scientific atheist thinks that science rather than philosophy is the best, if
not the only useful, weapon against religion. But the scientific atheist typically
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subscribes to what is effectively the religion of Scientism, and inevitably resorts to

philosophy in arguing against theism. Thus, scientific atheism self-destructs twice over.
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Jerry Coyne on Scientism and Freewill

____________________________________________________

Jerry Coyne is a popular new atheist and biologist. In his blog, Why Evolution is True,
he often defends two positions among others, both of which I think are dubious. The first
is scientism in what I call the narrow, academic sense, that science is the only source of
empirical knowledge. (Note that this sense of “scientism” is different from my broader
use of the word as a synonym for the substitute religion of secular humanism. That
broad sense of "Scientism" isn’t relevant to the present discussion. Whenever I refer to
scientism in this particular article, then, I have in mind the narrow sense.) The second is
that freewill is an illusion, since science shows that determinism is true. I’ll address each
in turn.

Scientism and Knowledge

Coyne says that he’s ‘always maintained that there are no other reliable ways of
knowing beyond science if one construes science broadly--as meaning “a combination
of reason and empirical observation.” ’ Again, “The real question is whether there’s any
way beyond empirical observation and reason to establish what is true about the world.
I don’t think so…” In another article, he speaks of his challenge to Keith Ward, which
was ‘to give me just one reasonably well established fact about the world that comes
from “general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and
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judgment” without any verifiable empirical input.’ Coyne summarizes this by saying that
he ‘questioned Ward’s contention that faith or other non-empirical “disciplines” could
establish facts about the world or universe.’ And in an article on whether the humanities
are scientific, he says “There is only one way of finding out what is true, and that doesn’t
involve revelation or making up stories.” Again, his point is that science broadly
construed is that only way. Finally, in an article on whether fiction is a way of knowing,
he says,

it’s clear that disciplines like history, archaeology, and even sociology have the
capacity to tell us true things about the world, but I have my doubts about the
arts. Either they can present some facts (like the facts peppering historical fiction
like War and Peace) that we can independently verify, or they can give us an
idea of what someone felt like in a particular situation (as with Gabriel at the end
of Joyce’s The Dead). The latter, though, is not a “truth” in the normal sense, but
a rendition of emotions: a way of seeing but not knowing.

According to Coyne, then, the question of scientism is whether there are ways of
knowing besides reason and empirical observation, where “knowing” means the
discovery of facts or truths. Where Coyne goes wrong here was shown long ago by
Plato: knowledge isn’t just the possession of true (veridical) belief, since someone can
come by such a belief by chance or by being misled and we wouldn’t say this person
knows what she’s talking about. Thus, Plato famously added that knowledge requires
that the true belief be justified, or supported by reasons. This is to say that the belief
must also be acquired in the right way for it to count as knowledge. If knowledge were
just the possession of a true belief, where truth is correspondence between the belief
and a fact, and a belief is a symbolic representation of that fact, not just lucky people
but inanimate objects like books or billboards could be said to know what they
represent, which would be absurd. Knowledge is something possessed by a mind,
because knowledge must be acquired in a way that only a mind can manage.
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Once this is understood, we can see that what motivates the talk of scientism and of
nonscientific ways of knowing is an emphasis on the justification side of knowledge as
opposed to the truth side. The assumption is that the humanities and the arts count as
legitimate nonscientific ways of justifying true statements. Now, the scientific method of
proving a hypothesis is well-known: the hypothesis is confirmed or disconfirmed by
clever public tests that isolate the relevant variables, eliminating chance and subjective
factors, and letting the facts speak for themselves. Is that basic scientific method the
only way of justifying true statements? Note that were there others, these other methods
would count as forms of knowledge because they would amount to nonscientific but still
legitimate means of acquiring veridical mental representations.

To answer the question, we have to look at what’s meant by “epistemic justification.” A

belief is relevantly justified when the belief is acquired not just by chance but by some
sort of respectable mental labour. This labour is what philosophers call the search for
rational equilibrium, which means the search for the coherence of our beliefs with each
other. The goal is to avoid cognitive dissonance, the fragmentation and
incommensurability of our beliefs and thus a split between the sides of ourselves that
those beliefs express, and to achieve intellectual integrity which requires deep self-
awareness, the classic philosophical virtue. What’s meant by “coherence” here is harder
to explain, but one relevant factor is ethical: in attempting to render our beliefs
epistemically coherent, we should demonstrate certain virtues such as respect for truth
and for those who may be impacted by our beliefs; courage to face harsh truth; skill at
handling the complex issues that can arise in learning what’s true; and artistic creativity
in expressing or otherwise applying a true belief. The point of epistemic justification
is to ensure that the true belief is reliable rather than accidental, and the cognitive
virtues are the sources of that reliability.

With this in mind, contrast New Age ideology with modern, naturalistic philosophy. Even
were some New Age beliefs to turn out true, we’d have reason to doubt that New Agers
know what they’re talking about when they hold those beliefs, because their beliefs
wouldn’t be well-justified in the above sense. New Age speculations aren’t currently the
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fruit of a virtuous search for reflective equilibrium, since those speculations tend to be
anthropocentric, whereas modern science decentralizes us. Either New Age myths or
modern science must go, as they stand, and by accepting the former, the New Ager
shows little willingness to reconcile her worldview with the latter. Moreover, New Age
speculations, such as the ones found in the Oprah-approved book, The Secret, cynically
spiritualize capitalistic, social Darwinian ideology, holding the consumption of material
goods as the ultimate value. According to this sort of “spiritual” worldview, we’re
magnets that attract what we most think about, and this notion breeds contempt for
sufferers since supposedly they get what they deserve. This worldview is insanely
optimistic in concluding that all natural events on this planet are perfectly just, and so
the New Ager here doesn’t evince much courage in confronting the abundance of
disheartening truths discovered by modern scientists, about the moral indifference of
natural forces to our welfare and about our animal rather than angelic nature.

By contrast, naturalistic philosophers arrive at general naturalistic truths through a more

ethically respectable process of reaching reflective equilibrium. Modern philosophers
think logically, but they also speculate and explore and defend intuitions. But arguably,
these latter, nonscientific mental labours are epistemically justificatory, because they
attempt to satisfy ethical standards of conduct. For example, when rationalist, empiricist,
existentialist, or mysterian philosophers speculate or intuit metaphysical or other
philosophical propositions that might turn out true, they do so in a conscious effort to
unify modern science with intuitive self-knowledge. They courageously confront the fact
that modern science seems to undermine most of our intuitions about our place in the
world, and they creatively reflect on how some of those intuitions might be preserved in
a rationally respectable manner.

Self-Refuting Positivism

Some naturalistic philosophers, such as the positivists, argued that intuitions or

presumptions are cognitively worthless and that only scientific methods yield
knowledge. Their recommendation was to dispense with any belief that isn’t supported
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by scientific methods. This scientism led to a dead end, however, since scientific
methods don’t support the positivist’s contention that all worthwhile, “meaningful”
cognitive endeavours are exclusively scientific. Positivism presupposes a nonscientific
evaluation of science, a pragmatic attitude, or a Philistine prejudice, and these are
philosophical rather than scientific issues. In short, a superficially antiphilosophical bit of
philosophy is naturally self-refuting. The important point here, however, is that positivist
philosophers themselves came to this conclusion, because even they were committed
to the Western philosophical tradition which values intellectual integrity.

For example, Rudolph Carnap distinguished between external and internal questions,
where external ones are about the choice of a language and internal ones are framed in
a way that presupposes the language’s rules. The external questions are answered in
what Carnap called a pragmatic, sociological, and nonphilosophical fashion. Thomas
Kuhn argued that in the history of science, Carnap’s distinction amounts to that between
paradigm shifts and normal, puzzle-solving work. What emerged from these distinctions
is greater attention to the values that are presupposed by paradigmatic work and that
come to the fore in clashes between theories during a paradigm shift. Suppose a
theory’s reign comes to an end, because sufficient amounts of data are rendered
anomalous by that theory, and suppose that a new theory gains favour not because of
its intellectual qualities, but because its champion holds a gun to everyone’s head and
so scares his colleagues into submission. Even were that new theory to turn out true,
none of the terrorized scientists could be said to know the facts as told by the theory, for
the above reasons having to do with epistemic justification. Again, the more respectable
search for reflective equilibrium--even in a power vacuum when there’s great
uncertainty about how to explain certain anomalies--is guided by ethical and aesthetic
values, including simplicity, beauty, fruitfulness, and so on.

You can stipulate with the positivist that this value-laden mental labour isn’t relevant to
the search for knowledge, but then you’ll have to show how science alone warrants that
stipulation. Instead, what most analytic philosophers learned from that period of the
philosophy of science is that knowledge isn’t as simplistic as theorized by empiricists.
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Cognitive science, too, supports a broader conception of cognitive processes, by

reminding us that reason plays an evolutionary role and by showing, in any case, that
we’re not so rational after all, that our most natural modes of thinking are technically
fallacious and biased. Modern science checks these cognitive defects, but the point is
that assuming that nonscientists possess some knowledge, knowledge had better not
be the result just of rigorous logic or hypothesis-testing. And indeed, as long as a
nonscientist, or indeed anyone in her daily life, strives to be virtuous and artistically
creative in her thought processes, and the result is that those thoughts put her in touch
with the corresponding facts, we’ve got the makings of knowledge on our hands.

Other Ways of Knowing

What about pure art, such as painting or fiction? Is any of these a way of knowing, on
this picture? Suppose you conclude that life is tragic after you gaze at a sad painting or
read King Lear. But suppose you conclude as much only because you’re forced first to
consult Coles Notes, since alas the meaning of the artwork otherwise escapes you.
Assuming that life does have its tragic side, you’d nevertheless not possess
nonscientific knowledge of this fact, since there’s little ethically or aesthetically
impressive about repeating the slogans found in a popular commentary on some
artwork. But suppose instead that you have a profound emotional experience in an
organic response to the art, that your way of perceiving the world is thereby drastically
altered. As long as you exhibit some relevant virtues in your struggle to harmonize this
new experience with what you thought you knew beforehand, your belief about life’s
tragic side is nonscientifically justified, and so you’ve employed a nonscientific way of
knowing the facts. Instead of justifying your belief with an argument or an experiment,
you've virtuously modified your worldview through an experience of an emotionally-
powerful artwork.

Finally, I want to point out that Coyne misconstrues what’s at issue when he challenges
folks to present knowledge that has no empirical input or any other overlap with
scientific methods. This challenge is quite unhelpful since it can be turned on its head.
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Why not challenge the scientist, instead, to present scientific knowledge that isn’t
arrived at in part by petty squabbles, turf defenses, or other power dynamics? Were all
scientific knowledge produced in part by such natural processes, we could then say that
there’s no such thing as a distinctly scientific way of knowing, that all knowing is
fundamentally an appeal to power.

Instead, the interesting question is whether knowledge is justified only by a scientific

brake on our subjectivity or also by the most respectable ways of being subjective in our
thinking. The former proposition is self-refuting scientism, and so we’re forced to accept
the latter, in which case the alternative ways of knowing remain so despite their overlap
with broad notions of rationality. This is because these other cognitive modes are
alternatives to the scientistic contention that science (rationality) alone is the only such
mode. On the contrary, the humanities and arts provide alternatives if only by
subordinating rational standards to ethical and aesthetic ones in an effort to create a
coherent worldview, that is, a set of beliefs that includes scientific knowledge as a
subset. For example, modern philosophers try to deal virtuously and creatively with the
conflict between folk intuitions, which call for some awe as outputs of millions of years of
evolution, and with modern science which threatens to bring liberal civilization crashing
down around us, mocking the traditional self-images that keep us sane and happy.

One such intuition is that we’re free in the sense of being self-controlling and thus
responsible for our actions. Do we know that we’re free even if science implies
determinism, that is, the view that every event has a cause? We feel that we’re free,
because we feel we have overriding power over our actions. As Coyne says about
fiction, though, feeling that something’s true is a way of seeing but not of knowing since,
I take it, feeling something doesn’t make it true. This is irrelevant, since neither is the
world round because scientists confirmed this by looking through a satellite’s telescope.
The facts are what they are regardless of what cognitive methods we bring to the table
(except perhaps in quantum mechanics). The question is whether some subjective
labour, such as the everyday experience of being metaphysically free, epistemically
justifies a statement that might turn out to be true, such as the statement that we’re free
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in that respect. Again, this would depend on how much effort is put into harmonizing the
one belief with our other beliefs, including those that derive from science which posits
natural laws and myriad mindless processes in which we seem to be caught up.

Freewill and Levels of Explanation

Now, Coyne says we’re not in fact free, since physics says there’s nothing that’s both
self-causing and responsible for itself. Particles may pop into existence from a quantum
vacuum, but were we self-creating by way of our actions in that respect, we wouldn’t be
responsible for them and freewill would be useless for moral purposes. As the
philosopher of science, Massimo Pigliucci, points out on his blog Rationally Speaking,
this mechanistic construal of current physics, according to which causes and effects are
metaphysically real, may be outdated. Instead, what’s real may be mathematical
structure, or patterns that can be explained at different levels. In this case, the
determinist’s principle that everything has a cause, including our choice to act in a way
we consider free, would be neither here nor there.

But whatever the case with regard to the metaphysical interpretation of physics,
Coyne’s determinism is undone by the fact that there are nonreducible levels of
explanation. Even were every physical event to have a prior cause, forming a causal
chain, this wouldn’t mean that every psychological event is a link in such a chain
extending past the person, since a person as such isn’t a physical object. When you
think of a person, as such, that is, in either the layperson’s way as a conscious entity
with beliefs, desires, rights, and so forth, or in the technical, psychologist’s way as a
naturally selected program for processing information, you’re not thinking in terms set
just by physics.

You can, if you like, perform a gestalt switch and leap from psychology to physics in
your conception of a person, in which case you assume a person is identical to the stuff
from which the body is made and with the processes animating that body, and you
assume also that the body is identical with a set of physical particles and their
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interactions. But those pseudoreductions call upon miracles in just the way that a
Christian declares that somehow God raised Jesus from the dead. You can wave your
hands and say that psychological, biological, and physical events are all surely natural,
but that notion of “natural” is philosophical rather than scientific. Otherwise, we’d have
an overarching scientific theory that reduces each level of scientific explanation to a
more general one. There’s no such theory. For example, no one knows scientifically
how to think about psychological categories in purely quantum mechanical terms. No
one can translate the one language into the other. No one can capture the full meaning
of psychological statements about human behavior using language that refers only to
mass, quantum fluctuations, and so forth.

Is this nonreducibility of certain levels of explanation a metaphysical or a mere

epistemic matter? That is, are we just currently ignorant of how to understand
everything in physical terms or is the notion of such understanding misconceived,
considering how the universe is put together? Are there emergent properties, such as
consciousness, that can’t be predicted or explained in lower-level terms? Are natural
processes genuinely creative in that respect, as the biologist Stuart Kauffman says? I’m
going to pass over these important questions here, except to say that there are
compelling mysterian arguments that the subjective aspect of consciousness, of what
it’s like to be aware of the world, can’t in principle be understood in its entirety from any
objective, scientific perspective.

Instead, I’m going to outline how freewill is possible on the assumption that there are
nonreducible levels of explanation. The point is just that the concept of freewill might be
useful in explaining special, rare phenomena like human behavior. As for the question
of how that concept would fit into the physicist’s picture of nature, there would be no
contradiction were physics and psychology incommensurable. Assuming there are
emergent properties, a theory that addresses them is just irrelevant to a broader theory
that explains the relations between other properties.
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But does talk of freewill violate basic naturalistic assumptions? In other words, must
morally useful freewill be supernatural? I don’t see why this should be so. Like natural
consciousness, natural freewill would surely emerge from the brain, and the trillions of
interconnections between neurons and synapses make the brain not just the most
complex, but the most self-contained, known thing in the universe. Something that’s
highly complex, with highly interdependent parts can be relatively self-contained and
thus self-controlling, and the capacity for moral responsibility follows. The brain isn’t
perfectly self-contained, since it has senses which connect it with the outside world, but
there’s no need for morally useful freewill to be absolute. We’re animals not gods, so
our self-control and our moral capacities are limited. We can be freer than other
animals, and much freer than rocks and tables, but still be free only some of the time
and perhaps often deluded about exactly when we’re free. We can sometimes feel as
though we’re free whereas instead our behavior is effectively programmed by
advertisements which frame issues for us and exploit our neural networks' inclination
towards associative thinking. All of this makes freewill limited and thus natural and quite
real. As long as sometimes or to some significant degree our brain controls itself without
being significantly influenced by anything else, we can understand how our mind might
be naturally free in the sense of being self-controlling and thus how we can be
responsible for our actions.

The Naturalistic Fallacy: a Case Study

In a blog entry reviewing a Guardian debate between Julian Baggini and Lawrence
Krauss on science, philosophy, and morality, Jerry Coyne hides behind an easily-
discerned rhetorical device to conceal his scientistic prejudice against philosophy.

In their Guardian debate, Baggini uses moral questions as prime examples of

legitimate, meaningful questions that are irreducibly philosophical. Coyne then says that
he’s coming around to Sam Harris’ view that we can already see how science will and
should replace the philosophy of ethics. And then Coyne deploys his rhetorical device
for the first of three times in his review, saying “People’s view of what is ‘moral’
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ultimately must rest on one or more of three things: an appeal to the consequences, an
appeal to some authority (like Scripture), or some innate feeling instilled by our genes in
combination with our environment (in other words, morality lies in our neurons)”
(emphasis added). Coyne is saying here that if there are moral truths, these must be
matters of fact which science can naturally discover, in which case philosophical ethics
isn’t autonomous or irreducible to psychology or biology.

But notice the ambiguity of the construction “rest on.” “Y must rest on X” could mean
either that X causes Y or that X logically implies Y. No one who thinks ethics is
irreducibly philosophical thinks science can’t discover the causes of moral judgments,
including their evolutionary history and the neural processes involved in our thinking
philosophically about moral matters. So of course ethics may “rest on” such
scientifically-discoverable facts, but this does nothing to show that there isn’t a big,
honking naturalistic fallacy in the way of Coyne’s scientism. The naturalistic fallacy isn’t
about whether some natural facts can cause us to answer moral questions in one way
rather than another, so that our answers “rest on” those facts in that sense. No, as has
been clear since David Hume, the fallacy operates at the epistemic level of whether Y
can be inferred from X. The question is whether a moral prescription, for example,
follows logically just from factual premises so that, if you like, the prescription “rests on”
those premises in this quite different, noncausal sense. The point, then, is that Coyne’s
use of the ambiguous construction “Y rests on X” allows him to pretend that he’s
overcome the point about the naturalistic fallacy, that he’s addressed the second,
inferential issue whereas science surely deals only with the first, causal one. Scientists
can explain what causes what, but this has no bearing on whether a prescription follows
logically from a description.

Coyne relies on this trusty device a second time, when he asks,

But on what grounds, then, do we determine whether homosexuality is right or

wrong? It must rest on an appeal to the consequences (which is an empirical
and scientific question), on the way most people feel about homosexuality
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(something that is a combination of our genes and our environment, and coded in
our neurons), on sacred books and dogma, or on a combination of these. Ruling
out the third, the first two are, in effect, scientific questions. [my emphasis]

He concludes that “in principle science must be is the ultimate arbiter of moral
questions” (sic). For the above reasons this is nonsense. Coyne tries to hide this fact
with his needlessly ambiguous phrasing, which apparently prevents him from
appreciating the difference between causal and epistemological questions about
morality.

After blundering about in this fashion, Coyne arrives explicitly at the question of the
naturalistic fallacy:

And for those of you who say that “is” doesn’t produce “ought,” I’d like to ask you
this: “well, how do we determine ‘oughts’”? They don’t come from thin air, and
they don’t come from free will. They come from human judgment, which is a
result of our genes and our environments. Why is that not, at least in principle,
susceptible to scientific investigation?

Notice that his confusion persists even in his asking of the Humean question. The
question isn’t whether facts “produce,” that is, cause moral obligations, but whether
statements about the former imply statements about the latter. Then he switches to a
third instance of the same type of rhetorical device. Now he relies on the ambiguous
construction “X determines Y.” As you’ll know from the freewill-determinism debate,
“determine” can mean cause, which is a scientific matter, but it can also mean ascertain
from reasoning, which is an epistemological one. Still, the ambiguity of this phrase
allows Coyne to attack his strawman when he reminds his reader that surely moral
statements don’t come from thin air, but from our judgment, which in turn is a result of
our genes and environments. Coyne is once again talking about causes, whereas the
naturalistic fallacy is about inferential relations between statements (or thoughts).
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All Coyne is entitled to say here is that scientists can explain the psychological or
biological patterns in our moral behaviour. So if, as Hume thought, we have a separate
sense of morality which he calls “sentiment”, a mental faculty of intuitions about what
goals we should pursue, a faculty we might call the conscience, this faculty will “rest on”
the brain, meaning that how we use that source of moral reasoning will be caused by
our genes and environments. After all, we’re naturally selected to be social, and children
are trained to think in moral terms. All of that is fair for scientists to explain. But this
leaves entirely untouched the philosophical, epistemological distinction between two
different logics, between that which licenses inferences to statements of fact and that
which licenses inferences to normative statements. Just because moral statements are
caused by brain states, which in turn are caused by the genes and so on, doesn’t mean
those statements follow logically from scientific explanations of the causes of morality.
Hence the naturalistic fallacy, which indicates that the philosophy of ethics, in which we
think carefully about prescriptions without attempting to replace them with descriptions,
isn’t reducible to a science of facts.
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Can Evil Derive from Atheism?

____________________________________________________

I’ve argued that for propaganda purposes, many New Atheists whitewash the social
consequences of atheism, ignoring more pessimistic forms like Nietzsche’s
existentialism and Lovecraft’s cosmicism. Moreover, scientific atheists lack respect for
philosophy and thus have low standards of argument in nonscientific debates, including
the inevitably philosophical debate between atheists and theists. These two deficits
combine to produce the howler that is the New Atheist’s frequent response to the
theist’s tedious rejoinder to the Problem of Evil, the rejoinder being that in the last
century atheists are responsible for their own horrifying measure of evil (Stalin, Hitler,
Pol Pot, etc). This response to the classic theistic problem of evil, that a benevolent God
wouldn’t allow so much natural and human suffering and therefore doesn’t exist as
defined, takes the form of the Tu quoque fallacy, amounting to the childish outburst,
“Yeah? Well so are you!” The problem of evil for theists isn’t just the pragmatic one, that
religion has caused much violence and is thus especially dangerous given advances in
weapons of mass destruction. The heart of the problem is that exoteric definitions of
God, which rely on weak metaphors, are bound to be absurd. The facts that not all evil
derives from religion and that atheists too can be evil have no bearing on that problem.

But one New Atheistic response to this counter-charge is highly revealing and annoying.
The response seems to originate from Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, in which he
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says that even were Stalin and Hitler both atheists, their atheism would have been as
causally relevant to their evil as the fact that they both had moustaches. “What matters,”
he says, “is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism
systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence
that it does” (309). And at the end of that section, Dawkins, the brilliant writer that he is,
might have birthed the meme so often repeated in these discussions, that “Individual
atheists may do evil things, but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism” (315,
my emphasis).

Note the difference in Sam Harris’ handling of the issue in his book, The End of Faith, in
which he blames evil on faith in irrational dogmas. Either secular or religious ideologies,
he says, can turn people into depraved killing machines, but this just testifies “to the
dangers of not thinking critically enough” about either sort of ideology (231). Indeed,
Harris avers, “Genocidal projects tend not to reflect the rationality of their perpetrators
simply because there are no good reasons to kill peaceful people indiscriminately” (79).
In its own way, this response is just as wrongheaded as Dawkins’.

The Path from Atheism to Evil

Return, though, to Dawkins’ declaration that there’s no evidence that atheism influences
people to do bad things. The fallacy here is the assumption that the theist’s comparison
of atheism and religion as full-fledged causes of evil points only to the axioms of either
way of thinking. Take the Crusades, the Inquisition, or al Qaeda terrorism. Those evils
don’t follow just from the most elementary religious beliefs of either faith. Just because
Jesus rose from the dead, doesn’t mean Muslims should be exterminated, and just
because God is Great and Muhammad was his prophet, doesn’t mean Jews and
Americans should be slaughtered. You’ve got to add many implications and natural
consequences of basic beliefs about God or his absence to find causes of specific acts
of religious or nonreligious violence. With regard to Christianity, you have the Catholic
destruction of pagan society and thus of the local rationalist tradition, as well as the
literalists’ victory over the Christian Gnostics and the exploitation of the religion by the
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Roman Empire, and thus the elevation of the pope as an absolute power. These
developments laid the groundwork for a Christian form of totalitarianism, and thus
ushered in the corresponding horrors. In cases of recent Muslims’ terrorism, riots, and
oppression of women, you have the rise of secular and Christian nations coupled with
the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th C., and the subjugation of Muslims by
dictators allied with the non-Muslim powers. Recent Islamist violence and retreat to
fundamentalist certainties are obviously flailing retaliations against the humiliation of
proud Muslims.

As for atheism, the connection between violence and atheism’s mere basic assumptions
is particularly irrelevant, since atheism is defined negatively as the denial of theism. This
hardly means that there’s no natural path, though, from atheism to ways of thinking that
cause atheists to perform evil acts. The fact that atheists have diverse ways of culturally
applying their rejection of theism is also of no consequence, since theism, too,
manifests in a diversity of religions. What, then, is the path from atheism to evil? It’s just
the Nietzschean and cosmicist path I’ve been discussing at length in my philosophical
rants. From atheism follows the rejection of our more naïve wishes and delusions about
perfect justice, a happy afterlife, an ultimately meaningful life, and a home for humanity
in the arms of a personal cause of the physical universe. Once those delusions are
done away with, the atheist faces the threats of existential angst and horror in the face
of our evident predicament.

We’re merely clever mammals. Therefore, some of us are lucky to live well, others are
not and they suffer horribly; some of us are selfless, others are predatory. Both nature
at large and human societies in particular are only partly hospitable to what most of us
would call the good life, because life evolved mindlessly from non-life and thus is
guaranteed no security, and that very mindless process now involves the mutation of
genes which creates a variety of body-types to survive in various environmental
conditions. So nature is unfair and far from ideal, from a naïve human perspective.
There’s no deus ex machina, given atheism, and we can hardly anticipate salvation
from our own virtues since those are as natural as the universe that contains black
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holes which swallow whole galaxies and that hurled a meteor into the Earth and
annihilated billions of creatures. If we’re made of stardust and not of some transcendent
spirit that belongs in another realm, our history is bound to exhibit the same mysterious
pattern of creativity and destruction that bespeaks the horror of our source.

To be sure, most atheists optimistically set about creating a secular society as a refuge
of laws for those interested in peace and happiness. Few atheists dwell on thoughts of
the Nietzschean implication of atheism, that morality is foolish without God, or of the
cosmicist one that if the universe isn’t fundamentally friendly to us, we’re all horribly
alienated whether we know it or not. But other implications of atheism are that the
universe is likely natural and thus that the brain is crucial to our identity. If we look at a
person’s brain, we find much activity of which she’s not remotely conscious, and this
activity can still affect her behaviour. Thus, the path from atheism to evil needn’t follow
along mere conscious lines of thought, let alone ending with the atheist’s most
fundamental assumptions. An atheist doesn’t have to be thinking explicitly of atheism
when she acts evilly, for atheism to be the root cause.

Take, for example, the role of individualism in modern societies. As the political
philosopher John Gray argues, the idea that each individual has inherent worth may
derive from the theistic principle that we each have an immaterial essence made in
God’s image. (See his book, Black Mass.) At any rate, modernists put a rationalist spin
on individualism, inspired by the Scientific Revolution. But the point I want to stress is
that individualistic societies can develop in opposite ways, depending on whether the
individuals are theists or atheists. In medieval Christian societies, an individual’s worth
was attributed to the everlasting spirit’s relationship to God. Any concession to freedom
of thought or action in the present life would have paled in significance to the need to
ensure the spirit’s safe passage to heaven after physical death, which latter task in
Europe was thought to require the regulation of earthly life by the Catholic Church. Even
were there more freethinking traditions in medieval Europe (beyond heresies like
Catharism), the rational calculation for theists would have been to suffer in the present
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life for great reward in the hereafter--and suffer most medieval Christians did, in great
abundance.

Now turn to modern individualism in its purest expression, which is the New World
culture of the United States. Here we find not asceticism but hedonism, libertinism,
pragmatism, and what Morris Berman calls the hucksterism of the American identity, the
infantile and self-destructive expectation of infinite progress in the form of material
wealth, delivered by technoscience. (See Berman’s book, Why America Failed.)
Americans hold their individual freedoms to be sacred, but they interpret their right to
live as they personally choose without any recourse to theistic principles. That is, they
calculate that it’s best to live for happiness in the here and now rather than living in
anything like a Christ-like fashion, and this must be because, regardless of their
politically correct lies to pollsters, they don’t actually have theistic beliefs. There are
some exceptions, such as the Mennonites, but they’re vastly outnumbered by this-
worldly individualists who merely pretend to be Christian theists.) What this means is
that all the business-oriented evils done by Americans, such as the genocide of Native
Americans, the slave trade of Africans, the mass imprisonment of African-Americans,
the torture and exploitation of nonhuman animals, the export of weapons around the
world, the patronage of foreign oppressive regimes, and the overuse of the world’s
nonrenewable resources are attributable not just to the faith in personal liberty, but to a
nontheistic version of that faith.

Or consider Hitler’s pseudo-Nietzschean spin on Darwinism. Whether Hitler was

privately a Christian or an atheist is relatively unimportant. Nazism as a whole may have
inherited its anti-Judaism from Christianity, but the Nazi quest for earthly power, to
celebrate the strong’s triumph over the weak, is perfectly legitimate as an expression of
atheism. Atheism, of course, is just the belief that there are no gods, but the reasons
atheists give against theistic religions are scientific and philosophical, the greatest fruit
of which is the naturalistic worldview. There are no gods because gods are
supernatural, and modern knowledge is based on sense experience and reason, not on
revelation, wish fulfillment, or the authority of ancient tradition. According to the positive
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definition of atheism, as a scientific, rationalistic, naturalistic worldview, all known living

things are animals, as explained by biologists and chemists. Darwin added the
evolutionary theory of biological design, which emphasized the role of death in the
environment’s “selection” of viable species. Rather than in an Edenic paradise or a best
of all possible worlds, life occurs under harsh conditions in which animals must struggle
for survival to pass on their genes.

Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer extrapolated from Darwin’s biological theory to the
social sphere, with Spencer in particular praising the virtues of unregulated economic
competition as those of the most natural way of organizing society. To be sure, his
inference committed what’s now called the naturalistic fallacy, but this is neither here
nor there since there’s no need for the path from atheism to evil to be a logically
rigorous one. Remember, according to the atheist’s naturalism, we’re just animals;
therefore, reason for us isn’t necessarily sovereign. An atheist is free to be irrationally
inspired by Darwinism to justify a pitiless view of the best society as one that lets nature
take its course, just as the whole irrational rigmarole of exoteric theism is needed to get
religious violence off the ground. After all, if natural selection has the power to design
the panoply of biological wonders, why not let that same power rule in the formation of
societies? Why not dispense with Christian, slave morality and submit to nature, like the
ancient pagans? Nazi rhetoric, about the glory of war and of the obligation to eliminate
the weak, derived its emotional power from atheistic wonder at the magnificent
inhumanity of natural evolution’s creativity. Once again, then, atheism is the ultimate
source of Nazism. I hasten to clarify that my point isn’t that atheism and Nazism are
equivalent or that all atheists should be Nazis. No, my point is just that, like hedonistic
individualism, Nazism is one potent way of avoiding the angst and the horror that
haunt any atheist who confronts the fact of our existential predicament which
atheism does entail.
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Evil “in the Name of” Atheism?

What of Dawkins’ assurance that secular dictators don’t commit their evil acts “in the
name of atheism”? This is just sophistry, benefiting from the evasively negative
formulation of atheism. The reason why a Christian crusader thanked Jesus as he
plunged his sword into a Muslim child’s belly or why a Muslim terrorist chants his mantra
that God is great as he flies a plane into a building full of civilians, is that the theistic
cause of violence works by encouraging egoism in light of anthropocentric projections.
Theistic evildoers are proud because they believe they’re mighty children of God,
destined to spend eternity in paradise. By contrast, the atheistic cause of violence works
by necessitating schemes to retain the atheist’s sanity in light of the ever-present threat
of confronting atheism’s existential implications. While theists childishly bang away at
their pots and pans, overjoyed that they should be so lucky to have a divinely written life
manual, atheists need to conceal from themselves and from others atheism’s
destructive potential. That’s one reason Nietzsche is such a controversial figure even in
atheist circles: defying the convention that secular humanists can freely borrow
Christian values while trashing their theological basis, he proclaimed that atheism has
socially revolutionary consequences--and as if to prove his point, he even lost his sanity
shortly before he died.

So of course atheistic evildoers don’t shout that they murder or plunder the environment
for selfish profit in the glorious name of Atheism; atheists are at least unconsciously
horrified if not consciously terrified by our existential plight, given that there are no
supernatural gods, and their evil is accomplished in the name of fleeing from the truth of
atheism. Postmodern, secular individualists distract themselves with material goods, to
avoid contemplating the unfairness of life and our greater alienation. The Nazis devised
a pantheistic religion, worshipping the champions of natural forces, the mightiest beasts
who conquer the weak to achieve a sort of Taoist unity with cosmic creativity. (Similarly,
current libertarians deify the free market and worship oligarchs as the freest individuals.)
By deifying and celebrating the evolutionary forces that make life a heroic struggle, Nazi
pagans likewise distracted themselves from the grimmer implication of atheism, that
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organisms are absurd byproducts of mindless forces and nothing more. In Nietzschean
terms, Nazis sought to overcome that harsh fact by inventing an original system of
values that affirms the brutal reality of natural life. But like Nietzsche himself, who
outlined a substitute religion of the Übermensch, the Nazis didn’t affirm so much as flee
from atheistic naturalism. (Contrast their arrogant and deluded secular religions, for
example, with the more tragic one I sketch in “Postmodern Religion.”)

Does Rationalism Prevent Atheistic Evil?

What of Sam Harris’ diagnosis of evil as caused by irrationality? In the first place,
reason can be bent to the service of evil. For example, social Darwinian economics,
which encourages the despoliation of the environment and thus potentially causes the
extinction of all life, consists of mathematical models, often concocted literally by rocket
engineers. The greedy Wall Street bankers, who in 2008 nearly sank the globally-
integrated economy, are among the smartest, most highly educated Americans. The
Nazis, too, boasted plenty of scientific justifications for their eugenic exploits. Just as
psychiatrists today are biased by the pharmaceutical companies, and economists by the
Wall Street institutions that fund think tanks and academic programs, and many
engineers by weapons manufacturers, all selling their coveted intelligence to the highest
bidder, scientists in the 1930s were biased by Nazi propaganda, tilting their research for
powerful positions in their social hierarchy.

This raises a second point, which is that an atheist, and thus most likely a naturalist, has
no business preaching pure rationality except as a sort of fairytale for children’s bedtime
stories. Harris is surely well aware of the findings in the cognitive sciences, that our
powers of reason are flawed by their evolutionary roles. David Hume was closer to the
truth when he intuited that reason is the slave of emotions. So even were rational evil
impossible, which isn’t the case, the ideal of peace through rationality would be
irrelevant to the question of whether there’s a path from atheism to evil. Given atheism,
humans are largely irrational animals. As I said, then, an atheist is free to devalue
reason and to celebrate instinct, as did Hume and Nietzsche. That naturalistic
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psychology can lead logically to the evils of laissez-faire economics, of Nazi social
Darwinism, or indeed of any secular dictatorship. Of course, scientific atheists are
rationalists, but they exaggerate the extent of human rationality by way of outfitting their
scientistic religion with myths and propaganda. The Enlightenment idea is that Reason
conquers Superstition and leads to Progress through Science and Technology. But that
modern metanarrative is an exoteric article of faith for secular humanists that’s
especially useful in the secular whitewash of atheism.

Nietzschean atheists have the esoteric insight to see through secular substitutes for
religion and to appreciate that atheism poses the great danger not just of causing evil
but of explaining why evil is inevitable for creatures in our existential predicament. An
atheist dispenses with gross fantasies about the human identity and understands that
we’re thoroughly natural creatures. Thus, the atheist appreciates that, as Harris says,
people will commit evil acts because we’re desperate, selfish, irrational, and otherwise
often vicious beasts. But an atheist must go further than just understanding the harsh
natural facts, and create a fitting set of values. Again, scientific atheists laud Reason as
our salvation, but there’s no necessary connection between atheism and
rationalism. All that atheism guarantees is the more likely awareness of our actual
existential plight, and as I said, the atheist must then choose how to respond to that
likelihood. Many New Atheists flee to a relatively peaceful, science-centered religion
(Scientism), which values democracy and capitalism and thus can be complicit in the
sins of materialistic individualism. Many other atheists turn to pagan authoritarianism
and revel in the drama of life as a heroic struggle for power, and their irrationalism is
complicit in the horrors of corrupt secular dictatorships. As I say above, I personally opt
for a different set of atheistic values.

But my point is that a scientific atheist merely begs the question when she says that
atheism doesn’t cause violence because atheists value reason and reason is the
antidote to evil. Reason is no such antidote, but even if it were, an atheist needn’t be a
rationalist. Rationalistic atheists aren’t necessarily superior to Humean or to
Nietzschean ones. Indeed, all atheistic values are rather desperate schemes to avoid
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the existential angst and horror that flow from the full appreciation that there are no
supernatural gods.

The Folly of Theism

Recently, I’ve been highly critical of certain forms of atheism. I want to close, though,
with an assurance that in my view, however disappointing scientific atheism may be,
little appalls me more than exoteric theism. The cowardice, gullibility, self-
righteousness, and narcissism of theists are palpable and repellent. Many centuries
ago, when rationalist traditions were scarcer and less spectacularly confirmed, naïve
theism could be forgiven as much less grotesque and ridiculous. Today, in wealthy,
educated countries, there’s no such excuse. Indeed, within the last several decades,
traditional monotheistic religions have had to retreat from those places, with Christianity
especially spreading to the global South, where people are poorer and less informed
about scientific naturalism. Without the oppressive dictatorships in the Muslim world,
which thrive on the ignorance of their populations, Islam might already have reformed,
which is to say secularized, itself. With technologically-driven globalization, the Arab
Spring and the great concentrations of youths in contemporary Muslim populations
might still indicate an imminent emasculation of that religion.

You’d think that the shame of being so transparently retrograde would dissuade
Christians and Muslims from clinging to their outdated creeds and worthless religious
practices. But the Churches have responded to their growing irrelevance in Europe,
East Asian democracies, and North America by spreading their outrageous
bastardization of Jesus’ “gospel” to Sub-Saharan Africa (Jesus’ “good news” being
actually the terrible news of Gnosticism). Dishonouring yourself with the personal
weaknesses required for the more inane theistic expressions is one thing, but actually
taking to the streets to protest anything on such religious grounds, publicly professing
your faith by means of archaic jibber jabber, or killing in the name of your fictional god is
an abominable crime against good taste, if nothing else.
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As I’ve said elsewhere, Eastern religions are more mystical, philosophical, and
naturalistic, and therefore less objectionable. What’s praiseworthy about mysticism?
Well, mystics are humbler than the theists who lean on anthropocentric images of the
divine. Mystics are what Western philosophers call mysterians, which means they’re
dubious of the potential for rationally understanding everything there is to know. Mystics
stay true to the religious dread of our perilous and lowly position in the universe, an
attitude that fosters the highly praiseworthy virtue of humility. Mystics have a lofty
perspective on life, often detaching themselves from worldly concerns and living
ascetically, demonstrating their freedom from egoistic delusions. These aspects of
mysticism aren’t wholly laudatory, but at least mystics have a modicum of intellectual
integrity, whereas exoteric, literalistic theists carve their minds into a thousand walled-
off fragments for fear of the reckoning were they to strive harder to prove the
consistency of their implicit naturalistic postmodernism and their premodern
monotheism.
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Nietzsche and Secular Liberalism

____________________________________________________

Secular liberals face a dilemma. Liberal values, such as individual liberty and
compassion, derive from monotheistic religious institutions, but these institutions are
dysfunctional and their theological rationales are no longer credible. Meanwhile,
secularism promotes oligarchy and regressive consumerism, much as Nietzsche
predicted. So warns Chris Hedges in his online article, “After Religion Fizzles, We’re
Stuck with Nietzsche.”

More specifically, the problem is that western secular assumptions--informed by science

and the capitalistic drive towards plutocracy--are that we’re all just clever beasts with no
intrinsic worth, who struggle for power with no divine oversight, but who are able to
create our own values. As Nietzsche contended, the most appropriate standard by
which to rank these values is the aesthetic, not the moral one. Universal western
morality is the creation of the early Christians, of conquered Jews who, in their
resentment towards the more powerful Romans, articulated a myth to trap their
oppressors. According to this myth, whatever helps the weak is right and whatever hurts
them is wrong. What helps them chiefly is the Golden Rule that everyone should be
treated as if they were the same, that people have rights just by being people,
regardless of their personal weakness or social status, since rights flow from something
other than natural ability. Instead of having the willpower and the strength of character
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to confront their world in an ennobling way, Christians delude themselves by trusting

that animals aren’t driven mainly by their will to power. As a product of the creative will,
Christian morality is ugly and ignoble, according to Nietzsche.

The amoral secularist affirms, instead, the sad truth of our belonging in the gloriously
violent physical universe in which stars and whole galaxies are created and destroyed
by the exercise of power, not by intelligence or benevolence. Hedges writes that the
results of this secular affirmation are the cultures of the Übermensch and of the Last
Man, which in our case are those of the power-intoxicated, financial and military
oligarchs and of the passive, apathetic mob of debt slaves, respectively. The Wall Street
titans, castigated by politicians and mocked by comedians for their amorality, are
actually the Nietzschean heroes who understand and personally accept that with God’s
death falls the whole monotheistic edifice, including morality. From a Nietzschean
viewpoint, says Hedges, the ruthless and hedonistic oligarchs stand tall as impressive
beasts, not just because of their vast wealth, but because of their creativity and their
courage in living as though the world were so horrible that sociopaths such as them
could come to dominate in it. From a scientific point of view, the world is indeed so
horrible, and there’s no escaping that horror except by succumbing to some delusion or
other, such as a stale monotheistic myth. But a delusion is just an aesthetically
displeasing product of the imagination. By comparison, in its affirmation of natural life,
Nietzsche’s myth of the glory of conquering heroes is an ennobling work of art.

Hedges rejects the foundational teachings of the Christian worldview, of the Bible’s
inerrancy, of Jesus’ miracles and even of Jesus’ historical existence, as indeed must
everyone who sees scientific methods as more worthy than tradition or institutional
authority. And Hedges thinks that secularism has nightmarish consequences. Clearly, a
doctrinaire Christian or Muslim would have some basis for condemning a Darwinian
culture; after all, assuming that the Bible effectively condemns Nietzschean philosophy,
that the Bible is inspired by God, and that God is perfect, no further argument would be
needed. But Hedges’ lament for the secular alternative to the declining religions isn’t
theological. He seems to accept what he calls the liberal values of monotheistic
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religions, such as individual liberty and compassion, while also rejecting the theological
rationales for those values. Thus, he stands wistfully between the two sides, unable to
explain how each individual could have rights and how compassion could be a virtue,
because he shares the basic scientific assumptions of the secular worldview even while
he rejects the harsh, Nietzschean values that are more authentic expressions of that
viewpoint. All of this raises the question of whether there’s anything to be said in favour
of secular liberalism. Can the best of liberalism and secularism be combined, producing
a third option? Is the only ultimate choice of cultures between theistic religion and social
Darwinism?

The Bankruptcy of Postmodern Liberalism

North American and European liberalism presents few if any hopeful signs for a way out
of the dilemma. In the U.S., Obama promised to change Washington and he was
elected on a wave of naïve optimism about the chances of victory for progressive ideals
in a broken, money-driven political system. But Obama has proven himself to be what
the media euphemistically call a pragmatic centrist rather than a progressive. In a so-
called bipartisan fashion, he wanted to initiate an alliance between the two, bitterly
opposed parties and to reach consensus to solve problems for the majority of the
American population. Pragmatism, however, is just flexibility in choosing the most
efficient way of achieving some goal. A mere pragmatist, as opposed to a liberal or a
conservative one, is a nihilist who has nothing to say about which goal to achieve, but
who adopts some preselected plan, as a functionary, for example, of a financial
oligarchy. “Centrism” entails ideological moderation, which is the lack of passion for any
political idea, and a focus on negotiating power imbalances. Centrist politicians can be
expected, then, to appreciate the weakness of their position compared to that of a
financial oligarch on which their funding and thus their political survival depend.

So as a functional nihilist (“pragmatist” or “centrist”) and servant of American oligarchy,

Obama has continued Bush’s foreign policies, gifted the private health insurance
companies with his signature domestic bill, and bailed out Wall Street at the behest of
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the duplicitous Wall Street insiders whom he appointed as his advisors. As a result,
American progressives are demoralized if not cynical and apathetic about American
politics, although Obama has already begun giving progressive, politically correct
speeches to win back his base for the coming presidential election.

One explanation of why this has come to pass is apparent from Hedges’ dilemma.
American liberals are either theistic or secular. Theistic assumptions can’t be taken
seriously in a society filled with the technological fruits of science and governed by
“pragmatic” (hedonistic, nihilistic, or sociopathic) businesspeople. And secularists have
no satisfying rationale for their own for liberal values. Hence, the liberalism of the
secular Democratic Party is mere pretense. When Democrats get into power, they
behave as centrists or as weak Republicans, because they have no liberal inspiration.
The noose of secularism around their necks has drained the life of liberal values from
them, values that are taken from the prescientific, theistic mythos. Moreover, as the
historian Oswald Spengler might have suspected, secular liberalism enters into a
decadent phase when it loses its mythical underpinnings. Thus, liberalism can devolve
into feel-good relativism; compassion for everyone comes to require respect for the
presumed equal worth of all cultures. This, too, emasculates Democrats, making them
prey for Republicans who retain an energizing, religious worldview.

The same pragmatism is found in Canadian liberalism. Canada is more liberal than the
U.S., on the whole, but many Canadians long for a leader with a liberal vision that can
regain a prestigious place for Canada in world affairs. None seems forthcoming, and
Canada becomes more and more internationally irrelevant, even as Canadian banks
proved highly responsible in the bursting of the recent real estate bubble. Europeans
have the most effective progressives in their midst, activists who force their
governments to implement liberal foreign and domestic policies. But these policies have
only fattened countries like Iceland, Greece, Italy, and the U.K., as lambs to the
slaughter, while parasitic oligarchs use mystifying financial instruments to plunder those
countries, having already laid waste to numerous poorer ones.
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The pattern is that secular liberals offer no viable opposition to the Nietzschean heroes.
These heroes are secularists and in some ways they’re more conservative than liberal,
but again they assess their activities in realistic, amoral terms: they’re just artists in the
struggle for power. The greatest, perhaps most sociopathic of these human predators
rule transnationally as oligarchs, even in corrupted democracies where they operate
outside of the media spotlight. Liberal values might regulate or even put an end to their
destructive games if liberals could bring themselves to believe strongly enough in
inalienable human rights to fight for them. But it’s unclear, at best, that there are these
rights, from a secular standpoint. There are feelings of sympathy in compassionate
individuals, there’s a certain rational strategy for creating a peaceful society, and there
are revered documents asserting that there are human rights, but none of these
magically turns a talking, tool-using primate into an intrinsically valuable end in-itself.
Even if language and human intelligence turn its user from an animal into a more self-
controlling person, this makes the animal very rare in nature, not normatively special.

A Straussian Solution?

Perhaps liberals can learn to live with their albatross of secularism, by applying the
Straussian political theory (as interpreted by the philosopher, Shadia Drury). According
to Drury, Straussians, such as many of the neoconservatives in the last Bush
administration, would agree that liberals face Hedges’ dilemma. Monotheism is a flawed
vehicle for the classic liberal values that sustain a society in which the greatest activity
of all, philosophizing, is possible, and scientists have confirmed the brutal truths of what
I’ve called our dire existential situation. The grim truths are that we have, at best, an
ever-shrinking supernatural dimension, as scientists explain more and more; we’re not
as conscious, free, or as rational as we like to believe and we aren’t intrinsically
significant; morality is ultimately the expression of feelings and our destiny is to war with
each other for earthly goods. The ancient Greek solution, however, is for the elite
among us, the Übermenschen with the willpower to digest the shocking truths, to tell
noble lies to the weak-willed mob, to pretend that monotheism isn’t flawed, for the
greater good of social cohesion. In short, the Straussian solution is for the elite to stand
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with Nietzsche and Plato, and for everyone else to worship Yahweh, Jesus Christ, or
Allah; the elite are those philosophers who are fit to receive esoteric wisdom, while the
nonphilosophical majority are fed pablum.

The problem with this Straussian solution is that academic philosophers make for
unimpressive Nietzschean conquerors. If Drury’s interpretation of Straussian philosophy
is correct, the neoconservatives may have had the backbone to accept the mournfully
dark truths of secularism, but they lacked the wherewithal and the competence to carry
out their bold schemes. Even if Iraq becomes a functioning secular democracy, that is, a
covert oligarchy as opposed to a naked dictatorship, thanks to the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein, the neoconservatives’ vision for the post-911 world far exceeded their reach.
With Ivory Tower optimism, Wolfowitz, Rice, and the young academics sent in as
bureaucrats to run Iraq, tried to remake the Middle East by military force and by the
presumed self-evidence of American ideals. Had they succeeded, the Straussian form
of secular liberalism might have been vindicated. But the fiasco of Bush’s administration
covered no neoconservative in Nietzschean glory.

The Need for Great Secular Myths

I can think of no easy remedy for the secular liberal, but maybe the options aren’t as
stark as Hedges suggests. The danger of absolute power is well-known: the prospect of
enjoying that power attracts someone who is already corrupt or else the use of that
power corrupts an innocent person. So oligarchies have tended not even to be great
works of art. Pharaohs, Caesars, emperors, kings, tsars, Kaisers, dictators, and the
Führer are guilty not just of the worst acts ever committed, from a liberal perspective,
such as genocide, but often failed to live up to amoral aesthetic standards. The Nazis
dabbled in pseudoscience and scapegoated the Jews, which demonstrated that the
Nazis feared certain truths, and so Hitler was no Nietzschean hero. Perhaps there never
has been any Übermensch, no one who overcomes all internal and external obstacles
in an artistically glorious way. Perhaps no higher primate deserves the godlike position
of an oligarch. But there is at least this psychological, existential side of the Nietzschean
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ideal. And this side holds out some hope that even if liberal values are impossible today
for the honest secularist, other values will be created to replace them, values that are
awe-inspiring even to someone who believes there are no miracles. These other values
may even inspire oligarchs to behave as heroes rather than as spoiled children.

Inchoate myths that secularists can cherish can be glimpsed in science fiction. In Greg
Egan’s Diaspora, for example, when humans discover that the universe is really a
multiverse, and that travel is possible between the infinite universes, they discover also
that an alien species has defied those vertigo-inducing facts by creating a multiverse-
spanning sculpture of their biological form, with parts placed in different universes. And
in Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series, there’s an alien species that uses biological weapons
as a last resort to utterly destroy its enemies, but that’s so disgusted by the tainted
process and so loath to profit from it, that the leaders responsible for the slaughter
always voluntarily kill themselves once the sorrowful task is done.

This latter ideal of honour in the battlefield is far from the horrible reality of war that
Hedges describes as a journalist. Far from committing suicide, those responsible for
high tech American wars are wealthy civilians who read reports in their offices instead of
confronting what their decisions unleash or who send instructions to remote controllers
of robotic weapons systems, while sitting safe in an underground bunker. But honour is
more highly prized in certain eastern traditions. The growing popularity of mixed martial
arts in North America may look like the result of a regressive mob’s lust for violence, but
the sport’s growth could also indicate an emerging secular mythos, one that
acknowledges the grim fact that natural life is a power struggle, but that makes the best
of this fact by upholding the suitable ideal of honour for the combatants. Honour is
respect, fame, glory, integrity. The mixed martial artist who sucker-punches his
opponent long after the bell rings has no honour, whereas the one who stops hitting his
opponent even before the referee intervenes, because the opponent obviously can no
longer offer an intelligent defense, wins respect. Christian charity has no place in mixed
martial arts, but this doesn’t mean the strong fighters can only prey on the weaker ones.
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Secular values must be rooted in an acceptance of the tragedy of life’s evolution within
an indifferent cosmos. There are no God-given rights and no secularist with any integrity
can feel Bible-inspired compassion for all hapless persons. On the contrary, pity for the
weak or for the unfortunate brings shame to the latter. But the secularist can feel
honour-bound to respect everyone as fellow combatants in the battle to retain our sanity
despite the available knowledge of our existential predicament. From a naturalistic
viewpoint, oligarchs need offer no apology for exercising their power to their own
advantage, even if doing so makes life harder for the weaker majority. But an oligarch
should feel embarrassed by any failure of his to make a masterpiece also of the inner
world of his mind. Only when his inner success matches his outward one can an
oligarch be expected to act heroically rather than as a mere tyrant, parasite, predator, or
sociopath.

The Pharaohs of ancient Egypt employed thousands of slaves to build the huge
pyramids, providing work but also symbols in an elaborate myth that made life and
death meaningful to the Egyptians. Many slaves died in the effort to give concrete reality
to the Pharaoh’s vision, and from a monotheistic perspective the whole enterprise of
ancient Egypt was absurd. But if, instead, it’s monotheism and its value system that’s
absurd, which it is, today’s secular oligarchs can learn from the Pharaohs. Some
progressive critics of our oligarchs speculate that their master plan is to recreate a
feudal society but on a global scale, with a central banking system that controls the
debts of nations. Suppose this is so and the plutocrats succeed. What then? Once all
human power is centralized, what awe-inspiring mission will the elite pursue with their
godlike control? The Dubai playground for the wealthy isn’t particularly stirring. A global
government should be only a means, not an end, and would be so for an oligarch
whose mind is as impressive as his or her mansion. A secular hero needs visionary
myths and inspiring symbols, and these are products of artistic genius which is found in
a certain noble character, not in a mere hedonist or an insane tyrant. A powerful secular
artist may not acknowledge human rights, as such, or feel Christian love for all God’s
children. But with the ever-expanding reach of technology, this artist might lift up weaker
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persons in a way that can now only barely be imagined and that makes for an
aesthetically pleasing response to the horror of the inhumane cosmos.
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From Theism to Cosmicism: Toy Gods and the Horror of the

Supernatural
____________________________________________________

Most debate about God is a tempest in a teapot. For example, currently there are riots
in the Muslim world because some Christians insulted the prophet Muhammad in a
crude video. Likely, the violent protestors don’t represent the majority of Muslims, and
the majority is cowed into silence by the threat of retaliation from the militant minority
which goes unchecked by weak or complicit governments in that region. The ensuing
debate in the mainstream media has been about the conflict between freedom of
speech and religious fundamentalism, but this media discussion blithely ignores the fact
that an outright farce plays out whenever someone acts on the assumption that a
perfect person has anything to do with the world’s origin.

Indeed, there’s a secret history in major religions that’s driven by another conflict,
between religious outsiders and insiders. The outsiders take religious metaphors or
literalistic creeds seriously and so engage in all manner of nakedly childish behavior.
The spectacle of even a single Muslim rioting because someone denigrates something
the Muslim holds sacred is most ridiculous when viewed from the esoteric religious
perspective. A religious insider, you see, such as a mystic, would realize that what the
rioter thinks is sacred, namely the prophet, is effectively an idol. Ironically, the ban on
depicting Muhammad is meant to prevent ignorant people from worshipping the image.
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The ban’s natural side effect, though, is to turn the prophet himself into a sort of
forbidden fruit, giving the untouchable Muhammad a mystique that might as well be a
mark of holiness. In any case, rampaging through the streets because of a slight against
your favourite long-dead person is as ludicrous as an insane person’s tantrum thrown
over some injury done to his favourite chair in his mental institution.

Why, though, is there an exoteric religious discourse in the first place, that is, a
discourse which is necessarily the most popular and the least respectable compared to
a different, more self-consistent way of talking about god? Why is the truth about
monotheistic religions kept so secret by the religious insiders? Answers to these should
emerge from what follows.

Why God Can’t Exist

The old debate of whether God exists is everlasting because it rests on a confusion that
sends its participants on wild goose chases. By definition, you see, god doesn’t exist, so
to say that god exists is to make a category mistake. The word “exist” is synonymous
with such words as “be,” “real,” “factual,” and “actual.” You can learn how to use these
words by inter-defining them in terms of each other, as the dictionary does, but you
won’t understand any of their meanings without analogies and examples drawn from
your daily experience, and that in turn requires that you effectively naturalize anything
you think of as existing. For example, to exist is, in part, to take up space, to pass
through time, and to have causal power, and this is to imply that everything that exists is
part of the natural universe. But the idea of god is of the source of everything natural,
which means that god can’t be bound by space or time or have causal power; neither
can god have a mind if a mind requires a brain, nor need god follow the laws of logic if
logic too applies merely to everything that could exist, where anything we could know of
as potentially existing must be limited by our ways of understanding.

Adapting some terminology from the philosopher Immanuel Kant, things that exist can
be called phenomenal, which means that they necessarily don’t transcend the
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categories and mental faculties we use to understand things. By contrast--and by

definition--god is noumenal, which means that the rather paradoxical notion of the
monotheistic god is of something that can’t be comprehended by us. God couldn’t be
anything in nature, since he’s supposed to be the precondition of nature. Phenomena
appear to us only because they register with our cognitive equipment, whereas
something that falls outside our net of understanding, as it were, wouldn’t be
experienced by us in the first place. So if being, existence, reality, actuality, and
factuality are understood explicitly or implicitly as aspects of natural things, which is to
say things that are understood by a strong connection to our everyday sense
experience and modes of conception, god lacks any of those aspects. Thus, if we use
those concepts to distinguish something from nothing, god has more in common with
nothing than he does with something: both god and nothing don’t exist, and again this is
merely a definitional, conceptual matter. Once you define “god” a certain way, you
should follow through without self-contradictions.

This is why when the theist says that God “caused” the universe to exist, the natural
response is to ask what caused God. We ask that question because we assume that
whatever exists must exist in the natural sense, since there is no other meaningful
sense of that word, and all natural, relatively familiar things have effects and causes.
Likewise, when the theist says that God thinks, speaks, or acts, we naturally understand
those words by analogy with our common experience, and so we add absurd attributes
to God; for example, we assume God must have a body of some sort, even though he’s
supposed to be the source of all bodies, or that God must have a gender and either a
deep or a high voice, even though to say that is to naturalize the supernatural and thus
to speak in self-contradictions.

You might be wondering about the metaphysical status of abstract objects: if everything
that exists is natural, and numbers and other mathematical structures are natural, do
those abstract structures exist? It sounds funny to suppose that they do, but even if
numbers and so forth do exist and are abstract rather concrete in the sense that they’re
repeatable, an abstract object is still like a spatiotemporally-bound thing in nature in that
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either is limited by its specificity. The number 2 has its arithmetical properties, which
differ from those of other numbers, and those distinguishing properties set limits on that
number. Likewise, physical laws and dimensions set limits on everything in nature. But,
once again, god is supposed to be the unconditioned setter of all limits and conditions.
As soon as you try to specify what god is like, say by distinguishing his character from
that of an evil person, you take away with one hand what you give with the other; that is,
you misunderstand the point of talking about the monotheistic god, because although
you successfully apply your commonsense, comparing god to moral people in this case,
you thereby contradict the basic definition of “god,” since you set a limit on that which is
supposed to be unlimited--all-powerful, all-present, infinite, and so forth.

As the Jewish theologian Maimonides maintained, we have at best a negative

understanding of God: we can say only what god is not, not what god is. Or take the
ninth C. theologian John Scot Erigena’s statement, “We do not know what God is. God
Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not,
because He transcends being." This is to say, with Kant, that we have a mere
placeholder idea of god, an idea of that X which reason leads us to believe is the
ultimate source of everything we experience without being any such experienced thing.
Eastern mystics have long made this point, that to understand just the meaning of “god,”
you have to entertain the possibility, at least, that our cognitive powers are limited, that
there’s more in heaven and earth than fits inside even our best, most complete theory of
everything. Mystics often contend that god can be directly experienced, but they
appreciate that as soon as anyone tries to explain that experience or use logic to prove
that god exists or has such and such qualities, she inevitably resorts to commonsense
metaphors and so begins talking nonsense, holding god out to be both the cause of all
causes, the mind that creates all brains (even though every mind needs a brain), and so
on.

God is ineffable, because language has an evolutionary purpose of enabling us to cope

with nature, whereas god is, simply by definition, not natural. Note, though, that
although this is a semantic point about the meaning of “exist,” this doesn’t mean the
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point is about an arbitrary choice of linguistic labels, as the pejorative use of the phrase
“just semantics” would have it. Rather, the point is that our imagination, our categories,
our perceptual pathways, our modes of interacting with the world may all be too limited
to reconcile us with certain deep truths, such as the truth of what lies behind the natural
order.

Why God is the Most Awful Horror

In line with the mystic’s insistence on humility with respect to our cognitive powers, a
philosophical mysterian would compare god to consciousness, taking each to be
necessarily beyond our comprehension. Although we can answer some indirect
questions about either, we’re met with a stumbling block when we try to fit
consciousness or god into the naturalistic worldview, since consciousness is
quintessentially not objective and thus not quantifiable or measurable, while god is
supposed to be nature’s precondition. Once you see how this mysterian idea applies to
the question of theism, the idea being that what there “is” needn’t be and likely isn’t
limited by our capacity to understand things, you should also be led to appreciate that
the thought of god is the most horrible thought we can formulate.

After all, once we see that literalistic, exoteric, metaphorical theism leads only to
confusion, the proper thought of god is no longer even theistic in the usual, highly
objectionable way, since god isn’t usefully conceived of as a person who acts within
nature. Nothing specific can be said about god, because the fundamental idea behind
the word “god” is that everything we can understand, the natural universe, comes
mysteriously from something else. Thus, the myths, fables, and fairy tales of religions
become so many distractions from contemplating the possibility, implied by the
monotheistic religions, that not only must we lack satisfying answers to our ultimate
questions, but those questions are bound to be wrongheaded, because they’re
produced by minds that are unprepared to fathom the ultimate source. This further
indicates that our best theories and treasured values are at best limited, if not made
ridiculous by their insular scope. This is the horror that threatens our happiness, and
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religionists dutifully pretend that god is on our level, after all--just a better person than
any of us or the best thing in the universe. But no such thing could then be meaningfully
called the almighty precondition of the cosmos.

What, then, is the supernatural? Does the supernatural manifest in the miraculous event
or in the scary phenomenon, in a ghost or goblin that stands at the border between our
world and something beyond? A mere partial mystery that’s half-way caught in our net
of understanding, something we glimpse but can’t explain? No, anything that appears
before us, registering at all with our senses or our conceptual capacities, is natural. At
best, some natural phenomena are subjectively magical in Arthur C. Clark’s sense, in
that we might happen not to understand the mechanisms that make what we observe
work. By contrast, the negative concept of god is the concept of a permanent
objective mystery, of the possibility that if nature has an ultimate explanation,
this explanation will forever be beyond our reach, because nature comes from
something else--call it supernatural, preternatural, noumenal, or god (with a lowercase
“g” since “god” isn’t a proper name of a person, from the esoteric perspective).

The complement of this idea of the hugeness of god is the idea of our vanishing
smallness. If god is so far beyond us, we must be miniscule to god and this applies not
literally to our contrasting sizes, since god would have no measurable body, but to our
quality of life. The closest analogy is the relation between a human and a bacterium or
some other microscopic organism that has little if any conception of where it stands. Of
course, biologically speaking, organisms need to know only enough to perform their
evolutionary functions; an ant, for example, doesn’t need to understand the chemical
composition of the earth in which it lives, to know that the stuff can be molded just so to
form what we call a colony. An ant has no conception of much outside that colony,
including our planet, the galaxy, the multiverse, and so forth. Still, the ant lives on,
performing its limited tasks, which is all the ant can do. In short, the ant doesn’t know
what it’s missing, and so this insect is spared any embarrassment by the shallowness of
its life cycle.
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Our curse is that we can see beyond our limitations; we can conceive of the
possibility that our concepts are limited, that there’s more to know than we can
possibly understand and that nature likely originates from something entirely
alien. Thus removed from the state of Edenic ignorance, we can’t live in peace but must
constantly suffer from anxiety or flee to the false Edens of our fantasy worlds, of our
hallucinatory delusions that confuse us with false hope and cheap comfort. For
example, we assume God is our loving parent who prepares heaven for us when we
die, or that God writes life manuals for our benefit. Our delusions can be religious,
political, or otherwise cultural, but the point is that most people seem to prefer them to
the radical, mystical alternative, which is that the ultimate truth is a cosmic horror. Those
who even ponder this latter possibility tend to suffer the anxiety of displacement, of
being detached from everything that makes for a fulfilling life, because once you
suspect that we’re all incapable of understanding everything, you wonder about the
status of the civilizations our species has erected in its saga. Like a witness whose
character is impeached when she’s caught in just a single lie, and whose whole
testimony thus becomes suspect, our cognitive limits, which distinguish us as specific,
natural beings, may infect all our accomplishments and joys with existential absurdity
and tragedy. Instead of occupying herself with practical tasks, living as a healthy,
functional member of a community, like a busy ant helping to build its colony, the
mystic, cosmicist, or omega person can’t fully engage with a mainstream culture for fear
that this culture is, in the end, perfectly ridiculous.

Cosmic Horror and Science

Reason seems the messenger that brings this anxiety and detachment, and by “reason”
I mean objectivity, the ability to stand outside your ego or your culture, to dehumanize
yourself with a frame of mind that might just be dispassionate enough to mirror the
world’s alien neutrality towards us, thus enabling us to see things as they more nearly
are. But is this cosmic mysticism, which identifies god as that which mocks our every
pretension, which, when juxtaposed with us, haunts us with fear of the necessarily
narrow and thus absurd ambit of our lives--is this point of view really the more rational
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one? The psychiatrist speaks of anxiety, which seems to plague especially modern and
postmodern societies, as a type of disorder. Here, presumably, the psychiatrist seems
merely to follow the social preference for happiness over philosophy, for peace of mind
at the price of delusion. But perhaps the notion of cosmic horror is the greater delusion,
and the wisest course is to adopt cultural conventions as your touchstones. Is there any
reason to believe that “god” in the mystical, cosmicist sense applies to anything?
Perhaps there’s nothing beyond the natural and nature takes full care of itself.

At first glance, the success of science indicates that there’s no such god, that the
mysterian, cosmicist, and mystic posit a god-of-the-gaps, foolishly betting against the
power of science to develop a complete and self-contained theory of everything.
According to the Yahoo News article, “Will Science Someday Rule Out the Possibility of
God?”, for example, the cosmologist Sean Carroll points out that as scientists have
explained more and more of nature, there’s less reason to call upon God to explain
anything. This, however, assumes only the confused, exoteric notion of God. Given the
rational, scientific model of explanations, a valid explanation that adds to our
understanding must explain something natural by reference to something else in nature;
indeed, the methods of rational explanation (logical inference, gathering of data, and so
on) effectively naturalize the explanans, that X which explains the explanandum Y.
Since by definition god isn’t natural, you can’t rationally explain anything by referring to
god; that is, you can’t increase your understanding of nature by saying that god causes
this or that, since the notion of god is of something that’s supposed to transcend our
rational comprehension. To the extent that scientists have overturned traditional theistic
theories of diseases, witches, and the origin of life, the latter theories must have been
associated only with the exoteric anthropomorphisms that obscure the implications of
self-consistent theism, to enable religious people to feel a modicum of existential
security.

The only way the advance of science could count against esoteric cosmicism is if
there’s reason to think that scientists will one day answer all valid questions, leaving no
excuse for even a negative or indirect appeal to anything supernatural. As the above
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article suggests, a theory of quantum gravity might be both complete and self-
contained, presupposing nothing. But is this how science or indeed any form of rational
explanation works? Certainly, the Lawrence Krauss affair suggests otherwise. Krauss,
the theoretical physicist, touted his book, A Universe from Nothing, as offering an
explanation of how something can come from nothing without God. David Alpert pointed
out in his NY Times review that Krauss’ theory does no such thing, since his theory
presupposes certain fundamental physical laws as well as the reality of some
elementary stuff, such as relativistic quantum fields. The fact that that stuff is nothing in
the sense that such fields don’t occupy space doesn’t address the underlying,
philosophical question of how something specific, individuated, and thus natural and
rationally understood could derive, or be understood as deriving, from something else.

Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves how reason basically works. When you think
logically, you infer some statements from others, and inference is a sort of affirmation
warranted by certain rules, such as the laws of some logical system or the values of
scientific inquiry. Take away the rules and you lose the reason to affirm a statement.
Thus, rational explanation would seem to presuppose those rules. Suppose, though, the
rules presupposed by a scientific theory of everything were somehow self-evident laws
of nature. This would mean only that such laws are fundamental to the human way of
thinking, and this would lead to a dilemma: either there’s only one theory of everything,
which theory miraculously happens to be within the reach of primates evolved on our
planet, or else there are multiple such theories, which means each would be somehow
incomplete, reflecting in part the interests of a particular culture or species.

Now, one reason to think that a complete theory of everything is within our reach is that
natural forces and materials are mindless, which implies that the natural elements can
put up no intelligent resistance to the scientific enterprise. If nature is neutral towards us
and we’re sufficiently industrious, the universe can’t literally hide its secrets from us. In
this respect, then, our arrival at a finished theory of everything might be expected rather
than miraculous. However, there’s also a scientific reason to believe the opposite, which
has to do with our decentralization in the scientific picture. From Ptolemy to Copernicus,
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Galileo and Einstein, our planet is understood as being less and less central until finally
the notion of absolute centrality loses its meaning in relativity theory. Of course, the
notion of our centrality in the cosmos has historically had a qualitative rather than just a
quantitative sense, the idea being that humans are the most important things in the
universe, that our existence fulfills the purpose of all Creation. Dispensing with that
anthropocentrism naturally humiliates us, in that we become painfully aware of our
fallibility and of the limitations that distinguish us even as objects occupying particular
times and places.

This shift in perspective should bewilder rather than merely humble naturalists, since
the result is an all-consuming pragmatic attitude that justifies only our means, not our
goals and thus produces a sense of vertigo typically experienced as postmodern
cynicism and apathy. Pragmatism replaces modern idealism about our greatness even
in the absence of any god to vouch for our pedigree. The upshot of science’s
decentering of us is that we can no longer trust in our magnificence in even the secular
humanistic manner--at least, not without feeling that we’re perpetrating a fraud. Of
course scientists should pragmatically assume that they can explain everything, since
we can’t know for sure in advance what we might be unable to understand. But this
pragmatism, this methodological naturalism is far from a full-throated defense of the
promise that a complete and self-contained theory of everything wouldn’t be a
miraculous, which is to say a stupendously improbable achievement for us. If it’s only
useful for the business of technoscience to assume that humans can, in principle,
understand everything, there’s no metaphysical or epistemological guarantee that this
business will pay off in the end; after all, most businesses fail. (Indeed, there’s now talk
within physics that string theory, which has dominated physics for several decades, is a
dead end. See Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics.)

In light of the loss of anthropocentrism, which is to say Reason’s killing of our naïve self-
confidence along with the anthropomorphized God, there’s at least as much reason to
be pessimistic as there is to be optimistic about the ultimate fruits of science. Again, if
we’re merely an accidental byproduct of natural processes, why on earth expect that our
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cognitive faculties, which themselves evolved to carry out local and quite humdrum
tasks, can encompass absolutely everything? Instead, we might expect that just as
advanced civilizations mock the conceits of isolated cultures, such as those of
geologically-confined peoples, our best modern efforts might in the end be wildly
deficient and indeed laughable.

Granted, nature would lack any diabolical genius to prevent us from understanding as
much as we can--although super-intelligent alien species might serve that role, as
science fiction authors speculate. But nature’s mindlessness makes its elements alien
to our way of thinking, since we evolved to function in a social context, which is why we
naturally anthropomorphize whatever we try to understand. Thus, what looks like a
reason to be confident in our intellectual capacity may instead be a reason to believe
the opposite, that precisely because there’s no personal God to account for why
the universe is as it is, social creatures like us are particularly ill-equipped to
come to terms with the world in which we find ourselves. Granted also, some
people are less social than others, and we all have the capacity for objectivity, which
strips away our personal and cultural biases. But even the most objective human, who
can speak the languages of exotic mathematics, must translate the findings of those
alien perspectives into subjective, traditionally-human terms to assimilate physics to the
broader worldview that includes intuitions and phenomenological knowledge of how
things appear from a lay perspective. If we’re contemplating scientific progress that
involves a replacement of all our subjective viewpoints with the depersonalized,
objective one, we’re effectively conceding that the perfect theory of everything is in
range only of transhumans.

Abstract cosmological theories, drawing on rarified math, are already disconnected from
folk wisdom, and that gap provides us with a rough analogy of the break between the
natural and the supernatural, foreshadowing the unattainability of some knowledge by
us. Cutting-edge physics lies at the furthest reaches of human cognitive powers, but
again, even bizarre mathematical structures are natural in so far as they can be
positively specified and categorized by the human mind. Anything that couldn’t be would
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be supernatural and would be nothing to us--not necessarily nothing at all, mind you,
but no thing to creatures like us. Whether or not there’s somehow a god, the negative
concept of a transcendent source of everything around us is the mysterian, cosmicist,
mystical concept of such a monstrous, strangely active nothing.

Conclusion

You might think the notion of such a nothing is neither here nor there, since that notion
is more deistic than theistic, meaning that such an alien god would have no practical,
knowable effect on nature. This leaves out, however, an indirect, psychological effect,
which is that creatures cursed with excessive reasoning powers can reason their way to
the end of their reason, leading to self-doubt and to postmodern malaise. Moreover, to
compensate for these deleterious effects of the mere thought of the-god-that’s-nothing-
to-us, mainstream religions design a panoply of friendly anthropomorphic masks that
can be placed across that god’s alien face, and the childishness of these religions has
plenty of social consequences.

This answers the questions I ask in the introduction. Why is there an exoteric religious
tradition and why is the esoteric one kept hidden? The reason is that the religious
thesis, that the supernatural is somehow prior to the natural, is--far from being
more politically correct than, say, atheism--subversive, endangering both society
and an individual’s peace of mind. Only the most courageous or foolhardy theist is
willing to confront the stark implications of the concept of a deity, while the majority
prefers the comfort of toy conceptions of the supernatural.

What’s needed, then, is a cosmicist religion that makes the best of the potential for
anyone to wake up and arrive at the Baneful Thought that everything familiar to us may
be nothing to something wholly other. The more you objectively ponder our limitations,
the more you find yourself alienated from the politically correct conventions that govern
popular cultures, since in that case you come to regard most of our preoccupations
(happiness, sex, stealth oligarchy, anthropomorphic theism, cryptoreligious Scientism)
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as absurd and tragic. Thus, the lost, omega individual could use an uplifting way of
digesting and sublimating the Baneful Thought. Buddhism and other mystical traditions
may well suffice, but I don’t know of any major religion that captures the cosmicist
insight that cosmic horror seems a prerequisite for existential authenticity, which is to
say, for an ethically and aesthetically justified mindset.

Finally: a note about pantheism. How does the mysterian, cosmicist god relate to what
I’ve called the undead god, which is nature’s mindless power of astonishing creativity?
“The undead god” is just a poetic name for how nature appears from a position of
relative clear-headedness. This undead god is fully explainable by science, although
autonomous levels of explanation may be needed to address emergent levels of
complexity. By contrast, the supernatural god I’ve considered above isn’t at all rationally
explainable. There may well “be” nothing supernatural, but general objectivity, science,
and religion tend to drive us to this point of ultimate humility and postmodern angst,
where we regard the universe as fundamentally absurd, which is to say unintelligible to
us and so as silly as a child’s babbling. The undead god, which is the monstrous body
of the cosmos, represents the extent of what’s intelligible to us. If there’s no complete,
self-contained explanation of nature, however, and reason and curiosity compel us
always to ask deeper questions, we may worry that the sum total of what we can know
is like an iceberg’s tip that peaks above the bulk concealed by the sea of our
incomprehension. At any rate, the esoteric, mystical traditions of theistic religions are
mysterian in this respect, since they posit an utterly transcendent entity as the source of
everything that’s more familiar.
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Lovecraftian Horror and Pragmatism

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I’ve referred to Lovecraftian horror a number of times in my rants and this calls for some
explanation. To see the relevance of Lovecraft to the philosophical issues I’ve been
ranting about, you need to be aware that there are roughly two kinds of secularists, the
Nietzscheans and the non-Nietzscheans. The Nietzscheans, including American horror
author H. P. Lovecraft, British writer John Gray, and existentialist philosophers, warn
that what Nietzsche called the death of God, which is to say the ascent of modern
science and of secular powers, was a revolution that demands a reassessment of our
values. Nietzscheans stress the illegitimacy of those traditions and institutions that
presuppose theism. By Contrast, the non-Nietzscheans, including most New Atheists
like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Jerry Coyne, believe that the rise of secularism
doesn’t have such radical consequences. For example, these secularists often assume
that the liberal value of a person’s sacredness is sustainable on an atheistic basis, even
though that value derives from theistic myths. The non-Nietzschean secularist usually
responds to the Nietzschean by saying that theists acquire their values in turn from the
use of their own reason as they cherry-pick from scriptures, and from our prehistoric
ancestors’ evolved social instinct.
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Lovecraft's Cosmicism

Unlike the more optimistic secularists, Lovecraft worried about the philosophical
implications of modern scientific findings. He dramatized his worries in weird short
stories featuring super-powerful gods or aliens, whose motives are as unfathomable to
us as are ours to ants. These extraterrestrials symbolized for Lovecraft the cosmic
forces of nature which are just as alien to us, given that they’re not creations of a
familiar, humane parent figure like God. The point is that modern science discovered
not just the universe’s inhuman scope, but its impersonality and thus its inhumanity.
Lovecraft used the existential abyss between his scientific characters and the inhuman
universe to produce in his reader a sense of the truly strange. By “existential abyss” I
mean our alienation from the rest of nature, given science’s disenchantment of it and
our own need to enchant what we perceive by projecting anthropocentric categories
wherever we go. Science is the eating of the apple and the source of our expulsion from
Eden, and once we’re on the other side of the barrier, lost now in postmodern self-
consciousness and skepticism, we’re no longer at home anywhere. To paraphrase what
Milton says about Satan in Paradise Lost, hell travels always with us, since it’s a state of
mind (see Book IV, line 20).

Lovecraft called his philosophical outlook “cosmicism,” using the inhuman aspects of the
natural order to drive home the insignificance of our own ideals and pet projects. Our
ambitions are pathetic vanities next to those of intelligent creatures who may well have
prospered for billions of years and even now direct the course of galactic development.
Even were there no such elder, squid-faced gods, the natural forces themselves have
proved to be inhuman and thus alien to us, operating as they do on vast time scales,
from subatomic particles to galaxies and perhaps even across multiple universes.
The upshot, for Lovecraft, is that the world discovered by modern scientists is
awesome, above all, in its capacity to horrify us. We’re happiest when we delude
ourselves that we’re at the center of a manageably-large universe and that underlying
everything is a supreme person who not only comforts us but is actually related to us as
our ultimate parent. The universe becomes a home for our extended family, and so
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ultimately we have nothing to fear. Nothing is strange in that universe, since God has
sovereign control over everything--he knows even how many hairs there are on each of
our heads--and we’re made to be similar to God. When we intellectually mature and can
no longer view the universe with such innocence, everything becomes alien and
strange, even ourselves as we learn of the effects of the now-impersonal natural forces
on everything above and beneath the sun. We’re afraid of what’s different from
ourselves, of the strange and the alien. We assumed that natural forces are controlled
by people, because we control many processes in our little corner of the cosmos. But if
people are just accidental byproducts rather than the architects of Creation, we’re adrift
on a sea with no safe harbour.

Pragmatism as a Secular Whitewash

There are many consequences of this cosmicism, but one that should be more
appreciated is that the New Atheist’s rosy secular outlook, according to which we should
simply get on with our lives, creating our own meanings, following society’s laws, raising
our families and working hard at our jobs, looks for all the world like a whitewash. Partly,
this whitewash is due to the prevalence of scientists in the New Atheist movement, who
don’t have much sympathy for philosophy, and partly it’s a tactic in the culture war
against the religious fundamentalist in the US, for example, who accuses biologists of
presupposing godlessness, to disastrous social effect. Instead of teaching merely the
scientific facts of evolution, says the fundamentalist, biologists inevitably instill atheism
in their students, since atheism follows from the rigorous use of reason at the expense
of faith and atheism leads, in effect, to Lovecraft’s cosmicism or to Nietzsche’s
revaluation of all values. In response, the New Atheist insists that neither the modern
scientific worldview, nor philosophical naturalism, nor atheism has any such dire
implication.

As the Atheist Bus message says in Britain and Canada, “There’s probably no God.
Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” This pragmatic message is most telling. Just as
Pascal says in his infamous Wager that even if you don’t yet believe there’s a god, you
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should go through the motions until you fall into the habit of being a religious person, so
too the non-Nietzschean secularist says that even if you don’t see meaning or value in
anything after God’s death at our hands, you should go through the motions until, no
doubt, the secular myths from political, corporate, and Hollywood propaganda enthrall
you. The hyper-rational secularist encourages the use of reason to wipe out theistic
beliefs, but stops short of recommending skepticism about liberal secular values. No,
that extended skepticism must be just postmodern gibberish. Best to trust the liberal
technocrats, the cheerful scientists, and the shining images on the silver and little
screens. After all, look at how rich and powerful those secularists are. No one could be
so successful without possessing great wisdom, and so when they say that even though
life is accidental in an immensely cold, grim, and impersonal universe, secularists
should just get on with their lives, they might as well be selling coffee, nicotine, or some
other capitalistic stimulant.

To be sure, non-Nietzschean secularists have their philosophical defenses of liberal

values and of morality, democracy, and capitalism, that is, of the secular way of life. In
fact, analytic philosophers, political scientists, and economists are for the most part
devoted to producing just those defenses. And their arguments may be more or less
compelling. But they fail to persuade the less intellectual person in the street who’s
more liable to follow his or her feelings. So too must those pretty speeches and
technical articles flying out the doors of secular institutions, of governments, colleges,
and think tanks, fail to persuade the secular academics and professionals when now
and again they don’t get their way and their animal instincts get the better of them.
When their logic and science avail them not and they’re forced to go with their gut,
they’ll tend to worry like the Nietzscheans. Unlike Pascal’s calculative wager, the point
of cosmicism is that the secular worldview has an overall negative emotional
impact. This worldview deflates our self-centered preconceptions, while the rigorous
application of scientific objectivity trains us to be hyper-skeptical, to distrust all authority
figures and traditions, and thus deprives us of any substitute myths. We have idols
aplenty, but none of them is sustainable in the chaotic postmodern climate.
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In other words, while the philosophical and soft scientific defenses of liberal secular
values may be rationally compelling--and I’m conceding that for the moment only for the
sake of argument--those defenses lack the power of Nietzschean cosmicism because
the natural cosmos is above all a scary place. Richard Dawkins sometimes wishes that
religious authorities hadn’t have dictated the content of European art in previous
centuries, since secular poets, for example, armed with scientific data, would have been
inspired by nature’s grandeur to produce their own artworks of epic beauty. But this is
naïve philistinism. Whatever beauty there is in nature is utterly tragic; in fact, the beauty
dies with the inevitable extinction of the beholder. Unless the secularist is a closet
Platonist and thus a cryptotheist, the secularist should know that value judgments are
subjective and that our talk of a flower’s beauty is a byproduct of our parochial mating
ritual in which we size up a member of the other sex, searching for telltale signs of
health, like facial symmetry and certain body proportions.

Fear too is an evolutionary mechanism, which causes us to fight or to flee when faced
with an unknown. But at least there’s no misapplication when we fear the inhuman
cosmos, as there is when we deem fractals and other natural forms beautiful. The
Lovecraftian, existential emotion of angst is true to the revolutionary spirit of modern
science, lacking the anthropocentrism of the cheap metaphor in which the harmony of
cosmic processes--assuming there is such a thing--is compared to the harmony of the
human form. The rosy secularist who calls nature "majestic" and "elegant" merely vents
his or her prejudice when faced with what’s perfectly nonhuman. In this respect, modern
secularism is neo-pagan, a high brow version of prehistoric animism, according to which
nature is sacred because nature is flush with humanity, or with spirits that are similar to
ours, and humans are sacred because, well, we children are narcissistic. The angst-
ridden secularist, however, grapples with the scientific lesson that anthropocentrism is
childish folly and so--instead of cheerfully seeing our reflection in the cosmic pool--
resorts to the only suitable emotions we have left: fear, horror, awe, a recognition of the
Other as such and thus of the limit of our standards and the necessary short-
sightedness of our goals.
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Whatever intellectual merits pragmatic secular optimism may have--and again, I grant
them here only for the sake of this particular rant--this optimism can’t compete with the
fact that fear is the most suitable emotional response to nature. That was
Lovecraft’s point, which is why his protagonists were mainly men of learning who are
driven insane when they’re forced to feel the strangeness of a world without a humane
God. For non-Nietzschean secularism to work, we’d need a means of neutering or
short-circuiting our natural terror in response to our tragic existential situation. Perhaps
this is the ultimate purpose of political and Hollywood fear-mongering, to distract us with
fictional or propped-up monsters (communism, al Qaeda, middle eastern dictators), to
avoid western social collapse from the death of God.
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Inkling of an Unembarassing Postmodern Religion

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In a few rants here I’ve hinted at the Nietzschean view that one of the major problems
with secular society, after the death of God, is the lack of an obvious replacement that
we can feel in our bones to be sacred. When scientists discovered the universe’s true
inhuman scale and the full animalistic nature of our bodies and of our evolutionary
history, the result was a disenchantment of the world that threatens to burst the
delusions that sustain our sanity. Postmodern cynics contend that no such nontheistic
religion is needed, that we can live with infinite layers of irony, turning our culture into a
giant Stephen Colbert skit in which every public statement is at best a white lie and we
applaud each other’s savvy pragmatism, our disdain for philosophical questioning, and
our nihilistic poses.

These cynics may fool themselves but they don’t fool me. Hold a gun to the head of a
postmodern poseur’s family member and see whether that erstwhile cynic retains her
quasi-Buddhist detachment and truly holds nothing on Earth sacred. Naturally, as the
animal she is, the postmodernist would sacrifice herself for her loved ones. Her religion
is thus biochemically determined. She’s used as a puppet not by a transcendent Creator
of all, but by mindlessly replicating genes which cause each of us to care a lot about
those who most share our genetic material. The question to ask the postmodernist is
whether some feelings can be judged superior to others according to ideals that aren’t
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lost with the premodern, theistic worldviews. Nietzsche believed that although traditional
morality is rendered dubious by the death of theism, aesthetic standards are still
compelling. The problem with the emotional defense of our immediate family members,
then, or of our instinctive replacement of traditional deities with naturally selected idols,
is that aesthetically speaking, such a primitive religious impulse has surely by now, after
millions of generations, become a god-awful cliché.

Can we postmodern nontheists do better? Given that religions are inevitable in human
societies, because we’re emotionally driven to identify something as sacred, as a
radiant good that uplifts us despite our profane lives filled with disappointment, angst, or
delusion, can we create a more beautiful religion that’s viable even after modern secular
humanism has given way to postmodern hyper-skepticism? Had I such a religion fully
worked out, perhaps I’d be on television hawking T-shirts adorned with the creed’s
associated slogans. Needless to say, I know of no such religion. However, I’d like to
speak of some themes that do inspire me and that sketch, at least, the sort of religion I’d
like to see. Some of these themes are found in the closing speech of Olaf Stapledon’s
1930 science fictional novel Last and First Men. This novel is found in its entirety online,
hosted in Australia, so I’d like to quote the whole speech after I summarize the context,
and then I propose to analyze the speech. However, if you haven’t read the novel and
don’t want its ending spoiled, you should skip the next section and perhaps even put
aside this philosophical rant of mine for another day. Fair warning then...

Stapledon’s Speech

Stapledon’s novel is about our entire future history, stretching across two billion years
until our extinction. After many cognitive and physiological evolutions, plus near
extinctions, humankind eventually faces its inevitable and imminent death at the hands
of solar radiation. Stapledon perhaps naively imagines that that last generation of
humans will have achieved a psychologically mature and peaceful culture in which
altruism is the norm and selfishness is anathema and even physically repulsive.
Although enervated by the deadly solar winds that rapidly make our descendants’ final
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home planet uninhabitable, those last humans struggle to complete their final project:
creating interstellar seeds to carry a record of human achievement so that at least the
memory of our species might not vanish.

The narrator speaks of the “Degeneration of the higher neural centers,” due to the sun’s
disintegration, which “has also brought about in us a far more serious and deep-seated
trouble, namely a general spiritual degradation which would formerly have seemed
impossible, so confident were we of our integrity...We look back now at our former
selves, with wonder, but also with incomprehension and misgiving. We try to recall the
glory that seemed to be revealed to each of us in the racial mind, but we remember
almost nothing of it. We cannot rise even to that more homely beatitude which was once
within the reach of the unaided individual, that serenity which, it seemed, should be the
spirit's answer to every tragic event. It is gone from us. It is not only impossible but
inconceivable. We now see our private distresses and the public calamity as merely
hideous. That after so long a struggle into maturity man should be roasted alive like a
trapped mouse, for the entertainment of a lunatic! How can any beauty lie in that?”

A group called the Brotherhood of the Condemned, to which the narrator belongs, now
and again meets “in little groups or great companies to hearten ourselves with one
another's presence. Sometimes on these occasions we can but sit in silence, groping
for consolation and for strength. Sometimes the spoken word flickers hither and thither
amongst us, shedding a brief light but little warmth to the soul that lies freezing in a
torrid world.

“But there is among us one, moving from place to place and company to company,
whose voice all long to hear. He is young, the last born of the Last Men; for he was the
latest to be conceived before we learned man's doom, and put an end to all conceiving.
Being the latest, he is also the noblest. Not him alone, but all his generation, we salute,
and look to for strength; but he, the youngest, is different from the rest. In him the spirit,
which is but the flesh awakened into spirituality, has power to withstand the tempest of
solar energy longer than the rest of us. It is as though the sun itself were eclipsed by
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this spirit's brightness. It is as though in him at last, and for a day only, man's promise
were fulfilled. For though, like others, he suffers in the flesh, he is above his suffering.
And though more than the rest of us he feels the suffering of others, he is above his
pity. In his comforting there is a strange sweet raillery which can persuade the sufferer
to smile at his own pain. When this youngest brother of ours contemplates with us our
dying world and the frustration of all man's striving, he is not, like us, dismayed, but
quiet. In the presence of such quietness despair wakens into peace. By his reasonable
speech, almost by the mere sound of his voice, our eyes are opened, and our hearts
mysteriously filled with exultation. Yet often his words are grave.”

And then the narrator ends the novel with the words of this last born of the Last Men:
“Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a
star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For
though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but
actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be
nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal
form of things.

“Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now
ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he
should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He
is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable
of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling's knowledge. His
admiration is a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He
delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes
over him, through him, and is not heard.

“Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very
beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.
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“But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony?
And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence
man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself
once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he
can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect
music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.

“But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that
makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man
himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to
have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and
peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair
conclusion to this brief music that is man.”

Life’s Absurdities and Tragedies

The themes I want to discuss are the recognition of our grim existential situation,
mystical pantheism, the aesthetic vision of life, and gallows humour. To begin, then, the
speech-giver, who I’ll identify with Stapledon for simplicity’s sake, clearly appreciates
the apparent absurdity of human life, including the gulf between our vain pretensions to
greatness and our actual standing in the cosmos as “fledglings” (young birds), and the
objective worthlessness and futility of all our endeavours. A noble religion must begin
with this existential premise. The further a religion strays from it and compromises with
some variety of happy-talk, the less the religion uplifts and the more it provides a
framework merely for baby-sitting the clueless multitudes. In Stapledon’s novel, the
absurdity takes the form of the tragic demise of our species. Even today, though, due to
our many advances in scientific knowledge, the gulf between the facts and our fledgling
preferences seems so wide as to be almost a case of intentional overkill. Now we know
not just that the universe is so large that we can never cross it, expanding our home and
thus feeling less alienated, but that our universe may be merely one of an infinite
number of universes in a multiverse.
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In Volume One of Myth of the Machine, Lewis Mumford addresses this question of
alienation due to the dwarfing of us and our ideals, given nature’s unimaginable scale.
He points out that on some level there would be no universe without the perceiver’s
consciousness, so that the direction of normative diminishment should point in the other
direction. In line with the view of philosopher Immanuel Kant, the way the universe
appears to us depends on the cognitive equipment we bring to bear, on our forms of
perception. According to quantum theory, this importance of the perceiver is true even
at the most fundamental level of nature. Indeed, says Mumford, the mathematical
notions of size and scale, the very application of numbers, are human-centered, so any
alienation we might feel when we employ our own forms of measurement or even our
notion of measurement itself is wrongheaded. It’s the universe that’s insignificant
compared to conscious beings who bring that universe to fruition by perceiving and
understanding it.

Yet, contrary to this Kantian response to Stapledon, our alienation needn’t be due just to
the immense difference in size; the size-gap only brings to mind the more fundamental
abyss between our familiarity with our home and the Otherness of all that lies beyond
our home’s borders. When galaxy is piled on top of galaxy and then universe on top of
universe, we’re struck not just by how literally puny we are, but by how much inhumanity
there is compared to the human. Even were mathematical concepts of measurement
anthropocentric, in which case nature’s immensity would honour rather than alienate us,
since there would be no size as such without our creation of that form of measurement,
the fact is that were there no human beings or concept of size, nature would still be
doing much that’s perfectly nonhuman. A cosmic party would still be in progress to
which we were never invited. In Kantian terms, the world of phenomena, or
appearances that depend on our modes of understanding, would vanish, but the
noumena or things in themselves as they are regardless of whether they’re perceived or
explained by anyone, would still be as they inconceivably are, and their Otherness is the
ultimate source of our alienation.
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Thus, even accepting the Kantian view, Stapledon’s point that a human’s “admiration is
a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature” would still apply. As
Nietzsche put it in “On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense,” “When someone hides
something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as
well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters
stand regarding seeking and finding ‘truth’ within the realm of reason.” This is, he says,
“a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth.” We’re alienated by the fact that we can never
understand the inhuman heart of nature without dehumanizing ourselves.

Mystical Pantheism

Next, Stapledon alludes to the philosopher Spinoza’s pantheism when he says

repeatedly that we’re “eternal beauties in the eternal form of things.” Spinoza shares the
mystic’s intuition that despite the apparent independence of things or “substances,”
everything is interconnected, or to use Spinoza’s metaphor, everything is supported by
a single underlying substance called God or matter, the two being mere ways of looking
at the same thing. In Hinduism, the names for this apparent duality of mind and matter
are Atman and Brahman. The pantheist’s point is that God can’t extend beyond matter
if, as the mystic’s vision of unity suggests, everything is one, in which case the whole
material universe and everything in it is divine. Divinity here is tantamount to impersonal
creativity, which is to say that nature may be considered divine in so far as it creates
through an evolutionary process. Einstein, Hawking, and other great scientists share
Spinoza’s reverence for nature, so this pantheism isn’t foreign to scientific naturalism.

But the point I want to emphasize is that mystical pantheism mitigates alienation, by
affirming that all things in nature are metaphysically united and thus precluding at that
level a gap between self and world. In Spinoza’s terms, there’s a divine viewpoint from
which the causal and logical connections between everything in nature are registered
and the order in the universe’s development is made apparent. Every cause and effect
and every level of nature from the subatomic to the intergalactic, every speck of dust or
hair on our head has its place in that natural order, in that monstrous body of God which
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is the pantheistic universe, which unifies everything according to natural laws, whether
these laws be probabilistic or necessary. This pattern in which everything that exists has
its place as part of some natural process which connects it ultimately to everything else,
is what Stapledon calls the eternal form of things. From God’s perspective, which is just
that of completed natural science, time stops in the sense that the godlike scientist can
predict anything in the future by looking at some other part of the pattern; nature is
comparable to a spider’s web in which everything exists as an interconnected node, and
when the web is understood in its entirety, when all the interconnections are recognized,
temporal connections become just more nodes in the web.

All parts of this pattern, then, have a kind of immortality, because although events come
and go from one moment to the next, time too has its limited position in the whole
natural course. The universe unfolds according to natural laws which determine the
causal processes and the emergence of complex properties, and even though many
things lie in the past, from our limited perspective in the present moment, those past
stages of nature’s unfolding aren’t lost within the godlike vision of the omniscient
scientist. On the contrary, their role is guaranteed in the ultimate scientific theory, their
position in the pattern subject to reaffirmation. So even were all life to die out and the
stars to fade as the universe ends its creative cycle, the oneness of everything that
happened in the universe would remain, even if only as a potential for someone to
understand.

Note that this pantheism is meant to be metaphysical, not epistemic. In practice, of

course, actual scientists will never be able to measure everything in the universe, since
many events will lie outside their light cone or in impenetrable black holes or
singularities. Still, in so far as those events are natural and thus understandable in
terms of natural laws, they’re part of the whole natural fabric. When we imagine an
omniscient scientist recording every node of the natural web of events in the scientist’s
divine book in which nature is perfectly modeled, we’re engaging merely in a thought
experiment. The experiment’s purpose is to comfort us with the idea that even were
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such a perfect scientist never to exist, everything in nature would nonetheless be

metaphysically and thus atemporally united by the bonds of causality and logic.

Aesthetic Ideals

Why, though, does Stapledon speak of natural “beauty” and of the “music of the
spheres”? Well, this is the third theme I want to pull from Stapledon’s speech. All values
we might bring to bear on our judgment of the unified web of nature are more or less
parochial, since they all have humble origins in the natural selection of organisms that
have the limited purpose of surviving and propagating the species by sexually
reproducing. Moral standards are relevant to social beings with relatively high degrees
of freedom, and thus the notion of nature’s goodness is painfully anthropocentric,
Plato’s teleology notwithstanding. Aesthetic standards too evolved as means of
estimating the health and genetic fitness of potential sex partners.

Still, the aesthetic vision of cosmic development is less anthropocentric than a moral
one, for example, because mystical pantheism is consistent with talk of nature’s beauty.
After all, the oneness of nature turns the universe into a single diffuse entity, and the
causal and logical links that hold everything together are potentials for scientific
understanding. Again, even if no scientist will ever actually understand all of these links
or possess data on every instantiation of natural categories, the metaphysical/religious
model of mystical pantheism lays out the underlying unity of nature by means of a
thought experiment in which the unity provides the potential for a godlike view. This
metaphysical potential isn’t obviated by the natural impossibility of this omniscience.
And so Spinoza’s mystical pantheism entails both a single cosmic entity and the
supposition of a godlike scientist who gazes on the whole, inspecting all of its parts and
grasping their interrelations. Clearly, this is comparable to the aesthetic situation in
which a person admires an art object. All that must be added to the mystical pantheist’s
thought experiment is the assumption that the scientist has an aesthetic sense.
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The early modern notion of the music of the spheres had a theistic or at least deistic,
teleological connotation. After all, strictly speaking, the analogy between cosmic
development and the stages of a musical piece implies a composer. In this way,
Stapledon’s aesthetic theme would contradict his mystical pantheist one, since the
composer would have to stand apart from the orchestra and the music, that is, from the
cosmos. The two themes can be reconciled, however, by following up on the above
construal of pantheism, according to which the oneness of nature could be fully mapped
by a hypothetically omniscient scientist. Just as the design of naturally selected
organisms isn’t intended but can be appreciated by biologists, after the fact, so too
aesthetic properties may emerge from the natural order which could be imperfectly
appreciated by intelligent beings that occupy limited positions within that order. That is,
the natural order might be beautiful or perhaps hideous to behold in its mystical unity.

Gallows Humour

Lastly, Stapledon refers to the great man’s “strange sweet raillery which can persuade
the sufferer to smile at his own pain.” This I take to be a kind of gallows humour, which
in this case is light, good-natured ridicule that builds camaraderie. What could make
raillery a kind of gallows comedy is a tragic context, which in Stapledon’s novel is the
imminent doom of humankind. More broadly, the tragedy is the one given by the first
theme, which is the apparent existential absurdity of human life.

The gallows humour I have in mind can be instructively compared with the comedy of
Jon Stewart or Bill Maher. The subtext of their comedy programs seems to be the liberal
audience member’s desperate cry for official recognition of the sociopolitical absurdities
that attend the apparent decline of western powers, in the face of the mainstream
media’s obliviousness. This was especially so when George W. Bush took his country to
war against Iraq, cheered on by the mainstream American media, while most of the rest
of the world took to the streets to oppose the war. American liberals especially were
desperate for some confirmation that they weren’t crazy, that Bush’s regime was as
farcical as it appeared. Jon Stewart provided that confirmation night after night as he
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fulfilled the fantasy of someone--anyone--with a megaphone loud enough to be heard

by millions, condemning political absurdities as such and duly ridiculing the perfectly
ridiculous.

But although American political comedians joke about what’s actually a woeful and
perilous state of affairs, their humour isn’t exactly of the gallows variety. This is apparent
from the audience reaction to their jokes. Stapledon describes the response to gallows
humour, which is that the listener smiles at his pain, perhaps also nodding in grave
silence, appreciating the joke’s wittiness but also the horror and sorrow that motivate
the need for that comedy. Stewart’s audience members, however, betray their own
sense of their political situation’s absurdity, by idolizing Stewart and liberalism. They
vent their rage at their political opponents by bursting into wild applause whenever
Stewart blasts those outsiders, even to the point of creating awkwardness when one of
the opponents sits right in from of them during the interview with Stewart. The LA
audience of Bill Maher’s show, Real Time, is even more tribal, robotic, and utterly
without humility. Gallows humour is the last resort of a broken person who has no
illusions, who’s brought low by confronting the thought of his or her imminent or
inevitable death, or of the tragedies and absurdities that fill the postmodern world. The
occasions for such humour are solemn ones, calling for humility and the courage to
dispense with idols of the tribe and with the security blanket of premodern religion. The
context of American liberal humour is one of tribal ritual and self-aggrandizement, and
thus doesn’t quite exemplify the nobler comedy of the gallows that presupposes no
delusions.

Sketching the Religion

You might have noticed that the first theme seems to conflict with the next two. How can
human life be absurd or tragic if everything in the universe is metaphysically one and if
this oneness may be aesthetically appreciated? There are two reasons why there’s not
necessarily a conflict here. First, the absurdity of life has metaphysical and
phenomenological aspects. Metaphysically, life is absurd in the sense that there’s no
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objective purpose of life, that is, no purpose that transcends our interpretations. Briefly
put, theism is false. Phenomenologically, there’s the feeling of alienation, of tragedy, of
the heartlessness of natural forces, of our pitiful stature, and of the ultimate futility of our
endeavours. Pantheism is consistent with nontheism, since the natural order’s divinity,
which is its creative power, is impersonal. Also, existential angst might be appropriate
for actual creatures that only barely approximate the omniscient scientist in the thought
experiment. Although that scientist might have no cause for angst, that hardly benefits
us. However, even that ultimate scientist might feel despair and horror, since there are
positive and negative aesthetic properties. Were the natural order beautiful, wonder and
reverence could be expected to replace angst, but were the entirety of the divine body
of nature horrible to look upon, or were the music of the spheres irritating like a song
with a missing note, the scientist might well be disappointed by the anticlimax, to say
the least.

Still, these themes are materials for a postmodern religion, because the apparent, felt
absurdity of life is mitigated by the mystical scientist’s vision of nature’s unity, by the
possibility of an uplifting normative interpretation of that unity, and by the call for humour
to replace despair, given our cosmic situation. What would make this a postmodern
religion is that there’s no appeal here to anything supernatural, no retreat to delusion or
fantasy. On the contrary, those weaknesses of premodern religions are ruled out by the
stipulation that life is objectively meaninglessness. At best, we can imagine that a
hypothetical scientist who comprehends the whole natural order has an aesthetic
reaction to the pattern of interconnected events. This is only a thought experiment;
there’s no positing of such a scientist, and indeed we should assume that even were
nature a monistic system, metaphysically speaking, the comprehension of the whole
would be practically impossible. Finally, postmodernists love ironic comedy, and a
religion based on the other three considerations should reserve an honoured place for
this comedic remedy for angst.

After all, regardless of whether natural laws and logical principles of reasoning divulge a
unified pattern throughout nature, which immortalizes each node of the web, we’re stuck
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without any confirmation of that unity. Even were there music in the orbits of stellar
bodies or in a speck of dust’s swirling in a breeze, as Stapledon says, this music
wouldn’t be fit for us in our littleness. Nevertheless, we’re confronted with two well-
established facts: the apparent lack of a deep purpose of our being here, alive and on
Earth, and scientific advancement in understanding material processes. Add to these
the mystic’s universal claim of having felt nature’s oneness in a state of altered
consciousness. Next, assume that nature’s unity takes not simply the dry form of having
quantifiable interrelations between its parts, but that those interrelations would provoke
a visceral aesthetic reaction if only the pattern could be fully comprehended. In this
case, outrage is piled upon outrage, since at almost every turn, aside from the present
possibility of mystical experience, we’re merely tantalized by remedies for the brute
horror of our existential predicament. The abstract unity of nature provides only cold
comfort with the thought that we belong to the universe instead of being alienated from
it, given that our position could hypothetically be appreciated by the ultimate scientist.
There would still be no personal immortality and no known reason why angst is
inappropriate. The possibility of an uplifting, ennobling aesthetic value of the universe
and thus of our position in it begins to excite us, but then we’re left hanging, as in
Stapledon’s speech, with the fact that we can’t ourselves hear the music of the spheres.
We can’t know that there is any justifiable aesthetic interpretation of the whole natural
order or, as I’d add, whether that order might seem more ugly than beautiful.

This, then, is where gallows humour has its pride of place, as a means of our oscillating
between angst and hope, alienation and comfort, despair and awe. Humour generally is
a way of indirectly calling attention to an irony, to a disparity between a fact and our
interpretation of it. In our case, there are even opposite ironies to consider. First, the
death of God conflicts with our tendency to anthropomorphize, to vainly project images
of ourselves onto the Other. Second, though, our suffering from our apparent existential
situation conflicts with the possibility, at least, of a beautiful unity of all things, and thus
of a bond between each of us and the world that afflicts us. Thus, the natural facts
may be less comforting than our premodern theistic yearnings, but more uplifting
than our postmodern hyper-skepticism.
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A religious way of life requires a myth as its centerpiece, a narrative that makes sense
of the totality of human experience. Again, I’m not aware of any myth actually taking
hold in postmodern society that dramatizes the four themes of Stapledon’s speech.
Even were these themes widely inspiring and well-established, the problem would
remain that myths are works of artistic genius, whereas postmodern art is more often
than not utterly fraudulent. Trapped between the Scylla of politically correct liberal
spinelessness (manifesting in pragmatism and moral relativism) and the Charybdis of
an insider’s self-righteousness, the postmodern artist needs to deny that there’s any
ultimate value of anything, but also to pretend to have the cognitive upper hand. The
results are highly conceptual art that tends to mean less than nothing, and an art world
that throws millions of dollars at artists whose works are obviously worthless. There
seem, then, two possibilities. Postmodern artists may go down with the ship of western
civilization, without even a tune from the legendary obstinate violinists to assuage them.
Alternatively, these artists may shake off their disappointment from the souring of
modern culture, draw fresh inspiration from the wealth of scientific knowledge and from
their historically well-informed skepticism, and tell us all a good story.
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The World’s Creation as God’s Self-Destruction

____________________________________________________

What does it mean to declare that God created the world? There are two religious
answers, the esoteric and the exoteric. Insiders who best understand theistic ideas take
the notion of divine creation to be almost entirely empty. The suspicion is that the world
consists of everything we can understand, but that since our powers of understanding
are limited, the world likely emerged from something we can’t understand, something
unnatural. Religious people call that unnatural something and that emergence,
respectively, God and the highest creative act. But because the secret roots of these
religious ideas are mysterianism, cosmicism, and mysticism, the religious ideas have
negative rather than positive content. We can know indirectly that whatever god is, god
is alien and thus terrifying to vain and social creatures such as us, who instinctively
personalize everything we encounter to feel at home in the wilderness of nature. (I’ll
speak of God with a capital “G” only when speaking of the exoteric projection of our
personal qualities onto the unknowable.)

For reasons given by Leo Strauss, Plato, and others, philosophical truth tends to be
socially subversive and thus needs to be hidden from society at large. Plato spoke of
the need for noble lies told by the elite to the masses, to maintain social order. Thus, the
nontheistic basis of major religions, which is to say the fear of an inexplicable X as the
source of everything that’s rationally explainable, takes on a theistic, exoteric form for
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popular consumption. While the mystic says silence is best when thinking of whether to
speak of what god’s like, the theist indulges in anthropomorphic metaphors. As Dennett
argues in Breaking the Spell, theism is to this extent biologically determined. The theist
overuses the mental faculty, or neural module, that facilitates cooperation between
members of our species, by enabling us to predict our behaviour by way of positing and
interpreting people’s mental states. In short, the theist speaks as though god were a
member of our species, with capacities for reason, emotion, choice, and so forth. These
anthropocentric metaphors are all obviously absurd when applied to the unnatural and
taken literally, and when acknowledged as merely metaphorical they become irrelevant,
as the mystic appreciates.

With this distinction in mind, between the esoteric and the exoteric, let’s return to the
meaning of the statement that God created the world. Esoterically, the answer is the
negative, indirect one that something unnatural and thus beyond our comprehension is
somehow both “prior” to everything in nature, including everything physicists and
cosmologists theorize about, and also the “cause” of nature. Again, as soon as you try
to speak positively of the relationship between god and the world, you resort to
metaphors that make no sense under analysis. And exoterically, the most prevalent
monotheistic answer, for example, is that a white male designer engineered the
universe, by brooding over the face of the waters, speaking forms into existence, and so
forth, for the main purpose of producing life with which he could interact. The
implications of monotheistic creation myths, though, are that God wanted to create a
place where his children, who are necessarily more limited beings, could exist, and that
he did this not out of grace but out of loneliness.

When Catholics or others interpret Creation as a free, unearned and thus miraculous
outpouring of divine love they engage in doublespeak, playing the game of going back
and forth between the esoteric and exoteric conceptions of God. The notion of
unconditional, which is to say, inexplicable love is as self-contradictory as any other
theistic metaphor: love is actually well understood, and even when it’s altruistic the
motive is to achieve some higher good, one that requires sacrifice. If you look more
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closely at the monotheistic conceit, you find the image of God as a mighty individual
who stands necessarily alone. Recall that only in polytheism does the creator God have
equals; in this case, the anthropomorphism extends to a projection not just of personal
attributes onto the unknowable, but of social ones as well. In monotheism, however,
there’s a single, highest deity who stands at the top of the hierarchy of all beings; that
deity is the all-knowing First Cause of everything.

Now, when you’re forced to supply that solitary, almighty God with a gender, because
you can’t understand mysterianism or cosmicism or else prefer not to haunt yourself
with their implications and so you clothe God in human-made garments which call for
literary consistency, you’re forced to conclude also that Creation was meant to alleviate
God’s loneliness. As feminists have pointed out, the prejudice that the ultimate creative
act is a masculine one, with no feminine principle at work, is preposterous. At least a
goddess would have some sort of womb from which the universe could be imagined to
emerge. Instead, the male creator God must tinker with instruments and build the
universe from simpler materials. Human architects and engineers build structures for
the social good, for personal profit, and so forth, whereas God would have no such
motives.

No, the most plausible interpretation, again according to literary standards, is that God’s
life prior to Creation was perfectly unbearable for him. First, he’s male with no female
equals to be his mates. Second, he’s benevolent with no one to share in his greatness;
to paraphrase the saccharine cliché, he has a lot of love to give which goes to waste.
There’s no one else to give him advice on what to do. He must find the answer in
himself, since if he doesn’t know how best to make use of his talents, no one does. And
so God decides to have children. Given monotheism, God can’t create an equal to
himself, and so his children can’t live with him. Thus, God must create a place defined
by lower dimensions, which is the cosmos of atoms, stars, and planets. God is
necessarily removed from Creation and from his children, because he occupies a higher
plane of being, but at least he’s no longer perfectly isolated. Now, at least, he can spy
on men and women, like a voyeur with a transdimensional telescope, slipping
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messages to us here and there, like a shy admirer.

The Literal Death of God

Does this metaphor of divine creation satisfy you as a piece of fiction? Does the
metaphor make for a good story? I hardly think so, at least not in jaded postmodern
societies. For one thing, we’ve learned from history, as Lord Acton put it, that power
corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The monotheistic God is a person
cursed with absolute power which must have corrupted him. To assume otherwise is to
misuse language and to backtrack from the misbegotten venture of attempting to
humanize something that ought to humiliate us instead, because of its dreadful
inhumanity, thus making us hesitate before inflicting anything else with human qualities.
(What do I mean by that last statement? Well, when you study foreign cultures, which
naturally seem ridiculous to you, being an outsider who doesn’t care about the rules that
govern their practices, which rules thus must seem arbitrary to you, you’re very close to
putting the shoe on the other foot, as it were, turning this logic around to appreciate that
your own social conventions must seem just as silly to the foreigner.) The point, then, is
that when you foolishly indulge in an anthropocentric metaphor, you have to run with it,
like an improv actor who must react appropriately to any move made by her fellow
actors; indeed, a theistic metaphor is as silly and as empty as improvised acting which
both depend on the suspension of disbelief.

At any rate, once you equate the primary reality with a single almighty person, you’re
forced to apply your self-understanding to God. If humans tend to be corrupted by
power, so too must be God; otherwise, he’s no person, the metaphor falls to pieces, and
the theist is confronted with the dire prospect of settling into a life of angst at the hands
of esoteric, cosmicist philosophy. So God certainly didn’t create out of love. Oh, perhaps
the character God has benevolent impulses, but they’re bound to be corrupted by the
vast power inequality that separates him from any being he could imagine potentially
creating.
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In fact, our two best models for understanding the relationship between the theistic God
and nature are the dictator and the infant. Like God, a political dictator who is
unchallenged in his prime occupies the pinnacle of a power hierarchy, and like God the
dictator need merely speak for his words to be turned into action as his underlings
spring to obey their orders. This power inequality isolates and spoils the dictator, so that
he either devolves into a monster or the antisocial qualities that bring him to power are
given freer reign. Either way, the dictator is infantilized as his every whim is carried out,
so that his palace functions as an artificial womb that insulates him from harsh reality,
including the misery he usually wreaks on his subjects. This brings me to the second
model. Like the God of monotheism, an infant necessarily feels isolated, since the infant
can’t distinguish itself from anything else. And how does the infant react to that
perceived solitariness? Typically, an infant passes most of its waking hours screeching
into the void, crying for comfort. Unlike God, an infant has a mother who soothes it by
feeding it or rocking it to sleep. God would have no such distractions.

With this fuller picture of God in mind, I ask yet again: Why would God, the character of
the monotheistic fiction, create a universe populated in part by people? Love wouldn’t
be God’s primary motivation; instead, we must imagine a pitiful soul wracked alternately
by anguish, boredom, fear, and twisted perversions--anguish from the horror of his
position of being necessarily alone and beyond anyone’s comprehension or sympathy;
boredom from knowing everything and thus from an eternity with no surprises; fear that
God has no escape from his existential predicament; and perversions as his character
is warped into that of a decadent predator. If theists would only stop to think about the
religious metaphors they pass around as empty memes, they’d appreciate that the hell
described by prophets must actually be identical with heaven for God, which is to say
that it must be hell to be the monotheistic God.

A much superior reading of divine creation was given by the 19th C. German
philosopher, Philipp Mainlander, who conceived of what’s likely the most depressing
thought ever to enter anyone’s head, who wrote what’s been called the most radical
system of philosophical pessimism based on that thought, the two-volume Philosophy of
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Redemption, and who then killed himself. (To morbid English speakers, The Philosophy
of Redemption stands as a sort of real-life eldritch Necronomicon, since it hasn’t been
translated from German.) Mainlander’s thought was that God killed himself and that
God’s decaying corpse is the natural universe; that is, to carry off his suicide, God had
to transform into something that could degrade and eventually be eliminated, namely
into an array of quarks, protons, galaxies, and other physical forms. What we think of as
a magnificent act of creation was instead God’s escape from the hell of being God, and
natural evolution is the pattern of decay occurring in a body so alien we can’t see it for
what it is; in this respect, we’re like the blind men who touch different parts of an
elephant to identify the beast and reach wildly different conclusions.

Mainlander’s anthropocentric and profoundly pessimistic speculation has numerous

advantages over mainstream theism. First, as I said, his “creation” myth accords with
our self-knowledge, and is thus based on a more coherent metaphor, albeit one which is
still just a stained metaphor and so must be counted as a piece of fiction, subject at best
to aesthetic standards of evaluation. Second, Mainlander’s theism easily accounts both
for the natural evil in the world and for God’s absence. Third, and perhaps most
importantly, this pessimistic myth rings true for religious insiders, for the mystics and
Gnostics who feel alienated from the world and who, like God, seek to be liberated from
the torture of being alive (and from being reborn in the cosmic prison). Anxiety is our
most authentic source of inspiration, the most fitting reaction to our existential situation
that induces noble action. Happiness is for the unenlightened sheep; suffering, for those
who fall for the bait of Reason and discover that our ideals are social constructions, our
societies oligarchic disaster zones, out fate as a species one of ignominious oblivion.
The point, then, is that if we ought to feel like God would had to have felt, detached and
isolated by our sentience and objectivity, and if a myth, like any work of fiction, should
speak mainly to the phenomenological truth of what it’s like to be alive, Mainlander’s
myth of God’s creative suicide is far more moving and relevant than the obsolete and
hackneyed yarn about our heavenly Father who just wuvs us so much.
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Living Within God's Undying Body

I want to return now to a question I addressed at the end of "From Theism to

Cosmicism," of the relationship between the mystic’s supernatural god and what I call
the undead god, the pantheistically-conceived cosmos which blindly develops more and
more complex forms. The esoteric explanation of that relationship is just the cautious,
negative one that titillates us with the promise of something which can never be fulfilled:
we can know that there are likely things we can never know, such as how everything
that’s rationally explainable could have come from something else, something unnatural
which counts more nearly as nothing to us.

But the best exoteric, metaphorical explanation may well take the form of something like
Mainlander’s bleak myth. God created not out of love or generosity or artistic
experimentation, but out of desperation to escape the torments which afflict the best of
us too. I said that the fictional character of the monotheistic God would have reason to
fear that he lacks any means of escaping his plight of being God, that is, of being like
the infantilized and corrupted dictator, grown insane by his solitude and peerlessness.
But perhaps the more precise interpretation is that such a character would lack any
constructive way out. The most that God could create in addition to himself is a world of
inferior beings. Granted, some of these beings, such as angels, might understand God
better than others, but given monotheism and mysterianism, there would still be a gulf
between everything in the world that’s rationally understandable and the likely source of
that world. As long as angels are created beings that have bodies and mental faculties,
the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena applies: angels could
understand only what would fall into the net of their limited ways of thinking. So God
would still stand aloof from his Creation; he would still suffer the fires of hell, both as
expressions of his inner turmoil and as self-inflicted punishments for his inevitable sins
as a corrupted monster.

Perhaps God used his genius to devise a weapon of God destruction that would free
him from the outrageous embarrassment of being God in the first place. We Westerners
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laughed from a safe distance at the spectacles of Muammar Gaddafi or Michael

Jackson, and we still ridicule anyone else so obviously warped by the curse of being a
hyperpower. But how much more clownish must God’s character be--not wise or loving
like the half-baked theistic fantasies would have it, but downright grotesque in its
absolute freedom of self-expression. Perhaps, then, the colossal monstrosity which is
the multiverse affords us with superabundant empirical evidence of the pitiful last act of
the worst megalomaniac who ever lived. Perhaps nature is such a fearsome place, so
amoral and inhuman in its scope, because the universe is what the mind of a deranged
tyrant would look like were that mind by some miracle to metamorphose into a lifeless
shell.

Ah, but not entirely lifeless! Even in God’s death throes, he must have the last laugh in
the faces of his scapegoats: we drops of God’s lifeblood must suffer from similar
existential angst; our cries are thus echoes of God’s infantile shrieks into the void. In the
undead god, which creatively destroys itself by ever more complex forms of corruption
until these fade from entropy, we isolated and accursed creatures must live as godlike,
prancing in our bubble worlds of politically correct fantasies or ranting at the horror of
reality. What we should be working on, though, isn’t how to play with the toy gods of
exoteric theism, but where to go creatively from Mainlander’s more fitting theistic myth.
The mystic’s challenge is to avoid God’s fate, to sublimate angst so that personal or
collective suicide isn’t the only viable option. The transhumanist’s dream of downloading
our minds into a computer for eternal life sounds suspiciously like a sugarcoated way of
speaking of a bizarre act of self-destruction, much as God might have rationalized his
metamorphosis. And the postmodern monoculture seems a stage of social decadence
and decline, in the senses given by Oswald Spengler. In Mainlander’s myth we have the
starting point of a fitting, unembarrassing religion, of a grand narrative that honours the
suffering at the core of existential authenticity. But, to reverse the Christian narrative,
which seems a garbled version of Mainlander’s insight, we need to meditate on how
even the lives of such pitiful creatures as us can redeem the death of our God.
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Varieties of Mysticism
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Mysticism is the doctrine that the hidden wisdom of monistic theology, according to
which all souls are united with God, can be proved by direct experience of that unity,
through meditation or an altered state of consciousness. If we define “God” loosely, to
cover the pantheism that identifies God with nature’s impersonal creativity, we see that
atheistic mysticism is possible; indeed, Buddhism is another kind of atheistic mysticism.
But besides the difference between theistic and atheistic mystics, there’s that between
what I’ll call optimistic and pessimistic ones. The former promises a happy ending for
all, while the latter laments the fact that our time on the stage of life is “full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing,” and that our grand finale is ignominious extinction along with
the clueless animal species. I’ll explore here the ramifications of this latter distinction.

Optimistic Mystics

Mystics claim to have secret knowledge of the world’s unity. Buddhists, for example, say
that everything is interdependent and thus united, from an enlightened perspective,
whereas without that perspective, everything appears independent and that illusory
disunity is the overall cause of suffering. When we recognize that what seems a highly
heterogeneous world is actually united by causal and logical relations, for example, we
no longer draw absolute distinctions between the self and the rest of the world, or
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between selves. Those apparent differences are mere illusions, and when the mystic
replaces that naive perception with an experience of reality’s oneness, she feels bliss
instead of disappointment, alienation, or the many other forms of suffering.

In practice, though, optimistic mysticism takes two forms, depending on whether the
oneness of reality is identified with the individual ego or with the underlying state of the
unconscious. In the former case, mystical monism becomes a kind of obnoxious
solipsism, such as we find in feel-good, materialistic New Age ideologies. Oprah
Winfrey’s cult, for example, based as it is on the alleged spiritual law of attraction,
according to which we get what we most want (because our desires are like magnets
that attract what complements them), is individualistic in the Western, American sense.
In this comedic mysticism, reality consists of the infantile ego and its toys, all else being
illusory nuisances. So the chief virtue is Ayn Randian selfishness and this pseudo-
spirituality becomes propaganda in the service of the beastly economic competition that
naturally produces oligarchy.

An Eastern (Hindu or Buddhist) mystic would contend that “materialistic mysticism” is an

oxymoron, that individualistic, solipsistic gurus are charlatans who pander to people’s
spiritual inclinations, to hawk their books and other paraphernalia, and that true
mysticism, based on an actual experience of the world’s unity, leads to the opposite
lifestyle of asceticism. According to this more traditional variety, the ego is an illusion,
meaning not that our mind or personhood doesn’t exist but that it’s not what it seems; in
particular, no person is a self-sufficient, Randian superhero. Thus, to feed the appetite
for self-enrichment or self-aggrandizement is to betray a lack of mystical wisdom, and
materialistic mysticism is doubly comedic since the last laugh is on the spiritual capitalist
for being a fraud. Far from rationalizing infantile selfishness, the mystic should be
detached from her instincts and desires for her private welfare, since those (genetically-
determined and often culturally-conditioned) mental states trap the unwary into an
unenlightened state of awareness. Moreover, a true mystic is altruistic, helping others
escape the suffering produced by their ignorance. The reason for this selflessness is
that the mystic regards all people as metaphysically one, so that just as we wouldn’t
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normally wish to harm ourselves or any part of our body, we shouldn’t wish to see other
people suffer.

I want to emphasize the main mystical argument against existential angst and the tragic
perspective on life. Again, the argument assumes radical monism, the oneness of
everything through the interdependence of all forms. According to this argument, angst
is a form of suffering produced by ignorance of that unity; that is, the sufferer is misled
by the apparent difference between the self and the rest of the world, which can cause
loneliness, alienation, and fear. Far from ending with our biological death or even with
the likely extinction of our species, we’re all one with the underlying flow of natural
forces which evolves more and more illusory stages, levels, and other patterns within
itself.

Pessimistic Mystics

What, then, is pessimistic mysticism? Whereas a spiritual optimist says the values that
best correspond to metaphysical reality are love, peace, and so forth, the pessimist
says that the hidden wisdom calls for melancholy. Instead of cheerfully loving your
neighbor as yourself or prophesying the ultimate vindication of human values, the
pessimistic mystic shuts herself off from the world that doesn't live up to her wistful
ideals.

We should be careful not to overstate the difference between the two types. Spiritual
optimists must concede two points: first, all can be one only metaphysically, which
allows for the many rational distinctions between illusory appearances; second, as an
empirical fact, enlightenment is rare, so that most people are trapped by ignorance and
suffering. The optimist replies that reason isn’t as trustworthy as direct experience, and
the pessimist agrees, affirming that reason is a curse that brings us sorrowful
knowledge of what the mystic calls the merely apparent world. But the pessimist
reminds the optimist that, according to the second concession, even mystics are seldom
fully enlightened, which means that hardly anyone is liberated from our instincts and
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culture which drive us into the world of rationally-distinguishable illusions. For example,
even the mystic has a sexual instinct which causes him or her to distinguish between
men and women. An enlightened person overcomes the force of that instinct, which in
turn requires detachment from sex-obsessed cultures.

The point, though, is that if full, permanent enlightenment is very rare, so that even
spiritual optimists have only fleeting experiences of our metaphysical unity before those
optimists are plunged once again into the profane mode in which everything seems to
be a tragic multiplicity, even the optimist must concede that a mystic should grieve for
the majority whose delusions lead them to fail, to debase themselves, and to suffer. The
optimist can reply that what happens at the naïve level of consciousness, at which the
world seems a multiplicity, is insignificant compared to what happens at the deeper
level, which is that those differences dissolve. This fatalism is tantamount to saying,
though, that suffering doesn’t matter because it’s unreal in the first place, which raises
the question of why anyone should be motivated to seek to escape that suffering
through enlightenment.

No, mysticism in general assumes that enlightenment is better than the naivety which
causes suffering, and that bliss is better than the disappointments caused by foolishly
selfish grasping after hallucinations in the matrix. But again, this means that even the
optimist must concede that most waking hours lived by intelligent creatures are tragic
and absurd, meaning that they’re full of pointless suffering and that they don’t lead to
enlightenment (since most people die unenlightened, meaning that their consciousness
is never fully attuned to metaphysical reality). The optimist’s final rejoinder, as I see it, is
that reincarnation ensures that everyone will eventually be so enlightened, so we have a
happy ending after all. This, though, is a retreat from the mystic’s empiricist criterion,
which is that direct experience is more reliable than abstract reasoning; reincarnation is
a dubious theological doctrine that must compete with scientific theories.

Should we be optimistic at least about those few who are fully enlightened or who enjoy
moments of freedom from ignorance and suffering? Not in a way that brings any comfort
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to the majority with their profane delusions. Enlightenment means complete detachment
from the personality, character, and intellect with which we instinctively and emotionally
identify. A liberated mystic doesn’t identify with anything that the majority cares about,
including the individual’s fate, cultural distractions, social networks, or political or work-
related obligations. As I say in “Buddhism,” this is a paradoxical sort of happy ending for
the mystic that looks a lot like epic failure. In Hinduism, preparation for moksha is
supposed to be the priority for the forest dweller who shuns society only after that
dweller has run a household, contributed to society, and thus succeeded in profane
terms. This is like the rock star who parties nightly with scores of women, pickling his
liver with alcohol until finally in his old age, when he can no longer afford such
decadence, he sees the light, becomes a born-again Christian and preaches asceticism
as the ultimate ideal. The logic, I take it, is that you won’t appreciate asceticism until
you’ve exhausted your wrongheaded cravings for worldly things. But there’s still the
appearance here of hypocrisy: this all seems too convenient for the mystic, since she
gets to enjoy the benefits of foolishness, only to cheaply repent on her death bed.
Moreover, her spiritual rebirth can’t be perfectly tested, since she can’t take back her
previous life of relative luxury. Of course, this hypocrisy is irrelevant from the
enlightened perspective, since it applies only to the individual’s merit which is of no
consequence in the greater scheme.

In any case, I raise this case of the elderly ascetic’s double standard to illustrate that
while profane success is trivialized from the enlightened perspective, the feeling is
surely mutual: a life of poverty and renunciation of worldly pleasures is a paradigmatic
failure, from the unenlightened viewpoint. So enlightenment isn’t exactly a cause for
celebration. Enlightenment is what Schopenhauer calls the denial of the will to life,
meaning the devaluation of everything we’re naturally selected and culturally pressured
to prize; this enlightenment isn’t the freedom to do what you want or to enjoy an eternity
of pleasure in heaven, but is instead the end of the personal self and the replacing of it
with nothing at all, that is, with a state of nirvana. Here, freedom means escape from the
world’s seductions, as opposed to the libertarian’s egoistic, infantile freedom to pursue
your cravings with no impediments. The upshot is that there’s something tragic even
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about enlightenment itself, the latter being the mystic’s ultimate good. Not only must the
mystic’s success look like failure to society at large, but the mystic’s so-called bliss or
spiritual pleasure is entirely negative: the liberated mystic feels the peace that comes
from having no concerns or responsibilities at all, no ties to the apparent world which
cause stress. Spiritual bliss or peace of mind, which depends on an enlightened view of
our metaphysical situation, is what it feels like to lose everything that can be
categorized.

The Horror of Mysticism

Let’s return, finally, to the main objection to pessimistic mysticism, that there can be no
such thing since pessimism requires the limited, egoistic perspective and thus
ignorance about everything’s oneness. I think it’s true that standard existential angst,
horror, and rebelliousness require the distinction between the personal self and the
world that’s indifferent to that self. Thus, if mysticism has no room for that distinction,
existential mysticism makes no sense. As I said, however, the optimist’s monism does
include that distinction and merely reframes it so that instead of having to be
preoccupied by the gulf between what we’d prefer and how things really are, the
optimist can reassure herself that that distinction is only “illusory” and ultimately
overcome by the substantial oneness of all illusions. And as I’ve also said, that ultimate
overcoming would happen only for someone who is completely enlightened and thus
divorced from all naturally selected and most culturally sanctioned forms of life. The rest
of us are forced to identify at least partly with our mind and our personality, and are thus
doomed to follow reason to the existential dead end, retreat to some ignoble delusion,
or transcend angst by some means other than enlightenment, such as by adhering to
some cosmicist religion.

Now, as I’ve discussed in “Buddhism” and in “Postmodern Religion,” I doubt that the
only path to angst is through that Cartesian distinction between the thinking self and the
unthinking world. In particular, I question the basis for the enlightened mystic’s bliss.
Assuming the mystic’s experience of everything’s oneness is possible, why should this
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experience necessarily comfort rather than horrify the mystic? Our reaction to that
experience should depend on the nature of that underlying oneness. While Lovecraft’s
cosmicism needn’t be monistic, his view does illustrate how transcendent wisdom can
unsettle the recipient and even render her insane. For one thing, what the mystic should
learn is that all the goals we think are justified by our genetic instinct and mainstream
cultural indoctrination are woefully narrow-minded and diametrically opposed to what we
ought to want. For example, instead of perpetuating nature’s hold on us, by sexually
reproducing and thus replenishing the victims of natural forces, we ought to be denying
the will to live in all its manifestations. Far from comforting the mystic, her condemnation
of the ignorance that generates the entire world of so-called illusions should terrify her,
since she’s effectively abandoned most of her humanity, trusting that her altered state of
consciousness will elucidate how she ought to act while still in the belly of the beast,
that is, while still imprisoned in a body that’s configured to present her with the false
world of the matrix.

In any case, there remains the contradiction between wanting to be enlightened, to

escape suffering, and learning when enlightened that the instincts to prefer pleasure to
pain and to empathize with those who suffer are parts of the world that ought to be
abandoned. Presumably, from the enlightened viewpoint, there is no natural empathy,
pity, or utilitarian weighing of pleasures against pains; instead, there’s a vision of the
world that transcends all of our natural and politically correct expectations. Again, I ask
why that vision should reassure rather than horrify. Why, when we discover that our
meager personhood counts for nothing, that natural and cultural forces have probably
led us astray though we’ve relied on them from our infancy onward; when the mystic’s
metaphysical reality must be impersonal and inhumane, to have evolved the disastrous
world of illusions (samsara) in the first place--I ask, why be tranquilized by such facts?
Why turn then to New Age happy-talk instead of ranting from the rooftops, proclaiming
your disgust with that vision? If there is music of the spheres, why should that music
sound pleasant to human ears, no matter how enlightened the listening mind?
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Of course, the mystic can always say that you’ll never know until you directly experience
the unity for yourself. But because any mystical experience must be processed by the
human body, and because that body evolved to service the genes as opposed to being
intelligently designed in the furtherance of a benevolent agenda, I’m disinclined to give
the spiritual optimist the last word on this point. There is, after all, a skeptical
interpretation not just of the charlatan’s variety of optimistic spirituality, but of the
genuine, mainly Eastern kinds. How do we know the mystic is accurately or even
honestly reporting her transcendent experience, when she assures us that that
experience is entirely encouraging? Perhaps her optimism is one more delusion to
which she resorts to deny the deeper wisdom of cosmic horror. And perhaps ascetic
detachment is a sign of existential numbness and shell-shock, after a union with
otherness that undermines all human modes of judgment, and thus that must obliterate
her feeling of self-worth as an embodied, natural creature. Perhaps the ascetic
detaches from natural and social cares not just because they cause her suffering, but
because she learns that human nature is disgusting from the mystical viewpoint of
eternity. And instead of dealing honestly and creatively with that revelation, she endures
a more ambiguous form of suffering, avoiding her natural angst only by practically
lobotomizing herself, by means of excessive mental detachment. In this case,
pantheistic existential cosmicism, such as the sort I explore in my rants, would be the
more authentic metaphysical vision of mysticism, calling at least initially for a
melancholic appreciation of the tragedy and absurdity of our natural predicament.

Appendix: The Definition of “Mistake”

Mistake: what business graduates who lack a refined vocabulary call an act of vice.

When you pull your underwear on backwards, add a quarter rather than the needed half
of a teaspoon of sugar to your sauce, or make a left turn instead of the needed one on
the right, you make a mistake. That is, you absentmindedly fail, usually in some minor
way for which there’s little or no culpability. But when you’re a politician, a
businessperson, or a lawyer, for example, and you naturally lie, cheat, and steal your
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way to the top, you don’t err at all but knowingly play the social games that require
perverse excellence in vice, that is, great demonstrations of selfishness, deceitfulness,
cold-heartedness, brazenness, short-sightedness, and so forth.

When a Machiavellian power-player gets caught practicing those dark arts, he invariably
seeks to avoid responsibility for his choices by labeling them mere mistakes. For
example, western CEOs are notorious for pretending to be dunces or ignorant
figureheads when they’re caught trying to pull off billion dollar frauds and their
companies blow up in their faces. They then act like they never even deserved the
hundreds of millions they were raking in thanks to their hand-picked board members
who rubberstamp their pay packages, like they had no knowledge that their company
was engaging in the very frauds that have become standard operating procedure in so-
called post-industrial, financialized societies. Instead, they humbly concede, before
senators who are equipped only to “grill” and never to roast, boil, or skin--so says the
mass media’s meme--that they’re guilty of a mistake or two, albeit a mistake with
disastrous consequences, but nevertheless an innocent moment of absentmindedness.
To be sure, a power player never publicly owns up to her year after year of accrued
experience at honing the vices that’s a prerequisite for advancing any politician or free
market businessperson within her hierarchy. Moreover, because few people want to
admit that most sectors of their society consist of just such practically amoral
hierarchies, a nihilistic or sociopathic Machiavellian is quickly forgiven for his or her
“mistake.” After all, as the saying goes, anyone can make a mistake (i.e. everyone sins
in a declining, corrupt society).

The first such mistake was committed by Satan, the Prince of Evil, and I happen to have
the transcript. “Verily, Lord,” said Satan to God, “I’ve jealously watched you waste your
divine powers on this petty Creation, on these beasts you call humans. I’ve burned with
ambition at the thought of what I would do instead were I seated on your throne, and I
relished the prospects of waging an angelic war on your hosts and then either of
unseating you and becoming master of all or of losing my station in a blaze of glory and
then of marshaling all the demonic forces of Hell to sabotage every one of your foolish
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endeavours. Nevertheless, I say to you now with respect to all of that, on this Judgment
Day at the end of all things, with the blood of trillions of your humans dripping from my
claws and fangs, that I merely made a mistake.”

God is then reported to have grilled Satan for hours in front of TV cameras, before
punishing him with a fine of 0.003% of Satan’s total net worth.
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Darwinism and Nature’s Undeadness

____________________________________________________

Following the principle called Occam’s Razor, scientists seek simple explanations of
phenomena, meaning explanations that refer to as few theoretical entities as possible.
So instead of thinking of the Earth as somehow special and separate from the rest of
the universe, Newton unified the two by positing the universal force of gravity, a force
that works the same everywhere. Maxwell unified magnetism, electricity, and light,
showing that they’re manifestations of a single force, the electromagnetic field. And
Einstein unified space, time, and gravity with his theory of spacetime. In each of these
unifications, a complex way of speaking is reduced to a simpler way, and depending on
the complex theory’s mix of strengths and weaknesses, the reduction may entail the
elimination of that theory’s frame of reference so that the simpler theory alone is thought
to correspond to reality.

I think Darwin’s theory of natural selection is another case of unification, but some of
this theory's philosophical implications aren’t as well appreciated. What Darwin showed
is that nature can do the work of an intelligent designer, in creating species of living
things. Prior to Darwin, the difference between life and death was usually explained in
dualistic terms: natural life derives from God who is separate from all of nature and who
implants a spirit or transcendent, immaterial essence, within certain material bodies,
while nonliving matter lacks any supernatural spirit. Here we had an absolute distinction
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between life and death, much like Newton’s sharp distinction between space and time.
But after Darwin, scientists no longer regard the source of an organism’s distinguishing
features--its consciousness, agency, pleasures and pains--as supernatural, which is to
say that Darwinian biology is monistic with respect to the difference between the living
and the nonliving. Darwin’s theory of how members of a species come to possess their
traits is simpler than the theistic, dualistic explanation. Instead of having to refer to two
types of things, a Creator God and the created material form, we need refer only to
material forms, such as the environment, genes, and simple physical bodies which
reproduce themselves from one generation to the next so that their distant ancestors
migrate and occupy other niches, becoming more complex and specialized in the
process.

Darwinian Life

Those repercussions of Darwinism are familiar to most educated people. But when we
ask again, “What is the difference between the living and the nonliving, given the
naturalistic, nontheistic theory of natural selection?” we might be surprised to learn that
we’re no longer scientifically entitled to the commonsense dualism between spirit and
matter. When we understand life scientifically, after Darwin, we can no longer rationally
justify any talk of immaterial spiritual essences that derive from a supernatural realm
inhabited by a perfect person who somehow precedes the natural universe. But if there
are no immaterial spirits, what makes life metaphysically different from non-life?
Moreover, take what are intuitively thought to be nonliving things, like the environment,
DNA, proteins, and chemical reactions, and take also relatively nonliving things like
bacteria and viruses, which are the precursors to higher organisms. If these elements--
and not some supreme living thing, like God--are responsible for the origin and the
evolution of life, again what’s the metaphysical difference between the living and the
nonliving?

To be sure, there are scientific answers to these questions. For example, biologically
speaking, life must have genes and the capacity to reproduce, and thus must evolve by
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natural selection. Also, the physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, offered a deeper definition of
“life,” according to which an organism resists entropy and thermodynamic equilibrium
(death), by taking order (such as food) from the environment to maintain the internal
order of its metabolic processes. But these scientific answers are consistent with the
naturalistic elimination of the theist’s pre-Darwinian, dualistic notions of spirit and
spiritless matter. The naive way of understanding life, by thinking of a transcendent
spiritual essence within every organism, clashes with the modern scientific perspective
in which life can be explained by referring solely to material things in nature.

To summarize the problem, then, we have a commonsense, dualistic and theistic

assumption about the difference between a living and a dead body, and after Darwin we
have a scientific, monistic theory of that difference. According to the latter theory, what
we think of as living things are made entirely from what we’d intuitively call nonliving
things; moreover, not even the so-called highest organisms, such as primates, are living
in the naïve sense of having a spirit with a supernatural source. Thus, the naïve way of
speaking of life has been replaced by a more rational way. Instead of associating life
with the supernatural, biologists explain both life and non-life in naturalistic terms.
Instead of being created by means of an intelligent designer’s plan, living things develop
from simple, nonliving natural processes. Nature, which was once thought to be
nonliving, assumes the role of God in creating the diversity of life in the biosphere; and
instead of an all-knowing and all-powerful mind as the ultimate cause of life, there’s a
series of accidents that occurs over time that happens to set the conditions for the
transformation of nonliving matter into breathing, eating, fighting, and dying entities such
as you and me.

In so far as the everyday concepts of “life” and “death” are tainted by the pre-Darwinian,
theistic connotations, these concepts are no longer rationally respectable. But my
question is about the metaphysical concept that replaces them; specifically, if the
theistic intuition is longer tenable, in light of modern science, what viable
intuition about the nature of life and nonlife can be made to cohere with that
scientific understanding? Again, we have the scientific definitions which assume
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philosophical monism (naturalism). That is, according to biologists, both animals and
rocks, for example, are material objects subject to natural law and also to chance, as
opposed to divinely intended, interactions. If life comes from non-life, and both are
natural, meaning that neither is invested with anything supernatural like an immortal
spirit, what’s the metaphysical difference between, say, a person and the “nonliving”
evolutionary processes in her ancestor’s environment that brought that descendant into
being?

All are Undead

The answer, which isn’t widely appreciated, seems to be the following. Nothing in nature
is living in the old, supernatural sense. But neither is anything natural dead in that
sense, since the theistic intuition is that nonliving, dumb and blind matter can’t do the
work of God, which is why God is needed to create everything--especially life on Earth.
Natural forces are neither alive nor dead, in the senses given by the old intuition.
Nevertheless, those forces do the work of God but without being God and indeed
without being alive even in the modern scientific sense. These forces, then, are undead,
as are their products such as you and me, which is to say that the zombie stands as the
best symbol for our intuitions to latch onto as we come to grips with the philosophical
implications of Darwinism.

What is it to be undead? The word “undead” means technically dead but somehow
reanimated so that the corpse doesn’t stay dead. Undeadness is like spacetime, in that
an undead thing has some attributes of the living and of the nonliving, but isn’t the same
as either in the old, naive sense. Just as the concept of spacetime undermines the
Newtonian theory of the absolute (observer-independent) dimensions of space and
time, the concept of undeadness undermines the theistic myth of the gulf between living
spirit and dead matter. In recent cinema, a zombie is a monster that’s both alive and
dead, and thus neither; more precisely, a zombie has some features of the living (a
zombie moves, eats, senses) but also some features of the dead (a zombie is brain
dead, and it has a decaying body and no metabolic functions). In short, a zombie is like
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a macroscopic virus, possessing life functions so rudimentary that the zombie occupies
a grey area in the biological continuum between the living and the nonliving. Historically,
this movie monster descends from the African and Haitian folk practice of using a magic
potion to induce a state of death-like suspended animation in a victim. In any case,
there’s little rational content in the idea of the zombie monster, since this monster is, of
course, both fictional and paradoxical. Still, the zombie is the most useful symbol in
making philosophical sense of Darwinism, since the relatively harmless horror aroused
by the fictional zombie sublimates the horror we’d otherwise feel more frequently
whenever we’d contemplate the fact that Darwin effectively zombified the universe and
all of its inhabitants.

Part of the horror of zombies is that their state of living death is typically left as an
unanswerable mystery: they’re manifestly as dangerous as living predators, since they
hunt and feed off of animals, but they’re also obviously dead since they’re reborn, as it
were, only after a person’s brain death. The root of the horror is that their similarities to
both living and dead things confound us. How is it that a dead body could get up and
walk on its own? And how humiliated and alienated must we feel when we wonder
whether we might be left so far in the dark regarding the nature of reality? What sort of
twisted world could allow for such an abomination, for such counterfeit life in a corpse?
These are some of the questions we might ask about the movie monster.

But Darwinism compels us to ask such questions about our actual selves and about all
natural life forms and indeed about the whole cosmos! Just as the fictional state of living
death is typically left in the horror movies as a brute, inexplicable fact, so too scientists
and philosophical naturalists are content to stipulate that ultimately there’s no intuitively
satisfying explanation of how a godless, nonliving universe can pop into existence and
create life. As the naturalist says, the facts are what they are, regardless of how we feel
about them or whether they make intuitive sense to us. (Bertrand Russell took this stand
in his famous 1948 debate on God’s existence, with Frederick Copleston, when Russell
said that the universe doesn’t need a cause because “the universe is just there, and
that's all.”) This kind of metaphysical realism, as it’s called, amounts to saying that
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nature and all of its inhabitants are potentially as horrifying as zombie monsters that get
up and walk in the first place for no reason at all. Just as the universe begins with a Big
Bang, from a singularity whose internal properties are miraculous in so far as they’re not
subject to natural law, a zombie begins with a corpse’s magical reanimation, and both
are accepted as brute facts of life in nature and in the movies, respectively. In light of
Darwinism, however, all of nature takes on other zombie qualities as well, and so the
ultimate inexplicability of the natural universe makes for a more profound horror.

Moreover, biologists and philosophers of science frequently speak in shorthand when

discussing adaptations or biological functions, using scare quotes when attributing
intention to biological processes. The long way of explaining a trait like a bat’s wings is
to tell the story of how certain genes and proteins fitted into an ancestral environment, in
that the host bodies produced by those chemicals happened to thrive and reproduce,
and so on. The short, intuitive but naïve interpretation of the trait is that a bat has wings
because the bat is supposed to fly, as though the bat were designed with that end in
someone’s mind. The biologist wants to avoid that theistic intuition, since Darwin
showed that such teleology is wrongheaded, but the biologist is forced to give some
credit to the naïve view--and not just because the long way of speaking becomes
cumbersome. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett explains in numerous writings, the
evolutionary pattern is subject to the intentional stance, meaning that the bat’s success
in flying with its wings does look, for all the world, as though there were a designer’s
mind responsible for that success. Thus, Dennett personifies natural selection as
Mother Nature. The biologist is compelled by the life-like qualities of the evolutionary
process to resort to such anthropomorphism, but isn’t committed to identifying that
process as an intelligent designer. Thus, the biologist compromises by
anthropomorphizing the process, but by putting scare quotes around the offending,
naïve language. For example, a biologist might explain the adaptability of the bat’s
wings by saying that the wings are “for” the purpose of flying, or that flying is their
“function,” and the biologist will use scare quotes to signal both her displeasure with the
compromise and the fact that she’s speaking in an ironic fashion.
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Likewise, a zombie monster isn’t really alive even though its life-like qualities are
uncanny, so we’re forced to treat the monster merely as if it were alive. The zombie
passes the Turing Test for life, except that unlike in the case of a computer, we happen
to know in advance that a zombie is, scientifically speaking, dead. In other words, just
like naturally selected traits, a zombie triggers our intentional stance, our social instinct
for positing and interpreting mental processes, and so we think of the zombie as in
some way alive even though we know better. The zombie’s a monstrous abomination
because of that paradox: the idea of this monster mocks our cherished social instinct,
by simultaneously triggering and nullifying that instinct. And once again, Darwinism
turns all of the actual cosmos into the same sort of monstrous abomination. Natural
forces, which are devoid of life, scientifically and theistically speaking, nevertheless
behave as though they were alive by creating the cosmological conditions for life and
then by fine-tuning life through natural selection. Moreover, organisms themselves are
as dead as the natural forces that produce them, given the naïve, theistic conceptions of
life and death which flow so readily from our social instinct, but organisms behave as
though they were animated by immaterial spirits (even though we now know they’re
not).

All of nature should be thought to have mere pseudo-life, just like the fictional zombie,
and this is some of the metaphysical fallout of the Darwinian picture. Thus, the under-
appreciated philosophical implication of modern biology is that, like a zombie movie, the
evolutionary saga is a horror show. When we behold signs of life, whether by
communing with nature, walking through a zoo, studying a biology textbook, or just
looking in the mirror, we ought to be fleeing in terror as though from a zombie horde.
But of course we don’t do so because we’re not equipped with the superhuman stamina
to sustain the degree of terror that’s warranted by our existential circumstances.
Instead, we confine our dread of the metaphysical facts of life, or rather of the facts of
the great living death, to our reaction to the silly Hollywood beasty, in the safety and
comfort of a movie theater. Metaphysically speaking, though, the zombie is no silly
fiction; given Darwinism, we are all walking dead things. We are neither living nor
dead (in the old senses), but undead (to use a newer, more fitting term), and when we
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die in the scientific sense, our decaying body will add to the natural process by which
the larger zombie which is our planet evolves the next round of its zombie progeny.

Ironic Postmodern Pantheism

Indeed, this philosophical implication of Darwinism, that the ordinary notions of life and
nonlife no longer make sense and that they need to be replaced by something like the
idea of a baffling state of living death, amounts to an ironic, postmodern kind of
pantheism. Darwinism not only zombifies but deifies all of nature, since the evolutionary
process encompasses the cosmic preconditions of the emergence of life so that the
whole universe is required to create life in a mindless, natural fashion. There is no
personal God, but the universe as a whole in all of its interconnectedness does yield
organisms as byproducts, as though the universe were a creator god. Nature as a
whole isn’t personal, but social creatures like us will inevitably interpret evolutionary
patterns as anthropomorphic. The divinity of nature is no majestic thing, since the
cosmos is best understood as an undead monstrosity. Whereas prior to Darwin,
educated people could attribute intentional properties to the universe, with no hint of
irony since they could assume that a personal god created the universe as a machine,
bestowing it with artificial functions, in our postmodern time we can only look on in
disgust as the universe abuses our social reflex, compelling us to be overly friendly with
what we know scientifically to be inanimate matter. We know that we ourselves are
spiritless entities; to be sure, we have a brain that has marvelous effects, but
metaphysically we’re one with the natural cosmos, meaning that we’re thoroughly
material and physical. But physically interacting material things aren’t inert or dead;
they’re peerlessly creative and thus as divine as anything we can know. That divinity,
however, is repulsive, blasphemous, and just as abominable as a zombie monster’s
mockery of life.

Our ideal of life derives from the naïve intuition implanted in us by our social instinct, by
what Dennett calls the intentional stance. We wish we had an inner essence that
accounts for our suspicion that we’re not at home in nature; we feel we don’t belong
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because our human qualities are so unique. Thus, we assume we have an invisible
spirit, a precious fragment of a transcendent reality that marks us as akin to a greater
realm than the dark and primitive physical one. Evolution forces us to think socially
about each other, and so we interpret our behavior by positing minds that freely choose
and thus that possess moral value. We assume our spiritual core is immortal, because
it’s supernatural. But Darwinism reveals all of this as delusory. We are not alive in any
such respect. We’re forced to think we are, because that’s how our brain operates, by
installing mental programs that model both our external and internal worlds, simplifying
them to keep us on the straight and narrow path of fulfilling our evolutionary “functions”
(note the scare quotes). But neither are we dead in the naïve sense in which spiritless
matter was presumed to lack any divine creativity. No, we’re something worse,
something bewildering, and we’re children of an equally monstrous parent. We’re no
more personal than our god; all of us are undead monsters, conglomerations of
natural mechanisms that simulate life while lacking any metaphysical distinction
that sets us apart from whatever seems to us plainly lifeless. We personify each
other and our ultimate creator alike, but those projections are genetically- and culturally-
programmed vanities.

The word “pantheism” means that God is the universe, that everything is equally divine.
Although many theists insist on praying to the corpse, the personal god of mainstream
religions is dead, the ancient spells having little if any effect on those inspired by
modern scientists to think critically about big philosophical questions. But modern
scientists themselves re-enchant nature, divinizing it by being forced by their
methodological naturalism to preclude any supernatural creativity. If all creativity must
be natural, and the cosmic seed develops into a wondrous tree indeed, complexifying
and emerging levels of self-contained patterns like flowers growing from a stem,
eventually evolving biological life on at least one planet and probably on many more, the
universe isn’t just creative but supremely, awesomely so. That makes the universe our
god, our creator, albeit a mindless one that only seems personally alive to social
creatures like us, but which is actually in a nightmarish state of living death. Like each of
us, the cosmos is a spiritless leviathan, but one whose twists and turns create and
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destroy whole worlds and galaxies instead of just families, communities, or businesses.
Thus, the universe has at best a simulated mind, its processes triggering our social
reflex so that we’re forced to anthropomorphize nature even as we now know better.

But even were there no biological life to look on the universe in horror, nature would be
metaphysically undead since natural forces would still be diabolically creative, like
musical instruments playing a tune all on their own, with no one to breathe life into
them. Personal divinity is subjective, a mere projection by self-centered primates onto
the alien vistas to make us feel more comfortable in a humanized world. But nature’s
undead divinity is an objective fact. Natural forces alone create everything around us
and they do so inexplicably and monstrously, with no personal handler, spewing out an
infinite diversity of forms on a mind-boggling scale; creating prodigiously, thanklessly,
never tiring or second-guessing themselves, creating and destroying to make room for
more novel products, for new galaxies and untold wonders. We are such blind, childish
know-nothing blunders that we can be surrounded by such infinite creativity and then
stoop to attributing the whole universe to a guy like us who lurks somewhere offstage.
Only such clumsy braggarts like us could witness nature patently creating itself as it
goes along, and then ignore all of that and posit invisible, personal spirits (fairies,
angels, gods, etc) as the true culprits.

Anyway, Darwinism seems to me to have these dismal implications. There is no life or

nonlife in the old dualistic sense. Darwinism unifies life and death, showing that nature
simulates God, and simulated life that paradoxically occurs purely in spiritless and thus
“dead” matter is best symbolized by a zombie’s undeadness. The zombie apocalypse
has long come and gone and the zombies won. We can’t escape them, because we
never were the few remaining, uninfected heroes, remnants of a wholesome time before
the coming of the wasteland at the world’s end. There never was a titanic clash between
human and monster, between supernatural spirit and passive matter. From the
beginning, atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies and the whole panoply of cosmic forces
have been infected by the zombie plague, creating and evolving themselves just like the
God of yore was supposed to have created and shaped the universe. In our dreadful
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postmodern condition, we can worship our god only with severe irony, because we have
the same social impulses as our prescientific ancestors, but we also have the findings of
modern science, including Darwinism. Thus, our prayers should be rants within the
undead god.

Appendix: The Definition of “God”

Gods, undead and personal: gods exist but hide in plain sight, so that ironically
atheists surpass theists in their respective knowledge of the divine.

If gods are ultimate creative powers, there are two kinds of gods which are obviously
real: natural evolution and higher animal consciousness. The former is just the evident
power of matter and energy to combine in various forms which interact and develop new
forms in time, from molecules to galaxies and perhaps infinite universes. Nature’s
creativity gives rise to complex patterns throughout the cosmos, but this prodigious
power is impersonal; to be sure, like naïve children we anthropomorphize the sun, the
wind, and the rain, but that’s just projection, the over-extension of our personhood onto
the inhuman, so that we might mitigate our alienation from nature. Nevertheless, natural
forces are divinely creative. Nature is thus neither living nor dead. The natural creator
gods, named now by those modern wizards, the physicists, astronomers, biologists, and
other scientists, are undead: creative but monstrous, inhuman, terrifyingly other than
what we’re most familiar with and best capable of understanding, which is ourselves.

Consciousness is the living, personal god which creates what the philosopher Kant
called the phenomenal world by interpreting experience, beholding everything within a
worldview, applying concepts and values, identifying the natural form and thus acquiring
power over it. There’s no good reason to think that consciousness is naturally or
metaphysically prior to nature; no mind created the universe out of nothing. However,
the subjective aspect of everything in nature depends on conscious creatures. The
Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics calls this aspect the "collapse of the
wave function." The point is that were life never to have evolved anywhere, there would
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still have been stars, planets, atoms, and all the other products of undead gods, but
these products would differ from the ways we experience the world, given how our
brains happen to process information we receive from our senses. We help create the
world we experience, and to that extent we’re all divinely creative.

However, most conscious beings are doubly oppressed rather than reigning in glory.
We’re entombed within the decaying body of the undead god, that is, within the natural
totality that evolves as a result of the interplay of mindlessly creative forces. Also, most
of us are forced to occupy lowly positions in power hierarchies dominated by conscious
beings that, unlike so-called Christians, are genuinely twice born and doubly divine. The
oligarchs who tend to rule societies conquer nature by understanding their experience
within a worldview, but they also conquer their fellow conscious beings, identifying with
the undead gods as the oligarchs compete according to social versions of the principles
of natural selection. Oligarchs are thus avatars of monstrous nature, their sociopathic
depths of vice symbolizing the menacing inhumanity of natural forces which afflict us
despite our more modest divinity and limited power over nature.
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Science and the Matrix Metaphor

____________________________________________________

When the Matrix movies were at the height of their popularity some years ago,
philosophers were ecstatic because those movies popularized some canonical Western
philosophical ideas, reaching back to Descartes’ handling of the evil genius form of
skepticism, and to Plato’s Cave metaphor. Those films also have Gnostic and other
religious themes. Less well-known, I think, is that The Matrix is useful as a way of
popularizing what are now becoming scientific conventions, especially in biology and
cognitive science. In fact, the core idea of The Matrix, as opposed to the movie’s plot, is
shown to be almost literally true by those sciences. I’ve alluded a few times in my
philosophical rants to The Matrix, and so I’ll explore here the relevance of especially the
first of the three movies to Rants Within the Undead God.

First, I need to summarize the movie’s premise. The movie supposes that what most
people perceive of the world is actually a mass hallucination, a virtual reality constructed
by anti-human, artificially intelligent machines and employed to keep most people docile
so that the machines can use their dormant organic bodies for fuel. The hero, Neo,
wakes up from the dream world, into the harsher reality and fights the machines,
eventually sacrificing himself and rescuing his fellow liberated, enlightened allies.
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Genes and Mental Models

Now, there are two scientific theories that The Matrix seems to popularize, one from
biology, the other from psychology. The former is Richard Dawkins’ gene’s-eye
perspective on natural selection, and the latter is the theory of the self as the brain’s
model of its inner processes. To begin with Dawkins, he went as far as to resort to
science fiction tropes in pushing his point that natural selection can benefit the
replicators at the expense of their “vehicles” or “hosts.” On this view, that which is
primarily selected by the environment is a genetic lineage, and the phenotype--with all
of its physical and mental adaptations--piggybacks on the fitness of the genes, much as
Ayn Rand and plutocrats maintain that relatively poor people survive and enjoy many
privileges only because of the greatness of their financial superiors who create
civilization in the first place.

The second theory, found in books such as The Self Illusion by Bruce Wood, and The
Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger, is that just as the brain simplifies the external data it
receives from the senses, processing the information and producing a model of the
outer world, so too the brain simplifies and simulates its neural activity, producing what
we think of the self or the ego. The point isn’t that the external world or the self doesn’t
exist, but that neither is as we naively assume it to be. For example, even though our
eyes dart back and forth when we look at something, we assume that all of what we’re
looking at is visually clear, knowing that we could focus on any part of it at will. The focal
point of our field of vision is actually tiny compared to everything else we see at a
glance. That which falls outside the focal point is comparatively blurry, but the brain
remembers what we saw when we focused, say, on the left side of an apple, so that
when we focus on the right side, we can think of the whole apple as a crisply-delineated
object. In this way, our memories create a simplified impression, or model, of the apple,
which edits out the visual information pertaining to the apple’s blurriness.

Likewise, we have an idea of the self as a conscious, free, rational agent, but this self is
an illusion generated by the brain and serving an evolutionary function. Anyone who
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couldn’t simplify her inner or outer sense experience in these ways would be stupefied
as a result of sensory overload, and thus couldn’t actively safeguard the genes or
transmit them to the next generation. The kind of model at issue here is common in
science. For example, the physical model of DNA or of atoms is a highly simplified
representation that ignores many details, but the model might be useful for certain
purposes. A so-called ceteris paribus law is another kind of simplification, which
generalizes about what would happen in a system were everything outside the system
left out of the picture. In reality, systems interact and so a ceteris paribus law can have
exceptions. But the point is that our folk psychological myth about our nature as human
beings, which theists take to the extreme by positing the immaterial and immortal spirit,
is like these scientific models. At best, such a model is useful as a means to a certain
end, but at worst the end served by the model is detrimental to us or the model
oversimplifies the facts and becomes counterproductive (as is likely the case with
respect to the theist’s dualistic notion of the self).

Our Biomechanical Overlords

Back to The Matrix. The relevance of the genetic interpretation of evolution is that the
genes, the proteins, and the whole cellular assembly system that builds our bodies from
the moment of conception are literally machines. You might think we can say that that
assembly system, in which the genetic code is read by messenger RNA to build amino
acids, proteins, and cells, is only metaphorically a sprawling machine, since there’s no
God who designed those chemicals to perform any intended function, Creationism
notwithstanding. But this begs the question, since according to the psychological theory
at issue, neither is there any self who builds our cell phones, planes, computers, and
other devices. Our naïve conception of ourselves is undermined by science, and thus so
too is the standard notion that a literal machine depends on a designer’s intention. The
commonsensical notion of an intention, of a belief or a desire, is only a highly simplified
way of talking about part of the brain. Granted, complex patterns can emerge, but some
patterns are subjective illusions that depend more on the eye of the beholder; in other
words, a pattern can be a delusion rather than an illusion. We want to see ourselves as
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rational commanders, and so we define our technology as a slave carrying out our
command. But that may be a story we tell only within the matrix, as will become clearer
in a moment.

At any rate, as I say in “Darwinism and Nature’s Undeadness,” the updated intuition we
need to make sense of natural creativity of all kinds, including our designing of
technology and our genes’ role in building us, is the intuition of nature’s undeadness.
Anything which passes the anthropomorphist’s generous test of life is at best undead,
given naturalistic metaphysics. There are no supernatural essences of personality or
spiritual fragments of a transcendent plane. But given our preoccupation with social
relations, we’ll model as intelligent anything that looks to us as though it’s following a
plan. Thus, we model each other as having rational homunculi that control our bodies,
and most people, being theists, interpret all of nature as following God’s plan; even
atheists instinctively blame unseen gremlins, for example, when we meet with ill fortune.
Again, the naïve way of looking at this generous way of interpreting natural order is the
dualistic way, which is no longer tenable after the Darwinian revolution. Instead, we
should interpret all living and nonliving things as neither alive nor dead in the naïve
senses, but as blasphemously undead, as mere simulations of ideal, spiritual life; after
all, even nonliving things, like DNA, stars, and galaxies perform a great deal of work,
evolving, complexifying, and creating everything in nature. So according to the
Darwinian intuition, life and death are unified in the concept of the undead, and that
undeadness will seem enchanted to zombies like us who instinctively personify
everything around us.

In this way, everything in the cosmos, both that which is naively thought to be living by
way of being infused with a supernatural spirit, and that which is so thought to be
spiritless and lifeless, can look alive by merely following its routine, like a zombie
stumbling along as though anyone were at home in its brain. In particular, our machines
will look like they follow our orders, and DNA and protein synthesis will look like they’re
designed mechanisms that perform the function of building organisms. But there are no
such orders or designs--at least, not in the way we naively assume. Instead, the source
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of natural order at both the micro and the meso levels is the monstrous and mysterious
simulation of what we think of as planned work. Work is done everywhere, but there’s
no spirit in charge. True, some work in the universe is done by brains, and here we do
find emergent patterns of personal autonomy. But underlying the difference between the
brain’s self-control and DNA’s lack of personhood is the monistic, naturalistic
metaphysics which has become compulsory as a result of modern science, and
according to this metaphysics, there’s no substantial difference between a brain and
DNA with respect to their apparent vitality. Both work as undead automatons, although
brains can tell themselves self-serving (or rather, self-creating) stories to keep their
spirits up (or rather to pretend that they have spirits).

The upshot of this is that while a human brain looks more alive than the proteins
that build our bodies by receiving genetic messages, this is a matter merely of
degree, not of metaphysical kind. Metaphysically, everything that participates in the
natural order is undead, to some extent. With respect to The Matrix, this means that the
genes have the same sort of “life” as our machines, the difference being that brains
build our machines whereas no brain designs the genes. Still, if the genes and our
machines are both undead, in that they pass the test of seeming to be fine-tuned and to
work according to intentions, the movie’s narrative applies rather directly to our actual
situation. Substitute the genes and the cellular assembly process for AI machines built
by humans in the future, and you’ve still got the movie’s core idea: we’re programmed
and misled by machines to serve their undead pseudo-interests.

Specifically, the Dawkinsian biologist says that our fundamental role is to serve as
vessels for our genes. So in the Matrix, the machines use human bodies as batteries,
while in biological reality our bodies are used as vehicles to store, defend, and
propagate the microscopic machinery that sustains us. Moreover, in the movie the
dormant humans are abused by the machines and forced into the dehumanizing,
humiliating position of lying in a jelly-filled pod with tubes down their throats. In
biological reality, the genes implant in us the instinct to procreate, which is to say, to
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assume various dehumanizing and humiliating postures involving organic jellies and
tubes. The parallel, I trust, is clear.

Finally, there’s the matrix itself, the virtual reality of delusions that transfixes human
slaves. In psychological reality, the brain produces a highly simplified model of its neural
interactions, and we inhabit the space of that model; that is, we spontaneously apply
naive concepts, anthropomorphizing each other and virtually anything else, projecting
that model and reflexively retreating to it even after enlightening ourselves with respect
to our true nature, by studying biology or psychology, for example. We’re trapped in that
misleading view of ourselves, because our bodies are built--by our biomechanical
overlords, no less--to adopt that naïve viewpoint. We wear blinders that focus us on
completing tasks that aren’t even tasks in the ordinary sense, but are the end results of
our genes’ undead wanderings.

Our anthropomorphic models force us to think of each other as gods, as conscious,

free, and rational spirits, but the “lie” of those models is given by the fact that instead of
treating each other as such, we’re preoccupied with primitive urges, sexualizing and
otherwise objectifying each other, calculating breast sizes, hip-to-waste ratios, and other
signs of fertility or else the wealth and status of a reliable provider of resources for the
woman to raise a child. In the matrix of our naïve self-conception, we ignore our
animal nature and pretend that we’re godlike, whereas our predominant
behaviors, such as our secretive sex practices and our short-sighted, irrational,
and violent servitude to tribal conventions, unveil the grim truth for all to see.
Despite the obviousness of that truth, we seldom ever appreciate it or dwell on it for
long, because we are in fact trapped in a false view of the world, and we’re put in that
trap by machines that are roughly as undead as the machines we design and engineer.
Thus, the premise of The Matrix is a highly useful myth, which is to say a powerful story
that makes sense of where we are and what we should do.
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Escape from the Matrix

This brings me to the prospect of a higher self’s escape from the matrix. In the movie,
there’s a real self who underlies the illusory one in the matrix and who frees himself by
recognizing that the matrix isn’t real. Here I think science and the movie diverge. There
is no real, hidden self that either coexists with or exists prior to the brain’s mental model,
which can then overwrite that model in an act of enlightenment. However, I do think
there’s an important distinction between the enlightened and the unenlightened,
between esoteric and exoteric knowledge, between authentic people who understand
their existential situation and who heroically overcome it, and those who thrive on
delusions. The enlightened person can’t escape from being just a brain’s model of its
inner activity, but some models are aesthetically and ethically better than others.

At our best, we create an enlightened self from the rude materials of our more gene-
friendly pseudo-self, and just as some paintings are more inspiring, original, and
beautiful than others, so too some minds come closer to achieving certain ideals. Some
ideals transparently serve the routines of our undead, biochemical overlords, whereas
others are only byproducts of naturally selected traits, or what Stephen Jay Gould calls
spandrels. One such spandrel is surely the existential cosmicist’s ideal of appreciating
the full horror of our existential situation, summarized in the above section, for example,
and of taking at least a symbolic stand against that situation.

Unlike in the biblical Job’s case, there’s no one to hear our protests since our overlords
are undead, as are we, their “victims.” The price of liberation, then, is angst, alienation,
dread, and perhaps social detachment or even insanity. The brain didn’t evolve to
sustain a rebel against its makers. To become such a rebel, we have to overcome
genetic and social conditioning, and we need the courage and the creativity to invent
new and worthwhile ways of being undead, even while recognizing the tragic futility of
this spiritual, transhuman endeavor. To paraphrase Plato, those who are confined to the
matrix (or to the Cave of reflections) demonstrate their creativity mainly in the sexual
realm, dutifully producing a fresh generation of slaves, whereas the enlightened
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philosopher creates brainchildren. Ultimately, neither sort of creativity will likely matter.
Natural forces create biological patterns, but eventually such forces will replace those
patterns with something else; the universe’s evolution is monstrous--inexorable and
inhumane. But enlightenment is the best we can do; confronting the philosophical
implications of modern science, and living with dignity in light of that accursed
knowledge is, to use Nietzsche’s word, nobler than the alternative of sleepwalking with
a biochemical leash/noose wrapped around our neck.

A liberal secular humanist will protest that philosophy is irrelevant, that all that matters is
pragmatically applying science and technology to “raise our standard of living.” You
wouldn’t know it from the scientistic technocracy implied by this protest, but the
humanist has a burden of justifying the values that set the standard of living. How then
shall the humanist proceed, by polling a population, asking what its members want to do
with their life, and taking their answer as gospel? Will even the humanist be satisfied by
that grossly fallacious plan of action? Or how about deferring to the oligarchs that run
the system managed by the technocratic liberal? Should the most vicious among us
who rise to the pinnacle of a dominance hierarchy be trusted to dictate our ethical and
aesthetic standards? Surely not! No, this is where enlightenment is a prerequisite even
of the anti-philosophical liberal’s busywork. Those who feign pragmatism still need to
justify their goals, even as they preoccupy themselves with devising more and more
efficient means of achieving them. And enlightened people will have ethically and
aesthetically superior goals to those of the deluded folks who are mesmerized by the
matrix.
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God and Science: The Ironic Theophany

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What has science done to God? Atheists would like to think that science has made not
just theism but all myths obsolete. But neither atheists nor scientists need be such
philistines. What scientific discoveries have done is to turn the page on theistic fictions,
leaving us with just blank pages. Postmodernists could use a good story, one that gives
meaning to the world science has shown us and that leads us in a worthwhile direction.
I think this postmodern myth can be found in a certain unsettling vision of the death of
God. Before I come to that, however, I’d like to go over some highlights of the Western
history of science’s relationship to God.

Medieval Animism

Let’s begin with the medieval picture of God. The fall of the Roman Empire brought to
medieval Europe chaos, ignorance, disease, and thus infantilized the desperate
masses. The socialism of feudal society, in the lower classes’ dependence on the
largesse of the decadent aristocrats, was pragmatic as opposed to arising out of
adherence to the New Testament. Oligarchies were needed to maintain a fragile social
order, and the desperation to avoid the complete removal of the social barriers against
the wilderness, that is, against the natural forces that are opposed to life, led also to an
ironic self-indulgence. The masses that lived in squalor, eating gruel and owning
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practically nothing nevertheless compensated for their poverty by settling on a naïvely

anthropocentric worldview.

The Church comforted medieval Christians with children’s tales, springing from
Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotelianism and paganized Judaism (Catholic Christianity).
Aquinas replaced Aristotle’s impersonal Prime Mover with the Christian God, and thus
simplified Aristotle’s teleological metaphors. According to Aristotle, every event has a
purpose, a so-called final cause, and thus nature can be explained as though it were
intelligently designed even though it’s not; instead, everything in nature has a destiny
given its way of being attracted to the Prime Mover, to a sort of cosmic magnet that
starts and ends all natural processes. Aristotle’s naturalism thus anticipated Darwin’s
zombification of nature. Aquinas literalized and personified Aristotle’s undead teleology,
since the Christian God is not just a person but literally a particular human being named
Jesus. Aquinas thus enchanted the undead leviathan, infusing the undying corpse--
which displays signs of monstrous pseudolife--with actual life. In the medieval view,
instead of the mere appearance of mind throughout nature’s evolution of patterns, there
are good and evil spirits animating all changes so that the cosmos becomes a super-
organism, a colossal living body made up of a host of other living things.

And thus the fear of the wilderness was neutralized by rampant animism, by literalistic
Christianity’s bastardization of Aristotelian naturalism. Medieval Europe lacked the
economic prosperity that generates the arrogance needed to study nature objectively,
because naturalism opens the floodgates to horror and angst, which are the authentic
emotional responses to our real position in nature. The peasants were like homeless
children who needed reassurance that even though the pax romana was no more, God
was still with them--through Jesus and the Church, to be sure, but also throughout the
whole world: even when a peasant is forced daily to trudge through mud, a sorry
spectacle depicted so vividly in the movie, Monty Python and The Holy Grail, God is
present in the purpose of that filth. In medieval Christianity, God is omnipresent, not
directing from afar but animating everything from within by means of spiritual extensions
of himself. It’s hard to see how this animism could have comforted anyone during the
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Black Death, but the alternative was surely worse: at least if there are demonic forces
that cause the evil in the world, those forces can be overcome in familiar ways, by social
alliances and negotiations through prayer. Evil creatures can be reasoned with and thus
rehabilitated or else punished.

The Modern Machine

Still, the Plague wiped out around a third of the Christian population and discredited the
Church, since the clergy couldn’t cure the victims or explain the causes. Eventually, the
remaining population prospered because of the decline in competition. At the same
time, there was an influx of classical and eastern ideas, thanks to the rediscovery and
proliferation of ancient texts. The revelation that such advanced art was possible in the
ancient past shamed medieval Christians and led to the humanist movement, which is
to say to greater pride in our secular capacity to lead rich and fulfilling lives. The
merchants wanted to show off their new wealth with both outward and inward signs of
their status. Thanks to their patronage, niches were thus opened up for advances in art,
philosophy and science. In effect, the easing of competition in the present, due to the
Black Death, created a new competition between the present and the past, as those
who for centuries had suckled at the Church’s teat like terrified babies, jealously vied
with ghosts of the ancient Greeks for cultural supremacy. And so the Italian
Renaissance led to the Reformation of the Church and to the Scientific Revolution.

Comparing medieval and modern rationalism is instructive. The medieval rationalists

were the scholastics, who were pragmatic centrists much like postmodern American
liberals. The scholastics wanted to maintain the status quo, arguing implicitly that
without the Church, Western civilization would have ended after the collapse of ancient
Rome. And so the scholastics bent reason in the service of that goal, to defend the
Church at all costs. (Likewise, postmodern liberals can no longer seriously formulate
their policies in terms of normative progress, because a postmodernist has no faith-
based myths and thus no inspired ideals. Thus, these liberals are technocratic systems-
managers, like President Obama, and the system they manage tends to be oligarchic,
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that is, profoundly anti-liberal--for the majority, at least.) Of course, the scholastics’
pragmatic argument was shown to rest on a false dichotomy, since social and
intellectual progress did occur in the modern period.

By contrast, modern rationalists were devoted to their methods, to their algorithms, not
to any institution. These rationalists were both highly conservative and liberal: they
trusted only what their senses directly showed them or what could be logically or
mathematically inferred, but they were more willing than their afflicted predecessors,
than the scholastics and their peasant charges, to follow their inquiries wherever their
senses and their reasoning took them, even if this meant peaking behind the mask we
place on nature’s monstrous visage, thus threatening social stability and sanity.
Because of the naturalistic fallacy, no prescriptions are licensed by empiricist rationality,
especially if you’re assuming the modern, Cartesian dualism between facts and values.
The senses reveal only factual things and events, not goodness or badness, and there’s
no alchemy that transmutes factual premises into moral laws. Thus, modern rationalists
drained the life from the medieval super-organism and reduced the Thomistic “final
cause,” the natural event’s purpose, to the meaningless mechanistic cause. At least,
this is what they did in their exoteric work; on the surface, then, nature looked every bit
as cold and calculating as the scientists' functional sociopathy in their objective pursuit
of the truth.

Alas, the vaunted modern rationalists were hindered in their progressive labours by their
human brains, which instinctively use metaphors to understand the unfamiliar in terms
of the familiar. And so the universal metaphor of the super-organism was replaced with
that of the clockwork mechanism, and deistic speculations on the intentions of the
intelligent designer were confined to whisperings within modern esoteric cults, like
Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. After all, if rational methods are so successful in
discovering how natural processes work, then nature must indeed work, and a machine
is just the sort of thing that’s intelligently designed; moreover, the more intelligible
nature is, the more we wanton anthropomorphizers are tempted to share the misery of
being human with the impersonal cosmos, projecting our idiosyncrasies onto its undead
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evolutions. Modern scientists thus cogitated to follow the clues left behind in the cosmic
machine, hoping to deduce the plan of its maker, like Sherlock Holmes tracking a
demented killer.

The upshot is that modernists banished God from nature without killing him, and
although they exorcised the spirits from the cosmos, they didn’t recognize nature as an
undead monstrosity, as neither a living thing nor the designed product of one, but as a
blasphemous simulation of creativity and rational order that mocks the values of secular
humanism. There was a transition from theism to deism; God went underground so that
we could have our turn in the limelight.

Postmodern Pantheism

Modernists bathed in that light until the postmodern period, which to my reckoning
began in the early twentieth century with Einstein’s overturning of the Newtonian theory
of space. In classical physics, space and time are absolutely unchanging, which leaves
room for God’s omniscience and omnipotence: the dimensions of space and time are
like windows through which God could see and sustain absolutely everything in nature.
Einstein showed that space and time must instead be relative to the speed of light,
meaning that these dimensions change depending on how fast the observer is
travelling. So much for taking in the universe at a single, divine glance! And for Newton,
an object’s motion is deterministic, meaning that its causes and effects are local: there’s
always an intervening mechanism between cause and effect, as opposed to any
“spooky action at a distance.” This was the point of the clockwork metaphor and the
reason why God had to be banished from nature. But in quantum mechanics (Bell’s
Theorem), reality is nonlocal: because of quantum entanglement, a particle’s properties
in one galaxy can affect those of a particle in a distant galaxy with no mechanism
whatsoever connecting the particles. Again, in the Newtonian picture, we can calculate
motion with certainty, because nature is a machine that doesn’t depend on our
observation of it, but in quantum mechanics we can calculate only the likelihood of
fundamental events, because observation is bound up with those events. There is no
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preset reality, with objective attributes that obtain even when no one’s taking a
measurement, or if there is an underlying reality, it seems to be an undivided whole as
in Eastern mysticism.

Just as theism had to be replaced by deism, because modern scientists substituted faith
in the Church for faith in the rational method, and that method depicts the world as a
lifeless but self-determining machine, so now the sociopathic deity who builds the
machine and then stalks it like a voyeur must be exchanged for the undead god. The
upshot of postmodern physics is that the world is so alien to our ordinary conceptions
that anthropocentric metaphysics has become plainly self-indulgent. The universe is not
a machine, so it has no intelligent designer. Nevertheless, the world is hardly inert:
everything a personal God could do to the universe, the universe does to itself;
thus, the universe is god enough. But this postmodern pantheism is ironic and
bittersweet, because although we become surrounded by the divine just by being in the
midst of natural happenings, the god that’s actually omnipresent is a terrifyingly undead
abomination that mindlessly creates, thus working towards no preplanned end, evolving
for no reason at all and mocking the stories we tell about our supernatural essence of
personhood. When the universe requires no mind to evolve galaxies, why does a
human speck need a spirit to move from here to there?

To speak of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is to say that our intuitions are quaint.
We evolved to succeed in a social setting that requires that we outwit our competitors,
by divining their mental state and predicting their behaviour on that basis. We try to get
the most mileage we can out of that mental trick, since our life-preserving traits consist
only of mental tricks and our opposable thumbs. Thus, we turn our predictive powers
not just on each other but onto the rest of the world, positing mechanisms and hidden
dimensions in addition to a menagerie of gods and paranormal creatures. Postmodern
physics seems, though, to portend the end of all of that.

According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, which I take to be the dominant one

among physicists, there is no deep reality of the constituents of matter beyond the one
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that pops into place when measured. This metaphysically idealistic interpretation of
quantum mechanics follows naturally from modern positivism. When you foreswear
speculation and focus on what your senses “directly” show you, you’re bound to deny
the existence of anything nonmental, since you can no longer justify talk of an
independent cause of your sensations. This was the thrust of the early 18th C.
philosopher George Berkeley’s objection to empiricism. The positivist is interested in
exact knowledge, because that’s what’s needed to increase our technological power
(over nothing, once matter loses its independence). Thus, the Copenhagen
Interpretation is philosophically anti-philosophical, privileging operational knowledge,
which defines the elements of matter in terms of the procedure needed to measure
them, and whatever can be done with that knowledge, while deprecating speculation
and its potential benefits. Of course, the positivist’s scientific values can’t themselves be
scientifically justified.

Still, however expected a minimalistic, mind-centered metaphysics might be on the

basis of empiricist epistemology, the fact is that even those who might want to speculate
on the causes of quantum weirdness are unable to do so in the ordinary way, by using
metaphors to compare the unfamiliar with the familiar. Thus, even were there a deep,
mind-independent reality, we wouldn’t be well-positioned to understand what it might be,
because its quantum clues would be so different from our everyday world that our
metaphors would be laughable. This is why physicists say you need to understand the
mathematics to really grasp the quantum world; our natural languages are too intuitive.
(And to be upfront, I do not understand that math.)

In any case, the macroscopic world that emerges from quantum leaps is neither a living
thing nor the product of one; instead, that world is sufficiently lifelike that even its
undead phenomena can provoke the vanity of hapless creatures such as us, so that we
in the West have had to pass through millennia of theistic and deistic
misunderstandings before we’ve finally reached the point at which we can prove not just
nature’s undead divinity but our embarrassing ineptness at appreciating where we
stand. Quantum mechanics proves, among other things, that we’re alienated by the
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limits of what we’ve evolved to do best: biologically speaking, we malfunction when we

pretend that we’re more than animals, that we can apply our evolved skills to the
unnatural task of fathoming quantum reality, and that we’ll necessarily continue to
succeed biologically as a consequence. Far from flourishing thanks to modern science,
we may in the longer run fulfill the curse of reason and lose our sanity after staring too
long at the quantum abyss. We may be too curious for our good.

A Myth for Our Time

One way to endure the postmodern clash between nature’s alien reality and our
vaunted mastery of the Earth, is to face the worst-case scenario, to imagine the most
dishonourable situation and then to test our ability to pick up the pieces of our self-
respect and creatively reconcile ourselves with the imagined possibility. This is in fact
the Nietzschean attitude towards myths. When Nietzsche said that time might be
cyclical and that every moment might be replayed infinitely many times, he wasn’t
offering a rationally justified theory that was meant to compel belief. Instead, he was
trying to test your mettle, to ensure you’re not deluding yourself by attending only to
self-serving ideas.

I think Philipp Mainlander’s idea of the world’s creation as God’s literal suicide is a most
suitable candidate for such a myth. Mainlander’s vision of God is psychologically
plausible, merely following through on the theistic metaphor, whereas mainstream
monotheistic portrayals of God are stilted, incoherent, or incomplete as works of fiction.
Everything we know about the personal concentration of power implies that God would
not be benevolent or fatherly, but would become corrupted and insane as a result of his
isolation. By itself, this strength of Mainlander’s myth warrants that the myth should be
taken seriously--again, not as a scientific theory, nor even as a rational proposal for how
the world might be, but as a work of stimulating fiction. At their best, fiction and art
generally expand our awareness, enrich our mental associations, and fortify us in rough
times. Postmodernity doesn’t bode well for advanced civilizations. I suggest that some
philosophical work is needed to give us a fighting chance to emerge from this period
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intact. We must put aside childish things since they should comfort us no more,
and make friends with the monster that lurks under the bed. We must bid farewell
to our toy gods and if we still feel the urge to worship, we should pray to the god
that strides naked all around us, that creates and destroys all things, that is no
mere mental projection or respecter of our pitiful conceits. Nature is god. That god
isn’t alive, so our prayers will go unheard, but nature is undead and so we should match
that uncanny fact with an outrage of our own: we should worship not by groveling before
a magnified image of the most corrupt among us, which is the oligarch, but by ranting
songs of mockery at the void, proclaiming that we know where we stand in the grand
scheme and are unafraid.

But that’s just a poetic gloss on Darwinian science. Nature’s undead divinity is real. You
can strip away my figures of speech and the horrifying facts will remain. But as for the
needed work of fiction, we should appreciate that Mainlander’s idea is physically as well
as psychologically plausible. Take, for example, the Big Bang Theory, which explains
nature’s origin from a gravitational singularity. This singularity is a point of infinite
density and temperature which can’t be described by general relativity or quantum
mechanics. The singularity is thus miraculous as opposed to natural. The Big Bang is
thus consistent with saying that a transcendent being, subsisting beyond spacetime and
which we’re forced to understand by employing flawed metaphors, somehow caused
the singularity to expand and become what we think of as natural. For instance, the
singularity could be that transcendent being itself or else it could stand for the
miraculous technique used by that being. More relevantly, the singularity could be the
point at which God transformed himself into nature, into his undying corpse, thus
guaranteeing his eventual extinction through natural devolution. Of course, none of
these statements is scientific or even particularly rational; rather, what I’m saying here is
obviously speculative, the point being to tell a good story, to elevate the discourse to the
level of salutary fiction/myth. And my point is about the story’s plausibility and
consistency, not about providing evidence that the myth is empirically true.
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Or take dark energy and the possibility of the Big Rip. According to modern cosmology,
there’s a force called dark energy that counteracts gravity, pushing the universe apart. If
that force accelerates over time, becoming what’s called phantom energy, it could
cause the Big Rip, which is the absolute destruction of everything in the universe, from
stars to atoms. Again, this is consistent with the metaphysical speculation that nature is
God’s corpse, that God intended to annihilate himself by turning himself into something
that could be completely destroyed. It turns out, then, that there’s an actual force that
may be fulfilling that purpose.

Finally, take the quantum mechanical principle of nonlocality. If quantum reality is a

unified whole, as in Parmenides’ monism, this could reflect the unity of its transcendent
source in God. According to the monotheistic myth, there’s a single, somehow personal
being who is excruciatingly supreme in terms of his knowledge and power. That
uniqueness of God motivates Creation, not because of God’s generosity or grace, but
because divinity is intolerable: the reason God creates something other than himself
even though God is already supposed to be perfect, is that perfect knowledge and
power are perfectly corrupting and self-destructive. And God wouldn’t be creating
something else so much as transforming himself into something that could be utterly
destroyed, which is to say a material plane made up of patterns that can dissipate and
parts that can be separated until there’s nothing left. God’s death would proceed by
transmuting his infinite being into every possible natural combination of elements,
running through and extinguishing each of the configurations until there’s nothing left. In
the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics, every quantum possibility is
actualized in some universe, although presumably not every universe is driven by
phantom energy leading to a Big Rip. Perhaps, then, subatomic matter is unified
because everything in nature, in the undying corpse that evolves new ways to destroy
itself and so completes God’s tragic demise, derives from that single transcendent being
whose uniqueness caused the Big Bang. Still, natural complexification and evolution are
mindless, serving no purpose, because even though they may work towards the Big
Rip, thus in fact fulfilling an insane God's intention, that God would be dead and so the
meaning of his corpse would have died with him. For example, living things within the
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undead god would be free to modify nature to suit our own purposes, perhaps even
reversing the process of decay or at any rate interpreting nature according to our
ideals.

Now, theology can always be shown to be trivially consistent with science, because
theological statements are unfalsifiable and can be arbitrarily altered to suit the facts;
they’re not meant to be scientific and they’re limited mainly by the imagination. But there
are also ethical and aesthetic standards of myth-making. Myths can be more or less
emotionally powerful, depending on whether the story they tell resonates with a certain
audience. And my point is that I’d like to hear a good story, one that makes sense of the
postmodern world and that tells us what we ought to do now. From medieval Europe to
the postmodern global civilization, science, the cutting edge of accursed reason, has
ironically pushed only the false God further and further out of existence while also
putting the spotlight on the real divinity. From childish Christian theism, which has been
out of fashion for several hundred years, to modern deism which turns God the loving
father into God the coy voyeur, science hasn’t been a force for pure atheism. No,
science has cast out only pretenders to the throne, disposing of our vain and incoherent
anthropomorphisms. There is no personal divinity anywhere in the natural universe. No
personal God acts within nature, nor is nature an artifact produced by such a being.
Instead, what science has steadily revealed is that nature is itself impersonally
divine. Nature creates its infinite patterns by complexification and evolution; the undead
god decays. Technoscientific progress takes us inexorably to a theophany of the
true god: as we think more and more about what’s real and as we investigate how
nature works, we learn to see the world for what it is. But reason is accursed,
because what we learn is that nature’s mindless creativity is an abomination to our
dualistic and anthropocentric mindset.

So much for science’s contribution; science has shown us the true, eerie and creepy
god, the physical world that simulates life in its scramble to etch more and more novel
patterns into itself. How can art complement science in that respect? By telling a good
story, I submit, by deriving inspiration from science, to shape culture with a viable,
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unembarassing postmodern myth. I believe Mainlander’s melancholy speculation makes

for just such an edifying tale. We deserve no New Age happy-talk, nor need we settle
for stale theistic propaganda for oligarchy, nor should we pretend that secular
humanistic philistinism is emotionally fulfilling or uplifting. We need a master metaphor
that alerts us to what’s really going on and that instructs us on how to respond. We
should be like the God who’s a mainstay of our imagination, by effecting our drawn-out
suicide, living more or less ascetically, renouncing the delusions and corruptions that
would fell even the greatest being, and by facing our existential predicament with grim
humour.
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New Atheist and Spiritual Atheist in Dialogue

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New Atheist: What’s this I hear about you calling yourself a “spiritual atheist”? Are you a
recent convert from some religion and can’t bring yourself all the way to a rational
standpoint? Or maybe you’re a philosophical fellow who has to muddy all waters to
leave work for academics of your ilk.

Spiritual Atheist: Neither. I grew up in a secular household and although I do read

philosophy, I’m no partisan defender of its current academic form. On the contrary, for
all the social good professional philosophers presently do, they might as well close up
shop.

NA: Ah, then you must be a closet mystic, an accommodationist who thinks religion and
science can live happily together, because there are some mysteries that science or
reason more generally will never solve. In other words, you’re addicted to woo.

Spirituality as Woo

SA: Well, that’s a lot of loaded rhetoric. What do you mean by “woo,” for example?
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NA: Just what I said: you want to preserve mysteries by using obscure notions that are
supposed to build bridges between religion and science.

SA: More loaded rhetoric and ad hominem. Even if I were “addicted” to Mystery,
shouldn’t you feel embarrassed as a so-called rationalist to stoop to such a postmodern
fallacy, confusing the psychological origin of an idea with its epistemic merit?

NA: Fine, then, ditch the rhetoric! Sheesh! Who says the debate about atheism can’t be
entertaining?

SA: Is that the purpose of New Atheism, to entertain theists so they’ll stop demonizing
atheists? Is New Atheism just a media-driven shouting match that sells books for a
handful of popular atheists, following the same rules of infotainment as postmodern
American politics?

NA: Hardly, we’ve got logic and science on our side, as you should know.

SA: Then why not try defining “woo” again and this time without the personal attack?
You’ll find that I’m entertained more by a thorough investigation of ideas than by a
trumped-up partisan conflict.

NA: Fine, woo is the false mystical notion that human reason and sense experience are
limited, but that we have other modes of empirical knowledge, such as intuition, self-
consciousness (as in meditation), or--heaven help me!--divine revelation.

SA: That’s more constructive. First off, a quick semantic matter to avoid unnecessary
confusion: you’re begging the question when you speak of “empirical” knowledge, since
that sort’s defined as being scientific, relying on observation or experiment. So I assume
the question is whether the woo practitioner has independent access to knowledge of
some facts in general, not specifically to scientific knowledge such as knowledge of how
things work.
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NA: Fair enough, but woo is supposed to be a matter of ultimate Truth, not just
mundane knowledge.

SA: Understood. So let’s take your definition’s first part. Do you really think human
reason and observation, that is, logic and science, are unlimited? Are we potentially
omniscient thanks to those cognitive powers?

NA: I suppose it’s possible the universe contains things we could never understand.

SA: Just possible and not probable? Sure, modern science has progressed
tremendously, but science itself tells us how limited we are: our cognitive faculties serve
humble evolutionary functions and so it would be miraculous were everything in the
universe to be understandable by our mammalian brainpower.

NA: OK, so reason and observation are limited ways of understanding things. But that
doesn’t mean we have some third kind of knowledge, whether limited or unlimited. Woo
enters the picture when someone pretends to have genuine knowledge, whereas
they’re merely employing fancy rhetoric that exploits people’s gullibility.

SA: I suspect that your point here reduces to a semantic one having to do with your
definitions of “observation” and “reason.” Mystics claim to discover metaphysical truth
through intense self-awareness. Does a mystic’s meditation count as observation? And
does philosophical speculation count as a rational exercise? If so, many of those you’d
call guilty of the egregious sin of woo--apart from some paranormal pseudoscientists
and other charlatans--are actually fellow rationalists, given the extended definitions.

NA: Neither mystical experience nor philosophical speculation provides us with

knowledge that’s anywhere near as reliable as scientific methods.
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SA: Ah, but now you’ve moved the goalposts to your epistemic standard of reliability. Do
you mean to say that all of our beliefs that can be true or false should be reliable, that if
we’re not certain about something, because we lack a strict scientific theory or the
ability to measure the phenomenon with great accuracy, we should remain agnostic
about it?

NA: That would seem the most rational course of action.

SA: Maybe, but unfortunately we’re not so rational--again, as biology and the cognitive
sciences themselves have shown. Have you forgotten that you’re only a mammal after
all? That your brain has evolved to make snap decisions for the practical purpose of
keeping you alive in tight spots? That our species has survived largely because of our
boundless curiosity, which causes us to indulge in speculation, to comfort ourselves
with guesses as to hidden meanings, to creatively posit values, to project our biases
onto the nonhuman aspects of nature?

NA: Yes, we’re largely irrational animals, but rationality is my highest ideal.

SA: Really? Pray tell me whether you’re fully rational when you’re making love to your
wife.

NA: Excuse me?

SA: You heard me, and let’s not fall back now on politically correct conventions of
allowable discourse. Your resort to modesty at this point would already indicate that you
fall well short of being perfectly rational.

NA: I already conceded I’m not perfectly rational! And no, a rational frame of mind would
utterly defeat the point of lovemaking. Happy now?
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SA: So you don’t hound the bulk of sexually active humanity for engaging in woo with
respect to its romantic endeavors, reserving that criticism for mystics and other spiritual
folk. Sounds like cherry-picking, doesn’t it? The sort of double standard enjoyed by the
Christian literalist who chooses which parts of the Bible to accept, confusing her
personal preference with a God-given hermeneutic principle.

NA: I don’t cherry-pick anything. Sexuality is highly useful. Mystical gibberish isn’t.

SA: Nonsense! First of all, you rationalize sexuality when you pretend that people have
sex because of its utility. Sex is often practiced because it’s fun, it comforts us, and so
on. Second, it’s undeniable that for millennia the mystical core of religions has had
comparable psychological benefits. Thus, I say again that you’re working with a double
standard, cherry-picking like a fundamentalist; as an atheist, you’ll want to quit doing
that.

NA: Even if there’s a double standard here, it’s hardly an arbitrary one. Sex is more
conventional than mysticism, at least in modern societies.

SA: Again, errant nonsense! First, even in modern societies sex is usually acceptable
only in the abstract and on the surface. You’ll note that most people, yourself included,
are embarrassed to publicly deal with our sexuality. Sex itself is kept private. Deep
down, then, we modernists are as ashamed of sex as are puritanical religious
fundamentalists. Second, if so-called mystical woo were socially unacceptable, there
would hardly be any sin here which the New Atheist feels the need to condemn. No, it’s
surely because the New Age section of bookstores, for example, is often as large as the
science section that the New Atheist is so ready to pounce on woo. But this means that
what you call mystical gibberish is socially accepted even in sophisticated and wealthy
modern societies. For pity’s sake, just look at Oprah’s popularity!

NA: Alright, then, you’ve made your point. Rationality may not be my ultimate, exclusive
ideal.
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SA: And perhaps you shouldn’t be so judgmental of how people achieve their peace of
mind, as long as they don’t harm anyone in the process. Sex is fine despite its
irrationality, and perhaps so is woo, that is, the deriving of some kind of psychological
benefit from appreciating presumed grand mysteries. Again, as long as mystics don’t
retard scientific progress, you might refrain from arbitrarily condemning one form of
irrationality while indulging in your own form.

NA: I suppose that would be reasonable--although New Age mystics have indeed dulled
people’s appreciation of science in places like the United States.

SA: Yes, I’m sure you’re right. Luckily, my form of spirituality--what you called woo--is a
much more private and science-friendly affair.

NA: Well, now that we’re clear on the possibility of valuable forms of irrationality, what
exactly is your brand of woo?

SA: Actually, before we discuss it I’m afraid I’ll have to insist that you refrain from using
that word, “woo,” now that I’ve shown you the problem with your underlying double
standard. You understand, I insist this for your benefit, not mine: I’m just trying to
prevent someone from mistaking you for a type of religious zealot.

NA: Very gracious and condescending of you. Call it what you like then, but what on
Earth is your spiritual atheism?

Secular Humanism vs Existential Cosmicism

SA: My spirituality begins with an appreciation of the likelihood that we’ll remain ignorant
of important matters due to our mammalian nature. For me, this mysterianism, as
philosophers call it, goes hand in hand with a sobering appraisal of our position in the
natural universe. And so, in effect, I combine something like H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmicism
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with melancholy existentialism, which gives me a value system for dealing with
philosophical questions, but also for coping psychologically with life’s travails.

NA: Why call any of that “spiritual”?

SA: We needn’t get hung up on words. Perhaps you’re right and my use of that word
could be misleading in this context; indeed, “spirituality” has sloppy sentimental
connotations that I’d disown. However, the definition I have in mind is actually just a
standard one, according to which spirituality has to do with religion or with the sacred,
that is, with ultimate values. I suspect that everyone holds something to be sacred
rather than profane in that sense. For me, what’s sacred is the darkly comedic vision of
our life’s absurdity, the horror of our tragedy. In a Nietzschean manner, I seek to
transmute that horror into rapture, finding meaning even in our very worst-case
scenario.

NA: Well, then, if I understand what you mean by your “spiritual atheism,” your
spirituality conflicts with what you’d call mine, namely with my secular humanistic
philosophy. For me, we find value in life through the liberal institutions of democracy
and capitalism which raise the standard of living, thanks to the engine of modern
science. Freedom of thought and action and the secular pursuit of happiness dignify
human life. And wallowing in existential misery can only be counterproductive, not to
mention immature, that is, juvenile and romantic. Frankly, you should grow up, work
hard, and find ultimate value in your friends, family, work, and material rewards. Atheists
should be humanists in that sense. Indeed, existential or cosmicist atheism would be
politically disastrous in our war with the worst of religions. Were atheism such a
bummer, our ranks would dwindle.

SA: Lots to chew on there. You’re saying, I think, that our highest purpose is to be
happy, and that happiness is achieved by participating productively in society, by
maintaining social connections, and by enjoying the material benefits of scientific
progress.
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NA: Roughly, yes.

SA: In that case, while I agree that most atheists likely think that way, and also that for
strategic purposes, the dark, existential and cosmicist implications of philosophical
naturalism should be kept hidden from some people, I deny that secular humanism is as
respectable as the spiritual atheism I espouse. Indeed, I’d distinguish between what are
typically the exoteric and esoteric forms of value systems that separate the sacred from
the profane. Your secular humanism is for exoteric consumption, while existential
cosmicism is atheism’s higher, esoteric form.

NA: What do you mean by “higher, esoteric form”?

SA: I mean that even secular humanists should understand, if only subliminally, that
wrestling with the revolutionary consequences of what Nietzsche called the death of
God, instead of falling for a substitute, secular religion that’s just as delusive as any
ancient theistic tradition, is nobler, more heroic.

NA: Oh dear, you’re going to equate secular humanism with religion? And I suppose
you’ll declare that scientific rationality is just a form of religious faith. Postmodern drivel!

SA: No, like I said, I appreciate the strength of scientific methods, since it’s those very
methods that burst so many of our bubbles, and what’s sacred for me is the prospect of
coping in an aesthetically pleasing way with our humiliation at the hands of scientists.
Again, we needn’t get hung up on the use of words. But if we use Durkheim’s broad
theory of religion, as a social structure for implementing a distinction between the
sacred and the profane, or for upholding the group’s ultimate values, then yes, secular
humanism surely counts as a (nontheistic) religion.
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NA: Fine, call it what you like. And so you’re saying that secular humanism is a cheap
substitute for Christianity or Islam, a delusion that’s more compatible with modern
science than are those anachronistic ideologies?

SA: There’s nothing cheap about it. The modern values that emerged from the Scientific
Revolution--the Renaissance values of genius and originality and the Enlightenment
celebration of reason and individual liberty--were themselves products of genius: the
greatest European minds rose to the challenge of replacing God-centered culture with
an explicitly anthropocentric one. They could hardly have done otherwise once the
Church lost the political power to control what Europeans believed. As wealth shifted
from the Church to merchants, and as the elites came to admire artistic creativity and
reason more than tradition and faith, a value system was needed to accommodate the
fact that the sacred could no longer be considered supernatural. Modernists developed
just such a convenient worldview with myths of our great freedom and rationality.

NA: You can call them myths, but the superiority of capitalism and democracy to other
social systems is obvious. By harnessing scientific methods in the research and
development phases of satisfying our desires with material products, businesses
tangibly elevate our standard of living by building on well-established facts of how the
world actually works. Just compare the average economic power of the stifling
dictatorships in the Middle East or North Korea with that of the more modern G8
countries. Do you really think that for all our social ills, modern secular nations are as
deluded as theocracies?

SA: There’s no denying the greater wealth and power of modern societies compared to
premodern ones, but you’re assuming that economic success precludes delusion.
That’s dubious. Marx was likely closer to the truth when he said that all societies
embrace ideologies that serve the interests of the members who have the most
economic power, whether those members be dictators or free-thinking capitalists.
Hapless theocrats revere their Leader for his divine wisdom or his inheritance of power
from God, while modernists celebrate individual liberty and material wealth because
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those are the values of the vicious, willful competitors who rise to the top of the modern,
social Darwinian free-for-all.

NA: But you’re missing the point: everyone would embrace the values of personal liberty
and material wealth if given the chance, because those values generate more stable,
secure and peaceful societies. People immigrate from dictatorships to democracies, not
the other way around.

SA: You might be right that everyone wants to be happy in the primordial sense of living
in peace and security with those in their personal social network. This raises two
questions. First, does modernism most effectively achieve that end? Second, should
happiness be our highest goal? Let’s start with the first question. You say that
capitalism and democracy, the organs of modernism, raise the standard of living.
However, this assumes a materialistic measure of success. Even if we adopt that
measure, there’s the possibility of severe blowback, whether from terrorist uprisings
from the have-not parts of the world or from the destruction of the ecosystem, which
may threaten everyone’s chance for prosperity. But put that aside. It’s possible to enjoy
everything that money can buy and still be miserable, suffering ennui and spiritual
emptiness, holding nothing sacred because modern society surrounds you with
transparently false idols that are rendered such by modern freedom of thought itself.
Modernists may be prosperous, but they’re cursed with uniquely modern afflictions,
including even mental disorders like anxiety and depression.

NA: Alright, for the sake of argument I’ll grant that modernism generates a form of
suffering that’s left out of the economist’s measurement of success. Is your criticism of
secular humanists, then, that they’re less happy than they think?

SA: That would be slightly paradoxical. No, my criticism is that the modern ideology of
secular humanism makes for an admirable substitute religion that relocates the sacred
from heaven to somewhere on Earth or at least in nature, but that this religion is
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psychologically unsustainable for those who resort to shaky myths instead of grappling
with the existential consequences of worshipping nature.

NA: I hardly worship nature.

SA: Oh no? You refrain from killing even those people you despise, because you hold
human nature--our intelligence, freedom, consciousness--to be precious and indeed
sacred. You no doubt regard the cosmos that’s investigated by scientists as beautiful.
Secular humanists may not take up the trappings and ceremonies of religious worship--
although some of them do--but they do revere things in nature. Indeed, assuming we all
hold something to be sacred, naturalists could hardly do otherwise than satisfy their
desire to meet something worthy of intense love, respect, and awe, by turning to the
only domain they think exists.

NA: Fine, have it your way, but where’s the delusion in secular humanism? Surely the
belief that murder is wrong isn’t as wildly mistaken as the belief that a person created
the universe in six days.

SA: Tell me again why murder is wrong.

NA: Humans have rights that other animals don’t have, because we have special
abilities. Not only do we feel pain, but we’re sentient and self-guiding; we’re aware of
ourselves and can intelligently act to further our interests. So interfering with someone’s
attempt to work out her own life, especially by killing her and thus irrevocably eliminating
that capacity for self-direction, is wrong.

SA: Unfortunately, cognitive science is showing that we’re not as self-determining as

was preached in the screeds of Enlightenment individualists. There’s no room for the
commonsense kind of freewill in a natural, ultimately physical universe. But even if we
were able to govern ourselves, albeit to some limited and likely illusory extent, why
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should that process be allowed to continue? Why respect every individual’s ability to
direct her life?

NA: Why respect it? Well, for one thing, it’s highly rare and thus special and valuable.

SA: But surely no sooner than you finished uttering that statement, you saw its fallacy.
Why should something’s rarity make it valuable? The rarity of diamonds makes them
economically valuable, but that means only that there aren’t enough diamonds to satisfy
everyone’s actual demand for them, which discrepancy raises their price. But the
deeper questions would be why everyone wants a diamond in the first place and
whether that desire is justifiable. Economic value is neutral regarding the merit of our
desires. Diamonds are rare, but that rarity alone doesn’t justify everyone’s interest in
owning them. Likewise, everyone wants to decide for themselves what they should do
with their lives, as opposed to having someone else decide for them, and that autonomy
is rare in nature. But that rarity doesn’t justify our respect and indeed our reverence for
autonomy. As it happens, diamonds have other qualities that make them desirable,
such as their physical hardness. Do we have some intrinsic qualities that justify our
respect for each other’s existence?

NA: Obviously, yes. For example, heterosexual men and women find each other
sexually attractive, so naturally we’d prefer to have each other around if only to look at
and use once in awhile for our pleasure.

SA: Stumbled right into my trap, didn’t you? Once you tie the right to life to some
objective feature or other, you make that right doubly conditional. First, if people have a
variety of features, which we clearly do, then only people with the desirable ones would
have the right to live. Thus, following up on your example, we’d have a license to shoot
ugly men and women in the streets. Second, you make the right to life an instrumental
one that depends on our goals. An asexual person, for example, who isn’t interested in
physical beauty, would have the right to kill beautiful and ugly people alike, just as
someone who isn’t interested in cutting anything would be justified in doing away with
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diamonds. Likewise, you might say that respecting each other’s life is an efficient way to
get what we want in society, since people are more successful in such a peaceful
arrangement than in the wild. But again, that makes the right to life an instrumental
rather than an unconditional one and dependent on the usefulness of society. Do rich
people with their own security force, food supply, and so on, have the right to kill the
poor, because the rich can take care of themselves and so don’t have to respect others
as a means of ensuring their welfare?

NA: No, I suppose not. Fine, then, we deserve to live not because our freedom is rare or
because we’re useful in certain ways, but because...well, I can’t think of the reason
offhand.

SA: Do you see the problem now? What you’re looking for is a secular justification for
the monotheistic presumption that human life is unconditionally, inalienably, absolutely
good. There’s no such justification, and that’s evidence of the startling historical
transition that troubled Nietzsche. So where’s the delusion, you ask? The delusion is in
presuming that business can continue as usual in secular societies despite the fact that
something as fundamental as the human right to life is at the very least no longer
obvious once we bury God. The delusion is in paying lip service to politically correct
myths and memes about our preciousness despite the fact that scientists have shown
we’re just less-hairy mammals with peculiar linguistic tools. Where is the call for
sanctimonious praise of ourselves, given the scientific point of view? Sure, we’re the
smartest, most powerful known animals. But in our recent cultured form, we’ve been
around for only fifty thousand years. Dinosaur and insect species have thrived for
millions, and yet we’d hunt dinosaurs for food or sport if they were still around, just as
we actually hunt or domesticate their reptilian and avian relatives, and we swat insects
without thinking twice. Even if we reigned for billions of years--and not just over the
Earth but the whole galaxy--would that great power show that human life is good?
Would might make right?
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NA: You’re really starting to pontificate now, aren’t you? I’m trying to understand what
bothers you so much about secular humanism. Alright, so philosophy gets more
complicated once we dispense with theology, and naturally most people are too busy to
dwell on these disturbing questions, relying on pat answers to get by. Is your point,
then, that carefree rather than melancholy or anxious atheists tend to be secular
humanists rather than existential cosmicists and that the former are somehow inferior to
the latter?

SA: Ethically and aesthetically inferior, yes. Once again, we can define these terms in
different ways, but in so far as a secular humanist or a New Atheist opposes spirituality
as superstition or as otherwise misplaced in a functional modern society, in which
democratic and capitalistic business hums along, there’s something very wrongheaded
about that kind of atheism, I think. It’s not just that certain vices are involved in resting
content with delusions and conventional happy-talk, including cowardice, gullibility, and
incuriosity, nor is it just the feeling that the hypocrisy of condemning theism while
unconsciously assimilating a host of pragmatic modern myths, which perpetuate stealth
oligarchies, is aesthetically off-putting.

There’s also a non-normative problem with modern, allegedly nonreligious atheism,

which is, as I said, that this kind seems unsustainable. As we speak--and for decades
now--the modern has seemed to give way to the postmodern. This is complicated, to be
sure, but what seems to have happened is that we’ve become too rational for our own
good. We’ve become hyper-skeptical, like The Simpsons cartoon or The Daily Show,
which satirize everything under the sun. We’ve been burned so many times, we think,
but we won’t get fooled again. Certainly, we won’t be so foolish as to fool ourselves, by
pretending that someone’s opinions are true for anyone else. We’re suspicious of all
metanarratives, holding all truth and value to be highly subjective and relative. We
reduce theories to biases of gender, class, or of some clique. Everyone’s partisan, no
one should be trusted to speak for another, and each ego reigns supreme in its own
fragmentary world. Even the messianic Obama triumphed over McCain by pretending to
empower everyone but himself, encouraging his supporters to shout “Yes, we can!” like
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the 2006 Time Magazine cover which featured a mirror, proclaiming that everyone was
Person of the Year.

How long can this so-called postmodern state of affairs endure? Will the strain of being
hyper-skeptical finally fatigue us so that we Westerners will fall prey to demagogues and
impose secular dictatorships on ourselves? The radicalization of the right-wing in the
United States isn’t encouraging on that front. My point, though, is that if allegedly
nonreligious atheism is unstable, because those atheists replace comforting theistic
myths with flimsy secular ones about the glories of democracy, capitalism, and human
nature, we should have something at the ready in case the whole secular edifice
crumbles. Again, my spirituality is an attempt to salvage meaning from the very worst-
case scenario. Thus, I push scientific and naturalistic conclusions to their philosophical
extremes, as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and Thomas Ligotti do, and I search
for an honourable way to live under those dire circumstances. This makes for spiritual
and not just philosophical atheism, because this search is sacred to me; it’s what
matters most.

NA: I don’t have time now to ask you about the details of your existentialism and
cosmicism. Instead, I wonder whether you should simply get real. The threat of extreme
theism far outweighs the danger that modern societies might implode. Mainstream
religion is bad for women and fundamentalism is more dangerous than ever before
since the invention of weapons of mass destruction. So while your spiritual atheism may
not be as harmful as antiscientific New Age obscurantism, your doom and gloom
message could only hinder the New Atheist’s efforts against the worst foe. Strategically,
indeed, your so-called spirituality plays into the worst stereotypes about atheism, that
atheism implies that life is meaningless, that everything’s permitted, that our situation’s
hopeless, and so on.

SA: And you prefer to whitewash naturalistic atheism, pretending that now that God’s
dead, we can cheerfully get on with enjoying our lives, like the atheistic billboards say. I
don’t know how many potential converts to atheism would retreat to their churches and
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mosques were they to suspect that atheism has a dark side. Anyway, both exoteric and
esoteric levels of a value system tend to be needed to suit people’s differences. The
atheism of anyone who would retreat to theism were they to hear of existential
cosmicism surely wouldn’t have been worthy in the first place. But this is all idle chatter,
because deluded folks lack the interest or the intelligence to discover the unsettling
truth. Even were existential cosmicism shouted from the rooftops, most people either
wouldn’t care enough to be shaken or would lack the philosophical discipline to
understand the implications. The separation between the exoteric and esoteric levels of
a value system happens organically in that respect.

And to return to the question of whether atheists ought to be happy, I suppose the
answer depends on whether they’re ready to confront our tragic existential predicament,
as entailed by naturalistic atheism (that there’s no afterlife, no guarantee of justice or
fairness from the cosmos, no absolute morality, no reason not to feel alienated from
nature). Those who are ready tend to view happiness, in the sense of being content and
well-adjusted to life as an absurdly smart and doomed primate, as ludicrously
extravagant.

Sure, theists like William Lane Craig portray atheism in the worst light to keep their
fellow sheep in line. Those theistic fear-mongers go wrong not in pointing out that
naturalistic atheism has troubling implications, but in assuming that we have no
constructive options for dealing with them. Centuries before Christianity even began,
Buddhists gave the lie to that pessimism, inventing naturalistic psychotherapy and
pursuing atheistic enlightenment.

As for your earlier charge that existential cosmicism is juvenile, it’s hard to take that
seriously. Even were teenagers to tend to go through a melancholy, angst-ridden
phase, to say that all forms of such worry in adults are therefore naive would be a
straightforward case of the genetic fallacy. After all, there remains the possibility that
teenagers are in a unique position to appreciate some dark truths, as they occupy a
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twilight period in which they acquire greater cognitive skills while yet lacking adult
responsibilities and thus the pressure to accept uplifting conventional wisdom.

NA: Well, I’m still not sure that secular humanism is a religion except in a uselessly
stretched sense, but I’m glad to hear that there seems a kind of spirituality that’s friendly
to science, atheism, and naturalism--besides Buddhism, I mean. By the way, what
reason would you give for the wrongness of murder? Or is existential cosmicism
compatible with Nazism or with some other hideous slaughter of millions in the name of
a utopian ideal?

SA: That’s a good question. The New Atheist’s dismissal of the connection between
Nazism and atheism is often pitifully weak, as though Hitler’s alleged Christianity would
speak to the whole of Nazism. Even had Hitler been the Pope of Rome, the fact is that
Nazism was an original, eclectic cult of personality that upheld the modern ideal of the
creative genius, not to mention a thoroughly Darwinian and instrumentalistic perspective
according to which people aren’t intrinsically valuable, a perspective shared by most
powerful people throughout history, who tend to be educated and thus skeptical of
commonplace religion. As we’ve gone through, it remains difficult for naturalistic atheists
to justify the UN’s platitudes about the universality of human rights--not that the theist is
in any superior position, of course, but an atheist ought to have higher standards.

Anyway, as for how I deal with this question, I affirm with the Buddhist that all human life
is valuable and ought to be protected, and I ground this value in boundless pity for those
who suffer just by living in our accursed condition. This pity, in turn, develops just from
confronting the harsh truths that make for existential cosmicism. Once you look in horror
at nature, abandoning all comforting myths--including the secular humanistic ones--as
mere moves in an inhumane cosmic process, it’s hard to retain the ego to dominate
fellow forlorn creatures. On the contrary, the more natural response to that quasi-
mystical enlightenment is a feeling of alienation--literally of being thrown in an alien
prison, surrounded by fellow prisoners most of whom live in a fantasy world like the
hallucinating victims in the Matrix or like the shackled captives of Plato’s Cave.
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Aesthetically, the notion of exploiting anyone as pitiful and doomed as yourself, of

murdering them and so on, is just grotesque. Of course, this raises the question of
suicide. Again, were there nothing constructive to be done about our plight, as some
theists like to misrepresent the dark side of atheism, perhaps murder or suicide would
be appropriate. But that is a misrepresentation which egregiously understates our heroic
power to creatively cope with natural affronts to our modest dignity.
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Buddhism and Existential Angst

____________________________________________________

In the Introduction, I ranted against the popular belief that our ultimate goal should be
happiness. Our tragedy, I said, is that we’re equipped with high degrees of
consciousness, reason, and freedom, which enable us to appreciate what I called Our
Existential Situation (OES). This situation is roughly equivalent to our worst nightmare,
implying that life for most of us is effectively hell on earth. Our situation as intelligent
animals, thrown into the world, as the existentialist philosopher Heidegger said, is
defined by ironies, by the world’s being different from how we’d prefer it to be. For
example, theistic and New Age fantasies are all wildly off the mark, logically and
empirically speaking. Those differences between our naïve, anthropocentric picture of
the world and the modern scientific picture of it, are results not of any demonic design,
but of the inhumanity of the natural forces that put us here in the midst of cosmic
evolution.

In short, this is the worst possible world, from a humane standpoint. A Satanic dominion
over the universe would be preferable to dominion by mindless natural forces, because
Satan would at least be a person, albeit an evil one, and were personhood at the root of
reality, we could at least take comfort that the universe and thus life and our position
have meaning. Our purpose would be to serve as Satan’s playthings. Were this the
case, we might even succumb to Stockholm Syndrome and come to approve of that
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demonic plan. As it stands in the Lovecraftian, scientific picture, though, there’s no such
meaning and no such comfort. We’re alienated from reality and thus from ourselves,
because we view the world through the filter of our ideals, which project onto the world
what isn’t there, such as the ultimate propriety of our pursuit of those ideals. Our values
are either means by which natural forces drive us to perpetuate some stage in a natural
process or are free-standing creations of our imagination. Either way, our confidence in
their propriety is usually grotesque.

Our most popular goal is to be happy, to be successful and contented with the
pleasures we earn. This goal is certainly attainable to some extent or other, but we’re
aesthetically, if not also ethically, obligated not to seek happiness as our ultimate good.
Instead, we ought to be anxious and pained as a result of our knowledge of OES. The
existentialist’s remedy, of hopeless rebellion in the alien face of inhumane nature, is
nobler and more aesthetically compelling than the Aristotelian reduction of our ethical
purpose to our narrow biological function. Our narrow function is to stop investigating
what’s really going on, and to merely survive and sexually perpetuate our genetic code.
If we do that, as most people in fact do, raising a family and committing ourselves to
various delusions that serve that biological end, we become more or less happy,
whether we’re rich or poor or whether we’re born beautiful or physically disabled. We
then live at peace with ourselves and with the world, despite the fact that that peace is
as obscene as the peace of slaves in the Matrix, or in the philosopher Robert Nozick’s
Happiness Machine (a thought experiment about a virtual reality simulator that caters to
our fantasies, enabling a person to live successfully in a dream world that may differ
tremendously from the real one).

The Buddhist Critique

So I averred in that rant on happiness. There is, however, an interesting Buddhist

critique of this grim existentialism, which runs as follows. My talk of OES, of a gulf
between the conscious, free, intelligent person and the rest of the nature assumes that
that person is an independent, self-contained essence, detached from the world.
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Instead, according to the Buddhist principles of Interdependent Arising (IA) and of

emptiness, there are no such essences anywhere in the universe: everything is in flux,
ever-changing and interdependent. Instead of things, there are phases of processes. A
person’s mind consists entirely of such flowing transitions, from one mental state to the
next, with no unified self tying them together. There is no immaterial spirit or essence
that is the bearer of particular thoughts and feelings. Therefore, there can be no gap
between a person and the rest of the world; on the contrary, a person is interconnected
with the world, since both are bound up in natural processes that unite them. For
example, we breathe oxygen from the outer environment and exhale carbon dioxide
which plants in turn absorb.

According to Buddhism, when nature is understood in terms of cycles and processes

that are empty of essences or of thinghood, we can appreciate the source of our
anxieties: our delusion of an independent self causes us to crave an unsuitable
permanence or stability, an impossible control over those processes for our benefit. We
build walls to protect us from the natural flux, including literal walls and conceptual
frameworks that amount to fantasies. That defense against free-flowing natural reality
and the self-righteous, egoistic justifications of that defense are wrongheaded, for the
Buddhist. There is no such thing as an ego, or as a single, autonomous self that can
possibly bear the brunt of cosmic indifference or win for itself pleasure rather than
suffering. There are only interdependent stages of cycles that unite all that there is in
nature.

My existential rant, then, according to Buddhism, is based on a self-righteous delusion--

as if there could be anything wrong with nature’s inhumane treatment of sentient beings,
given that there are no such beings, because there are no beings at all. Assuming this
Buddhist anti-essentialism, the enlightened attitude is bemused detachment as opposed
to unrealistic craving. We should carefully observe changes in the processes we
encounter, instead of crying like babies when we’re disappointed that we don’t get what
we want. If there’s no such thing as a self, there’s no realistic basis for thinking there’s a
gap between nature’s inhumanity and our anthropocentric values. Natural forces aren’t
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alien to us; instead, we’re shot through with those forces, and since there’s no self to
protect from careless nature, we ought to observe the flux from an objective, aesthetic
distance, watching each thought pop into our minds like so many frames in a reel of
animated images.

Instead of suffering from resentment, like the boy who holds his breath when his mother
refuses to buy him his coveted toy, we can relish all changes, including painful ones, as
ever more data to scrutinize with a connoisseur’s eye for artistic detail. The enlightened
Buddha’s nirvana is like an art critic’s peace from being able to freely judge an artwork
from a distance, with no reality-based pressure to cling to one judgment or another.
Unlike, say, the artist who worries about not receiving the praise she craves, who
complains when her art doesn’t suit the critic’s taste and thus when she loses the job
offer she desperately wants to be able to afford a larger apartment, and so on and so
forth, the art critic--we can assume with some simplification--enjoys the freedom that
comes from aesthetic detachment. And it’s this detachment that the bitter, angst-ridden
existentialist seems to lack. There’s no need for any suffering at all, including so-called
dutiful or heroic suffering in defiance of what’s actually a non-existent abyss between
what there really is and what we ultimately want. In short, from a Buddhist perspective,
my account of OES is based on egoistic conceptions, and thus my prescription that’s
supposed to replace the politically correct one of happiness, is itself deluded.

Buddhism and Existentialism

The obvious response to Buddhism is to insist that there are beings, including selves,
after all, and that therefore existential angst can be justified. Indeed, there may be a
mere semantic dispute here. What non-Buddhists call the self, the Buddhist may call a
phase of a process. Moreover, while nothing in nature may be absolutely independent,
some things or processes may be more or less independent; hence, the usefulness of
concepts that posit similarities between things (or processes) that hold despite their
differences. What are commonly called selves have more in common with each other--
their cognitive faculties, their genotypes and phenotypes, and so on--than they do, say,
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with asteroids or with peanut butter. To explain those distinguishing features, we

categorize their bearers as instances of a type, and we theorize about them,
generalizing for the sake of understanding. For example, we say that humans are
persons and thus different from other animal species in certain respects. Were we to
stop with the Buddhist principle that everything is interdependent and united, we
wouldn’t understand any of the patterns in nature; that is, we wouldn’t yet be
generalizing about the differences and similarities we observe. In short, scientists and
ordinary people alike generalize, making use of concepts to explain patterns, and in the
case of our patterns, this requires talk of the self. Finally, even if the Buddhist is correct
that everything is interrelated at some level of explanation, relative independencies can
emerge at higher levels. At the quantum level, particles may be mostly entangled with
each other in superpositions, but regularities emerge as subatomic interactions develop
complex forms, like the chemical elements, the stars and planets, and all the myriad
species on Earth, including people.

But I don’t want to rest with those head-on answers. Instead, I want to grant the
Buddhist’s anti-essentialist assumptions for the sake of argument, and question whether
those assumptions really divide the Buddhist much from the angst-ridden existentialist. I
begin by asking why the Buddhist is interested in ending human suffering. After all, as is
apparent from the Four Noble Truths, the whole point of Buddhism is to end our
suffering, or dukkha, meaning all varieties of disappointment. But on the assumption
that everything is interdependent and part of a cosmic process, why the Buddhist’s
compassion for the deluded stages of that process--naively called persons--which suffer
from futile cravings? Shouldn’t the Buddhist fatalistically infer that that suffering is a
necessary part of the cosmic process, which the Buddhist should objectively observe
along with all of the other parts?

At first glance, it looks as though the Buddhist presupposes that some interdependent
processes--naively called persons--have special value due to their capacity for
disappointment and their autonomy which allows them to change their course for the
better, to become enlightened and end their miseries. In fact, Buddhists also take on
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board, along with Hindus, the theodicy of samsara and moksha, which is to say the
ideas that the cosmos of which we’re a part is a bad place to inhabit, obligating us to
liberate ourselves from the cycle of rebirth. Enlightenment, or nirvana, is freedom from
nature by way of emptying ourselves of the flotsam and jetsam that wash up on the
shores of our minds, borne by the waves of natural forces. When we detach from our
desires, we no longer feel disappointed when we fail to get what we want, because we
no longer want anything; our suffering ends and we enjoy the art critic’s bliss of
academic freedom.

Now, that theodicy has much in common with what I call Our Existential Situation. In
both cases, there’s a condemnation of the cosmos. Buddhism’s focus on ending dukkha
might even presuppose that condemnation: suffering ought to be ended, because
suffering inherits the badness of the rest of nature, being a stage of interdependent
natural cycles, spun by inhumane forces. But these normative judgments of the prison
of samsara and of the obligation to liberate ourselves don’t sit well with the Buddhist’s
metaphysical principle of IA. If everything is interlocked as stages of a cosmic process
of evolution, there’s no metaphysical basis for speaking of liberation from that process.
Most people may be deluded, entranced by fantasies that bind them to degrading,
punishing natural forces, while a minority manage to free their minds and enjoy the
peace of carelessness and the pleasure of objective, aesthetic study of natural reality.
However, both groups would surely be different stages in the same cosmic process.
Enlightened Buddhists don’t transcend nature in the sense of reaching a supernatural
vantage point overlooking the whole universe, but merely discover an alternative natural
way of life.

If we stress the principle of IA, we’re left with an amoral perspective on what is
empirically just a series of interrelated processes. Once again, then, I ask why the
Buddhist is preoccupied with ending disappointment and short-circuiting its causes,
delusion and craving. An authentically Buddhist answer would seem to appeal to
aesthetics rather than to morality, which is why I compared the Buddha to an art critic.
Above all, Buddhists are empiricists: they observe that everything is mixed together in a
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great flux of transitions. Enlightenment gives them the freedom simply of extreme
objectivity, of detachment from biases and personal inclinations. A Buddha perceives
natural reality as a process rather than as a host of independent things. And in that
objective frame of mind, the enlightened Buddhist creates a taste, an aesthetic style of
appreciating natural art, as it were, a new bias that befits a Buddha’s radical shift in
perspective, rather than a passively received bias that flows in and out of the deluded
mind. In Nietzschean terms, the Buddha is, to this extent, an Übermensch, a hero who
overcomes harsh natural obstacles and creates original values. On my existential view,
this enlightened creativity is a rebellion that gives our lives meaning and holds off the
insanity with which esoteric knowledge of OES threatens us.

The Buddhist may interpret the need for compassion differently, but he or she seems
forced to admit that compassion is gratuitous, given the metaphysics of IA. The
enlightened Buddhist merely chooses to become a Bodhisattva, a liberator of others
from their delusions and thus from their sufferings. That is, an enlightened person faces
a choice: to enter nirvana and renounce not only her desires but those of everyone else,
to live alone somewhere on a mountain top, or to teach others how to achieve the same
inner peace. That choice, I’m suggesting, is caused by an enlightened taste for one path
or the other. Nothing forces the enlightened person to care about other people’s
suffering--least of all individualistic morality that holds one process (the self) to be
metaphysically (as opposed to aesthetically) more valuable than another (say, dirt or an
asteroid), contradicting the monistic assumption of IA. Some enlightened people prefer
the natural process of life on this planet that includes less craving and disappointment,
owing to the Bodhisattva’s work. Likewise, some art critics prefer one style of art to
another.

Given this aesthetic interpretation of Buddhist compassion, there’s another commonality

between Buddhism and my existentialism: the choice to confront the horrors of nature
by a renunciation of what’s naturally expected of us. My problem with happiness is that
emotional contentment is aesthetically and ethically unsuited to creatures with dark
esoteric knowledge. These creatures should be anxious and melancholic, not at ease
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with themselves or their position. The cause of happiness, I said, is ignorance of Our
Existential Situation or some delusion that stands in for knowledge. Likewise, the
Buddhist renounces the so-called pleasures that derive from egoistic delusions, as so
many forms of what is ultimately disappointment.

The difference is that the Buddhist opposes dukkha whereas I oppose the popular
notion of happiness. But this difference may not be as significant as it seems. In the first
place, my condemnation of happiness as a degrading abomination isn’t the same as a
rejection of pleasure following the achievement of any goal whatsoever. The problem
isn’t pleasure or success of any kind, but just that which depends on ignorance of OES.
There may well be a kind of pleasure or contentment in renouncing a conventional way
of life, a sort of rebel’s or Gnostic’s glee of being an insider rather than a hapless
member of the herd. This wouldn’t be happiness, but gallows humour, a way of coping
with the melancholy that accompanies a commitment to existential philosophy. Just as
the Buddhist’s notion of dukkha is broad enough to interpret vulgar pleasures as forms
of suffering, I interpret vulgar happiness as an obscenity and an abomination, owing to
its dependence on pitiful fantasy.

Moreover, enlightened Buddhists certainly aren’t happy in a materialistic sense; they’re

contented with the peace that follows from their mystical vision of cosmic
connectedness. But while they don’t suffer, neither do they feel joy or any other
satisfaction caused by the achievement of what’s personally desired. In fact, their
personality disappears with the attachment to their desires. They become empty, which
is to say alienated from the world in so far as that world is egoistically conceived. To this
extent, a Buddha isn’t a Nietzschean Übermensch, since while a Buddha may accept
the natural flux as it is, without weak-minded illusions, a Buddha still withdraws from the
world, disengaging from her own desires. In any case, a Bodhisattva seems even less
happy than a Buddha. After all, compassion for other people’s plight is a form of
suffering. Empathy is the feeling of someone else’s pain as your own. If empathy
informs a Bodhisattva’s taste for compassion, this sort of enlightened Buddhist is similar
to the existentialist who responds to the duty to renounce opportunities for personal
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contentment, out of awe at the magnitude of our tragedy. Both suffer for their
knowledge, the Bodhisattva who understands the absurd needlessness of suffering
caused by egoism, and the existentialist who appreciates the grotesqueness of
pleasures that require ignorance or intellectual cowardice. Both affirm that the vulgar
form of happiness is the flowering of delusion and is thus aesthetically if not also
ethically degrading.

Nirvana and Angst

In short, Buddhism has much in common with my Lovecraftian existentialism. But what
of the main point of the Buddhist’s critique, that existential angst is egoistic and
therefore foolish? Is angst compatible with an acceptance of Buddhist anti-
essentialism? Certainly, if everything were really one and all concepts that differentiate
were misrepresentations, angst would rest on confusion, since angst presupposes a
gap between the self and the world from which the self is alienated. But Buddhist
monism isn’t so extreme. The principle of IA implies not that everything is one, but that
everything is interconnected as transitions in a flux. One transition must still differ from
another for their interdependence to be possible.

So the more relevant question is whether one part of a process can be alienated from
another. And the answer is obviously that there can be such alienation. After all, on the
Buddhist’s own assumptions, the cosmic flux includes a phase consisting of deluded
people whose consequent disappointments amount to ways of being alienated from
reality. To preserve our fragile egos and our pride and vainglorious ambition, we
pretend that each individual is absolutely independent, and even that each is imbued by
an immaterial spirit and thus deserving of his or her successes (and failures). If no one
is so independent, the egoistic lifestyle becomes absurd. The Buddhist seems led to
say, then, that egoism is the unenlightened person’s means of avoiding a confrontation
with the reality of everything’s interconnectedness in the cosmic process. This
confrontation produces either angst or, if the person is properly prepared, enlightenment
and nirvana.
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I would go further, though, and suggest that angst and nirvana are fundamentally the
same. Nirvana is said to be transcendent peace and freedom from suffering, due to
hyper-objectivity and attentiveness to everything’s interrelatedness, and to an antipathy
to egoism. But the Bodhisattva’s compassion makes for a kind of cognitive dissonance.
On the one hand, this mostly-enlightened Buddhist is free from ego-based suffering; on
the other, this person feels compassion for the unenlightened herd, which can mean
only that the Bodhisattva feels their egoistic pain. This is quite comparable to the two-
sidedness of an existentialist’s life experience. On the one hand, the existentialist is
naturally compelled to satisfy her animalistic appetites, to achieve certain goals for the
sake of her survival; on the other, this person is barred from happiness by her
appreciation of OES and is forced to endure angst. This cognitive dissonance is in each
case the curse of dangerous esoteric knowledge, whether of IA or of OES. While the
enlightened Buddhist finds that knowledge uplifting, she must admit that were everyone
to affirm Buddhist principles, modern civilization would be undone. Buddhist mysticism
is destructive to the ego, just as Lovecraftian existentialism destroys optimistic
delusions.

In addition, nirvana and angst are both forms of alienation. The Buddhist may feel
mystically at one with the cosmos, but by refusing to take ownership of anything,
including her thoughts and feelings, she casts herself adrift. She’s an outcast,
surrounded by egoistic animals that chase after their mirages of power and pleasure. As
I said, the Buddhist is alienated from the egoistically-conceived world. Most people think
of the world in anthropocentric terms, and so the Buddhist is alienated from all of these
people and from the social games that vain persons play. The existentialist is just as
alienated, refusing to pragmatically submit to optimistic delusions and horrified by the
tragic ironies that dominate our absurd lives.

Furthermore, as I suggested, nirvana and angst force the mystic to make aesthetic
rather than moral choices. The Buddhist and the existentialist are each like an art critic:
they’re alienated observers, objectively scrutinizing all of nature as a sort of
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meaningless, postmodern artwork. From what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called the
view from nowhere, or what Spinoza and other philosophers call the God’s eye view or
the perspective from eternity, which is just merciless objectivity, we learn the grim truths
that mock all of our dreams and illusions. Nirvana and angst are both uncompromising,
mystical perspectives that compel the Buddhist or the Lovecraftian existentialist to
renounce the fruits of false hope.

The difference between nirvana and angst lies only in the interpretation of what’s
perceived from the viewpoint of alienating objectivity. The Buddhist is trained to think in
terms of liberation from a world of suffering, whereas the existentialist regards certain
suffering as ennobling. The Buddhist meditates to escape from the debris blown through
her mind on cosmic winds, while the existentialist uses angst as the song inspired by
her muse, by the Lovecraftian cosmic god, for example, which is just a symbol for the
inhumane cosmos. Again, though, the Buddhist escapes suffering only by severing
herself completely from human life. As long as she remains at best a Bodhisattva, she
suffers from compassion and must regard her altruism as an absurd, purely aesthetic
decision, a matter of taste. Likewise, when confronting the remorselessly-alien cosmos,
without the comfort of crutches, the existentialist can judge only by the light of aesthetic
and primitive ethical standards. Equally alienated from society, the Buddhist and the
existentialist must live on with the sense that life is absurd. Just as the judgment of art
becomes farcical when art represents nothing, the evaluation of life becomes arbitrary
without the benefit of comforting myths. Compassion is as meaningless as psychopathic
misanthropy, given IA, which might explain why Buddhist societies, such as in Japan or
in Sri Lanka, sometimes endorse killing. And whatever the alienated existentialist does
to rebel, she does with a grave sense of irony and of the ridiculousness of all human
effort.

In conclusion, then, the Buddhist’s case against my version of existentialism isn’t so

clear-cut. The two positions are closer to each other than might at first be apparent.
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Part Two: Politics

____________________________________________________
Liberalism and Conservatism
Oligarchy
American Politics
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Liberalism: From Scientism to Nihilism

____________________________________________________

To understand liberalism, you have to distinguish between the modern and postmodern
varieties of that political philosophy. The story of liberalism is that of disenchantment
with modern myths and of their replacement with politically correct bromides.

Enlightenment Liberalism

The main question a liberal should be asked is this: What, deep down, do you believe
as a liberal, if anything? The old liberal answer to this question derives from
Enlightenment humanism. Inspired by world-shaking progress in science, humanists
became confident that similar progress could be made in human affairs, that societies
could be greatly improved through our own effort, using institutions such as
government. Following science, humanists elevated Reason over faith and religious
dogma. Whereas religious faith divides people, exacerbating our tribal instincts, reason
unites us. Reason leads to consensus in science and is a basis for universal values and
rights: in so far as we’re all rational, we’re equally precious as self-guiding beings.

Thus, the liberal believes in the equality of human beings and in human rights, including
the rights to life and to pursue our own goals as rational, free persons. These rights are
thought to follow from the dignity of rational persons. Whereas in a religious society,
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rights come from God’s commands as revealed in some holy text, in a liberal,
humanistic society, rights are discovered by the power of human reason. Just as
scientists learn how nature works by objectively testing hypotheses, we learn about
ourselves by reflecting on our distinguishing features: we’re sentient, free, intelligent,
social creatures, and those qualities dignify us, elevating us above the other species,
but only to a degree; as science shows, we’re part of nature. But we have skills that
make us special, and what the old liberal believes, as a humanist, is that we can use
these skills to improve our situation on this planet. We can use government to help the
poor, who have just as much dignity as rich people due to their shared humanity. We
can think our way out of crises, negotiating and compromising for the common good.

Above all, then, the liberal used to be a rationalist. But the liberal can no longer afford to
be such, because the history of western rationalism has moved from a modern to a
postmodern stage. The modern stage is what I just described: people were inspired by
scientific advances and trusted that any species that could win for itself so much control
over nature can learn to control itself. Like the technoscientific kind, psychological and
social progress lay in the hands of reason, hands we all possess just by being members
of our species. In this way, modern rationalists were scientistic, trusting that societies
could progress by extending scientific methods or at least science’s general rationalistic
approach to problems.

Postmodern Liberalism

In the postmodern period, however, we learn that scientism and secular humanism are
substitute religions; that reason is able to figure out how things work but not how things
ought to be and is thus no source of rights or values; that, paraphrasing Nietzsche,
morality is buried with the death of God and that the humanist is a ghoul sniffing around
God’s grave, rummaging through his possessions that are no longer serviceable.
Science turns its dispassionate eye backward, as it were, on the human mind, and we
learn that far from ideally rational, we’re usually irrational, prone to a host of fallacies,
and are thus easily manipulated. We learn that we’re not as free or as self-guiding as
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think we are, nor as conscious as we feel; consciousness is the tip of the iceberg of the
unconscious over which we lack conscious control. We learn too that we’re not as
united as we’d like to believe: the human brain consists largely of independent modules
that have their own, often conflicting evolutionary roles. Thus, social divisions are often
symptoms of deeper, internal divisions in the brain.

So while the old liberal was a mythmaker, or as the postmodernist Lyotard put it, a
purveyor of master metanarratives, about Reason, Liberty, Dignity, and Progress, the
more recent liberal finds herself out on a limb that’s about to snap. We’re not as the
Enlightenment liberal said we are. We can’t progress just with reason, because
progress requires values and goals that give us direction, and reason can’t tell us what
to value. Reason is a tool with a limited practical purpose, or rather as the cognitive
scientist, Keith Stanovich says in The Robot’s Rebellion, there are different kinds of
thinking, each with its own, even narrower purpose: there’s serial, slow-moving, highly-
deliberative logic and then there’s holistic, fast, unconscious and intuitive reasoning. We
use the former for long-term planning, the latter for snap judgments. Thinking requires
the prior input of assumptions, such as assumptions about right and wrong. The liberal
humanist values human beings for their personhood, but in the first place we’re not as
godlike as the Enlightenment myths declared, and secondly even if we were perfectly
rational and rare among other species, those qualities wouldn’t make us valuable. Just
because something is rational or free or rare doesn’t make it deserving of anything.
Science tells us what the facts are, but the facts alone don’t dictate what should be
done about them. To say otherwise is to commit the scientistic, naturalistic fallacy.

What, then, does the new, late liberal believe, deep-down, if anything? What has
liberalism become? What is postmodern liberalism? My answer is that there are kernels
of truth in the American conservative’s talk of liberal elitism, nihilism, and relativism.
What’s happened is that the liberal has come to realize that rationalist utopianism is
bankrupt. Marxist societies experimented with preplanned economies and failed. The
Enlightenment myths no longer captivate or inspire. If all humans have equal rights, all
free societies that let their citizens be what they rationally choose must be equally valid.
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But because reason alone is no source of culture, the liberal is faced with a variety of
societies that meet that condition and has no means of discriminating between them.
Liberalism thus reduces to politically correct multiculturalism. The liberal’s praise of
anything is hollow because the liberal’s test of worth doesn’t measure anything of value.
A society’s goodness or badness lies in its culture, in the goals of its citizens that direct
them towards a prescribed end. Just because a culture is freely chosen doesn’t mean
the goals are noble, uplifting, moral, virtuous, or in any other way qualitatively positive
(or negative).

Worse than that, there are no free societies; everyone is coerced to some extent, both
by other people and by independent parts of themselves. So should Muslim women
wear burkas, for example? The liberal feminist says No, unless the women choose to
wear them, and because many Muslim women are beaten or stoned for resisting the
patriarchal fashion police, the practice of wearing the burka is unjust. But women in
materialistic, sex-crazed, libertine cultures are coerced to show skin. That is, these
cultures restrict choices by ostracizing women for choosing a way of life that falls
outside of mainstream expectations. Granted, these women aren’t physically beaten or
killed, but psychological and social pressures can be as effective as threats of physical
force.

Moreover, the liberal can’t just help herself to holding out physical coercion as being
worse than the propaganda and other refined social mechanisms found in secular
societies, without having a liberal reason to value human life in the first place.
Remember that the old liberal grew enchanted with science for disenchanting the
natural world, including ourselves. Scientists have looked within every part of human
anatomy and found no spirit or essence that makes us sacred. Our genetic code is very
similar to that of some other species, we have an enlarged cerebral cortex that lets us
plan far ahead, and we’ve language and modern science that give us ever-increasing
control over natural forces. Undeniably, these traits make us rare and relatively well-
informed and powerful, but those facts about us simply don’t make murder wrong. And if
it turns out that reason, consciousness, and freewill are all illusions, as many
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psychologists are currently showing, the humanist will be left with no justification for
liberal values.

As it stands currently, I think the liberal is caught between modern metanarratives and
postmodern nihilism. In practice, the liberal tends to put aside questions of ultimate
value, of which goals we should pursue and of which culture is best, focusing on
problems that reason can actually solve, namely those of managing systems. Late-
stage liberalism is instrumentalistic. The liberal defends not the goals implicit in any
particular culture, but only the efficiency of a rational bureaucracy in achieving those
presupposed goals. The postmodern liberal says not that people have dignity and
inalienable rights, as godlike beings, but only that if we believe as much, we should
empower the government to secure those rights, following science in implementing
rational strategies. Liberal rights, then, have become subjective and hypothetical. The
liberal ducks the deep, philosophical questions, preferring to look Serious and
Responsible, as a system manager.

Cast Study #1: The Democratic Party

The current American Democratic Party affords a perfect example of this downward
spiral. American progressives criticize “centrist” establishment Democrats for
triangulating, giving up on liberal values, and trying to appear like the rational,
compromising adults, opposed by obnoxious, uninformed “extremists” on either side.
But the so-called extremists who make up the “base” of each Party simply have deeply-
held values, whereas the centrist, postmodern liberals have none. To be sure, as I’ve
said and as I’ll argue elsewhere, neither progressives nor conservatives have good
arguments in support of their goals, but at least they take stands on qualitative issues.

The centrist liberal is supposed to be more serious because she appreciates that
modern science has left no room for anything as airy-fairy as values. What the
pragmatic, centrist liberal is ultimately convinced of may thus be what critics accused
the neoconservatives in the last Bush administration of believing. This underlying belief
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is in Straussian, Platonic elitism, which can be explicated as follows. Modern science

disenchanted the world, destroying forever the traditional myths that held societies
together. This is the dark secret known only to the elite members of modern society.
Were this truth to get out, society would collapse which would deprive the elite of their
decadent lifestyle. Thus, to manage the social system, elites need to tell the outsiders
noble lies, about continuing human dignity, reason, liberty, and consciousness even in
the face of God’s evident demise. To the extent that the authentic postmodern liberal
shares this Straussian elitism, that liberal is a closet nihilist. Her skills at managing
systems make her a social engineer, and so she may feel she’s entitled to an engineer’s
prestige. Hardcore engineers are prized for creating the machines that help us survive
by controlling the forces of nature. To do this, those engineers must master the wizard’s
arcane language of mathematics, and this too is awe-inspiring to the hobbits who earn
only liberal arts degrees or high school diplomas. But centrist liberals, making use only
of soft or pseudosciences, don’t enchant like Merlin or Gandalf; they administer a hyper-
rational society into the ground like the Star Wars Empire, sucking in recycled air like
Darth Vader.

Case Study #2: President Obama

To take another example, there’s currently much debate about whether Obama is (1) a
progressive who either doesn’t know how to negotiate (highly unlikely considering how
well he ran his 2008 campaign) or who selects the curious tactic of not speaking up for
or implementing a single progressive policy. Alternatively, Obama might be (2) a centrist
who pretended to be a progressive during the campaign and who governs as a systems
manager, dutifully adopting the goals of the American political system as he finds them,
which are the goals of oligarchy. Some progressives hope he’s the former, others
denounce him as the latter.

Notice that in either case, Obama likely functions as a systems manager. In scenario
(1), the reason Obama would govern as a “pragmatic centrist” even though he
campaigned as a progressive and still pretends to be such, is that deep down he’s
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embarrassed by the fact that postmodern liberalism reduces to Straussian nihilism.

Moreover, he wouldn’t want to humiliate himself going up and inevitably losing against
the oligarchic system, a system he can’t oppose with any conviction. Reading speeches
to win an election is one thing, requiring only the basic political skill of lying in one form
or another, but going to political war as President, in the pursuit of a non-Machiavellian
goal, such as the long-term good of the country as a whole, takes courage of
philosophical conviction. As a postmodern liberal and a Harvard man, Obama must
know at some level that nature is a Lovecraftian nightmare and that liberal myths are
just as delusional and absurd as conservative and religious ones. That’s what you tend
to learn in secular institutions; that’s the upshot of scientific naturalism and of
humanistic rationalism. And this would account for scenario (2). The difference between
the scenarios is just the extent to which Obama appreciates the implications of
postmodern liberalism: in (1) he only dimly processes them at an unconscious level,
while in (2) he’s a more self-aware, authentic liberal, that is, a full-fledged Straussian
elitist and decadent, nihilistic systems manager in an oligarchy that pursues not rational,
long-term goals for the greater good of all rational humans, but the self-destructive,
absurdly narrow and short-term ones of likely-sociopathic plutocrats.

Case Study #3: Canada

Canada is more liberal than the US, with higher taxes and more social programs and
government regulations of the economy, medical care, and even the selling of alcohol.
Conservatives call Canada a nanny state in which government power is abused,
curtailing personal liberties. The ideological liberal or socialist response is that the
government is needed to pick up the pieces after the fallout from parasitic business
practices, which threaten the nation’s long-term health. Government is needed
especially to support those whom, as implied by orthodox (social Darwinian) economic
theory, Mother Nature weeds out as failures in the vicious laissez-faire competition.
According to liberal ideology, the government should help the poor even when natural
forces spit them out in the brutal struggle for survival (on which civilization is supposed
to improve but which free market economists re-establish and deify), not out of Christian
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charity, but out of Enlightenment rationalism. Even the poor have equal dignity as
rational, autonomous persons.

So much for classic liberal ideology. The postmodern liberal has no such faith in any
normative implication of the success of scientific reason. Just because the poor can
think doesn’t make them valuable, and the same goes for the rich and for any other
group. What accounts, then, for socialist, or proactive liberal policies, despite the
postmodern decline of liberalism? My answer: instrumentalism run amok. The
postmodern liberal presupposes values and ideals that she no longer knows how to
justify, such as the ideals of personal dignity and happiness. Ignoring questions about
the normative status of those values, she fancies herself a technocrat who can apply
cold reason at least to the practical problem of how the corresponding goals can most
efficiently be achieved. But there’s no end to such problems: there’s always more room
to re-engineer society, to harmonize what actually happens in it with what ought to
happen--especially when society’s ideals are misplaced, as they are in the case of a
materialistic society that deems the pursuit of pleasure to be life’s ultimate purpose. And
so a liberal government can find its tentacles poking into more and more of people’s
personal affairs, ever questing for new ways to tax the population to fund more
technocratic schemes, constricting social interactions with more and more red tape,
turning society into a Rube Goldberg machine that functions smoothly but to no wise
end.

Canada is such a country, although there’s currently a conservative majority in the

Canadian government. Still, Canadian culture feels the effect of postmodern liberalism
in the dearth of vision in any Canadian politician. Even the Canadian conservatives are
pragmatic and technocratic. This is to say that Canadian leaders believe in nothing to
speak of and are mere managers of Canadian society, thinking only of how to maintain
the status quo as opposed to considering the country’s long-term direction. Canadian
politicians are not the only Canadians with no heartfelt principles. Many parts of
Canada, particularly Ontario, have no distinguishing character. In part this is because of
all the immigration to Canada, but there’s just as much immigration to the US and
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American immigrants tend to adhere to American myths, which unite all Americans in a
“melting pot” of democratic and hedonic delusions. Canada has no national myth that
could keep an immigrant or a native Canadian awake for even thirty seconds. As far as I
can tell, Canada is in fact the most boring country on Earth. This is hardly to say that
Canada is the worst country; on the contrary, it’s a very safe, naturally beautiful place in
which to live. The country’s just spiritually dead, suffering from the postmodern, nihilistic
phase of its bedrock liberalism.

I’d go as far as to hypothesize that Toronto’s current inability to succeed in any

international team sport, be it baseball, hockey, basketball, or soccer, is due to this
national somnambulism. Success in sports has an intangible psychological factor, and
Canadians on the whole are relatively weak-minded, lacking a national character that
means something to them and that they could describe without hollow liberal slogans.
Somehow, this cultural miasma seems to seep into athletes who play for Toronto teams
and drain their energy. Or perhaps these players can’t help but fall asleep at practice,
due to excruciating boredom simply from living in Ontario for an extended period.
Curiously, though, Canadians are well-represented in the growing sport of mixed martial
arts, and I suspect that that’s because this sport has a rich Eastern culture built into it
which fills in the void left by Canadian postmodern liberalism.

Appendix: The Definition of “Liberalism”

Liberalism: modern ideology of individual freedom, now anathema to the United States,
the so-called land of the free.

Originally, liberalism was the salvation of modernists from the Dark Ages, a celebration
of Reason, Freedom, and Progress. Liberals were grim secular humanists, scientists,
and renaissance men, God’s blood staining their faces as they set about creating a New
World, free from superstition, oppression, and squalor, with each liberal serving as her
own rationally self-controlling and creative sovereign. Now liberals are reduced to
effeminate, vacillating, double-talking managers of the new form of dominance hierarchy
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they created, the stealth oligarchy in which the strongest and most vicious use
democracy and free markets to enslave the mob. Ironically, liberal myths of our potential
godhood have backfired, thanks to the liberal’s science-centered philosophy which
corrodes all grand delusions, leaving the postmodern wasteland in which liberals know
enough to be miserable and are free to endlessly consume as an oligarch’s branded
cattle.

The very instrument that modern, classic liberals considered sacred, namely
technoscience, has been used to control society and not just nature, and so armed with
market research and cognitive science, American demagogues have demonized
liberals, counting on the public’s ignorance of the liberal’s role in the birth of modern
civilization. Liberals armed and unleashed a new breed of human predator and parasite,
whose ill-gotten wealth co-opts liberal governments against the majority’s interests or
whose perfected demagoguery creates the modern dictatorship. Thus has liberalism
demonstrated our gross inequality, making nonsense of the liberal’s myth of universal
human dignity. Liberalism was a paean to the end of the Old World, directing the
modern experiment in social engineering which didn’t eradicate kings and other pseudo-
gods but merely improved their methods of control. Liberalism is the myth of human
progress, but liberals have shown that sometimes change is an illusion.
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Should Liberals Try to Win Elections by being Less Rational?

____________________________________________________

In his book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,
the political psychologist and Democratic strategist Drew Weston argues that in the US,
Republicans are much more successful presidential campaigners than Democrats
because Republicans understand that voters are typically irrational when they evaluate
issues they care about. Democrats, however, labour under the eighteenth century
presumption that the mind is “dispassionate,” that the voter “makes decisions by
weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions.” Unfortunately for
Democrats, this theory of the dispassionate mind “bears no relation to how the mind and
brain actually work. When campaign strategists start from this vision of mind, their
candidates typically lose” (ix). According to Westen, Clinton is the main exception, since
he understood the importance of connecting with voters’ feelings. Westen’s book was
published before Obama’s election, but Obama’s optimistic and inspiring assurance that
“Yes, we can change” might count as another exception. Democrats like Dukakis, Gore,
and John Kerry, though, lost mainly because they presupposed an erroneous,
rationalistic theory of the mind.
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As Westen puts it,

Republicans understand what the philosopher David Hume recognized three

centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around. With
the exception of the Clinton era, Democratic strategists for the last three decades
have instead clung tenaciously to the dispassionate view of the mind and to the
campaign strategy that logically follows from it, namely one that focuses on facts,
figures, policy statements, costs and benefits, and appeals to intellect and
expertise.

Democrats do so, he says, “because of an irrational emotional commitment to

rationality--one that renders them, ironically, impervious to both scientific evidence on
how the political mind and brain work and to an accurate diagnosis of why their
campaigns repeatedly fail (15).

According to Westen, Democrats need to come to grips with the fact that

We do not pay attention to arguments unless they engender our interest,

enthusiasm, fear, anger, or contempt. We are not moved by leaders with whom
we do not feel an emotional resonance. We do not find policies worth debating if
they don’t touch on the emotional implications for ourselves, our families, or
things we hold dear. From the standpoint of research in neuroscience, the more
purely ‘rational’ an appeal, the less it is likely to activate the emotion circuits that
regulate voting behavior. (16)

“The paradox of American politics,” says Westen, “is that when it comes to winning
hearts and minds, the party that views itself as the one with the heart (for the middle
class, the poor, and the disenfranchised) continues to appeal exclusively to the mind”
(44). Westen recommends that in political campaigns liberals wear their heart on their
sleeve, since right-wing extremists have captured the conservative party and don’t
represent the majority of Americans.
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The Irrelevance of Westen’s Political Strategy

Westen’s assessment is consistent with my views on liberalism and conservatism, but I

don’t think he goes far enough. In the first place, his goal is just the partisan one of
helping Democrats win elections, not to ensure that the party with the best principles
and policies wins. Thus, he recommends that Democrats adopt the Republican strategy
of selling their message by appealing to voters’ feelings, of favouring truthiness over
truth, to use the comedian Stephen Colbert’s distinction. Of course, Democrats want to
win elections and they might run more successfully by following Westen’s advice, but
the deeper question is whether such an anachronistic party that needs that advice in the
first place ought to win elections in the postmodern world. What’s the point of electing
an unprincipled, hyper-rational party when no sooner than its candidate is elected will
his or her technocratic governing style automatically bend to serve the oligarchic power
structure which most benefits those who can achieve their political objectives by relying
just on their lobbyists, campaign contributions, and implicit private sector job offers for
cooperative politicians? Even were there no such bribery or economic blackmail, a
Democratic president who doesn’t understand how irrational voters are about their
cherished issues, precisely because that president has no such strong philosophical
feelings of his or her own, is bound to cower when faced in office with the great
unelected powers.

As progressives lament, this is what happened under both Clinton and Obama. Clinton,
who is Westen’s hero, in effect, for the depth of Clinton’s cynicism about our tendency
not to rise above the animalistic parts of our brain, may be responsible for “eight years
of peace and prosperity,” to borrow his supporters’ meme, but both the peace and the
economic prosperity were illusory: the peace was the result of al Qaeda’s preparation
for its main attack on the US, which came just after Clinton left office, and the economic
gains were due to a self-destructive ballooning of Americans’ debt and to tech and real
estate bubbles that again burst soon after Clinton left. Clinton is infamous among
liberals for his “triangulation,” which is to say his governing as a centrist Republican. For
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example, he deferred to Greenspan’s and to Paul Rubin’s policies of “free trade” and
deregulation, which led to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which in turn created
banks that are too big to fail and that therefore hold the global economy hostage.

As for Obama, as soon as he won his election by campaigning as a passionate

progressive, he too governed as a pragmatic, triangulating centrist Republican,
continuing or exacerbating all of Bush’s foreign policies, as Glenn Greenwald’s blog
demonstrates, and bowing to economic pressures on domestic affairs, such as in the
cases of his health care bill which doesn’t offer an alternative to the badly-flawed
American system that’s run by pharmaceutical companies and private health care
insurers, and his unconditional bailout of Wall Street. As Greenwald speculates,
Obama’s betrayal of his progressive base and of the independents that handed him his
mandate may explain the clownish status of the current Republican field of presidential
candidates, since the Republicans are able to demonize Obama only by moving so far
to the right that they lose all touch with reality.

Clinton and Obama may have been politically successful, in Westen’s narrow pragmatic
sense, in that they won the presidency by manipulating the voters’ feelings instead of
raising the bar and leveling with voters about the underlying reality in the US, which is,
as Chris Hedges says in Death of the Liberal Class, that the US is a stealth oligarchy
with merely vestigial liberal institutions that provide dysfunctional checks on its
undemocratic centers of power. The recent Democratic presidents may have been
politically successful in the narrowest, Machiavellian sense, but their elections didn’t
further any progressive or socialist endeavor. While in office as the president, neither
Clinton nor Obama framed issues in liberal terms in the way that Reagan pushed the
American political debate to the right, even though Clinton and Obama were elected
largely because of their rhetorical powers.

The underlying problem, then, is that even a nihilistic or indeed a sociopathic politician
with no feelings at all can succeed in narrow pragmatic terms, by arousing voters’
feelings in the politician’s favour during a circus-like, postmodern political campaign.
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This capacity to succeed in winning elections, by way of cynical pandering and

demagoguery, has no bearing on whether liberalism itself presently has any merit. On
the contrary, the reason that Democrats, and indeed liberals in general, are beholden to
an anachronistic rationalism or scientism is that they have no deeply-felt values of their
own and therefore presume that no one else has or ought to have such values. In short,
liberals are postmodernists who flatter themselves by thinking that they’re still modern:
they’re actually cynical, nihilistic pragmatists who pretend that they possess a rousing
liberal metanarrative that can compete with conservative myths. As I say in “Scientism,”
the liberal’s root error is the scientistic one of assuming that scientific methods of
acquiring knowledge can be extended to dictate how society ought to be run, that
society generally can progress just as well as can the institutions of science--and by the
same means, namely by the exercise of dispassionate reason in opposition to
traditional, intuitive, or faith-based myths. That scientism leads to the postmodern
corruption of liberalism, to moral relativism, political apathy, cultural decadence, and to
the technoscientific version of the primitive oligarchic status quo.

The Liberal’s Pitiful Vestige of Theism

Oh, to be sure, the liberal has strong feelings about social issues such as abortion, gay
rights, feminism, fair redistribution of wealth, and avoidance of war. Ask for a
justification of those feelings and the liberal will offer religious principles of either the
theistic or the scientistic variety. I’ll look at each in turn (and I’ll ignore the religious
aspect of scientism, for the sake of simplicity). Liberal theism is a pathetic, retreating
echo of authentic theism. Since prehistoric times, real theists have channeled the
energy of existential worries into apologies for social dominance hierarchies. Real
theism, whether for monotheists, Hindus, or Buddhists, is distinguished by exoteric faith
and thus by a narrowness of vision that pits empirical knowledge not simply against faith
in a transcendent, supernatural reality, but in a naïve replacement of mystical
experience with crude, anthropocentric images. The chief flaw of theism isn’t literalism,
the idolatrous worship of scripture, or even an authoritarian mindset; rather, the theist’s
calamitous weakness is his or her narcissistic projection of parochial human categories
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onto purportedly ultimate realities. The theist belittles the divine by humanizing it, mocks
the awesome miracle of the existence of a cosmos, not just by positing
anthropomorphic deities and supernatural events, but by narrow-mindedly clinging to
infantile creeds without all due humility. The most appalling shortcomings of theists are
ethical and aesthetic in character.

Now, liberal, progressive, and moderate theists are much more influenced by the
scientific mindset and so they can’t bring themselves to worship theological metaphors.
This means not just that the liberal theist is more familiar with scientific theories, but that
she appreciates the source of the scientist’s triumph, which is the humility that causes a
scientist to abandon traditions, intuitions, and wishes and to let the evidence speak for
itself. The liberal theist accepts the modern scientific worldview and is thus far a
rationalist, but she nevertheless clings to a traditional theistic religion rather than
adopting the more recent science-centered religion, marked by faith in modern
metanarratives of technoscientific progress and in the divinity of capitalistic creativity
and of the winners in a wild (free) market. Her rationalism sets her at odds with both
esoteric and exoteric theism (mysticism and mainstream religious faith, respectively),
but due to nostalgia, childhood indoctrination, social pressure, a lack of imagination, or
a cynical ruse for private gain, she adheres to a semblance of traditional theism. In the
more aesthetically repellent cases, the liberal theist passively absorbs the dominant
religion from her social atmosphere and pays mere lip service to its creed, without her
religion having any substantial impact on her behaviour. The more impressive liberals
are those who creatively seek a fitting religious interpretation of the postmodern world,
turning to New Age speculations. The chief flaw of this form of liberal religion, though, is
its pseudoscientific syntheses of perennial religious concepts with current scientific
knowledge.

Either way, the liberal’s theism is only skin deep, since rationalism undermines the
credibility of both traditional religions and of more recent pseudoscientific ones, and also
prevents mystical experience (although not the psychedelic, drug-induced version of
this experience). To see how this phony theism plays out for the liberal, see, for
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example, Westen’s argument that the liberal is astonishingly well-positioned to demolish

so-called conservative “Christian” morality on the ground that this morality is obviously
anti-Christian. This is so, says Westen, despite the fact that in the US, conservatives
have successfully identified any worldview other than what Westen calls the extremist,
fundamentalist Christian one as unpatriotic, immoral, and otherwise intolerable. After all,
Westen points out, the conservative Christian’s social Darwinian trust in market forces,
idolizing of plutocrats and soldiers, and lack of compassion for persons--the campaign
against the abortion of first trimester embryos notwithstanding--are woefully at odds with
the Bible. Says Westen, “You wouldn’t know from the language of the religious right that
Jesus was preoccupied with poverty, not sex,” and he goes on to point out similarly
glaring conflicts between the New Testament and the Republican’s views on school
prayer, war, and taxes (381).

But the liberal’s Bible-based denunciation of fundamentalist Christianity is futile. Of

course there’s nothing Jesus-centered about authoritarian, fundamentalist Christianity,
and if Jesus walked the Earth today he’d remind those imposters that he never knew
them, and then he’d blast the earth from under their feet and roast them in hell unto the
end of time. Being a friend of scientific rationality, however, the liberal or moderate
Christian knows that there’s no realistic potential for such justice; that the Bible was
written by ignorant, often plagiarizing and patriarchal or victimized males whose
metaphors have literary and historical significance, but not much spiritual weight in the
postmodern context; that all anthropomorphic images of God are misleading; that no
teaching from a religious institution should be dogmatically accepted; that none of
Jesus’ miracles happened as reported; that Christian theology isn’t about metaphysical
reality so much as psychological transformation and thus that Jesus may not have
existed even as an historical person, let alone as a human incarnation of the universe’s
creator.

The contradictions between the Bible and Republican orthodoxy mean little in light of
the essence of pure theism as a tool for social control. No sooner than the liberal refers
to the contradictions, the conservative Christian freely speaks of the Holy Spirit’s
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presence in the Church’s development or of God’s hand in inspiring new interpretations

of Christian revelation for the present worldly circumstances, or any other ad hoc
nonsense to harmonize the theological and political dimensions of the grotesque edifice
of conservatism. Theism in its own right is, and has always been, mainly a fantasy for
the authoritarian personality that worships power. Thus, by blurring the line between
religion and state for the sake of creating a theocracy, the conservative Jew, Christian,
or Muslim demonstrates that he’s the more authentic theist compared to the liberal or
moderate, regardless of the incoherence of the conservative’s worldview.

Only a rationalist with scientistic leanings like a liberal would assume that the question
of the literal truth of fundamentalist theology is crucial to that theology’s effectiveness as
a means of social control. To be sure, the fundamentalist will climb onto the rooftop to
declare the ultimate truth of some handful of religious ravings, but a conservative’s
religious faith is sustained not so much by trust in the intellectual strength of any
doctrine, but by animalistic pride in being friends with the block’s biggest bully, whose
power must be obvious to its victims as well as to its possessors. Thus, the Christian
conservative takes comfort not in what the Bible actually says, what happened two
thousand years ago in Palestine, or in the pseudoscientific hypothesis that God helped
along the biological evolution of species; instead, this conservative trusts primarily in
American economic and military hegemony, to which Christian symbols are attached for
the purpose of taunting outsiders and victims of that power. Fundamentalist Judaism is
sustained by Israeli military might, which extends that of the US, which in turn is aligned
with Judeo-Christian theism. Finally, Muslim fundamentalists are sustained by the
memory of when Muslims dominated during the Middle Ages and by the recent
manifestation of their power in the 911 attack on the US, the success of which they
incessantly attribute to their god.

So much for the liberal’s criticism of conservative religion. What about the religious
basis of liberal values? According to Westen, this basis is essentially just the Golden
Rule.
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Its key virtues are compassion and tolerance, and it reflects the clear and simple
moral dictum that we should treat others as we would want to be treated, whether
or not they share our religious beliefs, gender, skin color, sexual orientation, or
other characteristics, and even if we personally find some of their attitudes
distasteful....Although firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and ultimately
derived from the teachings of that tradition with its foundation in the Bible, this is
a nondenominational view of public morality that can be held equally by
Christians, Jews, Muslims, ‘secular humanists,’ agnostics, and atheists. (408)

There are a number of questionable assumptions in this quotation, but the one I want to
focus on is that we’re morally obligated to be compassionate and tolerant. As Westen
says, theists and nontheists alike can uphold the Golden Rule, but this universality
should give us pause. The reason for the universality is hinted at by Westen’s reference
to the virtues of compassion and tolerance. When we look more closely at the Golden
Rule, that we should treat others as we’d treat ourselves were we in their position, what
we find, of course, is just an appeal to empathy. Once you empathize with others, you’ll
find yourself agreeing with the liberal’s policies on social issues, such as on
redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, and on a preference for negotiation and
for trials rather than for a so-called war on terror. Most humans have an innate ability to
theorize about other people’s thoughts and feelings, because we’re social animals, and
once we begin dwelling on what’s likely happening in someone else’s mind, it’s not
much of a leap to start imagining what it would be like to be that other person. You
might have preferred to be someone who’s better off than you, leading you to feel
admiration or jealousy, and you might be repulsed by the thought of being someone
worse off, leading you to feel pity or contempt for that other person.

The capacities for imagining someone else’s mental states and for feeling certain
emotions in response to the other person’s situation are universal, because they’re
biologically ingrained in most people. But this doesn’t mean we morally ought to feel
certain emotions such as pity rather than contempt. Just because most people are
capable of empathizing, doesn’t mean that feelings of compassion and tolerance are
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virtuous nor that we’re all bound by the Golden Rule. Westen recognizes that the
Golden Rule historically had theistic justifications, but once the liberal comes to admire
modern science and to digest the naturalistic worldview, she can no longer help herself
to that rule in defense of her values. The liberal needs a reason why pity for those who
are worse off than us is superior to disgust for their failure or misfortune. Jesus offers a
reason: the poor and the miserable will inherit the world when God reigns over it more
directly, and those who presently flourish will likely be condemned to hell; moreover,
God commands that we help those who suffer. The liberal’s problem is that she doesn’t
take the New Testament seriously as a moral handbook, because her science and logic
dictate that its authors had no special insight on how we should live. So the liberal can
mouth her approval of empathy, but merely calling certain feelings virtuous and invoking
the famous Golden Rule don’t amount to a prescription of liberalism. Certainly, no
compelling justification of liberal values will emerge from the liberal’s hand-me-down,
threadbare theism.

Scientistic Liberalism: Instrumental Reason Masking the Ego

Liberals who appreciate that reason destroys childlike religious faith have attempted to
justify their values in more secular terms. The most common justification derives from
the social contract theory, as formulated by such political philosophers as Locke or
Rawls. According to this theory, liberal values are the results of an objective weighing of
the alternatives when pondering the thought experiment of how best to set up a society
to escape from the harsh state of nature in which, as Hobbes said, everyone is at war
with everyone else. We voluntarily agree to respect each other’s liberties, because the
alternative is anarchy in which most people are disadvantaged. This agreement is the
social contract, and the key point is that reason rather than religious faith in divine
revelation is the basis for the resulting liberal society. We weigh the odds of how we’d
fare under different social or antisocial arrangements, and we conclude that the liberal
society, in which everyone enjoys certain equal and unalienable rights, provides the
best compromise.
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This rational defense of liberalism shares its main defect with the theistic defense I just
criticized. Once again, a description of a prevalent state of affairs is mistaken for a
prescription of what we ought to do. Suppose that most people do reason as the social
contractarian says and so come to favour a liberal society over the alternatives. No
normative statement follows from that premise--no justification of liberal values and no
Golden Rule. True, each person who thinks about the alternatives and concludes that a
liberal society is best can cite those reason that convince her, but those reasons may be
strong or weak. Were there (1) powerful evidence that liberal values of respect for
liberty and compassion for everyone’s inherent dignity are needed to produce the
society in which everyone is most advantaged, and were (2) everyone to share an
interest in living in such a society, assuming that everyone acts in her own best interest,
or to “maximize her utility,” liberal values would be proven rational and all rational
people would in fact be liberals. But this doesn’t imply that anyone ought to be a liberal,
since the morally or aesthetically best way of life may require irrationality rather than
rationality, and those who seek their own advantage may be acting contrary to such an
overriding standard.

What we have here, in this rational defense, is an appeal to instrumental reason and to
conditional prescriptions. The hyper-rational liberal observes that most people do act
egoistically, in the direct or indirect pursuit of their own gain, and this liberal
recommends that if someone has such self-interest in mind, then that person should
prefer a compassionate, tolerant society to an opposite one. This is equivalent to saying
that a liberal society is the most effective means of satisfying people’s self-interest.
Instead of having any moral force, then, this instrumental liberalism reduces to a
scientific generalization about a causal relationship between a certain sort of social
order and a certain resulting mental state (satisfaction of personal goals). Only were the
liberal to defend the tendency to act out of self-interest (that is, egoism, or the attempt to
maximize your own welfare) would we have the makings here of a moral defense of
liberalism. Instead, we have only a scientistic one, since the secular liberal seldom
admits that her sociopolitical philosophy amounts to merely a description with no
normative implications; indeed, she’ll typically commit the naturalistic fallacy, especially
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when arguing against a nonliberal, and conclude, in short, that liberal values are
superior to nonliberal ones. With this instrumental liberalism in tow, the liberal is entitled
to conclude only that if the nonliberal ultimately values her own welfare, then that
person should think like a liberal, assuming that doing so produces the society in which
egoists are most likely rewarded. Unfortunately, such a person would already be a
liberal.

(A word about a piece of obfuscation that a secular liberal is wont to hide behind at this
point. Liberals aren’t committed to egoism, she’ll say; “maximization of utility” and
“acting out of self-interest” mean only that a person pursues goals that belong to herself,
not that her actions aim towards benefiting herself as the object of her goals. Compare
a person who kills herself solely to benefit someone else whom the suicidal person
hates, with a person who robs a bank to buy a mansion solely for her own enjoyment. In
the first case, we can say that the suicidal person acts out of self-interest in the first,
non-egoistic sense, since even though she doesn’t intend for her action to benefit
herself at all, she’s the self who possesses the non-egoistic desire to commit suicide for
someone else’s benefit. In the second case, we can say that the robber acts out of self-
interest in the second, egoistic sense, since not only does she possess the desire which
causes her to rob the bank, but her own personal gain is the ultimate objective in her
mind. Note that the non-egoistic sense of “self-interest” is utterly tautological and
worthless in a defense of liberalism. Just because someone acts out of self-interest in
the non-egoistic sense doesn’t mean rationality forces her to prefer a liberal society to
the state of nature, since the desire she possesses may be a suicidal, masochistic,
sociopathic, or otherwise insane one.

(No, the social contractarian’s argument from instrumental reason assumes the egoistic
sense of self-interest, since only the desire for your own preservation could cause you
to prefer a society in which you’re entitled to certain protections that aren’t otherwise
available. Granted, the secular liberal’s egoism doesn’t require that we each act to
benefit solely ourselves, since we’re free to benefit indirectly from our actions. Thus, a
secular liberal can help other people as long as doing so at least psychologically
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benefits the liberal. Were there no such positing of an underlying constant motive to
benefit ourselves, the liberal’s notion of “self-interest” would be the useless tautological
one.)

Once it’s clear that secular liberalism presupposes a nontrivial kind of egoism, the
liberal loses the moral high ground, which is why the liberal shrewdly masks her egoism
behind jargon like “maximization of utility.” This secular defense of liberalism is roughly
the same as the Invisible Hand defense of an unplanned economy. In each case, the
argument is that, rather paradoxically, everyone is better off if they just stop trying to be
so moral and put their own selfish concerns first. In the political context, a liberal,
democratic society follows by the power of instrumental reason, which causes the egoist
to realize that such a society is most likely to benefit her personally in the long run. In
the economic context, a free market, in which buyers and sellers get what they deserve
and the standard of living is most likely to rise for everyone, follows by the power of
cosmic creativity, which produces more and more complex forms from the atomic to the
intergalactic scales.

What’s wrong with egoism, given its role in secular liberalism? In the first place, the
assumption that rational people are nontrivially self-interested should cloud the
calculation of probabilities in the hypothetical assent to the social contract. Whether a
liberal society really does satisfy the majority in the long-run is less obvious if we
assume that those who reach that conclusion are egoists, since egoism is inherently
dangerous. If we replace an omniscient, benevolent God as the master force governing
society, with mindless cosmic creativity, we have no guarantee that the expression of
our instincts benefits us in the long-term. Even if we assume that our tendency to be
disproportionately concerned with our own welfare is an evolutionary adaptation that
makes ours a fit species, Mother Nature is frugal and imperfect, and every fit species
eventually is extinguished, leaving room for more novel forms of complexity. Our high
self-regard may protect our genetic lineage, but in the long-run egoism--combined with
our high intelligence--may destroy us. For example, assuming we’re innately self-
interested, a demagogue can more easily manipulate a mass of people by pandering to
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that instinct for self-preservation, say by demonizing foreigners, and what’s beneficial
for an elite group of insiders may harm the majority of outsiders. Also, an unplanned
economy in which everyone is encouraged to think mainly of his or her own private
welfare, may consume and grow without paying sufficient heed to future generations,
leading to environmental catastrophe and potentially the extinction of our species, let
alone the collapse of particular nations.

In the second place, aside from the damage egoism does to the liberal’s empirical case,
there are ethical and aesthetic objections to egoism. The main alternative to egoism is
the mystic’s lack of self-regard, due to a realization that the personal self is illusory and
to an identification with the unity of natural processes. I won’t attempt to show here
which is the ethically or aesthetically superior way of life, the egoistic, materialistic,
liberal protection of liberty and pursuit of happiness or the ascetic, Gnostic, mystical
detachment from such concerns due to a vision of their absurdity. Instead, I’ll just point
to what I say in “Happiness is Unbecoming” and “Curse of Reason,” that flight from the
knowledge of our grim existential situation, as animals that fall short of the idealistic
projections of ourselves in our religious myths, is unseemly. The curse of reason is the
knowledge that makes the intellectually curious person unhappy. To honour that
knowledge of what we are as beasts lost in the wilderness of natural forces, we need to
renounce any carefree lifestyle that depends on delusions. That conscientious
renouncing may entail self-loathing rather than self-interest: far from deferring to our
natural instincts that cause us to privilege our own welfare, we may find that a willful
revolt against those instincts is more tasteful and even awe-inspiring. At any rate,
egoistic secular liberalism is at odds with the mystic's condemning of the illusory
fragmentation of the cosmos that produces unique levels of alienation and suffering for
intelligent animals.

Conclusion

Drew Westen’s suspicion may be correct, that Democrats hamper their own political
chances by clinging to modernist and scientistic fantasies of rationalism in our
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postmodern context in which the myth of human greatness, due to our rationality, has
lost its power to enchant, thanks to the wars of the last century and to the scientific
discovery of our natural limitations. Republicans are better at running political
campaigns because they have much less shame than Democrats: they’re beholden to
much more absurd traditional theistic fantasies that rationalize the colossally unfair,
oligarchic social arrangement. As such, Republicans have less compunction about
exploiting people’s psychological weaknesses, such as the emotional and instinctive
foundations of our brains. Conservatives are the true theists, mesmerized by power
inequalities; their enterprise is to approximate the ideal inequality between Creator and
Creation, maintaining for us the dominance hierarchies that evolve as the most stable
social orders in myriad species, including ours. With all of that on their side,
Republicans and conservatives in general ought to be highly effective campaigners, that
is, hypocrites, demagogues, predators, or parasites.

Liberals are progressive to the extent that they resist those forces of gravity and try to
establish a new world order. Their tragic flaw is their scientism, which is their faith in
reason as our salvation: reason works in science, not in society at large, since reason
has no normative force. So the liberal is left unarmed, now that postmodern
disenchantment with reason has set in, but condemned with the Herculean task of
unseating the mighty conservative from his natural throne. The only way left to beat the
conservatives is to join them, and so a Democrat, for example, must govern like a
centrist Republican, fleeing from the opportunity to sell liberal values which are, after all,
so fragile now that their support from Enlightenment myths has been lost. In the first
place, though, a Democrat must campaign like a Republican, as Westen says,
appealing to emotions rather than just to logic or evidence. Were a liberal to succeed
with such a campaign strategy, the result would be no defense of liberal values, since
such a politician could be expected to triangulate for Machiavellian advantage, having
acquired a taste for the cynicism needed to win political power in a competition with
inhumane conservatives. And were a Democrat to lose with that strategy, the culprit
would surely be the greater difficulty of becoming excited about relatively recent liberal
values that are no longer motivated by charming theistic or scientistic myths.
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Existential Grimness and Cornel West’s Catastrophic

Compassion
____________________________________________________

This summary of his philosophy draws on the online article, “The Supreme Love and
Revolutionary Funk of Dr. Cornel West, Philosopher of the Blues,” by Jeff Sharlit. See
also West’s short YouTube video on “catastrophic love.” Cornel West is an existential,
Kierkegaardian Christian and progressive. As Sharlit says, the “Westian turn” is that
West ‘roots himself in what he calls “the night side of American democracy” so he’ll be
ready for the dawn. He begins with anger so we can end with love.’ West speaks as a
sort of postmodern prophet. However,

“To prophesy,” he [West] writes, “is not to predict an outcome but rather to
identify concrete evils.” He’s concerned not with divine revelations but with what
he sees as jazzlike improvisation, the radical hope he tempers with the tragic
sensibility he takes from the blues. “I’m a bluesman in the life of the mind,” he
says, “a jazzman in the world of the ideas”....The blues, West says, is the
suffering that’s at the heart of the American story, both tragic and comic, darkly
grandiose and absurdly mundane. Jazz is democracy...Jazz--improvisation--is
his answer to things as they are, the negation of the status quo and thus the
affirmation of another possibility.
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For an appreciation of the tragic aspect of life, West recommends the 19th C. Italian
poet Leopardi, who saw that the naturalism of Enlightenment philosophy gives rise to
what West calls “the paradox of human freedom,” that we must resist oppression even
as we acknowledge, as Sharlit puts it, ‘that we are ultimately weak in the face of death
and despair. “We are organisms of desire,” West defines the human condition, “whose
first day of birth makes us old enough to die.” ’

West’s perspective is summarized in the title of his early book, Prophesy Deliverance!:
An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, in which he synthesizes
Marxism, Christianity, and a tragicomic African-American sensibility. Sharlit:

West believes in Marx’s radical critique of capital and empire, but he also
believes in God. To West, Marxism without what he calls “the love ethic” is
inhumane, just as Christianity without a systemic economic and political analysis
is incomplete. And what would blackness contribute? Death; or, to put it another
way, the blues, a sensibility both tragic and comic that was lacking in the
utopianism of the left and the messianism of religion.

He advocates what he calls “prophetic pragmatism.” This is to say that West is

interested more in political action than in academic debates, and that he regards
theodicy as the chief obstacle to progressive action. As Sharlit says, West ‘locates the
problem of theodicy not in the abstract of heaven but in the concrete of the world: “How
do you really struggle against suffering in a loving way, to leave a legacy in which
people would be able to accent their own loving possibility in the midst of so much
evil?” ’

West is after what he calls “catastrophic love,” meaning loving-kindness or, as West
puts it, “steadfast commitment to the wellbeing of others, especially the least of these,”
a compassion, however, that’s rooted in an understanding of the tragedy of human life,
of what I’ve called our existential predicament. West is directly impacted by one of the
primary American catastrophes, which was the enslavement of Africans, and his
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Christianity requires that he focus on compassion for the poor and the downtrodden. As
West says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Sharlit explains: ‘justice is not
vengeance but fairness; the respect he [West] believes should be accorded every soul.
“And democracy,” he [West] continues, “is what justice looks like in practice.” That is, a
society where there is justice--a vast, public loving-kindness--for all.’ Sharlit adds that
‘West is steadfastly anti-utopian. He thinks perfectionist illusions drive both religion and
radicalism to murderous ends. He knows that love for all is a hopeless cause, that thus
justice is a hopeless cause, too. Democracy? Not a chance. It’s a blues dream of a jazz
impossibility. But still, he can’t help dreaming.’

This is the practical problem of evil: our religious and political ideals seems impossible
to achieve. But West nevertheless prefers compassion to despair or bitterness. Thus he
calls everyone his brothers and sisters and is quick to hug strangers and friends alike.
As I see it, then, a Westian might read Rants Within the Undead God and say that what
I’ve left out is a practical concern to help the poor, to correct injustice. It’s fine to remind
ourselves that nature is a harsh place and that we’re all doomed to die, but not if this
pessimism is unmitigated, not if it prevents progressive action. West overcomes his
pessimism with Christian faith in the rightness of compassion, which drives him to fight
against political and economic injustices. Like West (and Chris Hedges, another
existential Christian), I’ve spoken of the injustices of oligarchy. But what resources, if
any, do I offer in the field of political action? Have I drunk from the cup of bitterness, to
which West refers in his video on catastrophic love? Should we succumb to despair and
allow injustices to take their course, retreating from politics, as detached ascetics or
outsiders? And is West’s Christian, African-American Marxism what I’d call an
aesthetically respectable path to worthwhile political ends?

Kierkegaardian Liberalism

My response begins with a summary of what I say in my various rants on liberalism. The
gist of my take on liberalism is that modern liberalism has degenerated into a
postmodern form, leading to what West, as a postmodern liberal, is forced to think of as
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the paradox of human freedom. Whereas a modern liberal, flush with Enlightenment
ideology and confident in scientistic myths, wouldn’t hesitate to declare that the rational
route to social progress is self-evident, the postmodern liberal can vouch for her political
ideals only with duplicity or with much hemming and hawing. Rationalism has led, as
Nietzsche predicted, to hyper-skepticism in modern societies, to a disenchantment of
nature and a corresponding incredulity towards all metanarratives, which is as the
French philosopher Lyotard said, the mark of the postmodern. The liberal continues to
value equality, human rights, and fairness, but has lost any compelling justification for
those values. That’s the root of why “liberal” is a dirty word in the US. Granted,
conservatives demagogued and demonized their opponents, but liberals failed to
pursue the course of annihilating the obvious evil at the heart of political conservatism
(the unabashed preservation of dominance hierarchies), because liberals can no longer
trust in their goal of social progress. Liberals can’t bring themselves to defend their
name, let alone their ideals, and pragmatic Americans have no respect for such lack of
self-confidence.

In effect, Cornel West confronts this problem for liberalism, but his theological and
existential construal of it obscures the fact that the liberal is in an especially precarious
position. The problem, West says, is the more universal one of theodicy, that we must
all find a way to overcome evil. But unlike rationalistic liberals, conservatives see
nothing paradoxical about human freedom, because conservatives live in a fantasy
world in which nature is still enchanted. Christian conservatives ignore the upshot of the
Age of Reason and wallow in shameful theistic delusions, while libertarian, atheistic
conservatives subscribe to an economic religion which deifies the cosmic creativity of
the wild (free) marketplace and the avatars of that divine creative power, the oligarchs
who triumph in the evolutionary struggle which is the ultimate creative process.
Postmodern liberals are energized by no such myths and their lot is the angst which is
Reason’s curse. Liberals who hold onto a vestige of some mainstream religion typically
can only pay lip service to its creed, because they’re more fervently committed to
modern rationalism.
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Now, West’s Christianity is the rare Kierkegaardian sort, which prescribes an irrational,
absurdly dangerous leap of faith as the only way to overcome the despair of knowing
the facts of our suffering and our mortality. In terms of political strategy, Christian
liberalism, which reduces the religion to that blind faith, is likely to founder, especially
when rationalists can move now from technoscientific strength to strength. Even if
physicists may currently be reaching the limits of science, substituting open-ended
string theory for a genuine Theory of Everything, a blind leap of faith in moral and
political ideals seems not just absurd but gauche. Certainly, a liberal shouldn’t admit
openly, in sophisticated postmodern society, that liberalism is based on compassion for
the poor which in turn is justified by nothing but Kierkegaardian blind faith. Such a
defense of liberalism would be torn asunder by savvy, pseudo-rational journalists before
the defense could even reach the subterranean lairs of conservative beasts. This is to
say that Kierkegaard doesn’t sit well with West’s professed pragmatism. It’s one thing to
fuel political action with prophetic rhetoric which calls attention to concrete injustices,
but it’s another if the prophet in question is Kierkegaard who concedes that theism, the
liberal’s ultimate motivation, has no rational justification whatsoever.

But what of the more substantive question of whether Kierkegaardian liberalism is

privately necessary, however publicly impractical this political philosophy may be?
Kierkegaardian theism is consistent with what I’ve called postmodern liberalism. A
postmodern liberal can’t subscribe to exoteric, literalistic theism, since that theism is
plainly irrational and unlike the conservative, the liberal is afflicted with the capacity for
shame, which compels her to respect the power of Reason. However, instead of
subscribing to one-sided rationalism, which leads to the fallacy of scientism, the liberal
can be an existentialist who understands that reason’s power is limited, especially for
the adapted animals that we are. If all worldviews are ultimately irrational, resting on
emotion, instinct, and faith, why not trust in constructive Christianity rather than in self-
destructive Reason? This is the existential argument put forward at the end of the
popular novel, The Life of Pi.
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Consistency, however, is too minimal a standard for philosophical purposes. When

deciding what to believe at the philosophical level, we’re inevitably guided by other
values that help discount certain choices. One such value, the aesthetic one, derives
from our instinctive (sexual) preference for beauty. Why didn’t Kierkegaard leap to faith
in Hinduism rather than in Christianity? Obviously because he lived in 19th C. Denmark
which was culturally Christian. That coincidence calls into question the notion that he
exercised radical, absolute freedom in leaping from nothing to something. He began not
with doubt about reason’s capacity to provide a satisfying philosophy, but with his
differential familiarity with cultures. The same is true with respect to Cornel West: he
grew up in an African-American culture which adopted European Christianity.

This is to say that the leap of faith can be clichéd and thus aesthetically suspect if it’s
not truly blind or original. Originality is praiseworthy, according to the modern ideal of
progress due to our divine creativity. But a truly despairing omega person, an outsider
who knows not what to believe because she’s lost in lamentations for the death of God,
won’t be caught with such a telltale bias. Her choice of a philosophy will be radical
because she’ll be a genuinely alienated outcast, beginning her philosophical journey
from nowhere in particular. She’ll be guided not by a fully-formed, presupposed
ideology, but by her character, instincts, and experience. And as I said, that means
she’ll have an aesthetic sense for which ideas feel right to her. As I show in “Christian
Crudities,” Christianity may feel right within Christian culture, but not within a modern,
rationalistic one.

Now, an existential philosopher, a radical who questions everything in pursuit of ultimate

truth, can be expected to question Enlightenment philosophy along with all other
cultures and ideologies, but questioning technoscience itself on non-normative grounds
isn’t part of any search for knowledge. You can doubt the optional and especially
dubious philosophies that crop up around technoscience, like scientism, naturalism,
pragmatism, and social Darwinism, but no one who’s interested in knowledge can doubt
the cognitive merit and power of scientific methods and their results. To that extent,
modernism must now be presupposed along with the ideal of good taste in ideas.
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However, certain values seem to follow inevitably from that appreciation of

technoscience, such as those of human ingenuity as a source of progress, and of
intellectual adulthood, meaning self-knowledge and personal integrity which are
antithetical to delusion. As I show in Christian Crudities, even from the most alienated,
detached and aesthetic viewpoint, Christianity now looks especially foolish and
degrading. What this means for Kierkegaard and Cornel West is that the proper
suspicion of rationalism, which can be expected to lead at some point to a leap of faith
to escape the pangs of angst, shouldn’t end in an embrace of Christianity--even when
the leaper lives in a Christian culture, given that certain modern values presently trump
Christian ones.

Solidarity, Pity, and Disgust

Leaving aside, then, West’s Christian basis for liberalism, what of the point that we
should still seek justice for the downtrodden rather than renounce our public
responsibilities, as bitter, postmodern ascetics and outsiders, leaving the field to the vile
oligarchs and their pets? There are two main points I want to make in this connection,
which I’ll address in turn. The first pertains to Leopardi’s philosophy of solidarity, the
second to the irony of equal rights. West says in his interview with Sharlit that his
favourite poem by Leopardi is The Broom, which is indeed a moving work. Leopardi’s
main point there is that we humans ought to stick together, given that our common
enemy is Mother Nature. Nature causes the majority of our grief, as symbolized by the
eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Instead of attacking each other, bringing all of us down like
a wayward soldier who flails about on the battlefield and harms both friend and foe, we
should unite and square off against inhumane natural forces. That, then, is a non-
Christian reason for compassion, namely pity for all fellow sufferers at the hands of the
undead god, the mercilessly evolving natural universe.

As I say at the end of my dialogue between New Atheists and spiritual ones, I too think
that pity is a fitting basis for morality. However, pity goes hand in hand with disgust. In
so far as our plight is pitiful, our victimhood is also disgusting. When we suffer from
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being thrown into the world, as the existentialist Heidegger says, and from being cursed
with the accidental godlike power of reason which shows us too much of the universe
for us to fulfill in good faith our primitive urge for happiness, we’re revealed as ugly
creatures. Contrary to the secular humanistic philistines who vacuously mouth the
meme that nature is a beautiful place, with humans being the most glorious and
fortunate species, nature is comparable to a decaying zombie and humans to flies that
zip absurdly from one spot to the next to burrow in and feast on undead flesh. Of
course, much in nature is beautiful when compared to the well-proportioned human
body which we instinctively prefer; thus, we’re biased to admire symmetry, averages,
and other physical signs of health. But the overreaching application of that standard to
scientific theories or to anything other than the sexual context is preposterous and
worthy of ridicule. Nature is hideous and terrifying because of the grotesque disharmony
between its mindlessness and the minds which nevertheless naturally evolve.

What this means is that universal pity for our natural predicament should be mixed with
disgust. Thus, sentimental compassion is as inappropriate as is the incapacity for
shame or the predator’s egoistic dehumanization of his victims. What’s more inspiring, I
think, is a grim camaraderie as depicted at the end of Stapledon’s First and Last Men or
as surely felt on actual battlefields, by soldiers who’re forced to face death together. As
Chris Hedges points out in War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, and as became
apparent from the debacle of the neoconservatives’ war on Iraq, under Bush, war
seems glorious only to psychopaths, chickenhawks, or academics who haven’t actually
fought in any capacity, let alone in a war. Well-trained soldiers do indeed feel strong
solidarity, banding together in the foxhole as they must to live through the hell of a
military conflict. But their solidarity shouldn’t be sentimentalized or otherwise
whitewashed: they desperately need to rely on each other because bullets whiz by them
which could just as easily penetrate and maim their bodies. Any unity we might feel with
all people, as equal in our victimization by Mother Nature, would be more like a
harebrained scheme to preserve our sanity than a hero’s formulaic conviction that he
fights on the side of absolute Right. After all, we’re not literally at war with natural forces,
since they’re not deployed by any Mother Nature.
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Leopardi’s human solidarity, then, can be based just as embarrassingly on

anthropomorphism as can theism. Another way this moral pity can go wrong is if,
instead of projecting human properties onto the rest of nature, we draw a Cartesian line
between humans and everything else. If the world is an undead god, we’re the flies that
inhabit that strange cadaver. After all, we’re also natural beings. Thus, we can develop
into symbols of nature’s inhumanity, into oligarchs who rule over dominance hierarchies,
the Great Chains of Being. Out of Christian sentiment, West will likely say that he ought
to feel compassion for oligarchs as well as for their poor victims. And indeed, the
tragedy of the existential insignificance of oligarchic hegemony renders the oligarch
pitiful, to some extent. But the more fitting feelings are disgust for the oligarch’s betrayal
of his fellow humans and for his sociopathic identification with the undead god; fear of
the reality of the natural power over humanity which the oligarch’s supremacy
represents; and despair because there seems no escape from our natural prison. The
poor masses, too, are thoroughly natural creatures: not wholly innocent victims, but
weak animals that nevertheless seek power, animals that are easily corrupted or
manipulated and whose destruction is but a step in nature’s creative evolution.

Oligarchy and the Irony of Civil Rights

This brings me to my second point, which is in response to West’s interesting reminder

in his video that African-Americans fought their oppression not by seeking revenge
against whites, but by winning civil rights for all Americans. The Christian spirit of
forgiveness caused these children of slaves to act not as animals, West would say, but
as morally superior beings, and their compassion brought about genuine social
progress. According to West, we should follow their lead and lean towards universal
compassion rather than bitterness which exacerbates our plight, further alienating us.

I assume West’s historical narrative here is more or less accurate. Still, West has
reason to doubt his prescription of unconditional compassion and human solidarity. This
reason is provided by a case study of President Obama. As West points out, he
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campaigned for Obama, suspecting that Obama would succumb to temptation while in
office and betray his liberal principles. As is clear from Obama’s foreign and economic
policies, he has indeed so succumbed, aligning himself with the American oligarchs and
managing the status quo as a nihilistic, “centrist” postmodern liberal. What must be
especially galling to West is that Obama has done so little particularly for African-
Americans, who’ve suffered the most from the fallout from the oligarchs’ recent
economic games. For example, the June 2012 unemployment rate in the US remained
stable among whites and Hispanics, but has increased only among African-Americans.
(See the Business Insider article, “June Jobs Report Misses Expectations,
Unemployment 8.2%.”) Far from tilting his administration towards the Christian goal of
helping the poor, a disproportionate number of whom share the President’s skin colour,
at least, Obama bailed out Wall Street, neglecting even to reframe the American
economic debate with his bully pulpit (until his reelection campaign), let alone pursuing
progressive policies--contrary to clueless conservatives who demonize Obama as a
socialist without knowing what the word means.

So taking a long view, the liberation of slaves allowed an African-American eventually to

become President and to govern as a figurehead for oligarchs, like so many other dead
white guys. West himself has said as much, but he calls this merely a “setback” for the
progressive movement, failing to appreciate the irony, I think. Although Obama is only
one person whose behaviour hardly represents that of all African-Americans, his
shedding of his liberal ideology at the behest of oligarchs can’t responsibly be
interpreted as accidental. All signs point to the fact that Obama used to be a naïve
(academic) liberal as a community organizer, before he taught constitutional law and
ran for politics. As many commentators have noted, Obama campaigned for President
with moderates and progressives like Volcker and Cornel West, only to ditch them at the
outset of his time in office, populating his cabinet with pro-oligarchy, “free market”
Clintonites like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. This was no accident, if only
because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, according to which oligarchy is natural and thus
inevitable. Just try to manage a large group of people without centralizing power and
delegating responsibility, thus creating a dominance hierarchy, and just try to exercise
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power as a saint instead of being corrupted by it. In effect, then, Obama benefited from
the liberation of African-Americans in that he earned the right to become corrupted like
any other powerful person. What sort of congratulations are in order?

Of course, African-Americans would prefer to be so betrayed by one of their own than to

be slaves with no human rights; they’d prefer to vote for a puppet of oligarchs than to
lack the right to vote in the first place. But once again, informed liberals should remind
themselves that their ideals of liberty, justice and equality are delusions. Those who
occupy the lower levels of the power hierarchy may change, but the hierarchy remains.
The US freed its domestic slave labourers only to exploit wage slaves elsewhere,
turning to South America, India, China, and the Middle East. Moreover, in the very
basement of our power hierarchies are found the many nonhuman animal species that
we domesticate (enslave) or extinguish. Even if all nations came together under a global
government and social classes were abolished, we’d rely on our machines (private
properties) to sustain our high standard of living, and these machines would eventually
become sufficiently intelligent that our use of them would amount to enslavement.

Bitterness and Compassion

West may not be a naïve utopian with unrealistic political expectations, but publicly he’s
an enthusiastic advocate of compassion and solidarity, condemning what he’d call
counterproductive bitterness. Instead of drinking from the cup of bitterness, he says, we
should forgive and show universal compassion. I’ve argued that the Christian
justification for this is dubious and that the results of this Christian or humanitarian
attitude are perfectly ironic and thus not in keeping with pragmatism. But what exactly is
bitterness? Resentment, cynicism, stemming from indignation or in less righteous
cases, from rationalization for one’s own regrets. If we’re speaking of our proper attitude
towards natural forces, there’s nothing to resent, since there’s nothing personal about
our natural victimization. Thus, as I said, ascetic detachment or grim humour is more
appropriate. Grimness is sternness, an unyielding, harsh attitude befitting a soldier’s
dire circumstances. The stress from wearing such a warrior’s face will likely overwhelm
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the average person, and so grimness should be leavened with gallows humour, like a
bagpipes tune played on the battlefield.

Now which is superior, grim humour or West’s catastrophic loving-kindness? This may
just reduce to a question of personal character, but unconditional compassion seems
deluded without even addressing its Christian origin. To return to Lombardi’s metaphor,
compassion has no room on the battlefield. With respect to our position in nature, we’re
not literally at war, nor are we literally imprisoned, nor is nature literally undead. But
natural forces are literally mindless and they therefore only accidentally create intelligent
beings who suffer from their knowledge that they don’t belong in the natural world.
Given our existential predicament, love along with happiness are misplaced. Suppose
you show a homeless person compassion, offering him a blanket and a meal. You thus
place a Band-Aid on a wound that will naturally run its course regardless or your
intervention. You offer false hope that ignores the tragedy’s scope. If oligarchy is natural
and so inevitable, there will always be poor masses at the bottom of the economic
pyramid; as West says in the video, there’s always a catastrophe for the poor. But if this
is just the nature of animal life, with no hope for a deus ex machina, why pretend that
any of us is special enough that he or she deserves loving-kindness?

A homeless person is actually a fitting symbol for all of us, given the alienation caused
by our liberating intelligence. We’re all homeless in the inhuman cosmos: our claims to
own parts of the planet are laughably myopic; no god hears them. Of course, we are
special in the sense that we’re very rare, but that’s the source of our existential problem,
which calls for pity tinged with disgust, for awe, angst, dread, and grim humour, not
loving-kindness--as though we have reason to hope that everything will work out in the
end. West defines “compassion” as steadfast commitment to others’ well-being, and
that’s the heart of the delusion right there, the notion that we should be well; happiness
is for disembodied spirits in an ethereal heaven, not for homeless, trespassing animals
that concoct fantasies to escape the horror of being what we are. West is pessimistic,
but he still feels the need for compassion if only because he thinks this upbeat attitude
is socially useful. It may well be, but so too are the existential emotions like grim
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acceptance of reality and the artist’s detached joy in creating a new world by way of
conducting a doomed, foolhardy rebellion against the prior, natural one.

Political Action

Finally, what about political action? Clearly, existential or mystical detachment can lead
to asceticism, which is practically the opposite of a politically active outlook. Ascetics
have sometimes been forced into political action, though, as in the cases of Hindus
under Gandhi against the British Empire, Tibetan Buddhists against communist China,
and indeed the early Gnostic Christians against the Roman Empire. Gandhi was
outmaneuvered by the more modern Nehru who became independent India’s first Prime
Minister, and in any case so-called mystically enlightened India has had a caste system,
that is, a transparent dominance hierarchy, for thousands of years. The Tibetans
suffered the worst during China’s Great Leap Forward, with hundreds of thousands
killed and most of their monasteries destroyed. And as I show in “Christian Chutzpah,”
the Gnostic Christians were outmaneuvered by the exoteric literalists who partnered
with the very Empire that crushed Jesus.

Politics is the exercise of vice in the covert maintenance of naturally unjust power
structures. Mystics and other tenderhearted spiritual folk are infamously ill-suited to out-
compete the bloodthirsty sociopaths in a political contest. Indeed, as naïve a liberal as
Obama may once have been, he personally outmaneuvered Cornel West, the spiritual
academic, exploiting him to please his base supporters. West will point to the success
of the American civil rights movement under Martin Luther King, and once again I’ll
agree that that improved the lives of African-Americans, but I’ll maintain that that
success shouldn’t be idealized: it led to the grotesque ironies of Obama’s Presidency
and to the externalization of US slave labour. In any case, the Messiah still hasn’t
returned--no, Obama wasn’t the Messiah--and the American oligarchy endures like a
mountain.
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All of this is to say only that if enlightened people deem political action necessary, they
should expect the aesthetically worst-case scenario and the greatest ironies, including
the well-known capacity for political entanglement to corrupt a noble character. The
political realist would step in at this juncture and protest that this is the counsel of
despair, a rationalization that saves face for the outsider who lacks the courage to take
up real-life responsibilities. In the case of politics, these responsibilities would be those
of the informed citizen who’s duty-bound to democratically oversee the government’s
activities. This so-called realist who sneers at the idealist’s presumed cowardice and
naivety demonstrates that their relative positions are actually reversed. No informed
person can look at the US today and call it a functioning democratic republic. Yet that
nation hardly descends into chaos: business commences, power is channeled, and a
relatively high standard of living is maintained. That must be because some underlying
power structure is actually operative in the US, namely a stealth oligarchy in which
democratic oversight is irrelevant. The real-life civic responsibility of the American
masses isn’t to pretend to control the government; it’s to do what George W. Bush was
reckless enough to tell them to their face to do: to consume (like grazing cattle). They
carried out that responsibility with such fervor that they went into severe debt; thus, the
pecking order is maintained as the weaker masses sacrifice themselves for the greater
glory of their true gods, the plutocrats and other insiders who profit from economic
collapses as well as from booms, playing games with their pawns like the Olympian
gods of yore.
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Atheism Plus and the Liberal Conceit of Hyper-Rationality

____________________________________________________

Jen McCreight is a blogger at Freethought Blogs and recently she stirred the pot of the
New Atheistic movement, by arguing that a third wave of atheism is needed to replace
the Boy’s Club that currently rules and makes those like McCreight who say they apply
skepticism to everything feel uncomfortable. Atheists like McCreight who are politically
liberal and thus, as she says, who “care about social justice,” “support women’s rights,”
“protest racism,” “fight homophobia and transphobia,” and “use critical thinking and
skepticism,” don’t want to be called atheists when atheism is consistent with the
opposite of those liberal views. She calls for Atheism Plus, a liberal form of atheism, and
Greta Christina, another blogger at Freethought Blogs, distinguishes that form from
secular humanism--mostly for strategic reasons: “Atheism Plus” is clearer than “secular
humanism,” since “atheism” is currently more familiar to the public, and so forth.

I empathize with liberal atheists who want to belong to a social movement but who feel
marginalized or patronized in the New Atheistic one. Personally, being part of a social
movement doesn’t interest me, but I can understand why feminist atheists, for example,
would want to start a new wave of atheism, assuming they feel that many New Atheists
are conservatives or sexists.
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However, I suspect that were Atheism Plus to become popular and even replace New
Atheism as the main expression of the atheistic social movement in the US, UK, and
elsewhere, this would be due almost entirely to politically correct affirmation of liberal
talking points. The problem is the one I’ve taken up repeatedly in my philosophical
rants: reason is a curse. That is to say that when you apply skepticism to everything,
including social issues, you end up not with liberalism but with something like what I’m
calling existential cosmicism (until I think of a better label--talk about a social position
that needs rebranding!).

I’ve argued this at some length elsewhere, but I’ll summarize the main points here.
Skepticism is epitomized by the scientific methods of inquiry. So what is the scientific
picture of human nature? Is it equivalent to or even consistent with the liberal picture?
No, liberalism is as Nietzsche and John Gray say, a vestige of theistic morality, an
Enlightenment inheritance of Christian attitudes minus the theistic metaphysics that
gives those attitudes the appearance of being rationally justified. Granted, Christians
borrow their morality, in turn, from our innate, naturally selected inclinations towards
social, altruistic behavior. But biology explains only the causes of those inclinations, not
their philosophical justifications. That we’re instinctively driven to live together in
societies may be a matter of biological fact, but that doesn’t mean that that’s how we
ought to live. The normative question of whether Christian or otherwise altruistic
morality is best isn’t settled by science, but by philosophy.

Nevertheless, when skeptical philosophers turn to the scientific picture to inform our
reasoning, we find unsettling truths. First, we discover that we’re not as free or as
rational as we think we are. Second, we find that we’re animals that live under delusions
of grandeur, of transcending nature as angels or transhumans. We’re driven to sexually
reproduce because our genetic code dictates much of our behavior. We learn also that
just as the design of organisms is illusory, what with natural selection doing the work of
an intelligent designer, so too much of our normative self-conception is removed from
reality. Moral commandments don’t fall from the sky nor are they carved into stone,
because we’re not artifacts of a god. In particular, it’s not obvious that we have nearly
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as many rights as we feel politically entitled to claim. And this is the key point, since
liberalism depends on the notion of human rights. Women deserve just as much respect
as men, says the liberal, because women and men both have the same human rights.
Likewise, gays, lesbians, and heterosexuals are thought to have equal rights, as are the
poor and the rich, and the blacks and the whites, and so on. Without the notion of
human rights, there’s no reason to be socially liberal.

Liberals like McCreight claim that they merely apply skepticism to social questions, just
as atheists apply that rigorous, objective mode of inquiry to religious ones. But when
you think objectively about whether we have rights that flow from human nature, you run
up against a series of brick walls. First of all, there’s the naturalistic fallacy. Just
because we’re special in light of our reason, freedom, and social instinct--even if, again,
we’re not as special as we think we are, as cognitive scientists have discovered--
doesn’t mean there’s anything right, or normatively correct, about those attributes. Next,
there’s the genetic fallacy: just because social values are explained by our evolutionary
past and so secured by being normal, doesn’t mean those values are justified; for
example, just because we evolved to be sociable, doesn’t mean extroverts are healthier
or otherwise better than antisocial introverts. All you’re entitled to conclude from some
such evolutionary premise is that outgoing folks are normal and perhaps happier,
meaning merely that they’re in the majority and that their lives are more pleasurable. To
leap from that premise to the conclusion that the majority are also in the right is to
commit a fallacious appeal to popularity, to quantitative predominance. Likewise, to say
that because something is pleasurable, it’s also right, is to commit the naturalistic
fallacy.

You can go down the list of liberal positions on social issues and ask whether a liberal
really has so easy a time with them, given her rational methods. I suspect that while a
case can be made for some liberal views, based on a Nietzschean, aesthetic approach
to ethics, the notion that liberalism wins the day just on rational grounds is merely a
politically correct meme. Reason is largely neutral with respect to normative questions,
but when reason is relevant, that is, when we think of how we ought to live given what
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scientists have shown that we actually are, mainstream liberalism seems a mere
conceit. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t help each other--especially minorities who are
most desperate. In my view, altruism is justified only by the pain of feeling pity due to
empathy with other people’s suffering; we act to alleviate that shared pain. Those with
no such empathy have no reason to help others, and so they tend to focus on selfish
endeavours and to rise to positions of great power in our dominance hierarchies.
Liberals fool themselves with their scientistic quasireligion, when they pretend that their
emotional bias follows neutrally from something they call “skepticism,” from the alleged
application of Reason to all questions. Are liberals unaware that David Hume, the great
skeptic, performed a reductio on rationalism, using reason to show that we’re not so
rational? Far from merely thinking logically or looking at the empirical facts, what liberals
actually do is suffer from pity on account of how pathetic women, gays, blacks, poor
people, and other downtrodden groups seem in their lowly positions in the pecking
order.

Nevertheless, modern liberalism is scientistic, and so postmodern liberals earn a cheap

pass when they pretend that their social attitudes are in line with Reason. Reason
doesn’t carry the day for the liberal ideal of equality; instead, people are trained to nod
deferentially in the presence of anything associated with the awesome power of
technoscience. Postmodern liberalism, which is what liberalism becomes when faith in
modern myths of human greatness doesn't survive the death of God, is merely a piece
of political correctness, an empty shell of a philosophy, a song stuck in our head
because we can’t stand the cosmic silence, the undead god’s dearth of any advice at all
on how we should pass our time.

One philosophy that makes sense of the liberal’s aesthetic mode of inference and of the
emotional basis of her values is existential cosmicism. According to this philosophy, we
should feel embarrassed rather than proud every single time we think logically or
empirically about some problem. We should never forget that the cognitive dissonance
that permits clever mammals both to rationalize their pity for the weak and to humiliate
themselves with sex acts which they must keep private to preserve their dignity, is
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eminently ripe for satire. We are all pathetic, every one of us. We suffer tragically and
absurdly with no one but equally pathetic and deluded mammals to aid us. Liberal
saviours of the 99% aren’t flawless superheroes. Their scientism and hyper-rational
skepticism are politically correct delusions, nothing more. Reason spells the death of
God but also the unraveling of every myth, the bursting of every bubble, the transition
from modern naivety to postmodern cynicism.

I don’t trust the liberal's self-conception nor do I admire the interest in seeking a
community of like-minded people, in the first place. As is well known, democracy and
the internet fragment populations, creating echo chambers the divisions between which
are exploitable by demagogues. For example, New Atheists must be divided from
Atheism Plussers, who must likewise be divided from secular humanists. Thus, we’re
like birds that flock together because of our similar feathers. That’s all perfectly natural
but uninspiring, not a mark of progressive transhumanity, of a gnostic revelation of
something truly elevated above the grotesque natural order. Still, I wish Atheism
Plussers luck. Helping the downtrodden is aesthetically better than dominating them.
Liberals act on pity for the other, while conservatives act on disgust for the foreign. Both
spin tall tales to rationalize their character, but at least the liberal doesn’t sell us out so
thoroughly to the tender mercies of the undead god and to its mechanism of maintaining
social order, which is the oligarchic centralization of power.
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Conservatism: Myth-Making for Oligarchy

____________________________________________________

I’ll ask the same question that I asked about the liberal: What does the conservative
believe, deep-down, if anything? While liberalism is rooted in the Scientific Revolution,
conservatism has a much more ancient pedigree, stretching back to ancient monarchies
and aristocracies, to prehistoric nomadic tribes, and even to the dominance hierarchies
in most social species, from fish to birds to mammals, in which a minority of elite
members rule over the majority by force, for the group’s stability. Prior to the advent of
capitalism and the rise of modern science and the middle class, resources were lacking
to educate the majority of people to make them fit to rule; the majority had to work
tirelessly on the farm and had no time for more intellectual pursuits. Elites and predators
arose to occupy the power vacuums, and the paths they carved established pecking
orders. Myths accumulated to rationalize those unequal social arrangements,
associating the leaders with gods and positing the wickedness of human nature that’s
overcome either by the will of God bestowed on the king who’s given the divine right to
rule through his bloodline, or by intensive training in a religious or secular institution.

The British conservative, Edmund Burke, argued that this traditional form of minority
government is the most prudent and shouldn’t be tampered with by rationalist radicals,
such as the Jacobins who were to do just that in the French Revolution. Conservatism is
thus opposed to scientism, to optimism about the prospect for social progress that
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mimics the scientific kind, making government out to be social engineering. According to
Burke, traditions that stand the test of time have more authority than an unproven
abstract theory of how a society might be designed from scratch. Moreover, democracy
is an unwise system for the above reason having to do with original sin. Whereas
liberals trust in human nature, replacing God, angels, and other supernatural forces with
human technocrats, conservatives are pessimistic about human beings: we tend to
behave wickedly because we’re innately depraved. We’re lucky that some few of us
manage to control their beastly impulses, excel in their education, and act for the
general welfare by taking up the thankless task of government.

Elitist Conservatism

Talk of original sin is, of course, the oldest form of monumental fear-mongering for
narrow political advantage. Granted, there must have been nomadic tribes or villages
whose ignorant members were indeed thankful that they’d been blessed with leaders
who stood out from the crowd by being not just more intelligent but more virtuous. The
majority then would have benefited from the work of that elite minority, and the
inequality between them would have been not just real but relevant to the different tasks
for each social class.
But in a larger state, the inequality becomes a liability and the greater power needed to
run that state tends to corrupt the rulers. Moreover, the myth of original sin contradicts
elitism. If human nature is depraved, how can anyone overcome that innate depravity,
by human effort? If God can overcome it by somehow purifying royal bloodlines, why
doesn’t God grant everyone the same favour? When the king says that he deserves to
rule because God wiped away his corrupt nature, he appeals to a miracle, which is
tantamount to saying that no one but God understands why he should rule. Besides
being childishly anthropocentric, the myth that God hand-picks human rulers has been
all-too self-serving: long before the televised Kennedy-Nixon political debate, monarchs
learned to appear majestic in public, keeping their debaucheries secret.
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And we should concede, too, that in evolutionary terms a dominance hierarchy benefits
the whole social group by preventing unnecessary damage to the members, making the
group more stable, the alternative being constant internal conflicts in aggressive
competitions for scarce resources. Clearly, though, the existence of liberal democratic
societies shows that humans aren’t as limited as fish or birds in their capacities to solve
such conflicts. We can imagine alternative, less exploitative and self-corrupting ways of
organizing people than naked or covert oligarchy. The liberal thinks this can be done
scientifically, with social engineering, ignoring the nonrational factors such as the need
for inspiring visions, myths, ideals, and principles. The conservative seems to think this
can’t be done at all and that when a democratic society emerges, appearing to disclose
the possibility of an alternative to the primitive pecking order, the conservative should
hide the evidence by sabotaging that society’s ability to challenge the oligarchs’
privileges.

The upshot is that Burkean conservatism is a form of what I called Straussian, Platonic
elitism and is quite comparable to the liberal version. The difference between the two is
just that conservative elitism is much more brazen in its noble lies. The liberal humanist
has only the stale, derivative myths of civic religions to appeal to, pretending to uphold
the values of reason, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all the while suffering
internally from postmodern nihilism and angst. The conservative elitist taps into much
better-tested myths, flowing from ancient monotheistic religions.

You might think the conservative’s brazenness in this regard must be matched by a
more chaotic inner life for the conservative, since the conservative has to live with his or
her more-stupendous hypocrisy. When a liberal system manager falls short of human-
made law, this is no more egregious a crime than failing to follow the instructions in
setting up a microwave oven: since in liberalism there’s no evaluation of the system’s
ultimate goal, the liberal’s crime can be one only of inefficiency. But the conservative
elitist scares the majority into docility with wild, utterly anachronistic and manifestly
absurd myths, and the conservative’s failure to live up to them should naturally be
understood in just as grandiose terms. (Goebels must have been thinking of theology
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when he said that the greater the lie, the more people are willing to believe it--if only
because it so taxes faith in human decency to try to imagine the scale of monstrosity
needed to tell such a lie.) But this isn’t necessarily so, because the mental
compartmentalization and other capacities for cognitive dissonance needed to pull off
the conservative’s whoppers in the first place can be just as effective in rationalizing the
conservative’s inevitable hypocrisy.

Religious Conservatism

So far, I’ve suggested that Burkean conservatives are Straussian elitists. But those are
just the secular conservatives, who may pretend to be religious. What about the truly
religious conservatives? What do they really believe? The easy answer is just to look at
what their religions proclaim. So religious American conservatives, for example, would
be Christians and that would be that. But no one can understand religious conservatives
just by assuming that their fundamental beliefs are dictated by their religion. The main
reason this is so is that there’s an insuperable hermeneutic problem of interpreting
religious texts. Especially when the texts have multiple authors and are written over a
period of centuries, as is the case with the Bible, the texts admit of endless
interpretations, making the religion flexible enough to survive for millennia by
transforming itself as needed. Saying, then, that religious conservatism is defined by a
religious text only pushes the problem back a step: the reason conservatives interpret
their scriptures as they do, ignoring swaths of teachings and emphasizing others, is that
they already have fundamental beliefs which don’t derive from their religion.

There’s abundant evidence that the deepest beliefs of religious Republicans, for
example, aren’t religious. Their religion would be Christianity, but both the New
Testament and early Church traditions are obviously at odds with Republican foreign
and domestic policies. According to objective (as opposed to dogmatic) New Testament
scholarship, the few scraps of information that have a chance of tracing back to an
historical Jesus indicate that Jesus was, in effect, a hippie who believed that the world’s
end was somehow imminent in his own time. Therefore, people needed to quit their
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worldly concerns, such as their family relations, political squabbles and material
possessions, and focus obsessively on relating to God. In other words, Jesus was,
roughly speaking, an Essene, a type of Jewish radical in his day.

Instead of the world literally ending in the way expected by Jesus’ confused earliest
followers, Jesus himself ended on the Roman cross, and Paul provided an elaborate
theological excuse that preserved Jesus’ ethical message only by tearing it to pieces
and replacing it with his own in Jesus’ name. Paul’s message was that we can’t improve
ourselves enough to please God, because of that handy horror story of original sin,
which is why Jesus came to please God by dying as our sacrifice. All we need to do is
believe that Jesus did so and our inner nature will be magically transformed, giving us
the power to please God by living up to Jesus’ ascetic social standards.

When the world stubbornly continued instead of ending in apocalypse--the destruction

of Jerusalem in 70 CE notwithstanding--and Christianity accidentally became the official
religion of the collapsing Roman empire, the religion transformed itself again, to justify
the power that Christian officials would need to hold together the empire’s remnants.
Thus, by Catholic decrees that supplement what little is known about the Christian
founder, Christians could eliminate heresies, persecute pagans, and war with the
Muslim world. Whereas Jesus preached pacifism and impractical love of enemies--
again, because his ethical standards presuppose the terrifying mystical nearness of
God’s rule on Earth--later so-called “Christians” could act as though they hate their
enemies enough to torture or kill them, and that behaviour has been sanctioned by the
later Church officials.

Now, Republican policies (minimal if any government help for the domestic poor,
socialism for the wealthy, warmongering, etc.) may be more or less in line with late
“Christianity,” but this alignment is as political--rather than religious--as has been the
Church’s transformation over the centuries. Late Christianity reflects a secularization of
the religion, a necessary compromise so that the religion could survive despite its
foundation in Jesus’ absurd life and death. So once again, we can’t say that the
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fundamental beliefs of a Christian conservative, at least, are religious, because those

so-called religious beliefs (Family Values, Just War Theory, Prosperity Theology that
rationalizes material wealth, etc.) have nothing to do with religion, and that’s the case
even when those beliefs are blessed by the official Church, which itself long ago
became a cryptosecular institution bent on surviving regardless of the cost to its spiritual
side.

A similar argument can be made about conservative Muslims, especially the militant
Wahhabis who adapted Muslim traditions to fulfill their secular, anticolonial agenda of
ridding Muslim countries of occupying military forces, such as those of the Soviet Union
or the US. Regardless of whether there’s a kernel of truth in the militant’s interpretation
of his scriptures and religious traditions--there’s no doubt a kernel of truth in any
logically possible interpretation of them, given their poetic character--that interpretation
is clearly selected because of the militant’s prior interpretation of what seem to be
principles of social justice and tribal ambition. While Islamic theism and supernaturalism
surely exacerbate tribal instincts, the militants are defined not by certain contents of
their scriptures, but by their secular emphasis on those contents. At least, I think there’s
something deeper going on in so-called religious conservatism.

Note that I’m saying not that religious conservatives are really atheists who are
pretending to be religious. I’m assuming that they’re theists and therefore different from
the conservative variety of Straussian elitists. But their brand of theism is chosen for
secular reasons; once chosen, they believe in that brand as members of their sect.
While these conservatives are religious, then, their conservatism isn’t explainable
simply in religious terms, because their religious beliefs, which they genuinely possess,
serve a deeper secular purpose which I’ve yet to explain.

Evangelical Conservatives

What, then, does a religious conservative believe, deeper down? Why does that
conservative warm to a certain interpretation of scripture despite the plethora of
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alternative interpretations? In my view, the religious conservative believes simply in the

default form of government that was more or less universal prior to modern times: the
rule of the many by the few. This dominance hierarchy can be despotic, as in a
dictatorship, or linear when there are multiple levels of power, each dominating only
those below it (as in a complex oligarchy or a monarchy with a court beneath the king).
Those primitive evolutionary patterns are the “traditions” that religious conservatives
wish to conserve, their arch opponents being the scientistic, democratic liberals who,
inspired by modern scientific progress, trusted in the universality of human reason but
then found that that trust produces only rudderless, nihilistic technocracies (see Canada
and Europe), turning liberals into “pragmatic centrists” or systems managers like so
many desiccated Darth Vaders. Liberals want the majority to rule, because they’re
humanists who regard everyone as equal by their power of human reason.
Conservatives want a minority to rule, because they reject the scientistic reduction of
human society to the rest of nature, maintaining that just because reason can rule the
latter through technological uses of scientific theories, doesn’t mean it can rule the
former through big, bureaucratic governments.

Which minority should rule, according to modern religious conservatives? There are at
least two answers, accounting for the division, for example, between evangelical
Christian Republicans and superficially-secular, libertarian Republicans. I’ll consider
each in turn. To cut to the chase, evangelical Christianity is theocratic. The evangelical
Christian believes that Christians are superior to non-Christians, because the latter are
controlled by Satan’s demonic forces while the former alone are liberated by the power
of faith in Christ’s sacrifice. So this Christian rejects the social extension of the Scientific
Revolution in the Enlightenment, and is left with a preference for the default social
structure, common to primitive tribes overseen by elders, to empires run by monarchs or
aristocracies, and to police states ruled by dictators, not to mention most of the social
animal world. The conservative Christian’s deepest defining belief, then, is a preference
for autocratic rule by some elite minority over the inferior majority. That preference
causes the conservative Christian to favour a conservative interpretation of Christianity,
which in turn dictates the identities of the minority and of the majority. The minority who
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ought to rule is made up of born-again, Bible-believing evangelical Christians, while the

majority who ought to be ruled consists of everyone else, especially those who explicitly
reject Christianity.

Of course, I’m not saying that conservative Christians call themselves theocrats (some
do, known as Dominionists, Christian Reconstructionists, or The Fellowship, but most
don’t) or even that they understand themselves to be such. What I’m saying is that their
secular conservatism (their desire for autocratic order established by the capable few)
plus their chosen religion (a cherry-picked interpretation of myths and legends,
providing a theological rationale for their political preference) entail theocracy.

Libertarian Conservatives

As for the libertarian conservatives, they substitute the “free market” for the supernatural
power of God. Instead of miracles brought about by God’s invisible hand, Darwinian
competition in a marketplace is supposed to be meritocratic and self-regulating. Just as
natural selection produces the “miracle” of designed (adapted) organisms, the
unfettered market in which competition is allowed to occur with minimal if any
interference produces the miracles of the correct price of goods, innovative products,
and growing economies. The market is an environment that selects for economic
excellence by bankrupting failures, producing a functional economy that preserves
everyone’s freedom to compete.

Note that the libertarian is as scientistic as the liberal humanist, effectively reducing
economics to biology (the reduction is thought to be accomplished by Game Theory).
Note also that self-consistent libertarianism must speak only of functional markets, not
of meritocratic or otherwise normative ones. This is because there are no norms or
values--such as ethical or aesthetic ones--in the part of the world explained by
biologists. Natural selection creates functional traits, in that the traits will work as their
ancestors did, because the ancestors and descendents are built by the same genetic
code, which is all that’s directly selected by the environment in which the host
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organisms live long enough to sexually reproduce members of their type. The prevailing
designs in an environment that’s home to replicators are in no sense objectively best;
they’re simply the results of some animals’ survival under certain conditions. When the
conditions change, other species are built by mutated genes, and the process goes on
and on. The animals themselves may approve of their ability to survive thanks to their
adapted body-types, but that’s a subjective source of the value of those types.

Now, if that’s all a free market is, an arena for an economic version of natural selection,
the products of free market forces are in no way objectively right or wrong, or better or
worse. The myths to the contrary, put out by economic conservatives to hype various
bubble markets and persuade people to support deregulation, commit the fallacy of
social Darwinism, which is a variant of the naturalistic fallacy that infers an “ought” from
an “is,” a prescription by a norm or value from a description of an objective fact. A social
Darwinist takes Darwin’s biological theory to imply that human societies ought to be just
like life in the wild, and that raw competition between humans is best because that’s our
most natural state. There’s no such implication, and to the extent that free market
libertarianism is a version of social Darwinism, libertarianism is logically flawed.

What the libertarian can add, by way of showing how the free market could be
meritocratic, is that the free market produces goods that are appreciated, in that they’re
goods that people choose to buy. The value of those goods, though, would be
subjective and thus dependent on the quality of the consumers. The questions would
remain whether a free market economy tends to elevate or lower the standard of the
character of participants in that economy, and whether, in the latter case, the laissez
faire economy is sustainable.

In any case, talk of subjective value has no place in libertarian conservatism if the
libertarian has scientific aspirations for her political theory. And once we appreciate the
scientism of that political theory, we can identify the minority whom the libertarian must
say should rule over the majority. The minority must be just those select predators who
do actually rise to the top of their food chain in the wild (free) economy. The libertarian
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isn’t committed to preserving a bloodline, like a defender of aristocracy; instead, the

libertarian is religiously adamant that what must be preserved at all costs is an
economy’s wildness, since brutal struggle in the wilderness is the selection mechanism
for functional, well-adapted members of a society. Oligarchs may come and go, but
what should be constant is everyone’s freedom to leap into the capitalistic jungle and do
battle, to test his or her capacity to succeed in the conflict of ideas or wills, or whatever
is supposed to be the social analogue of genes. The majority who should be ruled, then,
consists just of those who are actually ruled in a free market, namely those who wind up
having relatively little money or control over the mainstream media or the superficially-
democratic political system.

Again, the scientistic reduction of economics to biology has no normative implications.

But what makes some libertarian conservatives religious is their use of myths to sanctify
the marketplace and to veer into fallacious social Darwinian glorification of economic
struggles. (The historian Thomas Frank documents much of this in One Market Under
God.) It’s one thing to compare economic competition in a harsh marketplace to natural
selection, but it’s another to help oneself to normative evaluations of either natural
process, worshipping business leaders for being “rewarded” by something ethereal and
reified called The Market, and hyping capitalism as qualitatively superior to any other
economic system. Whether capitalism is superior depends on which social goals are
best, and thus on the relevance of those sets of statistics that the libertarian
conservative likes to trot out when in a scientistic mood. And as a pseudoscientist, that
sort of conservative has no authority to speak on the normative, cultural question of the
direction in which a society should head. It may be that a fine social goal is to maintain
the ecosystem so that organisms can continue to live in it, and that capitalistic systems
tend not to be so self-regulating that they take that long-term concern into account.

Regardless, the religious libertarian conservative (as opposed to a traditional

monotheistic one) adds a half-baked theology to quasibiological economics,
mythologizing and obscuring what actually happens in a minimally-regulated market.
For example, competition tends to stop when a monopoly or an oligopoly naturally forms
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and potential competitors are bought up before they can effectively challenge the ruling
companies. The rulers then rig the system in their favour, purchasing politicians with
campaign contributions and with the implicit promise of a cushy private sector job;
writing bills with their armies of lobbyists; and concocting bubble markets that amount to
massive frauds, escaping unpunished when their handiwork--planned for obsoleteness--
crumbles. Thus, the “winners” in a once-competitive market tend to violate the
libertarian’s creed that the market shall not be artificially regulated, since the oligarchs
eliminate competition or “uncertainty” for themselves whenever possible, preferring
socialism for the wealthy and wild competition for the rabble.

What about democratic conservatives?

There’s an obvious objection to what I’ve been saying, which is that most modern
conservatives are democrats and therefore don’t prefer rule by the few over the many.
In the US, for example, most Republicans treasure the civic duty of voting, love to write
to their congressperson, and idolize the Founding Fathers of the American democratic
republic. So how can this love of democracy be reconciled with the prizing of vast social
inequality in a natural dominance hierarchy?

Here’s the reconciliation: the conservative loves democracy as a means to an

undemocratic end, not as an end in itself. The American experiment in democracy was
an exercise largely in liberal, humanistic scientism. Democracy as an ideal makes
sense only on the liberal’s rationalist assumption that we’re all equal, given our capacity
to reason, and thus that we all deserve an equal vote by way of holding the government
accountable. The conservative doesn’t share that optimism. Instead, the conservative is
pessimistic about human nature: we all suffer from a spiritual original sin or from the
beastly egoism of deluded animals that have been cursed with consciousness. Giving
political power to beasts is obscene. At best, then, the conservative can be interested in
democracy as a mechanism for sustaining the preferred form of government in which
the beasts are ruled by the exceptional few whom God favours (theocratic
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conservatism) or by the super-beasts who prove fittest (libertarian, social Darwinian

conservatism).

An oligarchy that disguises itself as a republican form of democracy prevents the sort of
rabble’s backlash that happened in the French Revolution. When the aristocracy’s
corruption and hypocrisy become too much to bear, and the myths explaining the
inequality between the rulers and the ruled no longer enchant, the ruled masses can
revolt, execute the aristocrats, and even set up their own barbaric government. The
American founders evidently learned that lesson and theorized that as long as the
masses believe they have ultimate control over the government, they won’t revolt no
matter what economic inequalities ensue, because to do so they’d have to revolt against
what they’d think of as themselves (those who enjoy ultimate power over the elected
officials). A conservative, then, can consistently be thankful for this instrumental value of
superficial democracy in an oligarchy.

Liberals and Conservatives

What to make of my analyses of liberalism and conservatism? The mainstream media

portray liberals and conservatives as being in perpetual conflict, but as media-savvy
people know nowadays, that portrayal serves the purpose merely of infotainment.
Conflict sells. There are some differences between the two sides of the so-called
political spectrum, but there’s also an underlying agreement between them. Specifically,
postmodern liberals have come around to the conservative’s surrender to natural
inequalities. Enlightenment notions of rationalism, equality, and individual liberty made
for a genuine alternative to rule by the elite few, but because the alternative rested on a
scientistic overextension of the Scientific Revolution, that is, on a weak analogy
between the physical and normative, social worlds, the liberal defenders of the
democratic experiments were bound to lose their faith. Rationalists make for poor story-
tellers, because story-telling is an art. And if reason is the only mental faculty worth
taking seriously, according to the liberal’s scientistic faith, there must be nothing
worthwhile to say about values or ideals, social vision, ethics, or myths. Hence, liberals
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devolved into nihilistic, pseudoscientific managers of systems, otherwise known as

technocrats, or “pragmatic centrists.” They thus lost the ability to challenge the status
quo, to maintain the alternative to the more primitive social pattern.

And so in North America and Europe, anachronistic liberals, who still hold onto the
outdated Enlightenment fantasies, are horrified when Obama turns out not to be a
liberal Messiah who can subdue his irrational conservative foes by masterfully shaming
them with his superior logic and awakening them to their innate capacity to help achieve
a rational consensus. These liberals are shocked to discover not just that reason has no
place at all in postmodern politics, but that Obama, the erstwhile incarnation of Logos,
uses his power of reason for ill, triangulating like Clinton to appeal to independents and
win the next election, and generally continuing Bush’s foreign and domestic policies.
When liberals look at Obama, they see what liberalism has become: bloodless social
engineering in the service of a prewritten master plan, namely the plan written by
Mother Nature, according to which order tends to be kept in surviving social species
when an elite few rise to the top and rule over the rest by force.

If he didn’t already learn about it at Harvard, Obama eventually found the US to have a
power elite ruling within an oligarchic infrastructure, and who was he to challenge that
status quo? Saying it should be challenged is easy; anyone can read from a
teleprompter. But actually challenging the prehistoric power dynamic of the dominance
hierarchy requires courage that comes from faith in a myth or vision that stirs the soul.
Liberal myths are insipid, politically correct delusions; after all, they were authored by
Enlightenment rationalists, not by artists. Just as libertarian conservatives make for
dreadful governors, believing as they do that government is a force for evil that dares
question the miraculous authority of natural selection by wild competition, liberals make
for dreary visionaries. Their scientism causes them to don their Darth Vader armor, to
pretend that in postmodern times their obsolete Enlightenment myths can enchant for
longer than a passing fad. There may well be an uplifting naturalistic religion waiting to
awe the masses and to inspire the creation of original social orders, but liberals haven’t
found it.
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Meanwhile, conservative elected politicians have by far the easiest job in the world.
Cleaning tables at McDonald’s takes more effort than being a conservative politician in
an oligarchy, opposed only by postmodern liberals. Just imagine: you’re given the job of
being the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse. You walk the halls of government
buildings, most of which you want to see burned to the ground. But actually setting them
ablaze would require more skill than what you’re charged to do as a conservative
mouthpiece of oligarchs: you simply have to perform incompetently in office, taking
orders from corporate lobbyists, and keeping the downtrodden from rebelling by pushing
their buttons with reliable religious myths.

Worshipping reason as they do, liberals no doubt feel anxious and dirty when they have
to stoop to telling noble lies, as elite social engineers who are contracted to keep the
system running smoothly. Conservatives have more worthy objects of worship: God
himself or the evolutionary power of nature to create novel forms of complexity. It should
go without saying that the conservative’s theologies are absurd, but that’s only the
verdict of reason. Being largely nonrational, unconscious, and instinctive animals, we
can be moved by rhetorical messages that have emotional force. Conservatives rule
mainly by exploiting people’s fear of the Other and of the Unknown, and they’re
therefore much superior spellbinders than liberals. One cost of lowering the social bar to
such depths, though, is that the conservative loses the capacity for feeling even a hint of
shame.

Appendix: The Definition of “Conservatism”

Conservatism: a paradigm of shamefulness.

Conservatism is a cynical rallying cry against what liberals have wrought, when powerful
conservatives pretend to favour premodern traditions while relishing the modern way of
imposing the eternal dominance hierarchy. However, when preached by the poor, social
conservatives, conservatism’s a preference for premodern myths that please, at least,
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compared to the modern ones that evoke horror and angst. Either way, conservatism is
the sheerest chutzpah, the most appalling concatenation of noises by those with the
least capacity for shame. Theoretically, a retrograde mindset is a check on the
excesses of modern liberalism, but in practice the conservative either approves of the
modern form of social engineering, worshipping the apex predators who emerge
triumphant from the social Darwinian struggle, or else actually espouses a preposterous
premodern worldview (Christianity, Islam, etc), as though she arrived from a time
machine, skipping over the European Age of Reason. Conservatives pretend to cherish
ancient wisdom, but they embrace either the stealth oligarchy, which deploys modern
methods of social control, or else ancient theistic drivel.

The United States was founded by deistic hyper-rationalists who wanted to build a New
World, free from Old World religious tyrannies. Today, the U.S. is perhaps the most
conservative and thus the most confused modern Western society, reveling in the
military power and wealth that flow from technoscience and from individualistic
institutions (democracy and capitalism), while paying lip service to old time,
authoritarian religion. “Freedom” and “liberty” are American shibboleths, but Americans
have managed to make liberalism taboo. Liberalism, says the American conservative, is
socialism, a form of tyranny in which the individual serves the State. But a stealth
oligarchy can also be officially individualistic, as in the U.S since its founding. American
conservatism is thus a colossal distraction, a carnival of follies that prevents many
Americans from appreciating where they actually stand as victims of scientistic, self-
destructive modernism.
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Oligarchy: Nature’s Inhumanity to Humans

____________________________________________________

In my rants on liberalism, conservatism, and happiness, I contrast some myths we live

by with unsettling natural realities. Liberals believe we’ve progressed socially as well as
scientifically and technologically, that we’ve discovered civil rights and the superiority of
capitalism and democracy over all other economic and political systems. Unfortunately,
liberals borrow their unidirectional, teleological notion of history from monotheism, and
while modern, secular humanistic societies have “moved forward” in that they’ve
developed--which is virtually a tautology--they’ve entered a postmodern stage of decline
by way of nihilism. Oswald Spengler may have been correct when he observed that,
much like an organism, a culture passes through inevitable stages, leading from
energetic growth, when the citizens believe fervently in an ideal that distinguishes their
culture, to corruption and extinction when the people lose confidence in that ideal.
Mesmerized by technoscientific advances, liberals assumed that scientific methods can
be applied to social problems. But science can’t tell anyone what ought to be done.
When social progress failed to materialize as expected--witness the many wars and
holocausts in the last century--liberals lost their faith even in their substitute religion,
which is scientism. And so liberal myths have become mere shibboleths, empty,
politically correct slogans and talking points that no one would die for.
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Conservatives have two myths: theism and social Darwinism. Science and philosophy
have demolished the rational basis for theism, a point to which I’ll return in my next rant,
and social Darwinism is both internally and externally inconsistent. The libertarian faith
in the wild market commits the naturalistic fallacy of inferring that because natural
selection actually makes use of brutal competitions in the biological sphere, economies
ought to be similarly structured. Moreover, the evidence shows that a wild market simply
clears the way for the default social order, for the dominance hierarchy, which is what
the religious and libertarian conservative actually defend, whether that oligarchy takes
the form of a theocracy (on Earth as in Heaven) or of a plutocracy (rule by the wealthy)
or kleptocracy (rule by the vicious). Unlike the narrow liberal myth of scientism, which
captivates only Philistines in certain scientific circles, conservative myths are still
powerful. Most westerners think of themselves as monotheists, although their behaviour
shows clearly that their true religion is the libertarian’s faith in the economist’s god, in
the creative force unleashed by a free-for-all of human vice. A consumer’s true faith is
that when we’re at our egoistic worst, society is miraculously at its best, because of the
invisible hand of natural selection. Again, though, while this myth still enchants, the
myth is a noble lie rather than a spiritually uplifting narrative, since the myth rationalizes
the gross, natural inequalities that inevitably result from vicious competition.

Consumerism and Oligarchy

Most people want to be happy, but the worthiness of happiness as our ultimate goal is
another delusion, one which ought to be replaced by the nobler goal of creatively
overcoming the knowledge of where we stand in nature. In Western, pseudodemocratic
oligarchies, happiness is also misconstrued: the rich are presumed to be happier than
the poor, because money buys pleasure and contentment indirectly, with the purchase
of material goods such as high tech gadgets, luxury cars, or even fast food. Studies
show that the rich are just as stressed as the poor, if not more so, but the materialistic
delusion persists because of its usefulness in stabilizing society. Materialistic happiness
is quantifiable: the more private possessions someone has, the greater his or her
happiness; indeed, money is countable, so following the myth of happiness through to
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its absurd end, precise judgments can be made about degrees of happiness depending
on the consumer’s calculable net worth. Tangible status symbols, like bank accounts,
home appliances, fashionable clothing, home square footage, and so on, indicate a
person’s place in the pecking order. If happiness is pleasure, everyone has the capacity
to be happy, but if pleasure is caused by ownership of material products--as associative
advertisements fallaciously suggest 24/7 on most surfaces of modern cities--there’s a
happiness hierarchy. Now, the money that buys those products also buys power, and so
the happiness hierarchy corresponds to the dominance hierarchy, which is the shape of
an oligarchy in which the many are ruled by the few.

After the French Revolution, the trick of oligarchy is to maintain the obscene social
inequalities and thus the stability of this social order, by preventing a rebellion of the
have-nots. Were a pecking order dictated by something like personal physical strength,
weaker persons couldn’t invest themselves in the society, because they’d lack any hope
that they could elevate their social position. The genius of a capitalistic pecking order is
its offering of the real possibility of social mobility, as a means of protecting the forces
that work against such mobility, namely money and power. In the first place, anyone can
be happy, to some extent or other, because every human brain is capable of some kind
of pleasure. And anyone can go from rags to riches in the US, for example, as long as
the person has a great idea, works hard, and maybe gets a little lucky--that’s the
capitalistic legend which isn’t wholly false, although the US isn’t as socially mobile as it
once was. So a pleasure-obsessed, capitalistic society becomes a Melting Pot, winning
the goodwill of all of its members.

But a truly democratic society works by mob rule, which is unstable. Only certain elite
members are fit to rule, and their fitness must be clearly signaled without disrupting the
whole society by antagonizing the ruled majority. Were the majority to know nothing at
all of the fact that they’re ruled by a minority, the majority might think they’re in control
and so unwittingly challenge the true holders of power, which would lead to conflict. The
signals therefore need to be given in the cherished language spoken by the majority,
using symbols of the society’s superficial fairness and equality. Happiness, the universal
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goal, is therefore quantified, by associating the hedonic mental states with the
ownership of material goods, so that degrees of happiness can be easily, albeit
indirectly perceived, by perceiving a consumer’s amassed possessions. The hedonic
ladder attracts the members of this society--and indeed many immigrants as well, since
the more ethical ideal of dealing heroically with our existential predicament is a tragic
one. Meanwhile, the rungs on that ladder indicate also the consumer’s degree of power,
which is to say his or her position in the pecking order. The minority at the top
dominates all of those below. And so the poor members of this stealth oligarchy see
their society as being equal and fair (in so far as they’re mesmerized by the chance of
ascending the hedonic ladder) even while they know, if only in the back of their minds,
that they’re ruled by a minority over which they have no control (in so far as the poor are
aware of the corresponding wealth gaps).

The poor majority don’t want to rebel, because they’re emotionally invested in a social
game with clearly distinguished positions: their position is one that affords them little
power, because they’re poor, and they submit to those who are clearly in control due to
their wealth and social connections, because the elevated position of these rulers is
measured monetarily, which also happens to be the more egalitarian measure of
materialistic happiness. In a semi-democratic oligarchy, that which divides the members
also unites them: material wealth divides the positions in the dominance hierarchy, but
this wealth also distributes degrees of happiness. The poor have practically no control
over how their oligarchic society is run, but as long as they can afford fast food and
other cheap goods, they have some tangible degree of associated pleasure, given the
materialist’s degraded notion of happiness.

The key to the way the myth of happiness can hold together a stealth oligarchy is thus
the ambiguity of money. Even in a democracy money provides power, but money also
provides happiness. In a materialistic oligarchy, happiness is more evenly distributed
than power, because even a little pleasure can satisfy an individual whereas a little
amount of power has no social effect. The poor majority have reason to rebel against
the wealthy minority, because the wealthy have power over the poor which they use to
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the latter’s detriment. But the majority also have reason to preserve the dominance
hierarchy, because this hierarchy corresponds to the happiness hierarchy in which the
majority are emotionally invested. The economic inequality translates into a dangerous
centralization of power, but the ability of money to buy a base form of happiness,
through the consumption of cheap material products, endears the whole social order
even to its victims.

Free and Tyrannical Oligarchies

A critic of what I’ve been saying about oligarchies might protest that the US and other
democracies can’t be oligarchic because they’re so different from tyrannical
dictatorships in which alone the few obviously rule over the many. In particular, the
majority in a dictatorship lack freedom of movement or of thought, equality under the
rule of law, and human rights. Victims of a police state can be kidnapped at midnight
and tortured without trial just for politically unpopular speech. In a democracy, however,
people are free, governed by the rule of law, and enjoy basic rights. There is, then, no
worthwhile comparison between a democracy and a totalitarian dictatorship.

Indeed, there are those three differences between them. Those differences, however,
have to do only with the means by which power is exercised and protected, not with the
question of whether the majority or a minority truly rule. A dictator has absolute power
and terrorizes his population so that their fear keeps them docile and functional.
Historically, that social system has had severe drawbacks. Absolute power also corrupts
the dictator or renders him insane, and brutalizing the populace makes them fearful but
also enraged, so that they’re vigilant for any opportunity to rebel. Knowing this, the
dictator becomes paranoid, surrounding himself with obsequious underlings who
ingratiate themselves by keeping bad news from him, so that the dictator becomes
further removed from reality. Eventually, the people revolt or an external power
intervenes, and the dictator is rounded up and torn limb from limb. A police state is a
crude, unsustainable way of keeping social order, because the ruler’s arbitrary use of
power antagonizes most of his population.
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Americans, by contrast, do enjoy more freedom, rule of law, and human rights, and
these facts can be expected to maintain their social cohesion. But let’s look more
closely at how the US lives up to each of those three ideals. With regard to freedom, it’s
important to distinguish between what the political philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, calls
positive and negative liberty. Positive liberty is the ability to live well that comes from
following what’s assumed to be an objectively correct ideal. Typically, socialist nations
and dictatorships hold up one ideal or another and their elites claim to instill the freedom
of the rest of their people, by indoctrinating them or forcing their compliance, equipping
them to embrace the ultimate value. Negative liberty is the ability to choose one’s own
way of life, according to what’s treated as a subjectively valued ideal, where the ability
follows from the preservation of a private domain in which there’s no coercion by the
state or by anyone else. Classically liberal nations like the US are supposed to defend
only negative liberty.

The problem with positive liberty is that if the state picks the wrong ideal, the sacrifices
involved in purifying the people are worthless and absurd, and who can prove which
ideal way of life is objectively supreme? The problem with negative liberty is that the
outsider’s scientistic faith in the rational individual’s autonomy is belied by the insider’s
confidence that people are fundamentally irrational and subject to manipulation through
the expert use of propaganda, as in the case of the government’s market-researched
talking points or corporate advertising. This problem can be seen in the fact that the US
defends positive liberty, after all: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Far from
being a Christian nation, the god that Americans actually obey is the creative chaos of
the wild capitalistic economy, the god that commands consumers--through its economic
and political spokespeople--to consume material goods for pleasure. And while
Americans aren’t tortured or imprisoned just for denying this ideal, they are
indoctrinated with a barrage of propaganda that links happiness to consumption. They
have the option of living privately with no such propaganda, in a log cabin in Alaska, for
example, but this is just to say that there’s no such privacy anywhere in American
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society, that the propaganda is inescapable unless you leave American civilization for
the wilderness or for another country altogether.

So the US guards both positive and negative freedom. The so-called American Dream
is to be rich and happy, to move up the happiness ladder and thus the pecking order.
The ideal way of life in the US, which Americans hold to be objectively correct, is the
technologically-enabled pursuit of pleasure. Negative freedom in American society is
enjoyed only within the parameters set by that guiding American myth--pockets of
antisocial wilderness in the geographical US notwithstanding. Thus, once an American
is trained from infancy to consume parasitically, without regard for the planet’s long-term
sustainability, he or she has an endless choice between brands and products.

As I argue in the Introduction, though, the pursuit of happiness is not objectively the
best goal, regardless of whether the happiness is materialistic or otherwise. Ethically
speaking, happiness is unbecoming to sentient creatures who understand their grim
existential situation. So even if a consumer acquires a trove of material possessions
and the corresponding pleasures, the consumer’s happiness still tends to be rudely
interrupted by anxiety caused by the extent to which he or she understands that
situation. This anxiety often manifests itself in the feeling that the American’s narrow
negative liberty is meaningless. So many choices, so little quality! So many superficial
differences between techniques for feeling pleasure, so little contentment in the end,
because nature is inhumane, the patterns in its processes are alien to our preferences,
and natural forces accidentally undermine our little games a thousand times each day.
The consumer who’s left with the free choice between products that are supposed to
bring happiness is in a similar position to the postmodern liberal who’s left with nihilistic
instrumentalism, who dreads normative questions and who can only calculate which
means most efficiently brings about a predetermined end.

In any case, the main point I want to make here about freedom and oligarchy is that the
peculiar mix of American freedoms seems the product of a stealth oligarchy. What the
critic should expect, assuming there’s no useful comparison between an alleged
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democracy like the US and a tyranny, is that there’s freedom in the former but none in
the latter. Instead, what we find is that there’s positive freedom in both and superfluous
negative freedom in the former. In either case, the positive ideal seems erroneous,
whether it be that of the Soviet Union, of an Islamic dictatorship, or of the materialistic
US, and in the case of the US the negative freedom, that is, the bewildering choice
between a superabundance of hedonic devices, provides another illusion that the
majority have ultimate control over their lives. This is just an illusion and the US is in fact
an oligarchy, because the choice is confined to the means of achieving the pre-
established goal of materialistic happiness, a goal not intrinsically preferred by people
but set by a capitalistic economy that happens to run on myths that drive consumption,
rather than on, say, the export of natural resources. Instead of coercing people to
consume products in a democracy, those with power over the consumers bombard
them with materialistic myths, exploiting people’s innate cognitive deficiencies. The US
isn’t a tyranny, but it seems a more stable form of minority-rule, despite its illusions of
democracy and of the rational autonomy of its citizens.

Equality Under the Law?

How about the rule of law? Once again, the US and other democracies have more
equality under the law than there is in a dictatorship, but the difference isn’t as stark as
might be expected. In a dictatorship, there’s rampant nepotism and the whim of an evil
or insane ruler or cabal of oligarchs. Any law in such a society expresses the will of the
powerful, so that power rules over the law rather than the other way around. But
nowhere does the law interpret or enforce itself. People must do so and people can be
corrupted--even in a democracy. So in a democracy, rich people can afford better
lawyers and also lobbyists to write the laws in their favour, buying off regulators and
politicians so that their injurious business practices become legal. The US, the so-called
freest of the democracies, has the world’s highest incarceration rate. The American god
of the free market has corrupted not just US medical care and its scientific institutions,
but also the country’s law enforcement, so that its prison system has become a thriving
business. Police, judges, lawyers, and prison builders profit from certain interpretations
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and enforcements of the law, and the conflict between that narrow self-interest and their
obligation to seek justice or to otherwise protect the society must be just another bit of
chaos on which Mother Nature thrives. (Let those profiting from the legal system and its
impoverished victims sort out their conflict by a brutal struggle! Natural forces will reach
an “equilibrium” that represents the optimal end state. As I point out in “Conservatism,”
by “optimal” the economist can mean only “descriptively functional,” meaning that a
predetermined end state which the economist can’t prescribe, will thus be most
efficiently realized.)

As is evident from the familiar fiasco of the O.J. Simpson trial, to the capture of the
MMS regulators who were charged to prevent catastrophes like the BP oil spill, to
Obama’s ability to let the Bush administration and Wall Street bankers escape legal
inquiries, the US clearly doesn’t have simple equality under its law. Instead, the US
weds its legal system to a vicious capitalistic economy which corrupts everything it
touches. Under that circumstance, the law becomes another weapon in the hands of the
powerful rulers to control the poor majority, to keep the latter class in its low position in
the power hierarchy. This is done by dividing the poor against each other, largely
through the drug war which promotes tribal warfare in the ghettos and creates lost
generations who are further spoiled by the prison system.

Again, what the critic should expect is that a totalitarian dictatorship is lawless, whereas
a democracy has equality under the law, but what we find are shades of gray. Power
distorts justice in a democracy too, because humans are in charge of any legal system
and humans are vicious, mostly irrational animals that readily give in to temptation. In a
wild capitalistic democracy, our corruption is even encouraged by a pagan faith in the
divinity of evolutionary forces. (These forces may be divinely creative, but why suppose
that they work inevitably in our favour? The economist’s optimism here is so childish
that it must be disingenuous, and the pagan faith must be a noble lie meant to maintain
an oligarchic social order.) Hence, the comparison between even a democratic republic
like the US and a totalitarian dictatorship: both are oligarchies, or rather the US
recurrently devolves into an oligarchy as domestic liberals and socialists lose their
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confidence in the viability of their scientistic, progressive alternative to the oligarchic

status quo that obtains in most groups of social animals. The legal system thus
becomes more and more undermined by natural forces, with ever less equality under it,
with more legal exceptions for the powerful, and with more crushing weight on the weak.
In the American free-for-all, both the powerful and the powerless want to nurture their
vices, but only the powerful can codify their white collar misdeeds and create or exploit
a legal system that persecutes the poor under the pretexts of a drug war and of holy
social Darwinism.

Human Rights?

Finally, there are those unalienable human rights that are enshrined in the US
Declaration of Independence but which are conspicuously absent in a tyrannical
oligarchy. A dictatorship is a dystopia in which some self-serving goal, such as that of
glorifying the Leader or the State, overrides all other values so that most of the citizens
are reduced to means of achieving that goal. Just as you can sacrifice part of a machine
if the part prevents the whole from functioning, so dehumanized people in a dictatorship
can be killed if that sacrifice is called for by the Leader’s vision.

In a classically liberal democracy like the US, by contrast, all of its citizens are
supposed to have rights as autonomous, rational beings. As the philosopher Kant said,
each person spontaneously creates her own experience, by applying concepts to
sensations, giving the person a kind of godlike sovereignty over that cognitive labour
and over the mental tools used, which means that we each own ourselves and, like any
piece of private property, a person ought to have sole authority over how she’s treated.
Our reason dignifies us, gives us godlike insight, freedom, and creativity, and so we’re
each an end in ourselves, not merely an object that might be useful to someone else.
As I say in “Liberalism,” however, this Enlightenment rationalism has fallen apart.
Cognitive scientists have shown that reason, being the product of natural selection,
consists mostly of heuristics, or rules of thumb, which are actually so many biases and
fallacies. Moreover, this rationalism commits the naturalistic fallacy of inferring that
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we’re valuable or that we have rights, just because we think a lot. In the current
postmodern period, liberals have therefore slipped into nihilism, realizing that no
normative conclusions follow from factual premises about our cognitive powers (even
assuming these premises are accurate, which they’re not).

Even before postmodernism, the myth of human rights hardly persuaded many
Americans. African-Americans were enslaved and half of the US wanted to go to war to
follow the capitalistic (vicious) imperative that slave labour should be exploited for profit.
Women were not allowed to vote until 1920. Like most other people, many Americans
are still racist and sexist. In foreign affairs, the American military has no difficulty
suspending the ideal of human rights, torturing foreigners in Abu Ghraib prison or
rendering captives to be tortured by foreign middlemen. Indeed, the unalienable right to
life conflicts with the waging of any war, and American society is highly militaristic. Note
that it would be self-contradictory to reply that the US Declaration is meant to recognize
the human rights only of American citizens, since Americans aren’t the only humans
around. Once you assume that some people have rights in virtue of their humanity and
not just their nationality, you have to recognize that all people have those rights. But the
point is that Americans evidently aren’t convinced that there are any such rights.

Take, for example, the issue of gay marriage. Proponents frame the issue in terms of a
civil right, as though all people ought to marry and have a family, and since
homosexuals are people they have that same obligation. Says who? Why believe
there’s any such obligation to get married or to respect the institution of marriage? Like
other animal species, humans seem to be at least serially monogamous, but that’s just
to speak of a biological function which has precisely no normative implication. Just
because people tend to marry doesn’t mean they ought to. Therefore, we don’t yet have
a right to marry; that is, we haven’t yet shown that marriage, or a monogamous
relationship, is to be valued as a good thing. Is there a religious reason to believe we
ought to marry? Don’t make me laugh! At best, marriage is a legal contract, which
means only that consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want as long as
they don’t thereby deprive anyone else of the same freedom. This makes marriage
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something that’s actually desired, which gives marriage mere subjective value, putting
the interest in marriage in the same category as the taste for, say, spicy food. No such
rights or tastes are unalienable; on the contrary, they can change as passing fads. Is
our ability to do what we want in this way itself a good, so that whatever we thereby do
is right? How so, without committing the naturalistic fallacy?

Now that I’ve disposed of some fatuous myths surrounding the debate about gay
marriage, I can ask what’s really going on. My answer: postmodern nihilism. Just as
with postmodern visual art, in which anything goes because people have lost their faith
in any grand metanarrative, ideal, or myth that inspires a healthy culture prior to its
inevitable death and decay, so too with postmodern sexual relations. What decides a
social debate between liberals who believe in nothing is just a handful of empty,
politically correct slogans. Liberals want to believe we should all be happy; they no
longer subscribe to the Enlightenment myths that once justified that imperative, so they
presuppose it and focus on how to advance society in the interest of spreading
happiness. If gay people are unhappy because they can’t yet marry, then the institutions
should change to accommodate them. The most efficient way to change social norms is
to deploy such Machiavellian tricks as the use of vacuous but nonetheless effective
rhetoric, given our cognitive deficiencies. Nihilistic liberals, who are the chief proponents
of gay marriage, think in such instrumental terms; they can do no other. Mind you, I’m
not saying gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry. My point is just that human rights have
nothing to do with the debate.

So even if people are more respected and better treated in a democracy than in a
dictatorship, there’s hardly a guarantee of human rights in the former. What are called
civil rights have legal protections in a modern democracy, but the reasons given in
support of those laws are noble lies. The discourse of human rights is, at this point,
thoroughly instrumental and scientistic, which is to say that the meaning of the politically
correct slogans about the dignity of all kinds of people, whatever their natural
inequalities or handicaps, is much less important than the effect of those slogans. As
with most of the words spoken by democratic politicians, the point of postmodern liberal
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speech isn’t to reach philosophical understanding, but to apply the social sciences, to
re-engineer people and their institutions.

Liberals behave as though they were technocrats; unfortunately, some of their social
technologies rest on pseudosciences such as economics. A social science that has
genuine force, though, in terms of a theory or model that predicts the future in such a
way that technologies can be invented to apply that empirical knowledge, is cognitive
science, which is actually a cluster of sciences. And the main finding of cognitive
science is that people are animals, not gods. For example, we don’t reason as well as
we often boast. Liberal politicians, pundits, and public relations folks (propagandists) are
doers, not idealists, and so when they speak about human rights, they’re trying not to
appeal to you as a rational agent, but to “spin” you or to “push your buttons,” meaning
that they want to train you to obey like a pet. That’s the function of instrumental rhetoric:
it’s used as a piece of technology that has predictable effects.

The remaining question is whether the rhetoric of human rights is useful to oligarchs, so
that we can see that there’s no internal conflict, at least, in saying that a stealth, semi-
democratic oligarchy might protect human rights, to some extent. Clearly, a dictatorship
has no use for those rights, since the rulers in that sort of society rule by terror caused
by physical brutality. But in an oligarchy that pretends to be a democracy, the minority
rule not by such a blunt, counter-productive tactic, but by granting the majority
superficial control over the government so that they identify with the leaders and won’t
rebel against them. This control is exercised by voting, and a myth about the equality of
all people naturally surfaces, complimenting this use of democracy. For the majority to
believe that they hold ultimate political power in their democracy, they must believe that
they’re at least as important as their elected representatives. Hence the egalitarian
notions of human rights and of equality under the law. In actuality, assuming minimal
democracy can be used as a cover for a stealth oligarchy, ultimate power is held not by
the majority of voters, but by a minority who enjoy undemocratic control over not just the
politicians (through campaign contributions and the revolving door between public and
private sectors), but lawmakers (through lobbyists and the revolving door), the economy
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(by capturing regulators and creating too-big-to-fail institutions that hold the nation
hostage), and the minds of the majority (with scientifically-crafted, multimillion dollar ad
campaigns, training even the likes of evangelical Christians to be pleasure-obsessed
consumers).

Just a Conspiracy Theory?

Lastly, I’d like to consider another likely objection to what I’ve been saying about stealth
oligarchy in a putative democracy, which is that this is all just a conspiracy theory.
Strictly speaking, this is no objection since there are such things as conspiracies and so
there can be theories of how they work. As conspiracy theorists like to say, many
people are actually in prison for committing crimes that the law itself calls
“conspiracies.” But this response misses the objection’s point. “Conspiracy theory” has
a pejorative sense, and it’s important to see exactly what’s wrong with such theories as
that the Bush regime was responsible for the 911 terrorist attack, that extraterrestrials
crash-landed in Roswell, or that the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the
Business Roundtable, and the Illuminati cabal secretly run the whole world. What’s
wrong with these theories, I take it, is that given what their conclusions say, the
proponents of these theories couldn’t possibly know enough to put the theories forward
in a sensible manner. The theories tend to be about the secret machinations of
quintessential insiders, whereas the theorists themselves tend to live in basements, with
access only to exoteric information. Conspiracy theories fill this gap, between what the
theories say and who the theorists are, with loose associative reasoning and other such
tactics of obfuscating the theories' necessary lack of sufficient evidence to justify much
confidence in them.

Is what I’ve said about stealth oligarchy a conspiracy theory in that sense? I think not,
because I’ve proposed mainly a metatheory that operates at a philosophical rather than
an empirical level. I haven’t pretended that I can name all the oligarchs or specify the
dates, locations, and other details of their activities. Thus, I haven’t needed to resort to
loose reasoning to tenuously link fragments of evidence. What I’ve concluded is that
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even while the majority are supposed to hold ultimate power in a democracy, what
tends to happen is that a minority holds that power instead, and that in the US the
minority’s power derives mainly from its wealth. Moreover, I’ve identified oligarchy with
the natural dominance hierarchy, making this social order the norm rather than the
exception. Granted, this theory predicts that those with the most money are fine
candidates for oligarchs, so if we wanted to investigate how a stealth oligarchy works,
the preliminary step would be to follow the money. The US is well-known for being the
most economically inegalitarian of modern democracies, with the largest inequality
between its rich and poor. So the US oligarchs shouldn’t be hard to find; they’re the
ones with almost all the money.

However, on my naturalistic picture of politics, it’s unlikely that the true rulers of
capitalistic democracies cook up schemes in secret meetings. Even were there such
meetings, they wouldn’t be crucial to maintaining the power inequality. On the contrary,
my point is that natural selection takes care of an oligarchy’s details. Just as fish, birds,
and chimpanzees don’t establish their pecking orders self-consciously, but just follow
their instincts which naturally sort the strong from the weak, so too in a capitalistic
democracy a dominance hierarchy happens as a matter of course--unless a heroic
effort is made to counteract that force of evolutionary gravity. In particular, capitalism is
a version of natural selection, and the struggle to compete in a wild, minimally regulated
market is comparable to the way so-called uncivilized, “wild” animals struggle to survive
in their environments. The point is that humans are animals too, our vainglorious
delusions notwithstanding, and so we should expect that in a capitalistic free-for-all in
which the pagan, virtually Satanic cult of free market economics celebrates vice as the
engine that drives Mother Nature to grow an economy, growth is nothing less than the
establishment of a stable dominance hierarchy.

Thus, I’d dump my critic’s objection back into his or her lap. Far from my philosophical
account of stealth oligarchy being a dubious conspiracy theory, just such a theory is
needed to explain how a capitalistic democracy could fail to naturally degenerate into an
oligarchy. The main countervailing force is liberalism/socialism, which strengthens
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government regulation and creates a middle class that stands as a bulwark against
powerful special interests who naturally seek undemocratic control over the society. But
this only pushes my counter-objection back a step, because now a dubious conspiracy
theory is needed to justify liberalism/socialism, or to explain how that countervailing
force could fail to dwindle in a postmodern climate. What gives humans unnalienable
rights as equally rational, free, conscious and otherwise godlike persons, given that
science has undermined those Enlightenment myths? Most of these myths were
borrowed, in any case, from utterly hopeless monotheistic religions. Or why should a
natural dominance hierarchy be prevented in a human society, given the liberal’s
commitment to the scientific picture of the world? What makes the weak and the poor in
the lowest class of a pecking order deserving of a more elevated position? What
justifies the normative dimension of liberalism/socialism? How can the naturalistic
fallacy be dodged without precisely a dubious, loosely-reasoned conspiracy theory of
natural rights that’s no real dodge at all?

Appendix: The Definition of “Oligarchy”

Oligarchy: rule by the most vicious few over the more innocent many; the default way
of organizing societies.

There are in practice three kinds of government: naked oligarchies, covert oligarchies,
and non-oligarchies which tend to degenerate into oligarchies. The explanation of why
this is so has at least three levels, each deeper and broader than the next. At the
highest, most apparent level, there is what Robert Michels called in 1911 the Iron Law
of Oligarchy, which is that the centralization of power is the most efficient way of
organizing large groups. Bureaucracies form as control needs to be specialized and
delegated, and as the bureaucracy grows, higher and higher levels of command need to
be put into place to avoid a regress to anarchy, whereupon those near the pyramid’s
apex tend either to be corrupted by the greater power they acquire or to have been
sufficiently vicious in advance to have successfully worked their way to the top of the
hierarchy, wining out against cut-throat competitors.
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More broadly, the most stable social structure in species whose members live in large
groups, including birds, fish, and primates, is the dominance hierarchy in which power is
centralized in a minority of alpha males or females who maintain a social order by
rigorously enforcing rules of which members enjoy such benefits as privileged access to
food or to mates. Oligarchy in human societies is just our form of the dominance
hierarchy, which is to say that the underlying structure of our myriad social systems is
naturally selected.

Deeper still, the inevitability of oligarchy and the injustice entailed by any such gross
inequality have Gnostic flavours, revealing the existential, mythical status of our ultimate
position within nature as accursed, imprisoned beings too clever to maintain our peace
of mind. The undead god, which is the monstrous power of cosmic creativity, blindly
spits up creatures that are instinctively opposed to living alone, only to create a second
dead end for these social beings: when they huddle to escape the anguish of loneliness,
the majority who are relatively docile place themselves in the clutches of oligarchs.
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How Godlike Oligarchs Train Consumers by Eliminating Babies

and Old People from Pop Culture
____________________________________________________

Personal liberty is mythologized by two kinds of people, whom I’ll call oligarchs and
consumers. I focus here on the psychological sense of the word “oligarch.”
Economically, an oligarch is someone in the minority who has undemocratic political
power over the majority, due to wealth, social connections, or some other special
strength. But oligarchs tend to share a social Darwinian mindset, according to which the
most powerful people are, as Nietzsche said, beyond good and evil and thus above the
law. The advantage of being more powerful than most isn’t just that you can afford the
best lawyers, who give you practical immunity from prosecution; no, in the first place,
the oligarch arrogantly assumes that no one has the right to judge him, that social laws
are for those who are forced to be interdependent because they’re not completely
independent. Those who can care for themselves without anyone else’s aid are gods,
and gods are lawgivers not law-abiders.

Historically in Europe, Catholic oligarchs lost their political power to modern, rationalistic
ones. The Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the
Enlightenment replaced the medieval rationalization of aristocracy with the modern
rationalization of stealth oligarchy by way of democracy and capitalism. In the medieval
scheme, peasants served lords as more divinely blessed thanks to their blood relation
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or social connection to the royals whose privileges were sanctioned by the utterly-
compromised, anti-Jesus Catholic Church. As money fell into the private hands of
merchants and as scientists discovered more and more discrepancies between
Christian theology and natural reality, the Christian myth became obsolete and
modernists duly replaced it with secular humanism. According to the new myth, the
individual human has the potential to be a god, depending on whether he has sufficient
empowering knowledge. Eventually, this myth was extended to women, but initially faith
in mortal reason and freedom was both sexist and class-based. Moreover, modernism
combined elements of what are now called political liberalism and conservatism:
modernism was liberal in requiring faith in human progress from the unrestricted and
thus untraditional exercise of reason, as demonstrated best by the likes of Copernicus,
Galileo, and Darwin; but modernism was conservative in requiring a naturalistic view of
human nature, according to which inequalities in rational self-control entail unequal
rights to happiness or political power. In these ways, modernism was at least implicitly
scientistic and social Darwinian.

In medieval terms, social progress is senseless, since God supposedly already revealed
the blueprint for the perfect society, for the so-called kingdom of God, millennia ago.
Modernists lost faith in that theistic metanarrative, owing largely to the Church’s
elaborate betrayal of Jesus for secular power, but were inspired by demonstrations of
human creativity in the Renaissance and of the power of technoscience in the Scientific
and Industrial Revolutions. Freedom of thought evidently empowers people, which
raises the standard of living and is thus socially progressive. That scientism, which
reduces the improvement of values to increases in knowledge and power, is at the heart
of political liberalism. But this very science-centered, naturalistic perspective entails
class divisions between those who are naturally smarter or stronger and thus better
equipped to enhance society in the scientistic manner, and those with natural and thus
scientifically recognizable deficiencies, who depend on charity for their survival. With the
death of God in the modern age, charity becomes much less motivated, and so the
modernist tends to be either a libertarian, economic conservative; a warped theist who
pretends to follow a humane ancient tradition but instead cherry-picks from that tradition
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with the impunity of a modern individualist whose trust in her apelike ego substitutes for
fear of God; or a postmodern liberal, whose liberalism is only a mask for nihilistic
instrumentalism.

When I say, then, that the oligarch is one of two types who cherish personal liberty,
what I mean is that the arch modernist (libertarian, fundamentalist, postmodern liberal)
resorts to noble lies about the benefits of freedom, to justify the greater bestial vices that
attend godlike knowledge and power. The oligarch is smarter, more powerful and
independent, and thus more liberated from social conventions, than those who are
compelled to obey received wisdom. That politically incorrect liberty, which is the god’s
freedom to sin, is the secret content of banal glorifications of freedom in modern
democracies. As was known in ancient Greece, democracies devolve into stealth
oligarchies, due to the potential for demagoguery, for mass manipulation by those who
prey on the herd. Oligarchs demand the freedom of self-rule because they alone are
fully capable of being autonomous, of being free from coercion whether by natural or
social forces, due often to their greater wealth which supplies them with cutting-edge
technology and with oligopolies in minimally-regulated capitalistic societies. Oligarchs
are thus the truest lovers of the divine, because they’re the most narcissistic and
godlike. They love to create their own worlds, like the mythical gods of yore, and so
they protect the freedom needed by natural gods to rule over their pets, who are the
mass of relative weaklings. When the modernist spoke of the need for “rational self-
control,” then, he was effectively prescribing negative liberty, which is the freedom from
any external force, and thus the open-ended positive liberty of anyone so empowered to
do whatever he wants as a carefree god toying with his inferiors. And so rationalistic
modernity devolves into chaotic postmodernity.

However, as I said, the modern myth of secular humanism has a liberal, progressive
side, which has the potential for socialism, as became apparent in communist societies
in the last century. Modern socialism combines theistic irrationality and supernaturalism
with the scientistic notion of social progress. The socialist ignores natural differences
between human capacities and idolizes the group rather than the individual. Progress
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then becomes a matter of enhancing society as a whole which requires economic

equality or at least no evidence of any vastly unequal individual. While there are group
dynamics and while no individual is as rational, free, or conscious as affirmed in modern
myths, psychology and biology provide a wealth of evidence that individuals have
limited or at least illusory degrees of rational autonomy. Socialists must ignore all of that
evidence, since the latter challenges the worship of the State with the more compelling
form of pseudotheism which substitutes the powerful mortal for the classic deity. One
problem with socialism, then, is its aesthetic weakness, since a group--being an
abstraction--can’t literally speak for itself and so doesn’t make for a compelling dramatic
character. A powerful individual, however, can plainly speak and act much like an
ancient god and thus can attract the same sort of adoration as was thought to be
enjoyed by Zeus, Yahweh, or Allah. (This is why nationalism in general, from that of the
Nazis to that of the Americans, prospers only with a cult of personality, whether the
Leader is found in politics or on the silver screen.)

Nevertheless, the progressive side of modernism (the liberal’s naturalistic fallacy

committed as a result of religious faith ultimately in science) can trump modernism’s
naturalistic, rationalistic side, which makes for the spectacle of gods being brought low
by lesser beings whose minds, at least, are potentially created (indoctrinated and
trained) by their superiors. The first such modern spectacle was the French Revolution,
from which American oligarchs learned to appreciate the need for effective noble lies, to
prevent a similar sort of perverse revolution in the “New World” (supposedly a world of
raw materials with which European immigrants could practice their godhood). The trick
was to use a limited form of democracy that has only superficial consequences, setting
the branches of government against each other by way of dividing and conquering the
masses. This was done not just to forestall the rise of a classic tyrant with a direct
political monopoly, but to prevent either any such tyrant or the population of weaklings
as a whole from revolting against those with indirect political monopolies, namely the
stealth oligarchs, such as the plutocrats who in the last couple of centuries came to run
the large American banks.
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The Disappearance of Babies and Old People

All of that is background to what I want to discuss, which is one means by which those
who enjoy godlike freedom (the oligarchs) sustain the illusion of freedom of their pets
(the consumers). By “consumer” I mean someone who sacralizes the consumption of
material goods, whose deepest values are therefore the most politically correct ones,
instilled by popular culture which is dominated by the mass media and the
entertainment industry, which in turn have been consolidated by the handful of
megacorporations that comprise the military-industrial-entertainment complex. While
consumers don’t identify themselves primarily as such, those whose behaviour indicates
that they worship the companies that brand them and that rain down techno toys like
manna from heaven should be thought of as consumers in this religious sense.
Psychologically, consumers identify with the celebrities and fictional heroes who lead
popular culture, but these characters become popular because they serve the modern
metanarrative.

As the (relatively unpopular) science fiction movie, Cube, points out so well, there need
be no conspiracy in the Creationist sense, since design can be accomplished in the
Darwinian manner, by natural selection. While modern societies are stealth oligarchies
in which a minority of superpowerful persons negate the socialist tendencies of
democracy, oligarchs are only false gods, themselves being playthings of the inhumane
cosmos. With all their knowledge and power, they can’t predict how economies will
develop in the long-term and thus can’t fully control them. Instead, what happens is that
dominance hierarchies evolve as stable, albeit apparently cruel social organizations,
with human predators naturally winning wild competitions and acquiring monopolies,
and with myths arising to reinforce that naturally advantageous order by captivating the
human herd. Like everything else in nature, human society is a process in what I call
figuratively the decay of the undead god. Clearly, nature is divine since natural forces
produce everything from galaxies to planets to organisms. But nature is neither alive nor
dead, neither a personal god nor inert and static; as argued by the biologist Stuart
Kauffman, in Reinventing the Sacred, nature is creative, but nature thereby gives only
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the superficial appearance of being alive without actually being so, like a zombie. And
like a zombie’s undeadness, nature’s sham vitality is horrible, because of its alien
endpoint, because actual organic life is only a byproduct of cosmic development, with
life having no necessarily uplifting ultimate role in the universe.

So consumers are enthusiastic participants in popular culture who thus most

successfully fulfill whatever mysterious function is needed to help maintain the modern
social order. Biologically, religious consumerism serves the genes by stabilizing a
dominance hierarchy, the latter being a social structure that’s proven to prevent social
collapse in most mammalian species but that in our freer, more intelligent species may
not likewise succeed. In any case, the ultimate end of the subset of biological processes
within the grander cosmic evolution is quite unknown. But, captivated by modern myths
that reinforce grotesque power inequalities, empowering vicious human predators as
oligarchs at the majority’s expense, consumers are blindly locked into that cosmic
process, which makes for an aesthetically questionable lifestyle.

How, though, are so many people captured by modern myths? How do so many
succumb to liberal Scientism, to the colossal naturalistic fallacy of trusting that society
generally can progress just as obviously as can technoscience? I want to explore here
just one facet of this domestication of the herd. Since consumers are chained to popular
culture, it behooves us to investigate that culture’s content, and one curious feature of
that content is well-known, which is the pretense that old people don’t exist. The
Simpsons cartoon, for example, has for a couple of decades now satirized retirement
homes, contrasting the modernist’s penchant for eliminating old people from public
view, with the more traditional culture in which old people are respected and more
directly cared for by their relatives. In addition to being abandoned by their modern
families, old people seldom appear in the mass media or in any form of mass
entertainment. Sterilized representatives may be concocted to sell life insurance or
drugs on television, but you rarely see old people in mass-consumed contents. Even
though their job consists of reading from teleprompters, when a news anchor reaches a
certain age, he or she’s often replaced by a younger mouthpiece, and the same is true
 410

of movie or television actors. Moreover, not just the living old people are conspicuously
absent from modern society, but so are dead bodies. In a traditional or so-called
premodern society, the dead are more visible, sometimes even paraded in public or left
to rot with no pretense of an afterlife, as in the Tibetan practice of the sky burial in which
the corpse is left to rot out in the open. In modern society, though, corpses are rushed
to funeral homes where they’re burned to ashes or secreted within coffins and buried,
sparing friends or relatives the hardship of looking Death in its hideously alien face.

Less well appreciated is the fact that the same phenomenon is found at the opposite
end of the spectrum: babies are also kept as secrets in modern societies, seldom
appearing anywhere in public, including the narratives of pop culture. The point isn’t just
that babies are rarely shown in movies or in magazines, for example, but that babies
are hardly ever even the subjects of public discourse. Indirectly, of course, many
aspects of popular culture bear on old people and on babies, but there’s little direct
observation or discussion of what we might call the alpha and the omega of the human
life cycle.

Two tempting explanations of these curious facts can be dismissed, I think. First, the
fiction writer will point out that babies obviously make for poor actors and thus are
useless as stars of advertisements, movies, novels, and so on. At best, babies are used
as props in the entertainment industry, because this industry is in the business of telling
stories/spreading myths, and babies are incapable of acting. This explanation has two
drawbacks. First, it doesn’t account as well for the comparable banishment of old
people, since older people can act and indeed may have all the more experience in that
respect. Second, this doesn’t address the neglect that occurs outside of commercial
enterprises, by modern families themselves.

The second explanation is the evolutionary one that old people naturally won’t become
the focus of a human culture which must ultimately be directed towards the fulfillment of
our biological function of sexual reproduction. Old people no longer carry out that
function and thus tend to fall by the wayside. As it stands, this explanation has
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numerous problems. For one thing, its major premise seems false, since while all
human cultures may affirm our biological function, thus instituting marriage, for example,
cultures can do this by indirect means. Thus, far from ignoring old people, traditional
cultures treasure them, giving them pride of place and codifying or mythologizing
respect for old people. Also, this explanation doesn’t account for the dearth of babies in
modern public places. On the contrary, the naïve evolutionist should predict that babies
are culturally central: at least, any culture that deals explicitly with sexual reproduction
should prize the biological result, which is of course the birth of infants.

Part of a more satisfying explanation, though, is related to the second one, which is that
in the case of commercial endeavours, at least, such as advertising, neither babies nor
old people are most welcome, because sexuality is the primary technique for selling
merchandise, and those in the eighteen to thirty-five age group are naturally the sexiest.

Sustaining Individualism by an Illusion

But more generally, I propose, people at their youngest or their oldest are detrimental to
the myth of freedom on which consumerism and thus the whole modern social order
depend. As I said, oligarchic freedom is just the lack of inhibitions and of any external
restriction on the will to get what it wants. In this respect, oligarchs are like infants as
much as gods, but however objectionable their exploitations, oppressions, or fraudulent
extractions of wealth, and however incompatible their infantile recklessness may be with
the modern myth of rational self-control, they’re ensconced in their privately-operated
worlds and thus likely beyond reform.

However, the consumer can’t afford to recognize the sham of the modern ideal of
human nature. The passive downloader of pop culture mustn’t become aware of the
dark pseudo-agenda of the undead god, of the natural powers behind the cultural
Matrix; instead, the consumer must blindly follow the modern ideal as though it were just
a harmless conventional stipulation, like another rule of the road. This modern ideal is
called Individualism, since it depicts a person as an independent entity walled-off from
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everything else by the trinity of Consciousness, Reason, and Freedom. These forces
unite to empower a person, to make her the “master of her destiny.” Modern liberty is
freedom from tradition, from preposterous institutions like the Church, from
antiprogressive forces such as superstition, from tyrannical governments, and from the
whims of Mother Nature. Consumption of material goods, then, is the fuelling of the ego,
the divorce between the increasingly-autonomous individual and the rest of the world,
the spinning of a cocoon to nurture a god-in-training. Less figuratively, the point is that
material goods add to a person’s control--supposedly over herself as well as nature--
since they’re artificially functional and thus more predictable and benevolent than
natural processes. Also, consumption of mass-produced toys and of other luxuries is
pleasurable, which reassures the consumer that modernism is worthwhile.

But as an ingredient of the modern myth, consumerism is broader than the commercial
sphere, extending to politics, sexuality, family dynamics, and to any egocentric,
“individualistic” endeavour. The individual is supposed to exercise perfectly free choice
not just in the supermarket, when faced with aisles of stacked products that tower
overhead, but in democratic elections. Liberated men and women are free also to have
recreational sex with no limits between consenting adults, selecting among the myriad
ways in which bodies can be conjoined. And being an autonomous, self-sufficient
pseudogod, with no overriding social obligations, an adult can dispense with his or her
old parents when they become burdensome, hiding their bodies again when they die, in
graves or urns.

With this modern ideal in mind, there are a host of reasons why the public presence of
old people and of infants is awkward in any society committed to that ideal. The fantasy
of technoscientific mastery over natural forces is shown to be ludicrous by evidence of
nature’s mastery over us, which is found all over the deteriorating bodies of old people,
still plagued as they are by diseases despite all the advances in medical science. Their
organs and mental faculties fail them as they near the permanent cessation of their
inner being, which cessation is so incomprehensible to the living. No one escapes that
submission to natural forces, not even the oligarch who is the most godlike among us.
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While old people show that even godlike humans are conquered by natural forces,
babies give the lie to modernism by showing how most of us can be conquered by
social ones. In the first place, a baby is a sponge, mimicking what those around it do. In
this way, a baby is transparently trained like any pet. By analogy, weaker adults may be
trained by stronger ones. Granted, babies and children occupy biologically formative
stages of development, but even the adult brain is highly adaptable, changing to suit
stimuli from different environments. Moreover, as shown by cognitive scientists, even an
average adult is much less rational than classic rationalists assumed. Adults are
susceptible to many fallacies and biases. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt says in
The Righteous Mind, reason evolved not to discover the ultimate truth but to flatter the
ego and to navigate social networks. (Unfortunately, Haidt’s defense of political
conservatism commits the naturalistic fallacy in an egregious fashion.) All of which
strengthens the analogy between a parent’s evident training of her baby with the
prospect of an oligarch’s training of a consumer. But a consumer who’s effectively a
domesticated pet of godlike predators obviously falls short of the modern myth of the
rationally self-determining agent. So the existence of babies is politically incorrect in a
stealth oligarchy.

Moreover, a baby is perfectly innocent and naïve, content with the most trivial activities
such as scrunching a piece of paper or throwing a toy across the floor. An existential
cosmicist, with a merciless philosophical perspective on our tragic position in nature,
should be heartbroken whenever she confirms that a baby’s bliss depends on the
baby’s complete ignorance. Again, then, by a reasonable analogy, anyone can infer that
just as a baby’s happiness is both tragically doomed, as the baby grows and loses its
ignorance, and also absurdly inconsequential and out-of-touch with natural reality, so
too an adult consumer’s lifestyle is doomed and ridiculous from an even broader
perspective. This analogy undermines faith in the sacredness of a technologically-
enhanced, self-directing individual. Just as a modern baby is surrounded by a toy
environment that separates the baby from the dangers of the rest of the household, so
too an adult consumer’s artificial world separates the individual from the natural
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wilderness, conferring the illusion of independence as long as the consumer’s vision is

limited to the dreams and fantasies purveyed by pop culture. Just as in the Gnostic
science fiction movie, The Matrix, we live with illusions that spare us from confronting
harsh reality. If the artificial intelligence of the futuristic machines that enslave humans
and install virtual reality software programs in their minds, as shown in the movie, is
comparable to the undeadness of nature’s creativity that operates via the oligarchs (the
“Agents”) and their industries, The Matrix is an apt dramatization of consumerism and
only barely metaphorical.

In addition, a baby is, of course, physically helpless, with a head that’s initially too big
for its body, requiring an adult to carry and feed the baby, and with instinctively
grasping, puny hands that can’t yet manipulate its environment with any sophistication.
And then there’s the baby’s naked egoism, its wailing whenever it doesn’t get its way, its
self-centered disdain for anything in its dream world which the baby doesn’t identify as
an extension of itself. When the baby eventually learns to distinguish between itself and
other things, one of the first lessons it learns in modern society is that of private
property, as the baby’s asked to hand over its toy but often refuses and cries when
forcibly separated from its presumed property. I trust that, following the above lines of
argument, the further analogies with adults along these lines are plain. Compared to
hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and the potential of a huge meteor's collision with Earth,
an adult human is just as helpless as a baby without the charity of adults. Oligarchs are
relatively self-sufficient, but they bless consumers with the gifts of modern myths and a
toy environment that save the fragile masses from the horror and the angst that follow
from existential insight. And all secular humanists, including modern oligarchs and
consumers, are egotists, idolizing the godlike human as a stand-in for the dead and
buried God. Little do these enthusiastic modernists appreciate that the ancient gods of
theists, killed off, as it were, by modern scientists and philosophers, were pipsqueaks
next to the undead monster of the natural universe, which evidently builds on itself in a
mindless, pointless evolutionary process in which even liberated humanists are
imprisoned.
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In short, from the esoteric, existential perspective, the baby is a fitting symbol of the
adult. As I’ve said, both the consumer and the oligarch are infantile in their own ways,
but when the oligarch appreciates the fictional nature of modern myths and so suffers
the stress of cognitive dissonance when he fails to live as an awe-inspiring god, the
oligarch can fall back on the infinite distractions supplied by his wealth, as well as on the
thrill of abusing his immense power with impunity. An oligarch can afford to recognize
his relative infancy compared to mighty Mother Nature, but a modern dominance
hierarchy could collapse were the masses generally to become disenchanted with the
myths that prop up the practice of endless consumption. And this isn’t just speculation.
The social revolution in the 1960s was led by anarchist hippies who deprogrammed
themselves with psychedelic drugs, thereby attaining the broader, existential
perspective by means of which they grasped precisely the absurdity of the modern
worldview. Lacking a viable alternative after the Soviet Union imploded, though, the
hippies sold out and the modern scientistic and social Darwinian dominance hierarchies
in the US and Europe reestablished themselves in the ‘80s. Still, the French Revolution
and the ‘60s social revolution both demonstrate a power hierarchy’s vulnerability, given
sufficient disenchantment with the noble lies that rationalize gross political and
economic inequalities.

One of the ways in which modern dominance hierarchies are maintained, I’m
suggesting, is by excluding babies and old people from politically correct discourse,
effectively identifying them as taboo. That way, consumers tend to live only with others
of our ilk, which allows us to retain our warped ideal of human nature. We’re led to think
that humans are essentially autonomous, responsible adults, and that babies and old
people are subhuman; after all, in the majority of public contents, from mass media and
entertainment narratives to the sorts of people who literally tend to exist in public
spaces, we adult consumers are narcissistically treated to reflections of ourselves.

Sure, like most adults throughout history, we modern consumers have our own children,
but we tend to cherish our careers, daycare services, or nannies which separate parent
from child for much of the day. Thus, the immersion in pop culture and in the world of
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godlike adult responsibilities can compete successfully with the nagging existential
worries that should follow from much experience with babies. And sure, there are public
places dominated by old people, such as cruise ships and certain beaches in Florida,
but those places function as extended retirement homes which younger consumers duly
tend to avoid.

Conclusion

To summarize the overall argument, then, the modernist upholds an ideology that
celebrates individual freedom, explaining this freedom as an inheritance of Reason.
Reason frees us from the dead weight of the past and creates a progressive future in
which we’re further empowered. While this ideology is hardly baseless, it does replace a
theistic religion only by becoming a science-centered one, which inevitably renders the
commitment to modernism an irrational leap of faith. Logic and empirical evidence won’t
suffice to sustain that faith; force of some sort is needed. When inherent wishes and
predilections for fallacies don’t ensure faith in the myths that prop up modern stealth
oligarchies, external pressures may emerge. One such pressure seems to be the
illusion in modern society that that society is populated exclusively by the freest, most
rational and godlike humans, by young and middle-aged adults. This illusion reinforces
the modern conceit that we have the potential to be godlike, a potential that’s
supposedly fulfilled by the oligarchs who climb to the top of the power pyramid. Too
much familiarity with the physical and mental weaknesses to which old people are prone
and with the habits of babies threatens the consumers--who comprise the majority of
modernists--with a debilitating existential perspective that could undermine the modern
social order. Thus, one way or another, babies and old people are excluded from
modern public spaces, to help sustain secular humanistic narcissism and arrogance
which are hallmarks of consumerism, the latter being the way in which the majority of
modernists express their so-called freedom.
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Untangling Liberalism and Libertarianism

____________________________________________________

Liberalism and libertarianism share a root word as well as a common history, but today
liberals and libertarians are often far apart on economic and political issues, especially
in the US. I’ll try to get to the bottom of the current divisions, giving due respect to the
self-serving talking points repeated by each side, which is to say no respect at all to
what partisan liberals and libertarians pretend to believe. I’m more interested in the
principles that can be deduced from what such partisans say or that are indicated by
their political actions. The principles I detect are rather shocking. As I’ve spelled out in
“Liberalism” and elsewhere, modern liberals must be distinguished from postmodern
ones, and postmodern liberals are disgraced, nihilistic servants of stealth oligarchies;
moreover, as I’ve explained in “Conservatism,” libertarians craft noble lies on behalf of
those same oligarchies. But in the present philosophical rant, I explore further the
nature of those lies, to lay bare the current difference between liberalism and
libertarianism.

The Ironic Undoing of Liberalism

Modern liberalism is a scientistic application of rationalism, which imports scientific

methods and standards from the empirical study of nature to the management of
society. By way of a decline from a modern to a so-called postmodern state, liberalism
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comes to bridge secular individualism and technocracy in the following way. Historically,
the Protestant Reformation, the rise of the merchant class, and the power of modern
scientific inquiries undermined the medieval European social structure, the authority of
the Catholic Church, and thus the basis for deferring to Christian dogmas. Faith in
received wisdom was replaced with the Renaissance confidence in human creativity
and progress. The godlike human, who replaces the theistic deity by learning how the
world actually works and re-engineering it to our benefit instead of trusting in revelation,
and by freely creating worlds of culture, inherits the prestige and the rights once
conventionally thought to belong to God.

Now, as a sovereign gifted with the powers of rational self-control and thus of some
freedom from natural forces, the secular humanist acquires the rights to create and to
profit from that labour, free from traditional strictures. This freedom of thought and of
labour requires democracy and capitalism. Liberal rights flow from the rationality of
human nature, and so all people are assumed to have these rights. Moreover, since the
modern liberal is optimistic about the prospect for social progress by an application of
reason similar to the one in technoscience, liberalism entails a protection of human
rights and of our equality by a progressive government. This is to say that liberal
rationalism has socialist implications: by replacing Faith with Reason and God with
Homo sapiens, the liberal hopes that social progress can be engineered just as well as
technoscientific progress in controlling natural processes. Each rationally-sovereign
person progresses by exercising her divine creativity and self-control, and just as God is
assumed to benefit from some religious hierarchy such as the Catholic Church, which
takes up the intermediary burden of managing Earth as the pinnacle of God's Creation,
a powerful bureaucratic government is needed to protect secular creations. This liberal
government will be technocratic in its aping of technoscience: instead of improving on
nature, a liberal government perfects society, but in each case the goal is rational self-
empowerment. And a liberal government will be socialist in its expansive view of human
rights shared equally by every rationally-autonomous person. Reason dignifies and
indeed deifies a person, and so just as a Church or other holy ground must be highly
regulated and safeguarded, much governmental care must be taken even with a
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pauper. Hence, we have the secular liberal’s technocratic administration of a social

safety net.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, the modern liberal society degenerates into what I’ve
called its postmodern version. Ironically, the very scientific progress that so inspired
secular humanists in the Enlightenment is largely responsible for this decline. What
happened is just that evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences showed that
humans aren’t divine after all; specifically, we’re not as free, conscious, nor as rational
as assumed by the Enlightenment metanarrative. On the contrary, we’re embodied
animals with no immaterial or supernatural spirit, our minds are mostly unconscious,
and our capacity for reason evolved alongside more prodigious capacities for unreason-
-for fallacies and biases--which play their own evolutionary roles. Thus, informed liberals
eventually lost confidence in the myths of modernity, and what I’ve called the religion of
Scientism entered its arid scholastic phase in which politically correct censorship
replaces the modern premium on originality.

Moreover, precisely because we were merely clever animals all along, the liberal’s
championing of freedom in the forms of democracy and capitalism naturally ushered in
stealth oligarchies which liberated and more truly deified minorities at the expense of
great majorities. In a “free” Western society, the socialist powers of technocratic
government are usurped by the minority who profit most from economic competition,
and are then applied to the exclusive preservation of their wealth. In the nadir of
postmodern liberalism, which is the current farce with the politically correct title, The
American Leadership of the Free World, the majority are degraded rather than dignified,
whether by an overactive prison system with the world’s highest incarceration rate, by a
governmental duopoly that responds much more to money than to votes, or by the
spectacle that the top tenth of the top one percent of wealthiest Americans, or one in a
thousand American households, made one out of every eight dollars in the US economy
prior to the recent recession, despite the obvious fact that that lopsided share hardly
corresponds to any superhuman social contribution on the part of those elite
beneficiaries. (See Winner-Take-All Politics, by Hacker and Pierson.)
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The result is an apathetic, cynical, largely impoverished and suckered majority

governed by godlike oligarchs in the private sector who manipulate mass opinion
through their control of the corporate media and their financed and lobbied political
representatives. Postmodern secular liberals, meaning scientifically-informed ones
who’ve lost faith in Enlightenment ideals of rational progress, are now mere nihilistic
functionaries in this greater oligarchic technocracy. These functionaries, who are said
euphemistically to be “pragmatic,” "centrist,” or “moderate,” are actually neutral, which is
to say passive, managers of an inherited system. This system is just the junk pile
remaining from the implosion of modern, idealistic secular liberalism.

Libertarianism as Disguised Social Darwinism

Libertarianism has complex historical connections to what’s now called liberalism. But
the key to what currently distinguishes the two political viewpoints is that the libertarian
holds out the individual’s divine freedom to create as an aspiration, or as an end of a
process, not as an inalienable right possessed equally by everyone. In effect, the
libertarian picks up where the postmodern liberal leaves off, accepting the disheartening
scientific discoveries of human beastliness, and thus rejects two liberal assumptions:
first, that all people deserve respect as substitutes for the traditional monotheistic deity;
and consequently second, that we should have general confidence in social work
performed by groups of people. Specifically, the deeds of a democratic government
which even partly represents the mob’s interests must be suspect. Thus, the libertarian
is in favour of marginalizing government as an instrument of the mob, since contrary to
modern liberal hype, a human mob isn’t necessarily comprised of rationally self-
controlled, godlike agents whose handiwork must be revered.

Still, the libertarian now accepts the liberal ideal of individual freedom. This freedom,
however, isn’t something that can be stipulated, but tends actually to be enjoyed only by
a small minority. How does anyone become truly free? Not by governmental regulation
or tinkering with a welfare state, since again, democratic government is controlled at
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least partly by beastly (ignorant, gullible, cowardly, selfish, etc.) humans who aren’t fit to
rule over anyone else because they lack even the power of rational self-control, being
as biologists and cognitive scientists find them. Instead, libertarian freedom, which still
needs to be defined, is won in a natural competition occurring in what’s euphemistically
called a free market. That is, liberty, in the libertarian’s sense, can only be a product of
mighty nature, like anything else of highest value, and the free market is just a human
recreation of a precivilized state of wilderness in which a social Darwinian struggle for
survival plays out. The fittest humans, namely those who achieve the most economic
success, are naturally the most vicious, predatorial, and sociopathic. (See, for example,
the study reported in “Shame on the Rich,” at sciencemag.org.) Ironically, those who
thus prove themselves to be truest to our animal nature win the right to transcend that
nature by way of achieving financial independence and the godlike power not of
freedom as rational self-control, but of a libertine license to live as decadent kings, as
conquerors of the rabble.

The current main difference between liberalism and libertarianism can be summarized
as follows. The postmodern liberal is an instrumentalist who prizes a sprawling
bureaucratic government as the best tool for hiding the liberal’s loss of faith in modern
ideals and for exercising technocratic control over the citizenry. Ensconced in the
government structure, a liberal can pretend to be just a partisan machine who follows
orders, with no way of appreciating the conflict between the liberal’s secular
assumptions and her ideal of human divinity. Moreover, the postmodern liberal consoles
herself with the thought that scientism is vindicated by the government’s quasi-
technological applications, which is to say by its regulations of the economy and of the
culture at large. This is a delusion, though, because the regulation now applies no
scientific theory, but just propaganda written by the minions of oligarchs.

By contrast, the libertarian is a social Darwinian who prizes natural selection as the best
tool for camouflaging the libertarian’s fascist preferences for dominance hierarchy and
for enforcing a clique of wild human predators’ control over the citizenry. The libertarian
trusts in the quasi-divinity of subhuman natural forces, not in universal and innate
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human greatness as expressed by a powerful political representation of the masses’

will. As science has shown, to the chagrin of modern liberals, most people aren’t free at
all, but are slaves to natural forces and to the environment created by the minority of
supreme winners; again, most people aren’t rationally self-controlled, but are controlled
externally by the wildest, cruelest, most irrational and impulsive beasts, namely by the
oligarchs. The libertarian effectively worships those beasts for their freedom, which is to
say their earned or inherited power to rule over the majority and their liberation from
conventions of good and evil.

Liberal vs Libertarian Freedoms

In the mass media, the libertarian talks endlessly of the need to secure our precious
liberties and freedoms, but what can the libertarian mean? Suppose she means that
everyone always has certain human rights in virtue of our power of self-determination.
After all, from at least Reagan onward, Republican politicians tap into libertarian
sentiment by saying to the little guy, “Do you need Big Brother from the government
telling you how you should live? No, you’re wise enough to take care of your money,
which is why taxes should be dramatically lowered. You can take care of yourself as a
rugged individualist, like one of our American forebears in the Wild West or in the
pioneering days.” The presumption here is that when each is left to fend for himself in
such a wild free-for-all, there can be only winners. Left unstated is that when human life
is reduced to a natural competition, there will necessarily be many losers. Likewise, in
the Wild West, when gun fighters were left to fend for themselves with no sheriff around,
one would shoot the other, leaving a loser to complement the other’s victory. Were the
strong permitted to prey on the weak without governmental intervention, the minority
who are naturally the most vicious and the least capable of shame would accumulate
most of the wealth and so impoverish and radicalize the majority, thus guaranteeing the
oligarchs’ eventual downfall as the vices needed to propel them to the top of the
dominance hierarchy preclude their having the humility to appreciate a stable mob’s role
in their own survival. In short, the uncivilized struggle for power plays out as an
analogue of the sexual game between sadists and masochists.
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But to return to the point, we need to ask why the libertarian seldom speaks at any
length about the necessity of losers in her social Darwinian dream in which the
government mainly preserves a field of wild competition by militarily preventing foreign
intervention and by punishing theft of private property won in the natural struggle for
survival. The reason is that any such reference to the losers points to the contradiction
at the heart of libertarianism. On the one hand, the libertarian wants a society in which
everyone is free to compete. On the other, such a society necessarily develops into a
dominance hierarchy in which the majority are deprived of that freedom, as power and
wealth are monopolized at the very top of the social pyramid and social forces of
upward mobility, such as welfare for the poor or what Chris Hedges calls the pillars of a
liberal establishment, including unions and a progressive Democratic Party in the US,
are eliminated. The libertarian pretends that everyone wins in a wild, that is, a free,
market, or that, at worst, if you go bankrupt, you can pull yourselves up by your
bootstraps, work hard, and win out in the end. The cold, hard fact is that just as most
mammals come to grisly ends as they’re eaten by predators or else starve to death due
to exposure to the elements, most people in an unregulated competition for economic
survival naturally lose outright, meaning that they become impoverished and dependent
on the victors' largesse, like peasants living off of the noble’s land.

The contradiction, then, is that in selling her political viewpoint, the libertarian
simultaneously holds out a carrot and a stick: first, she flatters her listeners by calling
them heroic individualists, but then she implies that in a libertarian society most of them
will go belly-up and rot in the street like worthless animals. Recall that it’s the liberal, not
the libertarian, who follows through on the assumption that everyone deserves respect
simply for being individual humans. After all, it’s the liberal who means to ensure that
were anyone to fail, that precious person wouldn’t be permitted to go to waste, but
would be nurtured back to health by the state.

Perhaps the libertarian would insist that the losers are respected all the more by
allowing them to face the dire consequences if they should fail in the competition they
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freely choose to enter. In so far as everyone is equally free, according to libertarianism,

this freedom thus would be everyone’s implicit consent given to the competition by their
participation in it. This consent would be the so-called rational social contract: we each
calculate that we can gain more by competing with minimal government protection of
our winnings than we can under anarchy. But faced with the honestly spelled-out choice
between the libertarian’s wild competition with its necessary conversion of the majority
into a pile of rotting corpses just prior to the oligarchy’s self-destruction, and the liberal’s
more civilized society in which private winnings are mostly protected but also taxed
sufficiently to preserve the dignity of the majority who, once again, inevitably fail in any
competition for survival, all but the vicious free-riders and potential oligarchs would
surely opt for the latter society. As the philosopher John Rawls famously argues, behind
a veil of ignorance as to our future, and with the crucial piece of information in hand,
that a competition necessitates a great many losers along with the winners, the rational
choice is to err on the side of caution and to create a social safety net.

So the freedom praised by the libertarian isn’t any choice to heroically enter a free
market at our own peril, with the expectation that in such a society the majority are likely
doomed to failure and to suffer the costs like wild beasts punished by natural forces.
Hardly anyone would exercise freedom by making such a choice. As Thomas Frank and
many others point out, to the extent that many people claim to prefer a so-called free
market, they do so unknowingly on the basis of carefully-arranged misinformation, such
as the libertarian’s hiding of the true cost of living in a Darwinian world. Such a “choice”
is grotesque rather than praiseworthy. Again, then, the libertarian can only pretend to
laud people generally for their right to liberty. As I’ve said, what libertarianism actually
entails is a very narrow role for liberty as an outcome for the minority of victors in a
natural competition. These victors win the right to indulge their appetites, to live in
luxury, and to flout the politically correct rules that govern the petty lives of lesser
mortals. Libertarian freedom is just the oligarch’s leisure to indulge his or her
superhuman vices.
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In summary, modern liberal freedom is the rational self-controlling human’s liberation

from natural forces, as the creator who replaces God. That sacred freedom is awesome
in its implications, and so all rational beings must be treasured at all costs and the
public must be taxed to preserve the lives of social victims or losers. Postmodern liberal
freedom is a set of civil rights, enforced by a code of political correctness that creates a
bland monoculture of consumers for the benefit of the oligarchs who profit most from the
sociopolitical system managed either by retrograde conservatives or by lapsed liberals
turned into nihilistic automatons. Libertarian freedom is the power of the most vicious
among us to demonstrate their superior beastliness by using the majority of people as
pawns in a hideous Darwinian game with the sole, self-destructive goal of maintaining
as much social inequality as possible in the form of a dominance hierarchy.

A move from liberalism to libertarianism thus entails a novel theistic development, from
the stale, scientistic apotheosis, or divination of humanity, with its socialist implications,
to a more Lovecraftian theology. Instead of deifying all people equally just for our
rational autonomy, most people are condemned in the libertarian scheme to being
fodder for the games of oligarchs who are like Lovecraft’s gods that transcend human
expectations. Somewhat paradoxically, the oligarchs, that is, the most vicious among us
who naturally horde wealth to their advantage, are rewarded with posthuman status
even though in a sense they’re the most human of all. These gods are above both
actual laws and politically correct strictures for the weak; they’re the powers behind the
throne, they dwell in their own gated realms, sitting on riches that could eliminate world
hunger in the blink of an eye, but that instead are squandered on luxuries to signal the
gods' contempt for slave morality. There is no rational justification for this state of
affairs. By cheerleading for the free market, which serves effectively as a cocoon for the
spawning of Lovecraftian gods, the libertarian may be likened to that typical
Lovecraftian character, the hapless cultist who worships the alien gods even as the
cultist is squashed beneath their colossal, quivering tentacles.
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Appendix: The Definition of “Politics”

Politics: the secret application of vices in preserving group cohesion; in professional

circles, politics features the art of telling noble lies to convince people, in effect, that
Sartre was wrong when he said that hell is other people.

When many people choose to live together in cities and nations, a dominance hierarchy
emerges as the most stable social structure, as it does in most social animal species.
However, most people are too vain to consider themselves animals whose lives are
governed largely by power relations. From a genetic viewpoint, our great intelligence is
a byproduct that leads us astray, filling our heads with diversions and delusions of
grandeur. Whereas many kings, emperors, tsars, and dictators have foregone the
political enterprise, preferring to rule as unashamed beasts with displays of absolute
power, modern rulers are forced to resort to Machiavellian maneuvers. This is because
modernists preach secular humanism, which inspires people to think of themselves as
heroes, boldly confronting the forces that hinder our progress. Spreading that myth and
then undermining it with brutal oppression of the masses would obviously be
counterproductive, and yet modern myths hardly prevent the emergence of dominance
hierarchies. Thus, modern politicians apologize for and exploit power imbalances with
covert rather than with open forms of corruption.

Politics is a charade in which leaders and followers pretend to be rational and virtuous
while demonstrating the opposite at every opportunity. After all, politics isn’t just for
professional politicians; no, whenever people interact socially in a group of whatever
size, we resort to political maneuvers to maintain the power dynamic while distracting
ourselves with our group’s loftier stated purpose--lest we break our social bonds, since
we’re too vain and clever to sustain transparently-degrading group dynamics. With
political posturing, spin-doctoring, white lying, backstabbing, double dealing, flip-
flopping, gossip, and brinksmanship, we concede that we’re animals vying for power
while maintaining the legend of our nobility.
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Political Correctness: Spellbinding the Masses

____________________________________________________

In “Scientism,” I argued that the modern science-centered worldview is religious rather

than strictly secular. This religion, which I call scientism, isn’t just academic positivism or
behaviourism, but the popular worship of technoscientific power and the divinely
creative forces revealed or enthroned by that power, such as natural selection in the
minimally-regulated (mostly uncivilized) market. Pitiless Mother Nature reigns in
capitalistic oases, as in Edenic jungle paradises, intervening in human affairs by
separating winners from losers in every wild, entirely unchristian struggle for profit. The
god of the free market, which must be the very same cosmic creativity that evolves solar
systems and galaxies, is omnipresent in modern economies, at one with our vices that
compel us to compete in a short-sighted, self-destructive fashion, leading presumably to
our eventual extinction and replacement by some other chosen species. All hail Cosmic
Creativity! And until that glorious future, when we’ll likely sacrifice ourselves for the sake
of mindless evolution, a handful of mandarins, tycoons, magnates, and other lords of
commerce rule as demigods, prophets and champions of that model sociopath, the
creative force of natural selection. These oligarchs are elevated by the free market and
so chosen by Mother Nature to rule in her social order, which is the dominance
hierarchy, or pecking order. Thanks to their cunning, modern wealthy societies protect
that underlying hierarchy with façades of democracy and with bribes of technologically-
achieved pleasure.
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How could scientism be religious, though, without some scripture recited in holy places,
causing knees to bow in reverence for the revealed Word of the Almighty? Where is the
so-called secularist’s holy book of divine wisdom, if so-called secularists really are
closet religionists? My answer: the verses of scientism’s scripture are repeated hourly
on the mountain tops of television and radio airtime; they're the politically correct
slogans, the spin-doctored and market-tested rhetoric, and the instrumental talking
points for the Pavlovian training of human cattle. Were that scripture confined to a single
book, its title might be Political Correctness: Sacred Verses for Spellbinding
Consumers; instead, scientism uses modern technology to piggyback its messages on
those of popular entertainments so that you hear them even when you think you don’t.
Remember that scientism is a paradoxical faith, a religion that pretends to be opposed
to all religious follies. Just as an oligarchy can disguise itself as a democratic republic,
pagan worship of nature can disguise itself as scientific rationalism and as postreligious
humanism. To see the religious aspect of so-called secular society, you have to step
back from it and ask yourself whether there’s any reason to believe that our innate
tribalism and creative urge to speculate, which are primary causes of religion, were shut
down by modern forces of progress. Sure, in the name of that progress, the old gods of
supernatural monotheism were dethroned and the perennial religious philosophies of
mystics were ignored or ridiculed, but since religions are found in all times and places
occupied by human beings, due to innate causes within us, we should expect that
modern naturalists deify whatever’s left to replace the outmoded objects of worship.

Taboo and the Sacred

What is political correctness? Officially, politically correct speech and attitudes are
conventions that respect social discoveries, such as the existence of civil rights due to
the equality of humans as free, rational persons. It’s merely good manners in the face of
the facts to tell the truth, for example, about the dignity of the poor and the rich alike.
The social discoveries are like mathematically necessary truths, and the student can
just tick the appropriate boxes in the Quiz of Life, thanks to regular tutoring from the
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authorities, such as politicians, pundits, celebrities--indeed, virtually anyone performing

her public function (her job) and certainly anyone on mainstream media. Your private
thoughts are more or less your own, but there are rules for public behaviour, besides
those recognized in courts of law, and the penalty for disobeying them is to be shunned
or ostracized.

This official account can be dismissed just by pointing out that there are incompatible
notions of what’s politically correct. For example, there are liberal and conservative
myths that contradict each other in speaking of different social facts that are supposed
to be respected. Perhaps one myth is correct and another is false, but it’s more likely
that scientific standards are inapplicable to political “theory”, since politics is the study of
power in human societies, and the act of putting forward a political explanation is itself a
move in that power dynamic. Natural scientists can be objective because they don’t
anthropomorphize their objects of study, and so their biases that are likely activated
when dealing with other people are held in check when investigating atoms, rocks, or
galaxies. When prescribing a social structure, however, the political theorist can’t be
doing science in that sense, and so her political rationale can be neither objectively true
nor false. The more appropriate standards of evaluation in politics are ethical and
aesthetic ones, and the political theorist is better regarded as a myth-maker.

In any case, liberal myths are more readily associated with political correctness than are
conservative ones, and the reason for this is just that postmodern liberals have lost faith
in their myths, whereas conservatives, lacking the strength of character or the
intellectual integrity to admit that their myths are grotesque when applied to what’s now
known about nature, hold fast to their monotheism or their social Darwinism. Liberals
therefore force themselves to belittle their myths, reducing them to Life Quizzes, and
their absolute imperatives to multiple choice questions with pseudoscientifically correct
answers. Liberalism, after all, begins with the naturalistic fallacy that since the natural
sciences have cognitively progressed, so too can societies normatively progress. But
the point I want to stress is that the notion of political correctness is a misnomer, since
political myths and scientific theories shouldn’t be evaluated with the same criteria; the
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latter can correspond to facts, because of scientific objectivity, whereas the former can
be ethically or aesthetically impressive.

For what, then, is “political correctness” a euphemism? Certainly, politically correct

speech is safe, inoffensive speech, the verbal equivalent of Muzak. But more precisely,
the rules of political correctness are meant to steer people away from committing taboo
acts. Every religious society has its division between the sacred and the profane. Liberal
and conservative myths about us and our social institutions prescribe what should be
worshipped as holy, as worthy of approval despite the fear which the holy arouses in us
due to its inhumane displays of awesome power. Modern, classic liberals deified the
rationality, freewill, and consciousness of human nature, and natural forces were to
have feared us, as it were, for our determination to bend them to our will. Again, though,
postmodern liberals no longer believe we live up to Enlightenment hype. Meanwhile,
conservatives seem to deify traditional supernatural forces, but the gods they actually
follow are money and earthly power and pleasure. After all, Christian and Muslim
conservatives have underlying secular agendas, such as the imposition of theocracies.
According to the monotheistic myth, we should all fear the supernatural God, but that
God is modeled on the human dictator. And according to implications of libertarian
(explicitly economic) conservatism, the weak should fear the strong whose greater
strength gives them all the right in the world to sacrifice the weak and the poor for the
dominator’s pleasure.

In a hyper-rational liberal society, humans are divine and the sacred space extends to
whatever part of nature we transform by our labour; whatever we touch turns to gold, as
it were. Wild nature is profane, like the face of the waters before God’s spirit brooded
over them and created the universe from those raw materials. The wilderness is profane
because it dares to oppose noble humankind instead of offering us its teat whenever we
whine like the infants we are, as implied by this instrumentalistic myth. With the glorious
power of science, we reconnoiter the indifferent enemy’s territory and smite the
inhumane elements, engineering them to our benefit. In a postmodern liberal society,
however, nothing is sacred or profane exactly, and instead there’s the distinction
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between the Serious and the Radical. The Serious citizen operates entirely within the
social system without questioning its assumptions and who dedicates herself to making
the system more efficient, while the Radical questions those assumptions and aims to
upset society. (Remember, from “Liberalism,” that the postmodern liberal is a wannabe
technocrat, a partisan nihilistic machine that views the world in pragmatic, non-
normative terms, seeking only to tinker around the edges to maintain the conservative,
naturally oligarchic status quo. President Obama is currently the leading example of this
sort of liberal; for more examples, see all those who call themselves “centrists” or
“pragmatists.”)

Now, in a theocracy, the sacred is defined not by religious scripture, but by the might of
the ruler who cherry-picks the interpretation of the scripture that best excuses the
preposterous imbalance of power in that society. Typically, for example, the ruler is a
man, whose vices tend to be more politically advantageous than a woman’s, and so
women become profane while masculine vices become sacred. To the extent that
science empowers a middle class that can challenge the monarch’s sovereignty,
through mass production and capitalism, science and technology also become profane.
This is, of course, the story of Catholic theocracies in the middle ages and of present-
day Islamic ones. With regard to capitalistic free markets, money, earthly power and
pleasure are sacred, since these and the vices needed to win those goods are fuels for
the engine that turns the natural cycle of evolution, which cycle is the ultimate divinity in
pagan scientism. Government regulations of economic activity are profane for daring to
restrain Mother Nature and to reverse her judgment as to who should or shouldn’t
possess wealth. More generally, anything that deviates from primitive instinct must be
profane; hence, the Republican’s false populist rhetoric against the snobbery of
intellectual elites who fantasize that they can run an economy better than can an
egoistic, chaotic free-for-all. Just because we learned how to reach the moon doesn’t
mean we should step outside of the savage jungle when thinking of how we should live
together.
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The taboo, then, is the sacrilege of profaning what is sacred, by mixing up the two
spaces. For example, a classically liberal taboo is to discriminate against anyone’s
human rights, by calling attention to natural differences such as race, ethnicity, gender,
sexual orientation, culture, or history and ignoring everyone’s equal measures of
rational capacity, autonomy, and consciousness. The sin is to ignore a person’s sacred,
godlike qualities and to elevate the profane, animalistic ones that place us in the
wilderness. By contrast, a postmodern liberal taboo is to ask a deep, normative question
instead of being “realistic” and taking a present system for granted. Typically, the
progressive “base” of the Democratic Party commits this sin against the grown-up
interests of the Serious, corporate Democrats. Thus, the classic liberal is an idealist
whereas the postmodern liberal is a realist.

Again, the taboo for religious conservatives isn’t disobedience to God’s

commandments; rather, it’s disobedience to a human interpretation of those
commandments, where the scripture is used in a secular ploy to establish a theocracy,
which is a natural dominance hierarchy. While the myths speak of rebellion against
God, the immediate, tangible sin is to rebel against God’s human representative,
whether it’s a priest, a televangelist, a Republican President, a cult leader, or an Imam,
Shiekh, or Ayatollah. The taboo for a libertarian conservative is to deign to exercise
godlike power to miraculously extricate yourself from your position in a natural pecking
order. Thus, it’s a sin to share resources, giving the poor a free ride. Cooperation is
supposedly unknown in the wild, and natural selection favours only the exercise of our
vices, not our virtues such as empathy or humility.

Of course, the libertarian supposedly permits charity as long as it’s not theft, which is to
say that individuals should be free to dispose of their possessions as they like, but the
government shouldn’t be allowed to use taxes to transfer money from the rich to the
poor. There is, however, no political principle at work here. In theory, people in a
democracy voluntarily submit to the will of the majority, so if the majority elect a party
that favours the redistribution of wealth through taxation, or rather the ideal of people’s
equality, even those who vote for a different party indirectly consent to the taxes. Why,
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then, is the libertarian actually opposed to a democratic government’s socialist use of

taxes? Because that’s the most effective kind of charity, which plays havoc with the
natural pecking order. And the reason the libertarian emphasizes vice over virtue is
because social Darwinism is a myth that rationalizes power that happens to be acquired
by vicious, human predators. When sociopaths overpower everyone else, they position
themselves to tout the benefits of their monstrous way of life, and so they can broadcast
their egoistic, social Darwinian celebration of their defining characteristics, such as
selfishness, ambition, pitilessness, hedonism, and short-sightedness. When even poor
people respect those vices, despite their having failed in the economic competition due
presumably to their greater degree of virtue, they don’t rebel against the power
inequality.

The Magic of Political Correctness

So much for a general theory of the religious nature of political correctness. Is there any
evidence that that theory applies to actual political correctness? There’s a clue that the
theory does apply, which is that we adopt and defend politically correct slogans with
primitive displays of emotion rather than with logical arguments. Often, the slogans are
repeated so many times that we become bored of questioning them or else the slogans
tap into mythical imagery, whether the images are from political rhetoric, commercials,
or the entertainment industry. For example, note the difference between the belief that
men and women are equal in terms of their personhood, and the belief that women
should be given preferential treatment, along with children, when there’s a desperate
choice between saving a woman or a man, but not both, in a natural catastrophe. The
first convention is backed up by a wealth of well-known scientific evidence that men and
women have similar brain structures, and it’s just this rational basis that makes the
convention scientifically rather than merely politically correct. There’s no such rational
basis for the second convention, especially given the first one. Granted, there’s some
suggestion that women are needed to reproduce, and so for the sake of future
generations a woman’s life is worth more than a man’s. But of course, men are also
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needed for sexual reproduction. That second belief is merely politically correct because
it’s justified, instead, by romantic myths of chivalry.

As for postmodern liberalism, take Obama’s dismissal of progressive calls for Bush
administration and Wall Street accountability through prosecutions. Obama and his
spokespeople ridiculed the progressives as hysterical children who don’t understand
how the system works. Whether Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wall Street bankers should
have been prosecuted just to eliminate moral hazard, even if the prosecutions would
have been doomed to failure, is a normative question that a pragmatic liberal doesn’t
waste time contemplating. All postmodern liberal decisions must meet solely the
engineer’s standard of making the most efficient use of available resources within a
predetermined system. In the political system, a President loses prestige for tilting at
windmills. The idealism of progressives is naïve and counterproductive, according to the
realistic liberal who effectively has no values. But the point I want to emphasize here is
that this progressivism is politically incorrect, because the liberal centrist typically
doesn’t bother to justify the dismissal, but merely relies on the comparisons to children
or to crazy extremists. To venture an explanation of the rebuff, the postmodern liberal
would have to reveal the realist’s functional nihilism, which would vitiate liberalism as a
viable, uplifting school of political thought. That would be most impractical.

There are many religious conservative slogans that are merely politically correct and
thus lacking even the pretense of a rational justification, such as the anti-science
slogans, “Global warming is a hoax” or “Humans didn’t evolve along with monkeys.”
One reason for this hostility to science is, of course, the god-of-the-gaps problem, which
is that the more scientists learn about nature, the more divorced from reality become
traditional theistic beliefs about God, spirits, and miracles. But science is also a
whipping boy for most religious conservatives: they berate scientific theories without
knowing even what a theory generally is in the scientific sense, let alone understanding
the details of how climate and natural selection are thought to work. The politically
correct belittling of scientific theories, in Republican campaign rallies or in televised
political “debates,” for example, would be just like a know-nothing hobbit’s carping about
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Gandalf’s magic spells--as if the hobbit were remotely qualified to say anything worth
listening to on such esoteric subjects. Still, the religious conservative picks up and
repeats these memes, dutifully signaling her political membership. Likewise, libertarian
myths about the evils of taxation and the need for market “freedom” are driven into
conservatives through relentless political and commercial advertising, which is repeated
over and over and which taps into American mythology of rugged individualism,
coloured by Hollywood images of the Wild West.

Political correctness seems, then, to function as a form of arresting magic, a way of

policing the borders of sacred or profane spaces, with verbal hypnotism. The hypnotism
works by the nonrational power of subjectively magical formulas that dare the
hypnotized individual to gainsay a certain convention, commit a taboo act, and thus be
ostracized. By “arresting” I mean that the politically correct speaker is held in sacred
space by her chanting of the formula, since she thereby signals her allegiance to the
group. The in-group slogans test the member’s commitment, because she must be
willing to mindlessly repeat them rather than challenge them with a skeptical mindset.

Liberals make a pseudoscience out of their dehumanizing use of language, pretending

to engineer society with talking points as though the liberals were in possession of a
blueprint of society which specifies how people are components of a social machine.
The conservative politician or pundit relies on talking points as well, but the liberal
shares the advertiser’s cynical view that consumers need to be manipulated by elites for
their own good, whereas the conservative is in the grip of idolatry that would elevate the
masses. Like the advertiser and the disillusioned radical, the postmodern liberal suffers
from self-loathing and from misanthropy: having lost faith in her rationalist, utopian
ideals, the latter-day liberal assumes there’s no compelling defense of any values and
the responsible adult should simply get on with work like Sisyphus pointlessly rolling his
rock up the hill. The liberal’s job is to defend big government, which in turn safeguards
the oligarchic arrangement, and the liberal’s chief tool is her mastery of politically
correct rhetoric, including platitudes, slogans, talking points, and a thousand kinds of
lies such as spin, obfuscation, and evasion, not to mention a legion of fallacies. The
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liberal operative thus practices the phony science of public relations, which aims at
managing public opinion the way a master trains his dog. The idea is to tell the public
what they unconsciously want to hear, as determined by polls and other forms of market
research. Telling the unvarnished truth is always anathema to the paternalistic liberal.
Again, the consumers and voters are taken to consist of levers, dials, and buttons on a
social machine, and the liberal is supposed to be a technician who manipulates them.

But because there’s no rigorous science of social engineering, and the liberal’s
scientism represents liberalism’s collapse after the twentieth century’s mockery of
Enlightenment expectations, the liberal’s rhetoric must be operating on a wing and a
prayer, like psychic mind reading or other dubious, so-called paranormal phenomena.
There may be no real magic in the sense of a violation of natural law, but there’s surely
subjective magic, which is just a matter of ignorance on the perceiver’s part. As Arthur
C. Clarke said, sufficiently advanced technology appears magical. Even if the
technology is a simple game of twenty questions, as in the case of John Edward’s
shenanigans, if the audience is prevented from appreciating that game, due to sleight-
of-hand mischief, the questioner can appear psychic. What the liberal actually manages
by chanting slogans, pandering, spinning, and resorting to numerous other tricks is
people’s perception of reality; she is thus a spell-binding magician, not an engineer with
her arms elbow-deep in reality’s underbelly. The liberal spin-doctor simply takes
advantage of people’s ignorance, gullibility, and fallacious thought routines and
manipulates them into buying the lemon of liberal orthodoxy.

Conservative elites are more brazen in the verbal abuse of their flock, encoding their
rallying cries in religious verbiage and thus playing the ancient game of enlisting God in
support of their prejudices. A clear instance of this is the evangelical Christian’s selling
of family values despite the New Testament’s anti-family message. The family value
slogans are thus at best politically, rather than historically, correct, but conservative
demagogues also indulge in the sordid business of exploiting poor people’s ignorance
of the Bible, pretending their retrograde ideal of the Cleaver family is founded on biblical
principles. It should go without saying that a fair summary of Jesus’ ethical teachings is
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the following: the more content someone is in worldly, secular terms, the less esteemed
that person is by God, since God favours those who fail in the secular rat race.
According to Jesus’ good news for drop-outs and losers, by preferring conventional
happiness to the higher mission of seeking God’s heavenly kingdom, the middle class
parents who raise a family in the suburbs, with a white picket fence, a dog, and a two-
car garage are actually hell-bound souls who got their priorities all wrong. But the feel-
good contrary message, that aims at reconciling Jesus’ spiritual radicalism with modern
hedonism, need only be tenuously connected to the Bible, thanks to the indispensable
art of cherry-picking, and the nominal Christian masses can fantasize that these
demagogues are prophets in their midst. Having absorbed at least some basic biblical
imagery, from movies if not from the Bible itself, the masses are hungry to associate
any passionate conviction with divine inspiration and so even Bush’s neoconservatives
could sell their “preventative” wars on pseudo-Christian grounds.

The religious aspect of the economic conservative’s politically correct rhetoric is more
scientistic than monotheistic. The libertarian trades on the masses’ fear not of the dead
supernatural God, but of the living demigods who fly from mansion to mansion and run
their corporate empires from Babel-like towers. Relying not on prior monotheistic
infantilization but on the corporate variety in advertising, the libertarian preaches an
anti-government creed that invokes the unconscious craving for a return to perfect
consumption in the womb. First the propaganda for endless consumption of material
products is digested in enormous quantities, in the form of omnipresent advertising, and
then economic conservatives press their advantage by advocating a form of self-
destructive government that empowers those who satisfy that infantile demand. Again,
there should be no illusion here that the slogans of small government, individual liberty,
and the free market are rationally embraced by the majority of economic conservatives.
Granted, there’s such a thing as libertarian philosophy, as spouted by Ron Paul, for
example, but that philosophy is mostly a rationalization for the true causes of libertarian
membership: the force of having read Ayn Rand’s paeans to capitalism while the
libertarian was still young, and the understandable deification of technoscience and its
oligarchic champions. Once the consumer glorifies the pseudo-Nietzschean ego and
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replaces her fear of a supernatural God with that of natural gods, she’s ready to
regurgitate laissez faire propaganda.

White Lies

Finally, I want to consider a more common kind of politically correct speech: the white
lie. Conventionally, a white lie is a lie told with benevolent rather than malicious
intention. But there’s another, more popular kind of non-malicious deception, which is
the speech emitted by what Freud called the persona, the self’s public side that plays
various social roles. The lies we tell to prop up our self-image and to maintain
acquaintances and group cohesion are legion. Almost every word we speak in public is
a white lie in that what we say isn’t what we really believe, deep down, as it were: we
speak knowing that we’re not speaking our mind, but we’re compelled to lie just like
actors reading from a script. We say what we’re expected to say, what we’ve been
trained to say, and we say what makes us happy. The exceptions to white lying, then,
are the heart-to-heart conversations good friends or loved ones sometimes have and
the times we “level with” each other or “tell it like it is.”

We white-lie when we humour someone, when we pretend to be optimistic to avoid an

awkward confrontation or to spare someone’s feelings, or when we say to an
acquaintance, “I’ll call you later” or “Let’s get together in a couple of weeks,” with no
intention of following up. You might think that the traditional lies told in a political
campaign are clearly white lies, assuming they’re aspirational promises as opposed to
malicious attempts to mislead. But white lying with benevolent intentions is only a
subtype of the kind of lying I have in mind, namely the kind that doesn’t proceed from
negative intentions. The more common kind of non-malicious lying happens routinely,
with no conscious intention at all. Some political speech may be deceptive but intended
to help the voters rather than just the lying politician, while other kinds of deceptive
political speech may be compulsive and impersonal or unmotivated, and it’s the latter
kind I’m more interested in here.
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Habitual white lying is the adult equivalent of children’s play in a fantasy world that lives
only in their shared imagination space. Children pretend that a large box is a spaceship,
freely making the best of what they’re given, fantasizing because they prefer an ideal
world to the one they actually inhabit. We seldom grow out of that tendency to delude
ourselves and others. White lies are pretenses, playful verbal constructions that
shouldn’t be evaluated in terms of their truth status or their conventional meaning.
Instead, the lies we routinely tell to avoid dealing with uncomfortable truths are means
by which we reinforce our social status and the enchantments of political correctness.
For example, when acquaintances pretend that they’re better friends than they know
they are, congenially promising to keep in touch, they might as well be chimpanzees
picking nits out of each other’s fur. The semantic content of their blather is irrelevant to
its function, which is to help hold together their tribe. Their smiles are forced, their
promises like the sing-song baby talks that soothe infants.

White lies are politically correct, because they’re not directed at individuals, but play to
people's social functions. When we speak reflexively, putting no thought into what we’re
saying and feeling no shame in slipping on a persona, playing a role, and acting
according to a conventional script, like a puppet on a string, we don’t honour what little
dignity or autonomy we have. Only when we engage in heart-to-heart dialogues and
rant like prophets possessed by the power of a muse or of Logos, the divine reason
shaping the universe, do we speak directly to each other as individual, potentially
godlike persons. When we dress in mind-garments, in phony personalities that are just
social constructs rather than our true characters, we perform in the show of
conventional social interaction, the evolutionary point of which is surely to keep us
happy long enough, at least, to reproduce and contribute to the gene pool’s flexibility for
the benefit of future mutants and their offspring. This conventional interaction is the real
Matrix, the mass hallucination that keeps us “functional.”

In public, we’re bombarded by lies that hypnotize, enchant, and comfort us. This is the
nature of political correctness, of speech that’s merely socially useful: we chant mantras
and feel-good slogans or read from conventional scripts, modeling our behaviour on the
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iconic images we see in commercials or in movies--all to remain in our sacred spaces,

to avoid taboos, and to keep in the good graces of what we secularists worship: the
mindless cosmic creativity that abuses self-aware creatures, programming us with
mesmerizing formulas spewed from our own mouths, and also the champions of that
natural force, the winners of the rat race, the predatorial oligarchs who reside at the
apex of a power hierarchy and who earn the most rewards from the cosmos for best
imitating its inhumanity.
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Obama or Romney?
____________________________________________________

I’d like to set down some of my thoughts here on the coming American presidential
election. I’m not an American, so American readers may wonder why I don’t restrict my
attention to the politics of my country, which happens to be Canada. There are a couple
of reasons why I don’t do so. First, American politics are approximately ten thousand
times more interesting than the Canadian variety. For example, when a so-called
religious social conservative gets into office in the US, his or her religion is (superficially)
front and center, as in the case of George W. Bush. Mitt Romney is the exception that
proves the rule, since he hides his religion in his campaign only because he’s a member
of an odd religious minority. American Christians prefer that their Republicans be
Christian, even though Jesus would cast almost every single modern Christian into hell
for selling him out to one secular empire or another. By contrast, Stephen Harper, the
Canadian Prime Minister, is allegedly a religious social conservative, but you’d never tell
this from his speeches or policies. This is because Canadian politicians are boringly
amoral pragmatists, lacking any principled vision of what Canadian society should be
like in the near future. The second reason is that I’ll be commenting only on the public
aspect of American politics, on the absurdist infotainment which, like all great forms of
entertainment, has universal appeal.
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What, then, do I make of the coming US election? Who will win and whose victory would
be best for the country? I don’t know who will win, because by some apparent miracle
the American electorate is so evenly divided. Although half of eligible Americans don’t
vote at all, and haven’t voted for much of the twentieth century (see Wikipedia: “Voter
turnout in the United States presidential elections”), the Gore-Bush election was still
decided by just several hundred votes in Florida. Since the 1950s, the margin
separating the popular votes for each presidential candidate has usually been less than
10%. The difference between Kennedy’s win over Nixon, for example, was 0.17%;
0.70% for Nixon’s win over Humphrey; - 0.51% for Bush’s win over Gore; 2.46% for
Bush’s win over Kerry; and still only 7.27% for Obama’s messianic win over McCain,
after the fiasco of the Bush decade (see Wikipedia: “List of United States presidential
elections by popular vote margin”). Now again, polls have Obama and Romney in a
dead heat. And according to a chart on US voter turnout, the percentage of voting age
Americans who vote for representatives in the House and Senate, when the presidency
isn’t at stake, has consistently been in the mere 30s since the 1970s (see “National
Voter Turnout in Federal Elections: 1960–2010” at infoplease.com).

Has anyone studied the odds of such a close and persistent divide arising naturally in
such a large country? What’s the likelihood that the liberal and conservative states
would so nearly cancel each other out in terms of their state’s electors, leaving just ten
or so battleground states populated by swing voters? What are the odds that just
enough millions of Americans would be so apathetic or disenfranchised that they would
tend not to vote, leaving--of all mathematically possible splits--a 50-50 split among the
rest? And what are the odds that such dead heats would be perfect for the corporate
media that have mastered the art of selling infotainment by drumming up conflicts?

This highly artificial political gridlock seems not so much designed or engineered, but
favoured and accelerated by multiple social elements, including the media, plutocrats,
demagogic culture warriors, and consumers. There’s a proverbial military tactic of
conquering by dividing your foes against each other. American politics are now so
hyper-partisan and dysfunctional (relative to the democratic ideal), because the US has
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both external and internal sources of division and thus of decline. Their wealth is being
extracted by oligarchs who, as Simon Johnson says in "The Quiet Coup," were only
practicing their free market techniques of exploitation on poorer countries, some
decades ago, before hunting for richer prey like middle-class Americans. But these
Americans have also learned to destroy each other with their inane culture wars.

If I had to bet, I’d guess that Obama will win a relatively narrow victory over Romney.
But I hope Obama will lose. This isn’t to say that I think Romney would be better for the
US or for the world, for that matter. The main difference between the Democrats and the
Republicans is that the former ambivalently apply old and failing brakes to the stealth
oligarchs' race to centralize power, whereas the latter hit the gas pedal. There are
plenty of cultural differences between American liberals and conservatives, too, but
these are mostly farcical and trumped up.

The Greater Comedic Value of American Conservatism

So why should Romney win? There are two main reasons, both of which I see as
aesthetic. The first reason is that a Republican victory would make American politics
even more entertaining than it already is under no-drama Obama, and in particular
would be a boon to the comedy industry, as was Obama’s predecessor. I’m being only
slightly facetious here. On my view, oligarchy, which is to say minority rule over the
majority, is naturally the default way of organizing large groups for most social species
and thus also for humans. We can challenge that status quo, as in the cases of
communism and egalitarian liberalism, but communists and liberals are rebels who
wage an uphill battle against natural forces. The Soviet Union devolved into a
kleptocratic oligarchy, as has China, and the US is also very clearly now a stealth
plutocracy, operating under the guise of a classically liberal democracy. Whether the
oligarchy works in secret or in plain sight, the results are the same: gross inequality,
corruption, and social implosion.
 444

Given that backdrop, the question for Americans should be not how to save their nation,
but whether they want their inevitable decline to be mitigated at least by high-quality
entertainment. Reportedly, when the Titanic sank the band continued to play. Had you
been on that doomed ship, would you have preferred to drown in silence? No, oligarchy
is inevitable in any free society, especially in postmodern and high technoscientific
times in which people are, respectively, cynical about all myths and thus about any
inspired alternative to our natural lot (decay within the undead god), and subject to more
and more powerful measures of social control thanks to advances in cognitive science.
Therefore, there should be a premium on entertainment and especially on comedy in
such societies. It’s no accident, then, that the freest country, the US, is also home of the
most popular entertainment industry.

You can actually measure the difference in comedic value between the Democrats and
the Republicans, by comparing the levels of inspiration in Daily Show skits or Bill Maher
monologues over the Bush and Obama years. There’s no question that Bush afforded
them much richer material. There was even a spike in the inspiration of recent Daily
Show comedy, due to the Clint Eastwood farce in the Republican Convention. However
centrist and pragmatic Romney may personally be, a Romney win would empower the
Tea Party, the neoconservatives, and the fundamentalist Christians. This is because a
pragmatic centrist lacks principles and thus the courage to make tough choices that
create enemies. Obama is also a pragmatic centrist and his compromises likewise
emboldened the far right, but again, Obama’s lip service to vestigial liberal values only
spoils the fun for the shrinking middle class. At any rate, the deal in US political
entertainment is that the Right provides the comedic material by their manifestly absurd
actions, and the Left provides the comedic discourse by mocking the right for that
absurdity.

(You might think Clinton’s sex scandals were exceptions, but remember that those
scandals were brought before the public eye only by a monumental effort of the
Republicans to sabotage his presidency. So while Clinton was merely an adulterer who
had sex in the oval office--offenses which aren’t all that funny, by themselves--the
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comedy came from the public humiliation of a very powerful man, or at least from the
revelation that the conservatives think that lying about sex is a worse moral offense than
any modern’s Republican president’s selling out of most Americans a thousand times
over in deference to oligarchs.)

That’s why most professional comedians are liberals. Conservatives are too busy
wrecking the planet to mock themselves for the irony of their business of self-
destruction. Yes, there are popular comedians who are political conservatives, such as
Ann Coulter, Glen Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, but their humour is fuelled strictly by
schadenfreude. Conservative comedians are forced to root for the overdog, because
conservatives are myth-makers for the rationalization of oligarchy, whereas
sophisticated comedy requires the comedian’s humility so that the audience can fall for
the anthropocentric illusion of human greatness which the comedian typically re-
imposes after a shakeup by natural forces. By rationalizing rather than rebelling against
oligarchy, conservatives side with inhumane nature against human welfare, whereas the
function of comedy is to give us hope that in the end we’ll not succumb to mindless
natural processes, such as the superhuman corruption and grotesque inequality that
typify a dominance hierarchy. For this reason, conservative schadenfreude-style
comedy of bullying the weak doesn’t work, which is to say that the conservative’s
commentaries are rarely funny.

The Greater Power of Republican Myths

So that’s one reason to hope that the Republicans take the White House. The ensuing
comedy would be topnotch. The second reason is to reward Republicans for their
superior myths. Both Parties propagate myths to sell their presidential candidate, and
both sides’ myths are gratuitous misrepresentations. Part of the current Republican
distortion is that Obama’s to blame for the weakness of the US economy, since Obama
is a big government socialist who deprives Americans of their freedoms. The
corresponding part of the Democratic myth is that Republican free market ideology is to
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blame for the economic troubles, and that while Romney would return the nation to
Bush-style deregulation, Obama is trying to heal the economy by changing course.

The reality is that both Parties are equally to blame for the state of the economy,
beginning with Reagan’s deregulations; continuing with Clinton’s Free Trade deals and
his unleashing of Wall Street with the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the deregulation of
financial derivatives; subsequently there was Bush’s cowboy enthusiasm for oligarchy
on all fronts; and that led, finally, to Obama’s capitulation to Wall Street insiders. As
soon as Obama took office he surrounded himself with free trade veterans of the Bush
and Clinton administrations; he bailed out the auto industry only by restructuring it,
cutting many workers’ benefits and pensions, but he signed the tax payers’ blank check
that bailed out Wall Street and got nothing in return for Main Street, permitting the banks
even to award huge bonuses to the very bankers who ran their banks into the ground
(later, Obama capped executive pay for banks receiving bailout money, at $500,000;
instead, Obama should have required that any such executive be fired outright for
requiring the bailout in the first place); Obama hasn’t insisted on significant reform of the
financial markets, nor has he sought prosecutions of fraudsters in the big American
banks, to deal with the problem of moral hazard.

The reason for this continuity is apparent: the US dominated after WWII when most of
the world lay in ruins. But when developing countries like China and India took over
many global manufacturing jobs, the US couldn’t compete while maintaining its middle
class, and so the US had to pay for its continuing global military dominance by inventing
a kind of business in which it could excel. That business is the financialization of
everything that can be traded in a stock market. Financialization is largely a matter of
borrowing and hiding money for the sake of gambling. But unlike manufactured goods,
which have tangible and verifiable attributes, financial speculation is the continual
betting on a future that always lies ahead.

It’s worth reminding you here that likely the oldest fraud in history is the theist’s promise
of eternal life or punishment, depending on whether people obey certain religious
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officials, and that this fraud still works because the promise can’t be tested by the living.
Likewise, since the future doesn’t yet exist to be examined, bets on the future can be
won in the present by fraud. Theoretically, as we move forward in time, of course, we
can always confirm which predictions in the stock market turn out correct. Some people
end up losing money in their trades while others win. But like the religious officials who
profit from their control of the afterlife narrative, sophisticated traders and money
managers profit by controlling the way financial bets are made. And what bankers have
discovered is that they can profit most by perpetrating frauds, using sophisticated
mathematics and automation of trades, which exploit the inherently ethereal nature of
the business of gambling on the future. Once enough profit is made from their frauds,
the titans of the financial “industry” become too big to fail and the quality of their
“products” can’t be confirmed.

The upshot of this is that no US president can afford to fix the US economy for the
majority of Americans, since an indispensable US business is the financing of gambling
in stock markets, the highest profit in that business is made from fraud which requires a
host of suckers and dupes (middle class investors), and the profit is needed to pay for
the US military by taxes on the rich, without which the US would be overwhelmed by
blowback from its numerous clandestine adventures abroad. Luckily, one reason many
Americans excel at frauds is that their idol of personal liberty entails freedom from moral
principles.

But to return to the aesthetic point about myths: while neither Romney’s nor Obama’s
campaign narrative is told in anything like good faith, Obama’s distortions are actually
less in touch with reality and less inspiring. Recall that Romney’s deceptions are that
the Democrats are to blame for the stalling economy, and more generally that the
Republicans aim to achieve something other than the further entrenchment of the
wealthiest class of Americans. (See, for example, Mike Lofgren’s book, The Party is
Over.) These myths are plainly needed as lies to ensure that the American oligarchy
remains in stealth mode. Once out in the open, an oligarchy can succumb to angry
mobs.
 448

Still, the sense that Republicans are always more masculine and powerful than the
Democrats, even when the Democrats are in charge, is due to the fact that Republicans
stand squarely behind the greatest power of all, which is the undead god and its natural
forces that evolve complex forms like you and me. Republicans are shameless
defenders of oligarchy, which is the human form of dominance hierarchy, and that
hierarchy is nature’s way of maintaining social structures in bird, fish, and mammal
species. By their policies and actions, the Republicans signal that they represent just
the oligarchs who are nature’s champions, the sociopathic predators who rule our
dominance hierarchies and whose vices best approximate the undead god’s
inhumanity. Of course, none of this is said publicly by any elected Republican. But this
is the ultimate strength of Republican myths.

By contrast, Obama’s deceptions are that social progress, which is to say a deviation
from the natural state of oligarchy, is sustainable, and that the Democratic Party strives
wholeheartedly for that progress. Despite the liberal’s pretentions to hyper-rationality,
Obama’s progressive rhetoric is actually more faith-based than Romney’s. Whereas
conservative theism is superficially supernatural, fundamentalist theism being a
rationalization of earthly dominance hierarchies, conservative political myths are
actually naturalistic. And whereas liberal theism is superficially secular, liberal theism
being scientistic, politically progressive myths are actually highly supernatural. Much
irrational faith is needed to think that mobs of weak people can’t just unseat the minority
of very powerful individuals who happen to rule in a given time and place, but also
violate the Iron Law of Oligarchy and establish a viable alternative to nature’s way of
organizing social groups. And that same sort of faith is needed now to uphold Obama
as a messianic agent of change. When the Democrats’ economic actions reveal that
their liberal values are postmodern, meaning that those politicians are actually nihilistic
pragmatists, Obama’s liberal myth loses even its subliminal capacity to inspire. Again,
on the surface the myth is preposterous, since even though Bush is indeed largely to
blame for the current economic crisis in the US, so too is Clinton and so is Obama for
following both Bush and Clinton even to the point of rehiring their crony capitalist
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economic managers. But while Romney’s distortions retain their power because of their
deeper naturalism and because of our existential horror of our position within the
undead god, Obama’s campaign rhetoric is sickly to its core.

A vote for Obama now is a vote for a weaker, less aesthetically appealing myth to live
by. Progressive myths are bound to be disappointing, since they require faith in a
supernatural, transhuman revolt against natural forces. By contrast, conservative myths
are always vindicated by demonstrations of the power of the true god: oligarchy abides
and oligarchs enjoy their godlike lifestyle while even the alleged revolutionary
progressives--the Democrats, in this case--kowtow to the avatars of cosmic creativity.

To be sure, or to vomit up the politician’s meme, "make no mistake"--like most

professionals, politicians need worry only about making innocent mistakes, never about
perpetrating moral outrages--Republican leaders and conservative politicians in general
are thoroughly despicable human beings. Were Romney to win, most Americans would
suffer horribly as a direct result and no one should want that--least of all an existential
cosmicist whose basic moral sentiment is pity for fellow sufferers. Those who suffer for
their dark philosophical viewpoint should empathize with those whose suffering is
perfectly explicable from that viewpoint. And in a perfect world, a clownish figure like
Romney or George W. Bush could go nowhere without being relentlessly mocked for his
superhuman vices and palpable inhumanity. Sure, these tools of oligarchs can feel
superior for their great wealth, power, and celebrity, but the price of their unqualified
service to the morally neutral social structure is their sociopathy. Only emotionally
hollowed-out wretches could so successfully perform their political function, and those
who speak of human rights might ponder whether biological humanity is as crucial to
those rights as is the psychological sort. Those who are genetically human, but whose
minds have been so warped by years of training in secret societies and business
schools, that they have no qualms about the consequences of their treacherous
complicity in the undead god’s torture of most sentient creatures, should be classified as
psychologically subhuman, in which case a license might conceivably be granted to
hunt those elites like wild animals. Instead, Republican politicians prance and preen like
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beasts in zoo cages. These creatures are myth-makers, actors on a stage, professional
liars with no trace of respect for average people, let alone pangs of conscience. Their
political myths are so many mantras chanted to symbolically affirm their allegiance to
the ultimate Beast whose inhumanity they must incorporate to ascend in a power
hierarchy.

So rather than voting for Romney, the more poetically pleasing option would be to
ceaselessly ridicule him and his ilk for their literal subhumanity. Nevertheless, while
conservative politicians never deserve votes on account of their character or depth of
humanity, their myths should be honoured for inadvertently indicating the deepest
philosophical truths. Democratic politicians aren’t saints in contrast to demonic
Republicans; the latter are more or less evil, while the former are just pathetic. Both
work towards maintaining the American stealth oligarchy, but at least liberals yearn for
an alternative. As I explain elsewhere, liberal scientism has failed and led to the liberal’s
postmodern conundrum. Liberals are thus ineffectual as inhibitors of the conservative’s
channeling of evolutionary forces.

My point here, though, is that the distortions in Obama’s campaign speeches, for
example, aren’t even accidentally beneficial. All we learn from scrutinizing liberal
interpretations of Obama’s first term in office--these being that he tried to reform the
system but was stymied at every turn by the apocalyptic Republican cult, and anyway
that Bush is to blame for everything--is that liberals have mastered the same class of
vices as the Republicans (cynicism, spin-doctoring, pandering, hypocrisy, etc.), which
are prerequisites for all politicians in free societies. But instead of being distinguished by
a shameless embrace of the natural order, liberals are identified by their cowardice.
Caught between the undead god, with its oligarchic kingdom that brings the cosmic hell
of the ghastly void above down to Earth, and the scientistic fallacy of rational social
progress, postmodern liberals obscure their service to the former with obsolete rhetoric
that lacks even subliminal force. Postmodern liberals are aimless and impotent figures,
either clinging to discredited modern ideals or mistaking technocratic efficiency for the
rightness of social goals, as though social sciences could dictate what society ought to
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be like. Liberals may be better human beings than are Republicans, but their political
message is presently useless.

Were Romney to win, Republicans would surely spin the election as a triumph of
American freedom over the tyranny of Obama’s central economic planning. As is
usually the case when a Republican politician speaks, his or her chutzpah here would
be breathtaking. Obama’s rhetoric may have been mildly socialist in that he spoke out
against social Darwinism and stressed the need for bipartisan unity, and Obama’s pitiful
negotiating skills may also have exhibited a willingness to follow up on that belief that
the public good is more important than the political gains of either Party or of any one
politician. But as for his policies and his actions, Obama has clearly been a centrist who
has maintained the status quo, rather than even a liberal, let alone a socialist. Everyone
who knows what these words mean knows that this is so. Thus, the Republican spin
would distort reality.

Nevertheless, Obama does deserve to be punished by voters for his mendacious

capitulation to the far right and thus to the demands of American oligopolists. The
reason Obama isn’t an all-powerful state planner is that when he bailed out the car
companies or the big banks, he was only a wannabe technocrat following orders from
some of the special interests that do hold the economy hostage by being too big to fail.
When Bush was president, he enriched private military contractors and oil companies,
that is, a different group of oligarchs who have long-standing connections with his
family. The ruling special interests that actively employ the government to do their
bidding may change, depending on the circumstances and the Party in the White
House, but the nature of American corporate capitalism remains plutocratic; the Tea
Party critics of this state of affairs merely mistake the employee for the boss. At least
the Republicans, though, don’t put so much effort into pretending that they stand for
anything more elevated than the moral and economic quagmire of a stealth oligarchy.
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The Subtext of the First Romney-Obama Debate

____________________________________________________

The consensus of pundit reaction to the first debate between Romney and Obama is
that Romney won on “style” if not also on substance. Liberal pundits point out that
Romney lied over and over again in the debate, flip-flopping or shaking his Etch A
Sketch; these pundits concede, though, that while the Republican nominee was smug,
condescending, and arrogant, smirking and squinting at Obama, Romney showed much
more enthusiasm. Conservative pundits gloat that Romney stood toe-to-toe with the
President and delivered the policy specifics that Americans allegedly requested. Obama
was “professorial,” making solid, well-worn points against Romney, but with atrocious
delivery: the President didn’t dumb-down or speak in punchy, pithy sound bites, and he
kept looking down while writing notes instead of maintaining eye contact with his
opponent, as though he were physically submitting to Romney; moreover, Obama
missed all sorts of opportunities to go after Romney, to vanquish his unworthy foe, to
speak the truth about the abysmal state of the Republican Party.

Arguably, Romney had more to lose so he came better prepared in addition to having
more recent debating experience--albeit with the clown car of the other Republican
contenders, like Bachmann, Cain, and Perry. Obama may have been distracted by
pressing political matters like Syria or Iran, he may not like debates, and he may have
been coached to sit on his lead in the polls and thus to not take any chances. But as
 453

psychologist, Drew Westen, pointed out a year ago in the NY Times, Obama’s lack of
passion throughout his time in office has been not just disappointing but baffling to
liberals (see “What Happened to Obama?”). While still a senator, Obama campaigned
for the presidency with such fervor that Democrats thought he was the anti-Bush
Messiah. In reality, it turns out that anyone with even minimal acting ability can read a
teleprompter with a fiery tone; plus, most of Obama’s memorable campaign rhetoric--
“Change!” and “Yes, we can!”--was amorphous. Obama wanted to restore bipartisan
sanity to Washington and was rewarded with the descent of the GOP into an
apocalyptic cult that brooked no compromise with the Democrats, and was bent on
annihilating liberalism and ensuring that Obama was a one-term President. Republicans
would vote even against legislation they themselves proposed, to deny Obama a
legislative victory.

The biggest lie Republicans now tell is that such vitriolic hatred of liberals is justified by
Obama’s socialist extremism. Republican leaders have learned from cognitive science,
as well as from the New Testament, that the best way to sell your policies is to couch
them in opposition to a mortal enemy, to activate your minions’ fight-or-flight instinct.
When Republicans distort Democratic policies, pretending that American liberals want
to impose a communist dictatorship on the US, outlawing capitalism, and so forth, they
not only demonize their opponents but reinforce an equally stark definition of what it
means to be a Republican. This is the underlying reason why Romney was so
energized in his first debate with Obama. Even though Romney is personally a
moderate, pragmatic centrist, which is to say a nihilistic, Machiavellian sociopath who
will say anything to get elected, he’s immersed in a miasma of Republican myths, in the
so-called Fox News bubble, which inspires him to pretend that Obama has a diabolic
plan to steal from hard-working, job-creating capitalists to further spoil the 47% of do-
nothing moochers.

The reason this is a lie is that Obama’s actual ideology is just as much an empty shell
as Romney’s. Both men know that political ideology in the US is a sideshow, since the
economic power of the wealthy elites dictates the political agenda and holds the country
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hostage. For example, this is what it means for Wall Street banks to be “too big to fail.”
As the radical pundit Max Keiser says, the American plutocrats function as parasites
and financial terrorists, literally holding the power to sink the American economy unless
the government swears fealty to their plan of establishing a neo-feudal social order. As
I’ve explained elsewhere, Obama is a postmodern and thus a disenchanted liberal. He’s
too smart to believe in anything; certainly, his liberal Christianity is vacuous, consisting
of feel-good New Age slogans that can’t withstand three seconds of rational
examination. And this is why, as Westen says,

When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his
stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem,
who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive
voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability.

Obama can’t even directly criticize Republicans, let alone demonize them, because far
from being a zealous socialist he personally stands for absolutely nothing--and this,
despite the fact that he’s confronted with Republicans who are actually more or less
evil! Perhaps mesmerized by the audacity of that evil, Obama retreats to relativist,
multicultural, post-Enlightenment liberalism, which means his principles dissipate as
soon as they’re called to action.

Is “evil” too strong a word” for the Republicans’ social Darwinism and Ayn Randian
egoism? Of course not. As became clear when Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul in a debate
whether libertarianism implies that an uninsured sick person should be left to die if he
can’t afford health care, and Paul was forced to backtrack and obfuscate when a thrall
from the audience cried out in ecstasy, “Yeah!”, the selfishness at the root of economic
conservatism is the same that motivates all wicked acts. Amoral social Darwinism,
according to which the social safety net should be torn away to preserve the freedom to
profit from the application of vices in a beastly competition, is the same worldview that
rationalizes blue collar forms of evil, such as first degree murder. As horrible as murder
is, the white collar sabotaging of progressive government institutions so that they’re
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helpless to prevent the re-naturalization of the social order, which is to say the
reconstitution of jungle-style dominance hierarchies, is no less evil for being a much
less direct form of violence. Callous henchmen get their hands dirty while a heartless
mastermind pushes buttons in his underground lair, but both are forms of wickedness.

And even after being humiliated by Republicans, who won back the House, obstructed
the Democrats despite their holy mandate for change after eight execrable years of
George W. Bush, and stooped to exploiting American racism to paint Obama as un-
American, Obama sleepwalks through his first chance to personally slay the dragon.
Face to face with the chief representative of the toxic Republican Party, Obama still
shies away from drama, from conflict. For numerous reasons, Obama can’t afford to tell
Americans the truth about the decline of their political system, but one such reason
which isn’t widely known is that Obama has no philosophical grounds to reverse that
decline or to condemn the juggernaut that’s chiefly to blame for the US implosion. Even
if Obama wanted to be cautious, to protect his lead by avoiding gaffes, a true-believing
liberal would have been unable to stop himself from eviscerating the leader of the
odious Republicans, were he given Obama's chance.

Like King Denethor from Lord of the Rings, who succumbs to terror after peaking over
his parapets and beholding the vastness of evil Sauron’s might in the form of his horde
of monsters and demons that stretches to the horizon, Obama’s hesitance speaks to a
larger problem: the bankruptcy of postmodern liberalism. There is currently no viable
philosophy or religion to resist the conservative myths that favour a reconstituting of
what Lewis Mumford calls the megamachine, which I interpret as the natural state of
oligarchy. Ancient religions are hopelessly anachronistic if not also compromised, while
Scientism (secular humanism) eliminates the whole field of normative inquiry as
unsusceptible to scientific solutions. I submit, though, that a prerequisite of a more
worthy alternative is what I call existential cosmicism.
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The Closely-Divided United States: A Case Study of the Matrix

____________________________________________________

The so-called great political horse race is finally over: Obama has won reelection. For
months now, the mainstream media have cited polls showing that the country is split 50-
50, that most of the states are solidly Democratic or Repubican, leaving around ten
battleground states that would be decided by a narrow slice of “undecided
independents.” Endlessly, media pundits return to this theme, that the US is a narrowly
divided country in cultural and political terms. And sure enough, when the election finally
happened, the votes in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and elsewhere were very evenly split
(51% to 49%, etc).

Do yourself a favour, though: the next time you hear someone repeat the meme that the
US electorate is politically split down the middle, with half the country being Democrat
and the other half Republican, pinch that person’s arm in an earnest effort to awaken
him from his slumber in the pod that evidently feeds him his daily dose of virtual reality.
The fact is that the country is not so split; only the likely and actual voters are. Half of
the country doesn’t vote and hasn’t voted in large numbers since the nineteenth
century, when the average turnout percentage in presidential elections was in the high
70s. In 1904 it dropped to 65%, in 1912 to 59%. In 1920 it fell below 50% for the first
time in US history. It stayed mostly in the 40s and 50s until 1952 when it hit 63% and
stayed in the 60s until 1972, when it fell back to the 50s where it’s been ever since,
 457

falling again to 49% in 1996. (For the numbers, see the above Wikipedia articles on
voter turnout.) According to a report from the Center for the Study of the American
Electorate, the voter turnout in the 2012 US presidential election was 57.5% of all
eligible voters.

What does this mean, you ask? Well, how can the recent closely-fought elections be
taken to represent the state of the electorate when some half of the country consistently
doesn’t participate in those elections? Sure, some of those who don’t vote in one
election might vote in the next one, so the non-voters don’t comprise a monolithic group;
no group so large is homogenous in its outlook or in its reasons or causes, in this case,
for not voting. Obviously, the Great Depression and the World Wars impacted the
voting. But there is a pattern here, nonetheless: throughout its history the US president
has usually garnered roughly half of the popular vote, sometimes as much as 60% but
more often just below 50%, and since the beginning of the last century, only around half
of the country has been voting at all in those elections. Granted, there’s sometimes
been a third party, and the voters were evenly divided a century before voter turnout
tended to drop below 60%. Still, for the last hundred years, there’s been no reason to
say that the electorate as a whole is evenly divided. This is because the electorate
includes those who are eligible to vote but who don’t do so, and for decades this portion
of the electorate has been quite sizable. Thus, for a century now, the even splits in the
election results haven’t reflected the state of the country.

The polls you keep hearing about, which can be misinterpreted as referring to a split of
the American electorate in general, are usually only of so-called “likely voters,” meaning
that half of the country isn’t represented in those polls. Obviously, the exit polls likewise
reflect only the actual voters, not the half of the country that doesn’t show up. And the
election results themselves obviously again represent only half of the country when the
other half doesn’t vote. So for decades now, the United States has not been split down
the middle, with only a narrow slice of undecided independents separating the
Democrats and Republicans. Instead, all of that action takes place on a playing field in a
stadium which seats only half of the country, as it were. The other half, which may
 458

change its ranks from election to election, but which has remained as sizable for a
century, stands outside that stadium altogether.

I’ve asked this before, but I’d still like to know what the odds are that so many recent
elections could be so close, given such factors as the electoral college map and the fact
that half the country doesn’t vote. Why, that is, should so much complexity and disparity
throw up consistently close election results with respect to the popular vote? Another
question: why do the two Parties restrict their attention to their base supporters and to a
narrow band of ignoramuses, called the undecided voters? Why not reach out to the
huge number of people who are the unlikely voters? I suggest that the main reason is
that most of those who tend not to vote are cynical about the US political process: they
observe that their country is a stealth oligarchy, that the conflict between the democratic
Parties is a sham because the Parties have a duopoly, that those with the most money,
who can afford full-time lobbyists, have a disproportionate impact on what the politicians
actually do, and so on and so forth. Many of those who don’t vote are unreachable by
the politicians, because these nonvoters are radical outsiders who have no illusions to
mitigate their knowledge of certain basic, natural facts, and so they’re left out of the
political narrative.

In any case, we can be confident that the mass media benefit from maintaining the
illusion that the country itself is evenly divided. This became painfully clear to me as I
ascetically mortified my flesh by watching CNN during last night’s election. (Again, I
follow US politics much more than the Canadian variety even though I’m Canadian,
because I can’t remain awake long enough to learn the facts of nearly any political issue
in Canada.) As early as around 9pm, ET, the analyst John King realized that although
the Florida votes were very evenly split, with around 70% of the votes then counted, the
remaining counties were Democratic strongholds, and if Romney lost Florida he had
virtually no chance of winning the election, especially as other states began to fall
Obama’s way. But King stopped short of predicting an Obama victory on that basis, and
CNN gave equal time to the results in each of the other states, hailing each as
profoundly important breaking news. Then, an hour or so later, when the situation
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looked even more hopeless for Romney in Florida and thus in the election as a whole,
King once again went through the map of counties, making his point that he didn’t see
enough available votes for Romney. This time, though, King was more insistent, saying
that it would be “impossible” for Romney to win the election at that point without Florida,
and Florida looked like a lock for Obama. Immediately thereafter, after turning the floor
over to Wolf Blitzer, Blitzer intoned--and I’m paraphrasing--“Every electoral college point
matters a great deal.” What Blitzer meant was that CNN’s viewers should nevertheless
keep watching the election, including the results in all of the states, even though King
was announcing on the basis of the evidence at hand that the election was effectively
over long before it was officially called for Obama.

Evidently, then, the media benefit from the myth that the country is so closely divided,
because conflict gets higher ratings and sells advertisements. Blitzer’s denial of the
reality in Florida, getting his viewers to focus on the horse race in the rest of the country,
provides a fine example of how the cultural matrix of illusions is actually maintained.
The reality is that half of the country plays no part in the eternal war between Democrats
and Republicans, so the country itself is not so evenly split. But the media, at least,
profit from propping up the oversimplification.
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Part Three: Sexuality

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Is Love the Meaning of Life?

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No, it’s not, contrary to the sentimental meme. Reading or hearing the sappier
assurances that all you need is love triggers my gag reflex. For example, as quoted in
Chris Hedges’ online article, "Acts of Love," even the existential psychologist Viktor
Frankl rhapsodizes “that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can
aspire,” that “the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought
and belief have to impart” is that “The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
Luckily, Chris Hedges' defense of the meme is slightly more readable, so I'll summarize
and discuss his article to elucidate why love is not our highest good after all, contrary to
popular opinion.

Chris Hedges on Love

Hedges summarizes his view of why love is so great:

Love, the deepest human commitment, the force that defies empirical
examination and yet is the defining and most glorious element in human life, the
love between two people, between children and parents, between friends,
between partners, reminds us of why we have been created for our brief sojourns
on the planet. Those who cannot love--and I have seen these deformed human
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beings in the wars and conflicts I covered--are spiritually and emotionally dead.
They affirm themselves through destruction, first of others and then, finally, of
themselves. Those incapable of love never live.

According to Hedges, love is opposed to loneliness, which is the “most acute form of
human suffering.” As he explains, “The isolated human individual can never be fully
human. And for those cut off from others, for those alienated from the world around
them, the false covenants of race, nationalism, the glorious cause, class and gender
compete, with great seduction, against the covenant of love.”

Indeed, Hedges subscribes to Freud’s Manichean interpretation of the evolution of

civilization as a conflict between instincts for love and for death and destruction. Neither
extreme, though, is ideal. For example, Hedges says, materialistic happiness is a sort of
pseudo-love of objects or of fame, which “withers if there is no meaning.” At the
opposite end, “to live only for meaning--indifferent to all happiness--makes us fanatic,
self-righteous and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of
others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning
and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion.”

Hedges ties this notion of grace to the god of his moderate Christian theology. Indeed,
he seems to identify love with “the reality of the eternal,” or of God, which “must be
grounded in that which we cannot touch, see or define, in mystery, in a kind of faith in
the ultimate worth of compassion, even when the reality of the world around us seems
to belittle compassion as futile.” This is the sophisticated, still somewhat obscure way of
saying more bluntly, with a variation on the meme that love is the highest good, that
God is love.

Continuing with his Manichean theme, Hedges opposes love to hate. According to him,
we love due to knowledge of what unites us, namely the universal desire for love. But
we’re tempted to hate when we’re distressed by “uncertainty and fear. If you hate others
they will soon hate or fear you. They will reject you. Your behavior assures it. And
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through hate you become sucked into the sham covenants of the nation, the tribe, and
you begin to speak in the language of violence, the language of death.” Thus, the dark
side of the force, as it were, which attracts lonely or fearful people, leads them to hate,
which in turn leads to destructive worship of idols.

By contrast, love is an action that makes a difference in the world for the better: “If our
body dies, it is the love that we have lived that will remain--what the religious
understand as the soul--as the irreducible essence of life. It is the small, inconspicuous
things we do that reveal the pity and beauty and ultimate power and mystery of human
existence.” Not only do lovers thus achieve a kind of immortality, but “To survive as a
human being is possible only through love.” Love “alone gives us meaning that endures.
It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has the power both to resist in our
nature what we know we must resist and to affirm what we know we must affirm.”

Love is No Mystery

I begin my deflation of the hot air balloon that carries the meme aloft on winds of
mawkishness, by calling attention to Hedges’ curious notion that love is a “force that
defies empirical examination,” and indeed that this force is somehow united with the
eternal, irreducible mystery of God. I suspect his motive for saying this is to render his
socialism unfalsifiable by hiding its foundation in an unfathomable mystery, thus
securing his political beliefs in spite of all the evidence of nature’s palpable inhumanity.
Thus, as Hedges quotes the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman as saying, the evil of the
Nazi Holocaust was impotent before “immortal,” “unconquerable” Kindness, and history
“is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.
But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will
never conquer.” Hedges was a war correspondent for the NY Times, and he seems to
defend his sanity against the horrors he witnessed by falling back on an abstract,
demythologized version of the Christianity he studied beforehand, when he obtained his
Masters of Divinity. Despite the abundant evidence of our beastliness which undermines
socialist ideals, Hedges has faith that love wins out in the end or at least that the
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“covenant of love” that justifies the socialist principle of equal rights can be upheld
without embarrassment.

Whatever his motivation, the ploy of hiding the goodness of love along with a god-of-
the-gaps fails. Putting aside the broad scientific picture of the universe’s magnificence in
which our preoccupation with love falls out as at best parochial, there’s the more
specific evidence from neurology which refutes Hedges’ contention that love “defies
empirical investigation.” In particular, neurologists now know that various so-called love
hormones such as oxytocin cause strong emotional bonds in mammals. So what
Hedges must mean when he insists that love is irreducibly mysterious is that altruism
makes no sense in evolutionary terms. But even if we lay aside biologists’ theories of
altruism, such as the peacock’s tail comparison, the mystery is solved simply by
assuming that altruism is a consequence of an adaptation rather than an adaptation
itself, that is, a trait that’s indirectly preserved as a result of another trait that was
directly selected for its enhancement of our fitness to serve as hosts for our genes. In
the same way, while our capacities to produce music or to scientifically study distant
galaxies through a telescope may have negligible immediate evolutionary value, such
capacities were opened up by our generic high intelligence which is itself naturally
selected because of its utility to our genes.

Whether we’re speaking of love for a family member or a life partner, or for a neighbour,
nation or species, these benevolent impulses are at a minimum experimental riffs on the
basic evolutionary theme, which is that of the human parents’ emotional bonds needed
to procreate and to care for their helpless infant who carries their genetic legacy. The
bonds between human parents and between them and their child aren’t at all
mysterious in evolutionary terms, and our ancestors apparently learned that similar
bonds can be formed in extended social relationships, giving rise to love of tribe or in
much rarer cases of people in general. Thus, even when love causes us to sacrifice
ourselves and our genes, as long as the evolutionary utility of the basic emotional bonds
and of high intelligence is higher than the costs incurred in the trial-and-error process of
putting those goods to work, there’s no evolutionary mystery of love.
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Indeed, even were the costs to prove greater, or to take another example, even were
our high intelligence to lead ultimately to our extinction through our investigations in the
evolutionarily-counterproductive area of weapons of mass destruction, there would be
no mystery since the forces of natural selection are mindless. Nature has no allegiance
to any species and creates them as freely and as indifferently as it creates solar
systems and galaxies, often by destroying the earlier results of its work. Our extinction
would make room for new forms of biological complexity, just as the death of the
dinosaurs made way for the reign of mammals. And even were we to destroy our
planet’s capacity to sustain any life at all, there would still be no evolutionary mystery,
since the genes aren’t all-powerful, all-knowing gods: their natural process of replicating
through the defense mechanism of creating host organisms would simply terminate and
Earth might come to resemble something like Mars. On the contrary, the burden of
having to believe that love is ineffable falls on the shoulders of even a cryptotheist like
Hedges who is left to wonder where God must be hiding, given that God would have left
us in a cosmos that’s mostly hostile to life while still commanding us to be vulnerable by
loving each other. Once the theistic projections of human self-centeredness are duly
trashed if only on the aesthetic ground of being intolerably clichéd, we can face the
prospect not just that love is a thoroughly natural phenomenon, but that any such
phenomenon comes and goes, serving no transcendent purpose.

No Refuge in Human Nature

Once we dispense, then, with the obfuscating god-of-the-gaps gambit, of conferring

phony value to love by hiding that emotion, as it were, in a place that can never be
found by a skeptic who can call upon all of nature to cast doubt on love’s glory, we can
deal more directly with the question at hand. Hedges argues that love is great because
the alternatives are horrible. You can love people or you can wallow in loneliness,
hatred, or idolatry and ultimately destroy yourself. Were these the only available paths,
Hedges might be entitled to conclude that love is the highest good, assuming that love
is better than the more destructive drives he condemns. But he doesn’t show that there
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are just those two paths and so most of his arguments are vulnerable to the charge that
they rest on false dichotomies. I’ll discuss a third path in a moment, which will show that
Hedges’ article does indeed propose a series of false choices.

First, though, I want to point out that the underlying disagreement has to do with
different views of human nature. Several times Hedges says that the so-called negative
alternatives to love cut us off from our humanity, that if you don’t love you’re not “fully
human,” or that “To survive as a human being is possible only through love.” There are
several problems with this appeal to a human essence. First, the empirical evidence
shows that, if anything, our nature is mixed. The clearest way to see this is to look at
how the human brain evolved by accruing new layers and modules. Thus, for example,
the language-processing and other higher-reasoning functions are implemented by the
most recent, outer neural layer called the mammalian cerebral cortex, whereas
hormones and other substrates for emotions are secreted by more ancient structures in
the limbic system which we share with even more species. Our identity as human
beings would depend largely on our neural capacities, and since those capacities
happen to conflict with each other, as in the infamous cases of logic’s frequent conflicts
with feelings, it begs the question to say that love is more authentic to our nature than,
say, reason or anxiety.

Moreover, talk of love as necessary for a full human being begs the question as to
whether a full or complete human is better than an incomplete one. We could just as
easily say that men have an instinct to rape women and that to be fully male we must,
therefore, succumb to that instinct. Finally, there is no human essence in any
teleological sense, no transcendent plan we ought to follow. On the contrary, we’re
constantly in the process of evolving, and again, if anything, we’re characterized by our
control over our own evolution and thus over our nature. Instead of being engineered by
our genes, for example, we stand at the threshold of being able to engineer them in the
pursuit of our personal goals. As the existentialist philosopher Sartre said, for us
existence precedes essence, meaning that we’re largely free to choose what we are
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and ought to be. Any appeal to human essence, then, is lame since it’s easily met with
the response that we needn’t choose to be that way.

The Third Way

Now, as I’ve laid out elsewhere, the results of these facts about our nature are that
we’re uniquely prone to angst and that we preserve our peace of mind by entertaining
fantasies and delusions. Clearly, reciprocated love feels better than loneliness or
anxiety, so if you think happiness is the highest good in life, you’ll place a high value on
love. I agree with Hedges, though, when he says that happiness is usually opposed to
meaning. A simpleminded person might be content with meaningless pleasure, whereas
someone with philosophical interests will prefer pleasure that arises from profound
activities, which is to say activities that respond well to deep facts. One such fact would
be our self-conflicted nature. Refined rather than trivial pleasure, therefore, might be
taken in some way of appreciating the absurdity that we each cancel ourselves out. For
example, there’s the pleasure of gallows humour, such as the pleasure many people
derive from watching the political satires of Jon Stewart or Bill Maher, and there’s what
Buddhists and other mystics call the bliss from meditating on the illusoriness of material
distinctions.

Contrary to Hedges, however, a philosophical passion for meaningful pursuits doesn’t

entail spiritual death and destructiveness, although it should cause the philosopher to
suffer. To take the obvious example, a mystic may prefer an ascetic life which allows for
maximal attention to the most profound matters. This ascetic may be lonely but will
hardly be unspiritual or predatory. What Hedges misses, then, is the difference between
what we can call, by way of much simplification, Western and Eastern approaches to
ethical questions. Westerners are generally more optimistic, because Western religions,
with the exception of present-day Islam, are friendlier to thrilling secular enterprises.
That is, Judaism and Christianity are largely secularized, the fundamentalist’s oblivious
protests against secular civilization notwithstanding, and so most Jews and Christians
view history in terms of linear progress and their behaviour indicates that they effectively
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welcome technoscientific advances. With some exceptions such as Confucianism and

exoteric Hinduism, Eastern philosophies are more pessimistic precisely because they’re
more mystical. Buddhists, for example, condemn the whole apparent material world for
causing suffering, and hold out the hope not of happiness but of peace through
detachment and renunciation, which extinguish the ego that’s so cherished by
individualistic Westerners.

To come to the main point, then, the glorification of love seems a more Western
proclivity, given that love is presumed to be necessary for happiness and only optimists
are inclined to pursue that goal. Easterners are less likely to romanticize love; indeed,
they still often have arranged marriages and think of familial relationships in terms of
duties. This hardly means that Easterners are more lonely, idolatrous, or self-
destructive. What the lovesick Westerner might fail to realize is that a philosophically
heroic, ethical, and pleasurable life is possible. This is the third path I have in mind.
Instead of performing good deeds as a result of feeling compassion, kindness, or other
optimistic or philosophically blind emotions, the humanitarianism of a melancholic
philosopher who appreciates the existential or mystical context of human life can be
motivated by pity, ironically-antisocial conscientiousness, or even an aesthetic passion
for avoiding clichés. Just because someone is a Scrooge with respect to love doesn’t
mean he or she is cruel, contrary to Dickens’ morality tale. Indeed, constitutionally-
antisocial folks, such as those suffering from Asperger Syndrome, are likely to
compensate for the shallowness of their social emotions with excessive rule-following,
which compels them to be scrupulous. (For dramatizations of this, see the Vulcans from
Star Trek or Sheldon Cooper from TV comedy, The Big Bang Theory.) The point is that
love is hardly the only source of morality.

Compare two cases of altruism: on the one hand, a loving, upbeat person rescues a
stranger out of compassion or some other tenderhearted sentiment; on the other, a
melancholic person rescues a stranger out of pity for everyone’s existential plight,
disgust with our haplessness, and distaste for ugly states of affairs. In the first case, the
feeling may be based on the optimistic assumption that everyone has human rights, but
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more fundamentally this feeling is caused directly or indirectly by the genes, as the
altruist extends her parental instinct by way of some perceived similarity between the
stranger and the altruist’s child or at least her image of what her child would be like.
That is, the altruist identifies with the stranger so that her feeling of love compels her to
act as though she were rescuing her child. In the second case, the altruist is also guided
by feelings, but by pessimistic ones. The result is the same, but the two altruists’
characters and philosophical outlooks differ. Which case is superior depends on which
philosophy is best.

To think that love is our primary purpose in life is to adopt a very narrow, hopeful, and
genetically determined viewpoint. Sure, there are sophisticated justifications of love,
such as theological or New Age ones, but these are rationalizations since love is, first
and foremost, a hormonal contribution to the proliferation of our genes. A loving
person is optimistic in that she affirms the value of human nature--as that nature
is given to us prior to philosophical reflection. That affirmation, in turn, is aligned
with our genetically determined function. By contrast, a melancholy person is
pessimistic in that she devalues that state of human nature; that is, she’s repulsed
by our inner conflicts, suffering the alienation and anxiety that are caused not by the
genes but by skepticism of social conventions and politically correct traditions. By
heroically overcoming the horror of facing the existential truth or by tragically failing to
emerge intact from that confrontation, the introvert, philosopher, or mystic thus tends to
malfunction as a vessel for microscopic replicators.

Either way, the question of whether love or a less optimistic basis for morality makes for
the best human life turns on a conflict between (1) the pragmatic consequentialist who
prizes success above all else, ignoring the quality of the means by which the success is
achieved, and (2) the existentialist who aesthetically rejects certain such means. A lover
doesn’t mind being a tool for the perpetuation of the human species, because she
typically subscribes to some delusion that covers up her existential plight. A nonlover
rebels against the natural order, preferring what she’d call a higher grade of human
being, such as a posthuman or a spiritual, tasteful, authentic, or enlightened person.
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Optimistic love has no place in the latter's mind, since such an emotion is stamped out
by her gloomier responses to a plague of unwelcome truths. When you loathe all our
weaknesses, especially our gullibility and our susceptibility to wishful thinking and self-
deception; when you harbour absurd, fruitless contempt for the zombie-like
mindlessness of natural forces which is the source of most suffering; and when you’re
inflicted with alienation and anxiety as the costs of doing philosophical business, you
lose the childish innocence needed for love. You become cynical. But if you survive
your ruminations, your standards are elevated and you become a mystical insider, an
observer of human folly, with godlike detachment, and your suffering is alleviated by
schadenfreude.

Is love for people, then, the meaning of life? Perhaps for human cattle, but not for the
enlightened ones who love instead knowledge enough to be horrified by the world. The
meaning of the philosopher’s life is to rebel: to struggle, to overcome, and to create as a
godlike animal. People don’t deserve love; instead, we warrant pity, disgust, fear, or
awe. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky says that hell is the inability to love,
which is correct in the sense that a misanthrope suffers a lot and is demonic in that she
makes a play for God’s throne; that is, she strives to become more than an animal and
a slave to natural cycles. Arguably, where Dostoevsky errs, though, is in his Christian
apology for our jailer, for his proscription of demigodhood and his conviction that
existential insight is immoral and counterproductive. For a Christian, hell is the worst
place to be, but for a philosopher, hell in the sense of an illuminated state of mind is an
obligatory burden that a more promising beast shoulders out of courage that the fires of
angst will burn away the chains that bind her to the cave of ignorance, so that she might
be reborn with a nobler, posthuman character.

Appendix” The Definition of “Love”

Love: key to the illusion of immortality.

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Especially after the troubadours and thanks to the modern celebration of the individual,
most people now think love is the most important and meaningful thing in the universe.
And by “love,” they mean mainly romantic love between life partners and parental love
for children. This conviction is represented in the philosophical movie (with the
disappointing, New Agey ending), Tree of Life, in which a character says, “Unless you
love, your life will flash by.”

From a biological perspective, the centrality of those two kinds of love makes sense,
since such strong emotional bonds are clearly mechanisms needed to preserve our
genes: romantic love steps in after the particular sexual impulse wanes, keeping a
couple together to care for the helpless infant that’s naturally produced by the sex act,
and parental love binds parents to their children, the latter being the vessels that carry
their parents’ genes into the future. So indeed, if you don’t love in those ways, the
genetic code that supports your life, at least, will likely be erased with your death. The
movie Tree of Life spiritualizes this biological truth, pandering to American theists with a
vision of an afterlife, implying that love is needed to avoid hell or to maintain a social
network to make heaven enjoyable, or some such mob fodder.

Psychologically rather than biologically, the point would be that people who love tend to
build up a rich store of memories, so that time doesn’t seem to pass as quickly to them;
they’re too busy living to notice the months and years ticking by.

An existential cosmicist, though, would rewrite the movie’s line as follows: “Unless you
love, you’ll appreciate that all life flashes by (compared to the duration of the cosmos).”
Love preserves the genes and creates new individuals, but doesn’t actually make
anyone immortal; instead, love creates the illusion of immortality by preoccupying a
person with a host of day-to-day familial chores, social functions, celebrations, and so
on. Without the rich experience caused by romantic and parental love, a person is free
to dwell on the horrible philosophical facts of natural life. The loveless soul then lapses
into alienating angst, cutting the person off from the community and thus depriving him
or her of a wealth of distracting memories. Time then seems to leap forward for such a
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person, as shown in the film Synecdoche, New York. Love is crucial, then, not as the
key to actual immortality, but as the stage for the play of a “life well-lived,” the bright
lights and drama of which distract from the horrors that lie behind the scenes.

Thus, the choice to succumb to biological instinct as opposed to philosophical or

mystical anxiety is the choice between two forms of alienation. You can detach from
cosmic reality and live in our now mass-concocted fantasy world in which romantic
myths paper over uglier biological truths or you can commune with the undead god
(mindlessly creative nature) and forgo the social games that most people play.
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Embarrassment by Sexual Ecstasy

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I want to consider a certain paradox. On the one hand, wealthy, modern, secular
countries are obsessed with sexuality in public places, meaning that references to sex
are found in most messages carried in all forms of media, including books, magazines,
movies, news reports, and advertisements. The obvious explanation is that sexuality is
central to human nature, and so naturally sex is much-discussed in open societies. But
on the other hand, even in these liberal places, people are averse to divulging the
concrete, personal details of their sex lives. Again, on the one hand, romantic love and
sexual intimacy are ideals praised literally in most songs, poems, and paintings ever
produced, and the marriage industry celebrates monogamous unions which are
considered legally void without sexual “consummation.” On the other hand, while the
value of romantic love in general is publicly affirmed, only arid signs of affection
between partners are tolerated in public places. Even public kissing is scorned. You can
hold hands or dance with your partner, but actual sex in public is, of course, typically
illegal. You can carry a picture of your spouse in your wallet and wear a wedding ring to
symbolize the exclusivity of your romantic love for your partner, but were a stranger to
approach you and inquire as to your spouse’s favourite sexual position, you would
probably punch that stranger in the face. So we praise sexuality and romantic love in
the abstract, but we hide the actual cases of them. Why the discrepancy?
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Before I come to my explanation, I’ll note some complications. First, some societies
have arranged rather than romantic unions, and to the extent that these are less
intimate or sexual, they fall outside the purview of this rant. Second, some cultures are
less prudish than others. Ancient Egypt, Rome, and India were more open to public
nudity and representations of sex, featuring statues of phalluses and pornographic
paintings. Even in ancient Rome and India, however, people’s sex lives were usually
kept private. Third, although Judeo-Christian and Islamic societies are currently the
most prudish, superficially because of the influence of the Eden myth, pornography is
rampant in secularized Christian societies, largely because of those people’s relative
wealth which enables their access to the internet. The stigma on porn, though, shows
that the openness towards sex in porn is the exception that proves the rule that we fear
there might be something amiss with sexuality, which is why we keep sex itself hidden
and private. Also, porn is a substitute for actual sex, and so the widespread use of porn
provides additional evidence of qualms about sexuality.

The Paradox of Human Sexuality

At first glance, the conflict between the two attitudes towards sexuality shows only that
sex and romantic love are highly valued and thus not to be trivialized by public boasting
or other outward displays. This sets up a false dichotomy, though, since there’s a third
possibility, between trivializing a highly valued sex life by making it public, and
reinforcing a taboo on revealing intimate details, by publicly honouring your romantic
love only with adherence to impersonal conventions. Indeed, just as the public rituals of
secularized, civic religion mock the presumed depth of modern people’s commitment to
traditional religions, so too the expression of romantic love through relatively stale
conventional channels, like the wedding ceremony or the rituals of dancing or hand-
holding, indicates, if anything, a willingness to sell-out that love. In the archetypal
romantic story of Romeo and Juliet, the strength of the characters’ bond is
demonstrated by their defiance of cultural convention. Their tragedy is that their
romantic love has no home in public and must be kept secret. But that’s true with regard
to virtually every sexual relationship.
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The deeper reason for the conflict, I think, is that although romantic love is highly
valued, this love is also dangerous because it entails secrets which can be entrusted
only to the partners in the relationship who form an emotional bond of trust between
them. This raises the question of what sort of secret is at issue. In many cases, spouses
alone become aware of business and financial secrets which must be kept private, and
so the prospect of publicly displaying the inner workings of the relationship becomes a
touchy subject. That is, the intimate relationship becomes tainted by an awareness of
wrongdoing, and so while sexual intimacy in general may be praised, in practice these
close relationships can become corrupted and shameful. Divulging what transpires
behind closed doors would require the breaking of confidence and the revealing of
personally-damaging information.

This point, however, doesn’t distinguish between sexually-intimate bonds and other
relationships that require the keeping of such secrets. Lawyers, coworkers, and Catholic
priests are also entrusted with dangerous information and so interactions with them are
often kept private. The distinguishing feature of romantic love, of course, is its sexual
dimension, and so the relevant secrets between lovers must be secrets about their sex
life. A person can be blackmailed just with photographic evidence of that person’s
sexual infidelity or of his or her preference for some embarrassing, kinky sex act. A
politician can be shamed out of office or his legacy can be tarnished by a public sex
scandal. These are secrets that people kill or die for. Those who are given access to
these pieces of life-threatening information are, ideally, just the romantic partners who
are complicit in the risky acts. How can lovers live without tearing their hair out in panic,
knowing that someone else walks around with private information which would ruin the
other person, if revealed, breaking up friendships, making the person a public disgrace
or a pariah? I’ve already suggested a two-part answer. First, the select persons who are
privy to that information tend to be those who have as much to lose by revealing it,
since they themselves are partners in the sex life which is the source of the threat.
Second, those select persons tend also to be just those who develop an emotional,
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romantic bond, and the feelings of love for the sex partner counteract any fear of
vulnerability as a result of the potential for public disclosure of what they do in private.

This still leaves the question of what exactly is so dangerous about sex so that only
impersonal, insipid or saccharine references to sex are tolerated in what are
superficially highly-sexualized public places. Clearly, Western cultures are influenced by
biblical myths, including the myth of the Fall, according to which disobedience to God
distances the creature from God, which leads the creature into shameful sin. Members
of most animal species know nothing of God and they sexually reproduce. In so far as
we perpetuate our species in the same biological manner, we’re animals and thus
distanced from God. Thus, our sexual nature reflects our original sin. But this
theological explanation deals with a mere symptom of the perceived problem with sex,
not with that problem’s cause. Just as Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma shows that at best
religions express our deeper, nonreligious concerns with morality, so too the biblical
myths merely report on and exacerbate some deeper cause of our guilt about our
sexuality.

The question is what that deeper cause might be. Why does the myth of the Fall
resonate and thus why has it been so influential? The reason seems clear: sexuality is
the largest thorn in our side, the starkest and most unwelcome reminder that despite our
pretensions to our unique value and to our transcendent stature as godlike beings,
owing to our consciousness, rationality, and freedom, we are instead embodied animals
whose behaviour is largely genetically determined, who live for some decades and
inevitably die, to be forgotten in time in an inhumane, pointless, alienating universe. In
short, our conflicting attitudes toward sex speak to what I call the horror of our
existential situation. We delude ourselves, pretending not just that we can be happy in
this world, nor even that we ought to be, but that happiness is our highest ideal. On the
contrary, rational, conscious, free beings ought to be the most miserable, renouncing
pleasures that are spoiled by knowledge of their natural source.
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Sexuality is clearly the greatest such pleasure and thus it’s the cause of our greatest
confusion. We can feel happy to some extent, because we’re only imperfectly
conscious, rational, and free: we have the capacities for self-delusion, for sloppy
thinking, and for being socially pressured or otherwise coerced, capacities that keep us
sane and productive despite the angst that lies always under the surface of our life
experience. And so we can give free rein to our delusions about the magnificence of
romantic love and our innocence in sexual play--but only so far before the facts of the
matter overwhelm us, our lies catch up to us and we’re confronted with the horrible truth
about ourselves. We can tolerate superficial images of, or whitewashed references to,
sexuality in public affairs, but come too close to publicly revealing the secret of what
actually happens in our own sex acts and we feel threatened by guilt and shame which
are preludes to existential horror and awe at the bleakness of our tragedy.

Sexuality’s Awful Secret

What is that awful secret of sexuality? The secret is actually not so secret. Philosophers
and scientists routinely speak about it, since the secret is implied by the secularist’s
naturalistic worldview. This secret has at least three aspects, which I’ll touch on, but
generally the dark truth of sexuality is that we’re not as noble, unique, moral, elevated,
rational, free, or as godlike as we prefer and need to think we are to live with what are
nevertheless our evolutionary, booby-trapped gifts of sentience and intelligence. We are
sentient and highly intelligent, but we like to think we’re thereby removed from the
natural world, that we belong in heaven thanks to our true, immaterial nature, or that
we’re not held hostage by natural forces since we can exploit them as masters of our
own destiny. The secret is that we’re special only in the way that any distinguished
animal species is special; indeed, the attributes that distinguish us merely adapt us to
one niche rather than another, namely the niche of life in environments we create for
ourselves from the raw material of ideas we instinctively generate. Likewise, spiders
spin webs and excel in their own way of life, and every species under the sun is special
in the sense that it’s adapted to its own form of survival.
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The secret, then, is that we’re part of nature after all, not outsiders as the Gnostics,
Hindus, and other theists say, with fragments of transcendent god-stuff in our innermost
being, longing to be returned to our true home beyond the cosmos. We’re part of nature
in that we’re animals: our bodies are naturally selected and our behaviour is largely
genetically determined. Our traits of reason and consciousness give us knowledge and
control over some natural forces, but the fact that we’re nonetheless, first and foremost,
animals, living and dying alongside the insects, fishes, birds, and beasts in the wild,
means that that control must ultimately be futile and otherwise absurd. We struggle to
transcend our natural limitations, to push the envelop of human achievement, to pursue
our own goals and to judge by our own standards, but the traits that enable us to appear
to be so supernaturally heroic are those that prove we’re mere animals after all, since
those traits, we now know, are fruits of natural selection or are illusory.

Sexuality is a startling reminder that our self-delusions are there to be deflated by

natural facts. The pleasure from sex throws us into our own private world, literally
shutting off our perception of anything outside itself. In that solipsistic world, we’re free
to entertain one fantasy after another, taking our life partner into our confidence so that
our emotional and intellectual backdrop, to which we prefer to return in our private
moments, is empathically expanded to include the thoughts and feelings shared by that
partner. Sexual ecstasy, then, reinforces the illusion that we’re supernaturally divorced
from the cycles of nature, that like gods we create our own worlds of culture to inhabit.
While we do create those worlds, that creativity is just what makes us animals in the
greater wilderness. Spiders spin webs and humans spin ideas.

Far from separating us from the animals, sexual ecstasy reduces us to their status since
they have sex too! Sexual intercourse is the strategy that birds, reptiles, insects, and
even one-celled organisms have evolved to survive and to spread their genes, despite
the threat from coevolving parasites. For example, by mixing the gene pool, we put our
eggs in multiple baskets, so that an expert at destroying one particular basket can’t wipe
us out all at once. Sex is what we cherish the most, what we can’t live without, what we
kill or die for. But sex reminds us of what we least want to dwell on, which is the fact that
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we’re animals, that we’re driven to spread our genes, to use our reason and our social
skills to succeed in the way of life to which those traits adapt us. We’re created not by
God but by proteins that build our bodies, cell by cell, using the self-replicating code in a
sequence of DNA molecules. Even the orgasmic pleasure that seems to shut off the
outside world and present us to ourselves as disembodied Cartesian egos is actually, of
course, a step in the algorithm of natural selection. The pleasure is caused by the
flooding of the brain with endorphin and other love hormones that bond us to our partner
and encourage us to reproduce, to help shuffle the gene pool, immunizing us against
parasitic attack and allowing for the future genetic assembly of our descendant species
in altered environments.

Our real objective on Earth isn’t to be happy, to write a great novel, to travel here or
there, or even to fall in love. We may prefer to pursue those goals, but they’re
objectively meaningless and in so far as they blind us to our actual, primary mission,
they’re delusions. That real mission is just the one we share with the other animals,
which is to participate in the cycle of natural selection, by surviving long enough to help
mix the gene pool, sexually reproducing with a mate and raising the child so that it too
can one day do the same. Of course, to call this a “mission” is still to anthropomorphize
the cycle and thus to flee from the dread of contemplating the Lovecraftian reality.
Animals have no objective mission, since in so far as they’re considered as complex
physical objects, they have no minds nor anything as commonsensical as values, goals,
or even delusions. In physics, nothing has a mission, a purpose, or a value, and the
same is true in biology and in psychology in so far as they’re objective, reductive, “hard”
sciences.

Granted, most people have sex not just to satisfy their primitive evolutionary impulse,
but to explore the possibilities of pleasure for its own sake. Thus, we bend our hardware
to our will, creatively adapting our instrumental reason to invent all manner of sexual
games. We sexualize absolutely anything, so that there are potentially infinite kinks,
fetishes, and other perversions of biologically normal, “vanilla” sexuality. But sex
reminds us that our dream of freedom from nature is a delusion. Just as we’re misled by
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the orgasm to deem ourselves free-floating lords of Creation, we take our sexual
creativity as evidence of that freedom and of our elevated, unique status. Actually, the
genes hold other species on what cognitive scientists call a similarly “long leash,” which
is to say that they too toy with their bodies with no regard for their genes, playing sexual
games including masturbation.

But more importantly, these games are empty and ridiculous, which is surely why
they’re kept secret and why their exposure threatens their participants’ social status.
The former American senator Anthony Weiner sent lewd pictures of himself to his
groupies, a game facilitated by recent technological developments, and when his game
was exposed he was mocked and he lost his job. President Clinton was caught playing
sexual games with cigars, overweight women, and blue dresses in the Oval Office, and
conservatives impeached him, holding him up for national derision. The hypocrisy on
the part of Clinton’s political enemies was, of course, stupendous, since those who most
loudly proclaim the imperative of godliness protest too much: the deviant antics of
conservative politicians who thrive on theological fantasies of angels and demons are
likely quite beyond the pale. The point, though, is that everyone is tempted to creatively
sexualize their lives, just as we’re tempted to anthropomorphize inanimate objects,
over-extending the use of our talents. But we’re also ashamed to do so, not because of
any biblical myth, but because we can easily perceive the idleness of those games.

Sexual perversions are meaningless because they’re accidental: perverts sexualize

everything from feet to black leather to the smearing of food on skin, using flimsy
analogies between the primary sex act and anything else. Sure, these perversions can
be aesthetically or morally evaluated, but because they’re purely for fun they’re also
objectively pointless, which is why they really are games, with artificial, arbitrary rules. A
sexual perversion is like a roller coaster ride: at some level, the thrill is embarrassing
because of its uselessness. Just as we feel proudest when seen at work, we’re loath for
anyone of substance to catch us at our leisure. Riders of roller coasters are sometimes
automatically photographed so that when the ride is over they can mock each other’s
grimaces, but I surmise that the true reason for the mockery is that the grimace
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substitutes for the rider’s orgasmic face. And what’s ridiculous is the rider’s suspected
choice of indulging in some sexual version of the roller coaster, some perversion or
other that serves no useful purpose and that’s creatively divorced from evolutionary
reality. Perverts are “turned on” by this or that sexual analogy or overextension, but the
attractions are arbitrary, whimsical, and thus empty. This is why perverts, which is to
say all who succumb to the temptation to creatively adapt the sexual instinct for the
sake of personal pleasure rather than sexual reproduction--that is, just about all people
who ever lived--often veer from one game to the next in a downward spiral of boredom
until they’re thankful that their sexual lusts subside when Mother Nature is through with
them and lowers her puppet strings. (For a dramatization of this futility of sexual
creativity, see the film Bitter Moon.)

I said there are at least three aspects of sexuality’s awful secret. The first, then, is the
existential emptiness of sex. Reproductive sex perpetuates genetic information and as
far as anyone can tell, that reproduction serves no purpose, just as there’s no purpose
behind the sun’s shining or the wind’s blowing. Those phenomena are naturally caused,
and causes are forces with no meaning or value of their own. We’re desperate to find
meaning in what we can rationally comprehend, and so we latch onto theistic and other
myths that glorify sexual reproduction and the continuation of our species, but scientists
have amassed mountains of evidence that were a comet to lower the final curtain on the
sex lives of our planet’s animals, the cosmos would be forced to proceed along its
tracks as laid out by natural laws. We are all insignificant except to ourselves and to
each other. And reproductive sex is a link in the chain that binds us to the natural world
of meaningless causes and effects in which our ideals and dreams are alien.

As for playful, perverted sex, this is meaningless and frivolous as a deviation from the
evolutionary force we serve as animals on genetic leashes. Indeed, most of what we
civilized people do in our cultures is deviational in that regard, and so we’re the most
alienated of animals in our state as emancipated slaves--free to pass the time playing
fruitless games to distract us from our existential discomfort. We’re secretly ashamed of
nonreproductive sex, though, and not just of any frivolous cultural expression, because
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this sex is a much more daring attempt to break free from natural forces. Perverted sex
flouts the genes right on their doorstep, as it were, whereas painting, baseball, opera, or
any other nonsexual cultural expression doesn’t tease the forces that run our natural
cycle, by approaching an act of sexual reproduction.

The secret’s second aspect is the way sex makes us all hypocrites: in public we play the
role of serious, rational, civil adults, while in private we routinely shrug off that role to
wallow in our juices like the most mindless of animals. Etiquette evidently consists of
rules for a mere charade we play to pretend that we’re not slaves to natural forces. But
because we maintain the delusion of our godhood, or to use the euphemism, the
delusion of being creatures made in the “image” of God, we’re nonetheless ashamed of
ourselves when we run afoul of those rules. Thus, the guilt we feel for our inevitable
private betrayal of public norms is another reason we keep the details of our sex life
secret.

The third aspect is the way sex reveals that we’re soulless biological machines. After all,
sex requires a focus on the body, the very body we now know is built from the ground-
up by natural processes. One of our main evolutionary gifts or curses is our ability to
imagine what’s in each other minds, and we’re so fond of this ability that we overuse it,
seeing minds where there are none, such as in the clouds, the stars, or the artifacts we
create. The fact that the fate of our minds depends on the state of our bodies is most
unwelcome to us, especially in economically-advanced societies in which people have
to compete against computers whose minds, in the form of their programming, can be
laid bare as separate from their hardware. For hyper-intellectual creatures with Platonic
aspirations of leaving our bodies altogether in an ethereal paradise after physical death,
sexuality is an awkward reminder of our embodiment and of its ramifications. In an
orgasm, for example, biomechanical stimulation causes pleasure that temporarily shuts
down all other mental functions. Even lovers who are romantically bonded are forced to
objectify their partner in the act of having sex, to manipulate the body for lack of any
more direct access to that person’s mind, besides communicating with it. Indeed, there
are only so many sexual positions, so many ways in which bodies can pleasurably
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interact, often leading couples to fall into anticlimactic sexual routines, and that also
reminds us that while our imagination seems boundless, in dreams or in philosophical
speculation, for example, our bodies obviously limit us. To take just the most depressing
consequence of our embodiment, physical death amounts to the mind’s death as well.
This in turn means that justice is imperfect and that morality is for the weak. In short,
sexuality supports atheistic naturalism rather than monotheistic religions, which is a
politically incorrect fact and itself a reason to pretend in public that sexuality doesn’t
exist.

The Existential Horror of Sex

In summary, the paradox of sexuality is explained by the fact that sex is existentially
perilous. We’re biologically compelled to uphold sexuality and the attendant conventions
of romantic love, and to enjoy the love hormones, which is why sex and romantic love
are publicly praised in general. But we’re also potentially horrified by what sex reminds
us of, which is that our self-image as civilized, godlike, supernatural masters of the
natural order is deluded. When we engage in the primary sex act, for reproduction, we
behave as puppets on strings of DNA. When we go our own way, freely sexualizing this
or that for our own pleasure regardless of the genetic consequences, we waste time
playing meaningless games that distract us with arbitrary and thus ridiculous pleasures.
Either way, we’re secretly ashamed of our sexuality, because we’re embarrassed and
terrified to learn that we’re animals, not the fantastic heroes in our delusions of
grandeur.

Now, I’m not so naïve as to assume that most people are actually horrified by sex. Were
there so much horror, there would be a lot less sex. My point about the disquieting
secret of sex is that while having it, we’re obviously preoccupied by pleasure to think
about what’s happening, but that were we to speak of the details of our sex life in public,
in the cold light of reason, those details would threaten us with horror. We therefore
keep those details private to avoid that confrontation with our tragic existential situation.
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Moreover, we’re so addicted to sexual pleasure, that we dare not bite the hand that
feeds us. If you asked a person in the street whether he or she thinks sex is a source of
horror as well as of pleasure or reproduction, that person would probably be mystified
as to the question’s meaning. But in so far as sex is just a means of pleasuring each
other, this is a most peculiar pleasure, one that must be hidden from view and kept
secret at all costs. Perhaps pleasure can be so intense that it becomes embarrassing; in
particular, our orgasmic faces might best be kept private. But what gives facial or bodily
gestures some emotional impact is their meaning, so an orgasmic face would have to
be embarrassing because of what it represents, namely ecstasy that reduces the mighty
human to a quivering, mindless receptacle for love hormones. Then again, perhaps
we’re ashamed of our naked bodies because we’re not as beautiful as celebrities. But
even celebrities keep their sex lives secret. The rich and powerful too would sooner be
caught dead than in the middle of a sex act. Again, there’s a small, ostracized minority
of exhibitionists or porn stars, but the greater mass of deluded primates denies the
obvious, that we’re potentially horrified by what we love the most. And that’s the irony of
human sexuality.
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The Perversity of the Sexual Norm

____________________________________________________

Two curious facts surrounding sex are that those who are virgins even after their teens
and twenties are deemed pathetic by virtually everyone else, while those who make a
living in the sex industry, whether as prostitutes or as porn stars are likewise despised
by most people. But not all is what it seems…

Virgins and Sex Workers

There are a number of pretty obvious reasons for each of those attitudes. Most people
assume that older involuntary virgins can’t find a sex partner because there’s something
wrong with them: they’re physically unattractive, impoverished, and/or mentally ill. Thus,
virginity would only be a symptom of the underlying cause of people’s disdain for these
dregs of society. Those who want sex but are unsuccessful in their efforts to attract a
mate seem to have lost out in life so badly that their loss becomes offensive. This is
because sex seems such an obvious good while also being relatively easy to have.
After all, animals--including humans--are compelled to want sex, so all people have to
do is go with the genetic flow. If someone finds a perverse way to paddle upstream,
against this force of nature, that failure seems almost miraculous and so certainly
worthy of ridicule. Moreover, for the same reason, those who claim they prefer not to
have sex, whether for religious reasons or because they’re opposed to sex in general,
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are suspected of hiding some personal defect that’s the true cause of their virginity. The
genetic floodwaters flow so freely, as it were, that virginity in an older person, say one in
his or her twenties or thirties, is more likely caused by a monumental personal failure or
character defect, as opposed to being a choice.

Thus, screwball comedy movies, featuring young people possessed by their sex
hormones, typically ridicule the pathetic loser who emerges from puberty with no sexual
accomplishments. The movie The 40 Year Old Virgin is exceptional in being more
sympathetic to the older virgin, criticizing the characters who mock the virgin, Andy, for
the deficiency of their sexual relationships. The movie explains Andy’s plight as being
the result partly of his decision to wait for the right partner to come along, meaning one
to whom he feels an emotional connection. But Andy develops into someone who’s
unlikely to find a partner without help; he’s depicted as being frozen in his teenage
years, collecting comic books and action figures, and of course he’s unskilled in the art
of wooing women.

These movies typify Western society’s attitude towards those who should but don't have
sex. Whether on a street corner, in a restaurant, an office, or anywhere else, were an
older virgin to admit his or her sexual status, the virgin would be either immediately
ridiculed, shunned, or pitied, depending on the situation. Even those who have some
sympathy for the weaknesses that cause the virgin’s failure will condescend to the
virgin, treating that person as inferior and perhaps even as literally beneath contempt.
The feeling is that someone who’s lost out so tremendously can no longer be taken
seriously as a competitor in any walk of life.

As for reasons for hostility towards sex workers, there are the assumptions that they
desecrate that which is sacred, that they spread diseases, break up families (in the case
of prostitutes) or, like their virgin counterparts, have personal deficiencies forcing them
to enter this despised industry. For example, porn stars may be addicted to sex, while a
prostitute may be forced to earn a lot of money quickly to pay for drugs or to feed her
child whom she had at too young an age. Just as a known older virgin’s embarrassment
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makes any social situation a hundred times more awkward, a sex worker’s shame or
presumed filthiness sullies nearly any occasion on which the porn star or prostitute turns
up. Prostitutes, for example, typically reveal themselves only at night and in taboo areas
such as a red light district, and were they to wear their sexy clothing outside of those
contexts, they could expect to be glared at with palpable loathing, if not more
aggressively ostracized. The movie Pretty Woman depicts this hostility, when the
prostitute character is refused service at a boutique.

Of course, there are exceptions, but these are exceptions that prove the rule. For
example, there are sex conventions in which thousands of people emerge to worship
porn stars as celebrities. After all, the porn industry thrives because a great many
people avail themselves of the sex worker’s services. But the expectation is that this
celebration of pornography be kept relatively secret, because sex workers are so
revolting that you shouldn’t be proud even to be in their vicinity. Thus, the people who
frequent sex conventions, strip clubs, or a prostitute’s street corner must conceal their
identity as they tread upon these profane grounds and live with the burden of knowing
that were their dealing with sex workers made public knowledge, the sex worker’s
loathsomeness would transfer to them like cooties.

The Self-Loathing of Sexual Normals

So much for what I assume would be the standard defenses of these attitudes towards
virgins and sex workers. In either case, the sexually normal folks would claim to be
disgusted merely by evident personal weakness, failure, or depravity. But none of these
defenses will do, as they stand, because of a third curious fact about sex which is that
all of these normal folks would be humiliated were their sex life exposed to the light of
day. If sex is so great that not having sex when you should be able to is pathetic and
worthy of open ridicule, why also be so ashamed of having sex that you’d sooner jump
off of a bridge than show a stranger a recording of your sex act? And if sex is so sacred
that sex workers are disgusting defilers who must be shunned by all decent, upstanding
citizens, why are these same citizens so obviously ashamed of that allegedly sacred act
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that they must hide their sex life at all costs? As I argue elsewhere, Christianity doesn’t
fully account for this shame. Indeed, Christianity’s opposition to sex falls out of pre-
Christian ascetic traditions which respond to the disturbing existential issues that
sexuality makes plain.

I submit, then, the following hypothesis for your consideration: hostility towards
virgins and sex workers is the sexually normal person’s projection of his or her
self-loathing. Even a normal, sexually active man, for example, must keep his sex life
secret, just like a virgin or a sex worker, because the sex act itself is contemptible,
disgusting, and profane rather than sacred. The sex act attests to our finitude,
contingency, and animal heritage; to our spiritless, mechanistic nature and the self-
deception behind all politically correct, feel-good myths. The sex act realizes our worst
fears about ourselves and our position in nature, about the lack of God and perfect
justice or morality, and so those creatures that are sufficiently intelligent to understand
sex’s implications naturally preserve their sanity and peace of mind--despite the
Darwinian necessity of sex--by making sex itself taboo. So a sexually normal person
has self-respect in public only when no one else is thinking of that person’s sex life. To
reveal, say, that you’re picturing a waitress naked or to present to a taxi driver a
photograph of him in the sex act is to humiliate and to dehumanize either person.
Nevertheless, with their drapes drawn tightly closed, normal people do have sex and so
the average person’s self-respect must conceal a deeper layer of self-loathing. If sex is
embarrassing and awkward, because of what it reveals about our existential
predicament, we must forget about our sex lives to preserve our dignity.

But now older virgins and sex workers come along and disturb this fragile compromise.
Virgins, after all, aren’t tainted by sex; that is, they haven’t earned their stripes by
confronting the horror of natural life under such traumatic circumstances. Thus, despite
their alienation from sexually normal society, older virgins are unburdened by direct
experience of the horrors of sex. Sexually normal people seem to envy what’s
sometimes tellingly called the “innocence” of virgins, even while the trauma of facing our
existential plight of being self-deluded animals, by engaging in sex, is obfuscated by talk
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of the “maturity” of sexual normals. The notion that having sex is a prerequisite of
human maturity presupposes a normative construal of our biological function, as though
the wandering of genes from one generation to the next--not to speak of the genes’
purpose since they have none--ought to automatically govern how we live. Just because
we’re genetically pressured to have sex, and sex is--on one level at least--highly
pleasurable, doesn’t mean that the normals fulfill the Form or Ideal of humanity, so that
they can be called more mature than older virgins. There may be some such ideal, but
this will derive from philosophy, not from biology or psychology. Meanwhile, sex workers
are secretly envied for the opposite reason: they have altogether too much sex without
mentally breaking down, despite their familiarity with such abundant evidence that our
politically correct self-assurances are comically amiss. Sex workers demonstrate
fortitude and great mental agility when they can live most of their waking hours as
animals in the pejorative sense, and then turn around and pretend to be members of a
socially advanced species in their off-hours.

This envy mustn’t see the light of day, however, since this admiration complements
sexually normal people’s contempt for themselves, for wallowing in such animalistic
endeavours while typically ignoring the existential ramifications in their public life as
“responsible,” “mature,” “adult” citizens of an “advanced civilization.” Thus, the normals
use virgins and sex workers as scapegoats, taking out the contempt they have for
themselves onto these others. All sex is a degrading business for those who think of
themselves as more elevated than the animals we keep as pets or as spectacles in
zoos, or that we exterminate in the wild. The standard reasons for hostility towards older
virgins and sex workers are untenable because of normal people’s embarrassment
regarding the very practice that’s supposed to endow us with more respect than the
losers and deviants. So the normals must despise themselves for having sex,
sometimes even disgusting themselves while they’re in the throes of passion and
possessed by hormones and lusts. But because they tend to have no philosophical
inclinations, especially in a postmodern society, they can’t address this response to their
animal nature with much existential authenticity, and so they direct their contempt that
they themselves deserve to those who, in their own ways, deserve less of it. To be sure,
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virgins and sex workers likely have their personal flaws and these may even be related
to their dealings with sex; moreover, these outsiders may even be contemptible for
those reasons. But this doesn’t change the fact that the sexual normals hardly cover
themselves in glory with respect either to their attitudes towards the abnormals or to
their own sexual behaviour in the first place.

The Need for our Hourly Ridicule

All in all, sex makes for a degenerate, awkward topic of discussion, but that’s also why
sex is so revealing and thus eminently worthy of rants. Sex is so obviously
compromising to our conventional self-image, to what Freud called our persona, that of
all the inspirations for our comforting myths, sex is the most in need of such mental
gymnastics. Generally speaking, the way we deal with sex is so ludicrous that we ought
to be mocked hourly for the lies we tell to endure as such misguided animals, let alone
for the compromises we make when we betray our principles and actually indulge in
instincts we’d be fired or arrested for expressing at work or elsewhere in public. Sex
must be kept secret because sex makes us all pathetic, and that fact is intolerable
to such proud beasts that believe we’ve tamed most of the planet. Sex is our Achilles
Heel, the tragic fault that humiliates us all, casting doubt on every optimistic myth, on
every politically correct delusion we entertain to avoid our existential, philosophical
responsibility as creatures cursed with excess reason and awareness.
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Sex is Violent: Why the F-Word is Taboo

____________________________________________________

Romantic love is frequently touted as the chief politically correct prerequisite for being
happy in secular society. But because the causal relationship between finding a life
partner and being happy is politically correct, you can be sure that the idea of this
relationship is metaphysically, naturally, and in all other ways that matter to those who
care about knowledge, wrong. Politically correct notions are propaganda signals that
beam back and forth between social interest groups to maintain power imbalances;
these notions are tools of social manipulation, not propositions backed up by critical
thinking, scientific investigation, or artistic vision. A connoisseur of human folly
evaluates mainly the aesthetics of politically correct blather, appreciating the efficiency
with which PC notions distort reality sometimes in the service of human vice.

That the idea that romantic love makes you happy is merely politically correct, and thus
substantively erroneous, is apparent from the attendant language game. Of course,
romantic love culminates in the sex act, and yet the double standard in our treatment of
words that refer to sex is most curious. The clinical word “sex” is perfectly acceptable in
the mass media, but the F-word is taboo even while superficially those two words are
synonymous. The trick is that their connotations differ. “Sex” calls to mind the biological
process of having sex, as in “sexual intercourse” or “copulation.” The F-word, however,
has metaphysical rather than mere scientific force, calling to mind the sex act’s deeper
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meaning. What is this deeper meaning? Well, the F-word gives away the game in its
nonsexual uses, as in “Fuck him up,” “Fuck off!” or “He’s fucked.” In these uses, the F-
word refers to violence or ruination. You might be wondering what violence has to do
with the sex act, with the consummation of romantic love which is supposed to elevate
us like nothing else, according to the PC happy-talk.

Clearly, the reason the F-word is usually censored in the media is that this word calls to
mind facts about sex which undermine PC propaganda. After all, sex is obviously violent
(to paraphrase the Jane’s Addiction song). Not only is sex violent, but symbols emerge
from the biological process of sex which threaten PC fantasies about equality between
men and women and about human nobility. Spelling out these symbols is probably
unnecessary, since they’re so obvious that to appreciate them you merely have to think
about sex as would a child, casting off the feel-good obfuscations. But I’ll spell them out
anyway. As everyone knows, the penis is symbolically a weapon, often compared to a
sword, spear, or gun. Less fortunately, the vagina represents a gaping wound, since
that’s what the female sex organ looks like, especially when paired with the male organ.
Thus, when the male penetrates the female in the sex act, the very reproduction of
human life looks aesthetically or metaphysically like a negation of life, as in an act of
murder. The male stabs the female and slays her, leaving her for dead afterward or
cuddling to symbolically resurrect her. This is to say only that the biological accident of
the sexual process inevitably strikes the minds of symbol-using creatures such as us as
horribly ironic, mixing up our ideas of life and death, of love and murder, and of
immortality through reproduction and mortality through killing. From these primordial
symbols issue rationalizations of patriarchy, such as the myths of female masochism or
of the woman’s secret attraction to the tough guy. These myths are so well-established,
buttressed as they are by the most naïve symbolic interpretation of the universal sex
act, that many women find themselves playing their assigned roles.

So sex has its ugly side and yet sex is at the heart of romantic love even while love is
supposedly the most beautiful good. Any reference to sex which naughtily threatens the
PC myths is therefore anathema. Hollywood provides many of the fantasies of romantic
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love, proliferating dramas that depict the fun and frolic of falling in love, the emotional
ups and downs which supposedly are hallmarks of mature adult life, as well as the
sappy New Age obfuscations of the natural, sociopolitical, and aesthetic reality of sexual
love. And yet these fantasies are so vulnerable and otherworldly that the mere utterance
of the F-word is apparently feared for its power to magically counteract Hollywood’s
whole wizard’s spell-book of enchantments.

The myth-maker’s goal is to regulate social relationships with conventions that maintain
an inevitably-unjust social order. Were you resident in a perfectly just society, you’d
have no need for myths or apologies; you’d simply point to heaven without uttering a
word and get on with the thrill of participating in a utopia. In nature utopia is impossible,
so white lies and other techniques of social engineering are needed to maintain social
orders that offer stability and other compromises as well as absurdities and tragedies.
The roots of all human societies are the biological facts of reproduction and childbirth.
Societies are needed in the first place to care for helpless infants, and to perpetuate our
species and more specifically our genetic code. However, those abstract and
biochemical ends are perfectly insignificant as far as people are concerned. And so we
need to be manipulated to play our natural roles as hosts of replicators. That
manipulation begins with such measures as the evolutionary designs of a baby’s
cuteness and of the adult’s innate approval of that cuteness. The manipulation
continues socially with mainstream myths. But we have the power to see through the
myths and to confront the horrible truth.

We celebrate the experience of romantic love even while we’re horrified by that
experience, sustained as it is by hormones and by our servitude to genes. That’s why
secular myths are needed to hold together families, especially after the Scientific
Revolution when theistic myths lost their hold of people’s imagination. Instead of
glorifying sexual reproduction, the raising of a family, and the biologically-dictated
perpetuation of our species, with myths of divine commandments, modern secularists
appeal to the business-oriented agenda of seeking a “life partner” or to New Age
pseudoscientific claptrap which whitewashes nature with excruciating sentimentality. In
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either case, the raw, politically incorrect power of sex becomes an embarrassing
reminder that we so-called emotionally mature adults are only kidding ourselves with
our euphemisms. We apologize for the sex act with feel-good egalitarian myths of
romantic partnerships or soul mates, and we censor whistle-blowing labels like the F-
word, because we’re ashamed of sex, and we’re ashamed because our most fitting
reaction to our natural reality as alienated animals is to writhe in sheer angst. The
primitive symbolism of the sex act is an unwelcome reminder that most of our myths are
arbitrary and worthy of mockery in the alien face of the inhumane universe. Of course,
no one is really killed in the functional sex act, but the symbols, of penis=weapon and
vagina=mortal wound, nevertheless compel men to lord it over women and women to
dehumanize themselves, because healthy adults are necessarily gullible, needing
myths to retain our sanity. We’re eager to believe in one myth, delusion, or
preposterous fantasy or another to escape the default reaction of horror when we
philosophically understand our existential plight.

The violence of sex isn’t just symbolic, however. According to the big biological picture
(and the Red Queen hypothesis), sexual reproduction is a genetic “strategy” in an arms
race with parasites that prey on the macroscopic hosts of genes such as us. Mixing up
the gene pool forces viruses and bacteria to mutate to overcome the animals’ evolving
immune systems. But the adaptation of sexual reproduction was only haphazard since
natural creativity is mindless, and so there has never been any guarantee of equality
between the sexes or even of any dignity in sex. Just as a battlefield can unleash
chaos, there are plenty of casualties on this front of the biological war between genes
and asexual viruses. Putting aside STDs, there’s the design of the unequal sex organs
and the biochemical parameters of the sex act, which degrade us on the symbolic level
discussed above, but also by imposing the requirement of penetration which is an
invasion of privacy. On the one hand, the genes help build our higher brain functions
which give us some degrees of autonomy and dignity, but on the other, the genes force
us to disregard our higher nature and to copulate like animals. In the case of traumatic
insemination in invertebrates such as bugs, the male sex organ literally pierces the
female’s abdomen, creating its own hole, which is deleterious to the female. That’s the
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brutal essence of sexual reproduction: on the macro level, the male must invade the
female’s body, sometimes causing her pain, just as on the micro level the male’s sperm
must bypass the female’s biochemical defenses. This is because, like any genetically
adapted design, the rigmarole of sex evolved partly by accident and with no sympathy
for the host organisms in mind.

Whole cultures have sprung up to rationalize the need to objectify our sex partner even
while we prize our sentience and intelligence which we think distinguish us from the rest
of the animal kingdom. For example, instead of viewing sexual penetration as an act of
necessary force (for the sake of conception), sex is deemed a test of intimacy, a matter
of sharing or cooperation. The glaring biological inequality of sex is thus equalized with
politically correct narratives. Indeed, fucking is commonly distinguished from making
love. The latter is supposed to be sex without the violence, or at least sex with an
emphasis on the emotional bond. Making love is slower and more intimate, whereas
fucking is animalistic, instinctive, and might as well occur between strangers (as it often
does, even among adolescents in countries like the US). But, to use the euphemisms,
lovers in the act of making love are still penetrating or being penetrated; they’re merely
so filled with love hormones or with memories of shared experiences, that they’re able
to overlook the act’s humiliating biomechanics.

To be clear, almost everyone who has ever had sex has been ashamed of it, though
few would ever admit as much; otherwise, sex would be much more public and people
wouldn’t be offended were they asked merely to describe their sex life. Sure, popular
Western cultures are filled with sex-related imagery, since sex sells, but not with images
of sex itself. Porn is a booming business on the internet, but this is an exception that
proves the rule since the internet facilitates the private consumption of porn. When we
say that sex ought to be "private," we’re concealing our disgust with what sex
demonstrates is our thoroughly animal and mortal nature.

Of course, any such disgust or embarrassment is routinely overcome by the pleasure of

sex, which is why animals have so much sex despite the burdens. Most animal species
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lack the intelligence to understand irony and so they’re not faced with the existential
predicament of being biologically driven to procreate even with an appreciation of sex’s
total lack of dignity. Sexual pleasure is now well-understood as a hormonal carrot held
out to us by the genes so that we fulfill our evolutionary “function.” Moreover, this
pleasure is tainted by the context in which naked bodies are forced to interact to
achieve it: the male is forced to repeatedly stab the female, which induces the pair to
mentally associate our ultimate creative act (the conception of human life) with our
ultimate destructive one (murder). Sexual pleasure can therefore never be innocent or
harmless. Putting aside rape or any minor physical harm that may be incurred while
performing the voluntary sex act, sex is always existentially traumatizing because it
shatters our idealistic self-image with our animalistic reality. In fact, this is the heart of
sex’s so-called naughtiness: sexual pleasure is the highest valued good, but it’s also
accompanied by undertones of violence, aggression, abuse, and domination even if
these undertones manifest only in fleeting images in our minds or in the choice of
sexual position.

You might be wondering whether there’s any evidence of trauma caused by ordinary
sexual intercourse; on the contrary, most people think, sex is normal and healthy. But
the effects of trauma from the inequality built into sex are felt everywhere in society,
ranging from patriarchy, to the battle between the sexes, to the mental
compartmentalization needed to avoid angst, to the feminist’s over-reactive misandry.
Sex is indeed normal, but social norms are seldom healthy. Luckily, our high intelligence
is double-sided: we’re horrified by our mortality and our puppet-like nature, but we’re
also able to ignore those sources of angst and to deal underhandedly with states of
cognitive dissonance. Thus, we can enjoy sex even while sex’s shocking, quite
politically incorrect reality inevitably distorts our relationships.

I questioned at the outset whether sexual love leads to happiness. Certainly, sex and
intimate relationships are enjoyable, but far from being sources of happiness in the
sense of contentment, they unsettle us with the threat of angst. This is why in our case
the biological compulsion to procreate requires waves of politically correct defenses,
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because we’re conscious and intelligent enough to appreciate sex’s absurdity and to
recoil from the prospect of being degraded as we perform our mammalian duty and
invade our mate’s body or submit to such an invasion. Those who abstain from sex
have even less of a chance at contentment, since they’re alienated from the highly
sexual human world and must repress their sex drive. Whichever predicament you find
yourself in, whether it’s hypocritically pretending to be a dignified, mature person in
public while in private groping a naked body like the sort of wild beast you routinely
consume for dinner, or whether it’s ascetically renouncing the force of cosmic creativity
and abstaining from sex as an outcast, happiness is unbecoming. So the fragility of
politically correct fantasies, such as those dispelled merely by uttering the F-word, is
hardly lamentable.
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Individualism and the Sexual Attraction of Opposites

____________________________________________________

In Plato’s dialogue “Symposium,” Aristophanes delivers a humorous speech that

provides a mythical origin of sexual attraction. Aristophanes explains the romantic
seeking for our complement in someone else, for our so-called soul mate, by imagining
that humans were once physically very different: each member of an earlier form of our
species had two heads, four arms, and four legs. As in the biblical Tower of Babel story,
these creatures tried to storm heaven, and so the gods punished them, not by
fragmenting their language, but by splitting each prehuman in two, condemning each of
us now to long for reunion with our other half.

Indeed, human sexual attraction is ripe for such satire, partly because of sexuality’s
conflict with the modern ideology of individualism. On the one hand, there’s a natural
heterosexual instinct, which causes most men and women to bond hormonally with a
member of the opposite sex. The differences between the sexes are psychological as
well as biological: notoriously, men and women think differently, thanks to our different
hormones and evolutionary social roles; moreover, these gendered thought pattern are
often opposed to each other. For example, while some female politicians, such as
Margaret Thatcher, are just as capable of masculine vices as male ones, women are
often noted for their disinclination to fall into the same traps as men when exercising
political power. While testosterone-filled, often sociopathic men aggressively compete
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for selfish advantage in a power hierarchy, estrogen-filled, baby-bonded women use

their greater capacity for empathy to cooperate with their opponents to reach political
compromises. The point, though, is that most men and women, who are psychologically
at odds with each other, are naturally compelled to be yoked with such opponents, to
live together as we fulfill our biological “function” of raising a family and preserving our
genes after our death.

On the other hand, modern men and women are beholden to the values of
individualism, believing we’re each sovereign agents with rights of ownership over our
private property, including our own bodies. This ideology is a secularized form of
Western monotheism, substituting the rational, technoscientifically creative human for
the divine Creator of the universe. Modernists believe that our intelligence, freedom,
and consciousness dignify us, giving us intrinsic value and inalienable rights. This
atomistic view of human nature glorifies the ego, the self-conscious, logical, and
pragmatic side of ourselves that was so instrumental in the Scientific Revolution and
that’s celebrated in capitalistic democracies. According to the commonplace selective
reading of Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand, for example, social Darwinian
capitalism is supposed to unleash the unintended altruistic consequences of the
practically necessary vice of egoism (selfishness). The legitimacy of this ideology has
come into question in our so-called postmodern period, due to hyper-skepticism,
feminism, the hollowness of utopian rationalism, and the familiar oligarchic reality of
individualistic societies. Nevertheless, the myths of secular individualism are the most
influential replacements for those of anachronistic theism.

Again, the clash between our natural embodiment and our cultural self-identification is
embarrassing and worthy of ridicule. The film Pulp Fiction makes light of just this aspect
of sexual attraction. The Bruce Willis character, Butch, is a tough, antiheroic boxer who
we learn lives with his girlishly feminine girlfriend, Fabienne, rendering that title of hers
literally true. Although she’s an adult, psychologically she’s an insecure child,
preoccupied with adolescent fantasies and affecting infantile mannerisms. When they’re
together, Butch is forced to engage in her baby-talk, concealing his macho impulses.
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Meanwhile, Fabienne’s girlish innocence is made hypocritical by her submission to

Butch, that is, by the fact that she’s attracted to the masculine ideal which is so opposite
to her feminine one. Although this device serves several discernable roles in Pulp
Fiction, which are irrelevant to my point, we can see the movie’s treatment of that duo
as a caricature of most heterosexual relationships, as an exaggeration of the gender-
based conflicts between most hapless life partners. (I leave aside here the complicated
question of whether the foregoing analysis applies to homosexual couples.)

The incongruity between sexual attraction and the ideal of individualism comes into view
when we consider how the former deprives us of our intellectual integrity. After all, the
emptiness of masculine and feminine ideals is revealed by their instrumentality: the
instinct to be macho or submissive is thrown up by natural forces as a mere device, as a
set of signifiers to attract a member of the opposite sex, and when we hold our gender
role to be essential to our character, we’re duped by those forces. Moreover, we’re
punished for that obliviousness, with the loss of our authentic character, as the union
of opposites nullifies both extremes. Butch demonstrates his bravery and killer
instinct by defeating evil foes, but the film deconstructs those antiheroic virtues,
revealing them as mere pretenses, given Butch’s underlying attraction to the opposite
qualities of girlishness. A callous antihero can’t simultaneously lay claim to the
prerogatives of manliness and fulfill the naïve expectations of a sissy. Thus, Butch must
hide from Fabienne the depravities he’s forced to commit when surviving in the hellish,
sadomasochistic man’s worlds of the boxing ring and the gun store’s basement, just as
she’s forced to feign ignorance of Butch’s beastliness even while she’s hypocritically
attracted to that very quality which is foreign to her.

Granted, there would be a vicarious satisfaction in completing yourself by living through

someone else’s strengths, but this would reduce sexual love to an egoistic game, which
in turn would spoil each lover’s mood to maintain the modern fiction that he or she is
loved as an individual and not as a means to a selfish end. Instead of being a method of
vicarious self-completion, the sexual attraction of opposites typically thrives on delusion,
which maintains the charade. The attraction becomes a repulsion as soon as we’re
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forced to confront the contradiction between the ideals cherished by different sides of
ourselves. Butch loves both his macho violence and Fabienne’s naïve innocence, and
that requires mental partitions. When taking up his sword against demonic villains, he
must surely banish the fear that only a sissy could care for a sissy, and that he therefore
lacks the killer instinct to vanquish them. Again, a feminine woman tends to resort to
similar self-mesmerism to maintain the illusion of her identity’s coherence, pretending
that her tough guy boyfriend is actually a “baby,” repeatedly calling him that as though
she were chanting a mantra. With no loss of personal integrity, a girlish woman can, of
course, love babies--along with unicorns, stuffed animals, and fairy tale ideals of
romance. But just such a woman is infamous for being sexually attracted to her
opposite, to the powerful, arrogant, sadistic alpha male. She retains the illusion of her
dignity by hypnotizing herself into believing that her thug of a sexual partner is a
helpless little baby who wuvs his wittle sweetums, calling him “baby” at every
opportunity.

The Elements of our Sexual Comedy

As standup comedians know, there’s no end to the wealth of ridiculous absurdities that
can be mined from the material of human sexual attraction. But the main reason why
that attraction is laughable is less appreciated. At its root, this comedy depends on the
thrill of witnessing an arrogant person’s comeuppance. Modernity delivers the pretense
that we’re Lords of the Earth and thus that we needn’t project that desire for godhood
onto any nonhuman Creator. But that same source of our divinity, our technoscience,
ironically delivers the news that we’re biochemical machines and playthings of cosmic
evolutionary forces. We pride ourselves on our value as individual persons, as dignified,
self-aware sovereigns, but we’re actually pets on Mother Nature’s leash. We pretend
that we’re autonomous and responsible for our actions, but we now know we’re
exploited by genes as vehicles for their replication. Thus, we value personal integrity
and coherence of character, but those values are dragged through the mud by the true,
horrifyingly mindless but still divinely creative forces, which compel us to betray our
cultural ideals by playing the roles assigned us by our headless directors.
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So why is most human sexual attraction now so laughable? Because the spectacle of
that attraction affords us a view of modernity’s implosion, leaving behind the
postmodern wasteland. Sexual attraction reveals the secular hero’s tragic flaw: the
noble, self-determining human Master of the Elements is compelled by instincts,
hormones, and cultural signifiers to betray the ideals of modern myths and perform a
degrading role. Most sexual attraction is between persons with more or less opposite
characters and thought patterns (as well as sex organs). The gender differences are
now largely vestigial, having originated in the prehistoric environment that selected a
protohuman mammalian species for neurological adaptation, an environment that no
longer obtains thanks to our selection of preferred habitats within the higher dimension
of cultural possibilities. In any event, psychological as well as biological gender
differences are byproducts of sexual reproduction, which is itself an evolutionary
mechanism for preserving the genes from microscopic parasites.

Again, in that higher, cultural dimension that highly intelligent animals inhabit, we invent
myths to mitigate the alienation and horror which are curses of Reason. Theistic myths
reigned for millennia until the Scientific Revolution replaced them with modern
ideologies of rationalism and individualism. Ironically, these modern myths celebrate
human achievements and glorify our nature while simultaneously sowing the poisonous
seed of postmodern decline, castigating Faith and thus clearing a path for hyper-
skepticism. The modern individual, rationally sovereign over inner as well as outer
nature, responsible for her mental states and exploiting universal physical processes;
democratically empowered, capitalistically enriched, and humanistically virtuous: not
gullible and submissive, but enlightened and courageously, freely pursuing personal
happiness--this hero is brought to heel every day, yanked by the leash on which is
found the tag with our natural identity scrawled across its face: Homo sapiens, clever
mammal, inhabitant of the cosmic wilderness, with no owner; thus homeless, desperate,
and properly horrified.
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Masculinity and femininity are leashes that make fools of most modern men and
women, proving our mammalian continuity with the other doomed species on Earth in
spite of our fantasies of transcendence. We long to escape from our animal nature:
even we progressive modern heroes, with a world of scientific knowledge and an army
of machines at our fingertips, require delusions to rationalize the effects of that
knowledge and power. But the modern myth of the heroic secular individual is
openly mocked by our sexuality.The masculine man is forced to concede that the
macho ideal holds no profound meaning of life, since this man is sexually driven to his
opposite, like a child who pretends to prefer vegetables even as his hand reflexively
reaches for candy. The feminine woman is also humbled by the farce of how she must
act to attract what she most wants: she must be internally divided, playing submissive
games to live with an aggressor.

The comical discord between our natural role and our artificial modern ideal of self-
determination extends even to the physical aspect of sexual attraction. The masculine
man tends to have a firm, muscular body, so that his body type symbolizes his gender’s
characteristics, yet this same man is usually attracted to a creature with the opposite
body type, to a woman with a rounded, soft figure. Thus, the masculine man is forced
into the ridiculous contortion of both prizing his muscles as symbolic of his mental
toughness, and of sexually desiring to possess, by way of manhandling, a body type
that bears the opposite significance. This striking contrast is displayed on the cover of
most romance novels: the swooning female, a sample of her soft curves prominently
unclothed, falls into the man’s muscular arms. Thus, she proves the incoherence of her
sexual appetite and her egoistic self-identification, as she must preserve her feminine
beauty not just as a means to attract a mate, but to safeguard the symbol of her
feminine individuality, even while her commitment to feminine values is negated by her
lust for the symbol of masculine ones.

I imagine the following response to this analysis of sexual comedy. Opposites sexually
attract, to encourage humility and to challenge brave people who must test their wits in
dealing with life partners with opposing personalities. Thus, for example, the Republican
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Arnold Schwarzenegger married the Democrat Maria Shriver, and the Democratic
consultant James Carville married the Republican consultant Mary Matalin. Birds of a
feather may flock together, but individualistic humans prefer variety, the spice of life.
This response makes a virtue out of necessity. Combative persons may well prefer to
challenge themselves by associating with a variety of people, but this incidental reward
of an adventurous social life doesn’t render the above conflict any less ridiculous.
Moreover, differences mustn’t be mistaken for oppositions. Liberals and conservatives
may have different political viewpoints, but if both types of people are politically active,
as in the above two cases, they must also share a number of personal qualities. In the
US, in particular, the marginal social differences between liberals and conservatives
mask the economic consensus of the upper class, that they prefer a stealth oligarchy.
Of course, most sexual relationships aren’t as ideally oppositional as the one between
Pulp Fiction’s Butch and Fabienne, but each is more or less so and any irreconcilable,
gender-based conflict between life partners threatens the credibility of modern
individualism. If we’re supposed to be self-controlling, creative and powerful individuals,
why must we belittle ourselves at evolution’s behest, fleeing from our personal values
out of lust for our relative opposite?

Transhuman Coda

The upshot is that sexual attraction in modern societies provokes the sort of gallows
humour I speak of elsewhere. However, I want to close on an optimistic note. Another
reaction to this conflict is to praise modernists for attempting to engineer a transcendent
posthuman from the materials provided by the naturally selected human animal. I’m not
speaking of a biological transformation by genetic engineering or nanomachines, but of
a psychological one, a global indoctrination that challenges not just stale theistic
religions but nature’s leash around our necks. As hinted at above, this challenge
wouldn’t operate yet on the level of our physical form, but in the cultural dimension.
After all, modern people really do feel happy, free, powerful and virtually omniscient.
Paradoxically, modern secularists keep sexuality both highly public and private, so
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despite the boon it provides the comedy industry, the clash I’ve been speaking of here
doesn’t actually spoil many people’s illusions.

We can speculate that a posthuman mind is an emergent phenomenon, a way of

thinking that requires not just highly advanced hardware but a radical transhuman
ideology that prepares us for our more total apotheosis. Modern individualism was
devised largely with this progressive end of view. Rather than overturning
anthropocentrism, Copernicus set in motion a secular, scientistic form of self-
centeredness. Descartes, for example, could doubt that everything but himself as a
thinking thing is illusory; Kant contended that the all-important appearance of everything
around us depends on our way of perceiving; and democratic and capitalistic thinkers
counseled that we needn’t fear a vast sharing of power with the common person, since
everyone is sufficiently rational to deserve to freely fulfill their own needs.

Comedy enters the stage when we observe the ironic contrast between that humanistic
self-image and our baser reality as sexual animals. Nevertheless, that self-image may
have its own emergent level of reality and causal power. As always, humour--along with
angst--are found by stepping back and taking a wider perspective, temporarily
detaching from our preoccupations and pondering how they fit into the bigger picture. I
happen to doubt the nobility of any transhuman, or any modern autonomous person,
who ignores the Leash and the cosmicism latent in free thinking. But perhaps rather
than leading just to a postmodern dead end, modern individualism is a crutch that will
enable us to live proudly alongside our evermore majestic technological creations.
Maybe we must believe fervently in our individual worth to counteract the trend of
cultural homogenization and the increasing psychological understanding of our
universal cognitive processes. A myth that captures the imagination of huge populations
is no arbitrary matter. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously.

Appendix: The Definition of “Beauty”

Beauty: in the human form, the biological equivalent of a backhanded compliment.

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One of the biological markers of facial beauty is averageness: those faces that stray
from the human or from a racial average are considered plain or ugly, while faces that
are most average are the most beautiful--and by “average,” I take it, the finding is that a
beautiful face is the one whose measurements occupy middle positions and are thus
average in the sense of the median rather than the mean or the mode. For example,
most noses are either large or small, round or thin, whereas the beautiful nose falls
somewhere in between. (See faceresearch.org/demos/average.)

Of course, there’s also a qualitative aspect of beauty, which is that the most normal face
is commonly identified as the most desirable. This teleological aspect seems strongly
influenced by Plato, the point being that normality reflects ideality: the most normal face,
for example, stands as an exemplar of the abstract Form of the perfect face, a face that
doesn’t exist in nature, like the perfect circle or the perfectly straight line; meanwhile,
actual faces strive to embody that ideal, as imperfect copies. Thus, we sometimes say
someone is “achingly beautiful,” and the ache is due to the reminder when we behold
such a face that the whole natural order is flawed compared to a more ideal realm that
taunts most of us with such blatant evidence of our deficiencies.

A similarly curious reaction to a beautiful body occurs when a male sees a curvaceous
female and feels compelled to exclaim “Damn!”--short for "God damn that ass!" Often,
the man who's struck by those curves is left with his eyes squinting and mouth agape
from exasperation, as though he'd been punched in the gut. Why the apparent anger or
frustration with such a beautiful sight? There are mundane reasons, such as the fact
that seeing a woman’s extreme curves can cause a man to have an uncomfortable
erection and may compel him to think, at least, of going through the time-consuming
and humiliating rigmarole of wooing her. He may also be jealous of the shapely
woman’s boyfriend or husband.

But there’s a deeper reason for the oddness of any hidden hostility to beauty, which is
that we dread the prospect of an alien, supernatural realm that surpasses our
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understanding. Whereas facial beauty is largely a matter of the face’s abundant

normality, the parts of a woman’s body most likely to arouse a curiously mixed reaction
from a heterosexual man, which is to say her large and round, or “phat,” buttocks, are
recognized for their strangeness. The man’s reaction to a woman’s phat rear is similar
to how a person would respond to the sight of an extraterrestrial creature: with shock,
incomprehension, and even annoyance that the sight is so apparent even as it defies
familiar categories. And so physical beauty can be otherworldly, symbolizing the limits
of our understanding and thus the absurdity of our way of life from an objective or
foreign perspective that transcends those limits. Thus, beauty can repel even as it
attracts, like a backhanded compliment.
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Should we Procreate to Honour our Ancestors?

____________________________________________________

There are at least three pressures to procreate. First, there’s the lure of pleasure from
sex hormones that are released during sex. Humans have learned to control that
pressure by separating the pleasure from procreation, with birth control techniques.
Second, there’s a limited time in which reproduction is biologically feasible, so that if
you’re interested in having children, you’re pressured to do so within only a certain
number of years. To some extent, humans have learned to control this pressure too, by
setting up infrastructures for child adoption or for raising children by the extended
family. Plus, you may not be interested in having children in the first place.

Procreation and the River of DNA

But the third pressure pertains to that question of interest, although this pressure is so
mind-shattering that it’s seldom consciously considered. Every animal is chemically
connected to what the biologist Richard Dawkins, in his book River Out of Eden, calls a
river of DNA that stretches back to the origin of life on this planet. This is to say that
we’re each alive not just because of the obvious facts that our parents reproduced and
that their parents did as well, but because a continuous stream of our ancestors did so,
including the evolutionary ancestors of our species and the ancestors of those ancestral
species, and so on back to the simplest sexually reproducing organisms. This is a
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biological fact rather than just a metaphor and the point isn’t merely the abstract one
that humans descended from other species; rather, each one of us, and each animal
currently alive, is alive only because that animal’s germ cells were produced by its
parents’ sperm and egg, which themselves were produced by their germ cells, which in
turn were produced by that animal’s grandparents' sperm and egg, and so on, going
back countless generations and thousands and millions and billions of years. Each one
of us, therefore, was literally produced indirectly by certain dinosaurs, for example, who
stomped around on prehistoric Earth long enough to procreate.

The third pressure, then, is that when an animal fails to reproduce, for whatever reason,
that failure is the termination of a multibillion-year-old chemical process that created
millions of generations of creatures that necessarily succeeded in sexually reproducing.
There’s the sense that although most of our ancestors, including our nonhuman ones,
can’t know when we fail to pass their genetic material to a new generation, we
nevertheless let them down when we fail in that regard, since we render their struggles
ultimately inconsequential. When a person dies without reproducing and raising a child
to be able to carry on the genetic legacy, the person is a dam blocking the river of DNA
from flowing onward. Did the river flow for countless miles and for billions of years,
through its dinosaurian and mammalian host organisms, only to be stopped by Joe
Blow, who slips on a sidewalk and dies prematurely or, even worse, who chooses not to
have children even when he has the resources to honour his ancestors’ victories by
letting their river of DNA flow through him as well? There’s the feeling that life is
precious and that if everyone ceased reproducing, ending life on this planet, the loss to
the universe would be unfathomable. Thus, when even a single person takes a step
towards realizing that possible lifeless future, by failing to procreate, the person sins
against the sacredness of life.

In his post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy depicts the end of most life
on Earth and the correspondingly increased pressure on a surviving father to “keep the
fire of life lit,” to protect what’s most precious, namely the life of his son, who represents
the continuation of life after the father’s eventual death. According to this grim thought
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experiment, then, we regard life as so precious that we’d cheer for its continuation even
when the world has ended and reasonable hope for happiness has been lost. The
symbolism of the Olympic passing of the torch is apt here as well: if the torch represents
life, we each have the solemn obligation to receive the torch from our parents and to
pass it to a new generation, by having and raising kids ourselves. If we drop the torch,
we literally can’t even imagine the enormity of our blunder. For example, we lack the
brainpower to empathize with each one of our millions of ancestors whose often
triumphant survival we negate with that failure.

Should Life be Valued?

Is this third pressure to procreate real or imaginary? Is it like our fear of threats in the
dark, caused by mere paranoia? Fear of the dark isn’t necessarily irrational, though, for
creatures who depend on their vision which in turn works best with adequate lighting.
But is it likewise rational to think of the river of DNA or the passing of the torch as a
reason to procreate? Only if life were precious, and this raises the question whether the
high value of life in turn is justified. Most people who ever lived regarded life as precious
because they assumed organic life was created by God who himself judges that life to
be good. At any rate, given this theistic assumption, we wouldn’t be merely imagining
that a universe without life in it would be bad, since a nonhuman intelligence, whose
perfect judgment we’d have to respect, would deem it so. However, theism is no longer
the default worldview, not after the Scientific Revolution and the influence of modern
rationalism in philosophy and in public affairs. So suppose there’s no viable theistic
reason to believe that life is precious. Is our urgency to protect our DNA, to pass the
torch, rational or irrational? This is to ask whether this urgency is caused ultimately by a
fact of life that makes it worthy of our esteem.

Perhaps the most promising reason to think there’s such a fact derives from naturalistic
philosophy, which posits our biological “functions.” A function is a purpose or a reason
to exist. For example, the heart’s physiological function is to circulate blood, and an
organism’s evolutionary function may be, in large part, to sexually reproduce. In the
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case of artifacts that we create, like shovels or computers, their functions are normative,
and so we can speak of a shovel’s failure when it breaks and is unable to fulfill its
function, because the shovel doesn’t measure up to its designer’s or its user’s intention.
Once we dispense with theism, there is no intention behind the design of a so-called
biological function, because natural selection has no plan. At most, then, the host
organism that uses its organs could be let down when those organs malfunction, and so
we could speak of the value of body parts to the user of those parts.

This would locate the value of life, though, in our own minds rather than in some
objective fact. Were we to change our mind, or our plan for our body parts, we’d alter
the normative status of their biological functions, just as nothing would prevent a
shovel’s function from changing were we all to favour some new use for it. Again, were
someone to commit suicide, deeming her life to be worthless, there would be no fact of
the matter to counter her negative evaluation, assuming the preciousness of life is due
to a biological purpose that has only that subjective use value. Suppose this suicidal
person is a hermit with no social ties to anyone, so that no one indirectly makes use of
her functional body parts. For example, suppose she has no employer who makes use
of her brain. In that case, there wouldn’t be even a conflicting subjective basis for her
life’s value. As soon as she deems her life to be worthless, her judgment would make it
so. Therefore, were life to have factual value because of evolutionary purposes, these
purposes would have to depend on something other than the goals of the user of the
functional body parts. Without theism, the only alternative is a version of panspermia,
according to which life on Earth was seeded by intelligent extraterrestrials. This only
pushes the question back a step, since now we’d have to ask whether we could trust
the judgment of those imperfect intelligent designers and whether the preciousness of
their own life is factual or delusory.

These considerations don’t prevent some naturalistic philosophers and biologists like
Dawkins himself from smuggling normative judgments into their talk of natural selection
and of biological functions. Dawkins shows us the gene’s “perspective” as the
“immortal” gene sends its “instructions” to protein “machinery” that builds its “host”
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bodies, “discarding” generations of them as it floats along waves of sexual reproduction.

The sole merit of this extended metaphor of the "selfish gene," however, is its
usefulness in simplifying a complex biological theory. We should remind ourselves that
this metaphor doesn’t report any scientific discovery that genes actually have a
perspective or that they instruct machines. These anthropomorphic images are
empirically gratuitous. At the genetic level, evolution is a chemical process, whereas in
the well-understood case of the function of artifacts, the function’s value derives from
intentions which are psychological. So if genes have no minds, they can’t confer any
value to the body types they help produce. Likewise, if the process of natural selection
has no mind of its own, neither can it confer any such value.

It seems, then, that biology gives us no reason to think that life is precious as a matter
of fact. On the contrary, by replacing Creationism and theistic Intelligent Design
theories, evolutionary biology supplies us with abundant reasons to think that, like any
physical system that exists ultimately as a matter of inexplicable brute fact (due to a
random quantum fluctuation that produced the big bang and natural laws, for example),
life is objectively, factually worthless. Indeed, to speak of worth in the absence of the
mind of a beholder is to commit a category error. What this means is that if we subtract
our personal goals and standards which we’re free to change, and restrict our attention
to natural facts that are what they are regardless of what’s in our immediate--mental as
opposed to bodily--capacity to affect, we find that as far as biologists are entitled to say,
life has no value one way or the other. There would be no more objective loss were life
to wink out of existence than were an asteroid, traveling along its path for millions of
years like the DNA river, to be suddenly blown apart. Again, what’s at stake here is that,
roughly speaking, if life isn’t precious there’s no failure in dying without procreating, in
the sense of any dishonour to the ancestors. More precisely, if there’s no objective fact
that makes life precious, the high value we put on life would depend entirely on our life-
affirming interests which we’d be free to change.

But this suggests another basis for thinking that life has a kind of objective value.
Instead of biology, we can turn to society. Even were life’s value to depend entirely on
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our minds, we have limited control over them. In particular, we have the most control
over merely our own mental states, and few if any people can affect how everyone in a
society thinks or feels. So if life’s value derives from a social convention, the value is
objective and factual in that the value persists regardless of what each person
individually has to say about it. Only were the social convention widely rejected and
were most of a population thus to regard life, say, as profane rather than sacred, would
life’s corresponding value change. Presumably, such a society would implode and so
wouldn’t remain long to influence other peoples’ attitude toward life, which is a
Darwinian reason why social conventions tend to be life-affirming.

Still, a convention can be more or less justifiable. Some conventions can even be
absurd, so while the true source of the third pressure on people to procreate may be
that of mass preference, this doesn’t afford much of a reason to procreate. As I said,
we’ve decreased the first two pressures, and an individual, if not society as a whole, can
shrug off the third by reminding herself that just because someone else acts
questionably doesn’t mean she has to follow. For example, just because non-
Nietzschean secularists cling to outmoded theistic values doesn’t mean all secularists
should do so.

Evolution as a Ponzi Scheme

If life isn’t precious, and thus the river of DNA doesn’t make for a good reason to have
and to raise children, how should we regard life? There are more than the two
possibilities I’ve so far discussed, that life is either precious or of no value at all. If we
assume that life has no objective or factual value, because it exists ultimately as a brute
fact, there’s still the question of whether life should be subjectively valued and if so,
what that value should be. I’ll assume that life should somehow be so valued or at least
that most people can’t help but be somehow interested in their own and in other
creatures’ lives. And I’ll assume the post-Nietzschean context in which theistic values
are for clueless zombies. Instead of deluding ourselves with faulty evaluations that no
longer make sense, what story should we tell ourselves about the strange existence of
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living things? What myth about the value of life has a chance of compelling authentic
nontheists?

I’ll assume also, as a starting place, the existential conviction that human life especially
is absurd and tragic. We’re the victims of a perfect cosmic storm: we’ve evolved to be
social and thus to be skilled mind-readers, and so we think in anthropocentric terms,
positing not just gods but meanings and purposes where there are objectively none; we
instinctively delude ourselves, clinging to comforting, politically correct fairytales even
while our consciousness, reason, and freedom alienate us from the rest of the world;
we’re self-conflicted, and the culprits, natural selection, the genes, and the laws of
nature have no ears to hear our complaints. Job could call on Yahweh to answer his
accusations, but we who understand such anthropomorphism as childish or lazy have
no such recourse. Ultimately, we’re destined to be unfulfilled, to prefer what can never
be, to be pawns in a game played by impersonal forces that we can’t help but
personalize. In these facts lie the ridiculousness and the grotesqueness of our
existential situation.

With these assumptions in mind, I’d say that instead of a river or a sport of passing a
torch that holds the precious flame, a more fitting metaphor for the profound continuity
between sexually reproducing creatures in a genetic lineage is that of the Ponzi
scheme. In this fraud, insiders steal money from a multitude of ignorant followers, by
selling them on a false promise that if they invest, they’ll each receive a high return. As
long as enough people continue to believe the promise and to invest their share, the
insiders can temporarily siphon funds for their own enrichment and pay back a limited
number of contributors to maintain the appearance of a thriving business. What makes
this a fraud is that the promise to the mass of investors is a lie: were everyone to be
rewarded as promised, the business would collapse, and indeed the business can’t
sustain itself in the long-term. The scheme requires that there be a minority of insiders
with secret knowledge who manipulate fresh legions of fooled outsiders whose
investments replenish the system.
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The proliferation of creatures by sexual reproduction can be likened to a Ponzi scheme.

The fooled majority are those who in nonhuman species have no conception of their
existential situation or, in the case of humans, who are misled by theistic delusions into
believing that living things are precious. The same neural mechanisms that cause the
projection of psychological categories onto inhumane natural processes compel the
majority to anticipate a lavish payoff in heaven if they follow divine commandments, by
multiplying and respecting God’s creatures. Some can interpret their relative success
and happiness on Earth, at least, as preliminary rewards for their contributions to the
kingdom of heaven, while unhappy folk obey and are seemingly punished for no known
reason. But if there are no gods, who are the sophisticated insiders that exploit the
system? I submit that the authentic nontheists can occupy that role. Granted, they don’t
direct natural selection or even necessarily concoct the religious narratives that propel
the fraud, but they can exploit the system in which we all find ourselves. This is because
only the authentic, post-Nietzschean nontheists understand the absurd, tragic nature of
that system. Only the insiders realize that human life has persisted despite our
exclusive ability to comprehend the horrifying truth, because of our compensating
capacity for self-delusion.

How, though, can the existentialist profit from nature’s Ponzi scheme? Some charlatans
pretend to be religious and, as televangelists, cult leaders, or pandering politicians,
exploit people’s gullibility, literally stealing from them and setting up classic mini Ponzi
schemes within the greater one that perpetuates our species as a whole. I reject that
option as distasteful. A more minor but aesthetically more refined payoff for the secular
insider is schadenfreude, amusement at other people’s expense. The value of life is that
in the minds of insiders, our tragedy can be transmuted into a comedy, and the profit for
sophisticated observers who exploit the victims of the evolutionary Ponzi scheme is
their extraction of humour from the haplessness of their more ignorant fellows. Insiders
should laugh inwardly, if not also outwardly, at the expense of adult humans who,
despite their godlike cognitive powers, act like hallucinating children.
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What does this mean for procreation? On the one hand, the insider can bear children
and raise them as insiders, spreading the wealth of schadenfreude. Should the offspring
wilt under social pressures and become duped outsiders, victims of the cosmic Ponzi
scheme, the parent may be forced to pass them off as hot potatoes, exploiting them too
for bittersweet pleasure. Here, then, is a mixed reason for even the authentic nontheist,
who regards life as objectively worthless and as subjectively ridiculous and largely
tragic, to procreate. On the other hand, merely coping with knowledge of our dark
existential situation requires great stamina and toughness. Facing the prospect of
bursting a child’s balloon by informing her that most people who ever lived have lived as
unknowing clowns or puppets, as victims of a monstrous system of natural forces that
renders the whole human endeavour laughable at best, may be daunting for even the
stout cosmicist. Then again, facing the potential tragedy that your own child may be
mesmerized by politically correct fictions and join the unknowing mass of cosmic victims
has a silver lining, since ignorance can be bliss. I see, then, no obvious implication as to
whether an authentic nontheist, a post-Nietzschean cosmicist and existentialist should
procreate. This depends on the individual’s fortitude and capacity to derive pleasure
from circumstances that might just as well be interpreted as exquisitely painful.
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Part Four: Pop Culture

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Ethics and Culture
Entertainment
Mental Health
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Modernism and Postmodernism

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In my rants here I’ve been throwing around the words “modern” and “postmodern”, and
I’d like to set forth what I mean by that highly general, and thus potentially quite useful
distinction.

Modernism

In my view, the essential difference between the modern and the postmodern is that
modernity is the purported cultural progress, in architecture, painting, music, mass
media, and philosophy, resulting from the Scientific Revolution, while postmodernity is
the cultural disarray resulting from the depletion of the fuel needed for that progress.
The fuel in question is faith in what postmodernists call the modern “master
metanarrative” or myth which I call Scientism. This myth presumes that society in
general can progress just as well as can institutional science, that just as scientists
discover how nature operates according to laws, we can discover the rules of how we
ought to behave and we’re able to follow those rules and so progress towards a perfect
union. In either case, the abilities needed for that progress are, first of all, Reason as
opposed to tradition, authority, intuition, faith, or revelation, but also the scientistic
virtues (or vices, depending on your viewpoint) that motivate the modern experiment.
These virtues include intellectual curiosity; optimism about our cognitive potential,
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including our abilities to discover, to comprehend, and to digest the natural truths; and
pride in the autonomy and dignity of hyper-rational scientists and their analogues in the
other social spheres. In short, modernism, the set of ideas implicit in the cultural
phenomenon of modernity, is equivalent to secular humanism, to the ideology that
reason, freewill, and sentience render us godlike, equipping us with the potential not just
for omniscience through scientific methods, but for happiness and prosperity.

The so-called New World of North America, colonized by Europeans, became the
testing ground for the modern hypothesis that social progress is possible by liberally
employing reason in all walks of life, without hindrance from tradition or special
interests. In particular, the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence enshrined
the values of secular humanism. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the
stated or implicit rights of people in a capitalistic, democratic society. Those three
values are maintained, first, by using relatively unrestricted science to produce lesser
goods as demanded by an equally unrestricted marketplace, that is, by a population
that’s allowed to develop its own desires instead of having them controlled by a
powerful institution like the Church; and second, by relying on the wisdom of rational,
free citizens to hold the reigns of political power through elections of political
representatives.

Theoretically, then, the Western success in using technoscience to raise the standard of
living with machines (robots or armies of human labourers) that mass produce goods to
satisfy basic needs and whims alike, is cause for celebrating the modern metanarrative.
What’s become apparent, instead, is that modern history is greater cause for mourning.
Scientism, in the sense of faith in social progress through hyper-rationality (the
application of reason throughout society at the expense of nonrational sources of
beliefs), is widely regarded as bankrupt. This is because the promised progress has
either not materialized or been revealed as a charade. Far from dignifying people in a
modern society, capitalism and democracy degrade the majority, both at home and
abroad. Democracy and capitalism are vulnerable to hijacking from “special interests”
that replace the Catholic Church’s autocrats in the medieval period. These modern
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oligarchs are the wealthiest managers and bankers who use technoscience to
consolidate their power, including public relations to demagogue the masses,
supercomputers to manipulate the stock market, and scientifically-managed political
campaigns to ensure that only Serious, Centrist politicians, friendly to the permanent
oligarchy, are nominated and elected.

In the British industrial revolution, material goods were produced by virtual slaves under
horrendous conditions, reestablishing a class of miserable labourers to service the
elites’ decadence. (Something similar is presently happening in capitalist China.) After
the New Deal and WWII, the American middle class was created, raising the standard
of living for most Americans and not just for the upper crust, but this entailed the
exporting of American manufacturing jobs to third world peoples who live in relative
squalor, so that once again “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” depend on a
gross power inequality between consumers and producers. The cheaper the goods are
produced, the more profit for owners of the means of production and the cheaper the
price for consumers; but the wealthier the consumers, the greater their pride and thus
the less content they are actually to get their hands dirty and work hard to produce their
luxuries.

Of course, the Great Depression, the World Wars, and the many genocides of the last
century helped to disabuse modern folk of the scientistic myth of progress. One of the
natural truths discovered by scientists and engineers is the means to create the nuclear
bomb. This weapon of mass destruction ended WWII but also threatens us with
Armageddon, with the final war. Whether we can digest that particular piece of scientific
knowledge depends on whether we’re smart and noble enough to manage nuclear
weapons. Unfortunately, as cognitive scientists have investigated human nature itself,
we’ve learned that we’re not nearly as rational, free, or as conscious as modernists
boast in their humanistic myth. For the most part, we’re deluded, easily manipulated
animals whose capacities for reason, freedom, and consciousness are islands floating
on seas of biases and preferences for fallacies, biochemical and physical processes
that determine our behaviour, and unconscious, modular neural programs.
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Postmodernism

And so we arrive at the postmodern malaise, at the disenchantment, cynicism, apathy,

and nihilism that follow from the collapse of the justifications for the modern project. To
be sure, modern infrastructures, including the institutions of science, democracy, and
capitalism remain intact. What’s collapsed is people’s confidence in the utopian benefits
of those institutions. Modernists are hyper-rational whereas postmodernists are hyper-
skeptical, meaning that modernism presupposes the excellence of reason and of the
secular humanistic character, whereas the postmodernist doesn’t take those valuations
for granted, but systematically “deconstructs” all metanarratives so that, through her,
Reason destroys itself and the Promethean hero. For example, the philosopher David
Hume pointed out that no one perceives a unified self through ordinary introspection;
instead, we perceive a not-so-godlike bundle of associated thoughts and feelings. And
Nietzsche called attention to the will to power that lies behind pretenses to pure
rationality. More recently, academic postmodernists reject all manner of authority by
cynically reducing the epistemic value of any statement to an expression of some
personal quality of the speaker. For example, the pragmatist Richard Rorty maintained
that instead of pretending to be objective seekers of absolute truth, we should admit that
ideological differences are based on nothing more than feelings of social solidarity.

One of the defining characteristics of postmodernism, then, is endless self-

consciousness: a postmodernist has no religious faith, takes nothing for granted, and so
is preoccupied with “unmasking” other people’s delusions and underhanded stratagems
for acquiring power, and with proving that she herself is innocent of such sins. Always
on guard against hoodwinking with a myth that merely masks the speaker’s crude
personal agenda, the academic postmodernist speaks in concentric circles of
qualifications and apologies, taking back with one hand what’s offered with the other so
that nothing is left but noise and the stench of condescension. And thus, more broadly,
postmodern culture is filled with self-referential phenomena like The Simpsons and the
Scream movies; what Jay Rosen calls savvy journalism that pretends to be neutral and
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objective; the postmodern novel that eschews character and plot as modern devices for
reinforcing faith in absolute knowledge of a pre-established order; the postmodern
painting or sculpture which is celebrated not for its beauty but for its demonstration of
the artist’s impudence; and disposable postmodern pop music which consumers prefer
to steal on the internet, because of its worthlessness.

Ironically, then, postmodernism brings to fruition the modern exploration of the self.
When the Church lost its control over European thought, as medieval merchants
acquired their own economic power and Renaissance ideals took hold, making way for
the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the Europeans’ cognitive
capacities were further unleashed in the Enlightenment. Modernism is largely the
celebration of that growing freedom of thought. Modern painters, for example, created
abstract works to experiment with the artistic media, traversing the range of our possible
modes of expression. The more closely we look at ourselves, though, without the
blinders of religious dogmas, the more unsettled we are by the disparity between what
we wish we were, according to premodern or modern myths, and what we actually are.
In the postmodern period, we look at ourselves and see not dignified, rational, godlike
beings, but enslaved, selfish, largely irrational dupes or alienated cynics.

As to what I personally take from postmodernism, I agree that modern metanarratives

have run their course. However, I reject postmodern nihilism and fatalism, and the
contention that no conceivable myth is suitable or necessary to live an elevated life. In
fact, true nihilism is probably impossible for any human being, since we’re hardwired to
resolve our disparate experiences with a coherent worldview, which requires the
engagement with philosophy; to express our emotions in a normative distinction
between what we regard as sacred or profane; and to justify that distinction even in the
inevitable absence of sufficient reason, taking a leap of faith. The most general stories
we tell to rationalize those human practices are myths. As Nietzsche and Joseph
Campbell said, the difficulty is creating, in effect, a suitable postmodern myth, a myth
that enchants even after science disenchanted the world.
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Granted, as I say in my rant on scientism, following Erik Davis’ thesis in Techgnosis,

David Noble’s The Religion of Technology, and other works, we should expect that the
scientific disenchantment of nature is only superficial. So-called postmodern secular
culture has its religious aspects, but the myth that best captures the postmodern
zeitgeist is as yet unclear to me. What I mean is that identifying just what we
authentically believe, deep down, in our postmodern culture, about ourselves and our
place in the universe, is exceedingly difficult. There are still plenty of vestigial modern or
premodern myths (philosophies of life) which must be discarded as irrelevant.
Moreover, many unknowing postmodernists and victims of efficient public relations
campaigns are beholden to mere memes, delusions, or propaganda, which don’t rise to
the level of myths. Certainly, there’s no shortage of postmodern philosophy, but much of
this philosophy is pretentious posturing and gamesmanship, gibberish, or dreadful prose
poetry that doesn’t come to grips with the modern inheritance that surely mustn’t be
abandoned, which is modern science’s accumulation of empirical knowledge.
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The Philosophy of Existential Cosmicism

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What’s the difference between truths and facts? Truth requires living things whereas
facts don’t. There could be a universe of facts even with no intelligent creatures to
appreciate them, but there would be no truth in a lifeless universe, because truth is a
relationship between facts and what are called symbols or representations of those
facts, and symbols are tools used by living things. To see the difference, suppose
there’s a lifeless world in a distant galaxy, and on that world there’s a range of
mountains and also a lake with waves that lap against a sandy beach. Now suppose
that by chance, as the froth is deposited onto the beach, the froth creates the spitting
image of those mountains, picturing their peaks and valleys as they would have been
seen were someone standing on that beach. In this case, there would be physical facts
of how the mountains are arranged and of their different sizes, but there would be no
truth in the froth’s accidental map of those facts, because the froth wouldn’t be a tool
used by any creature in its dealings with the world.

Now, from a highly objective perspective, the difference between the froth’s picture of
the mountains, and a person’s thought that one mountain is larger than another
vanishes; in each case, we might say, there’s just a pair of patterns that happen to
match in some respects. The information in the waves can be mapped onto the
information in the mountains, just as the neural activity in the viewer’s brain could be
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mapped onto what she’d view, were she standing on that beach. So maybe neither a
fact nor a truth needs any living user of information, after all; maybe truth is just a
certain abstract correspondence between patterns. This is how some philosophers think
of truth, as an isomorphism between certain sets of data. And indeed, when this match
between patterns is lacking, you don’t have truth and you may even have falsehood, but
this match alone isn’t enough: one of the patterns must be made up of symbols, and to
have symbols you need meaning.

A pattern, like a picture of mountains or the sentence, “One of those mountains is larger
than the other,” carries meaning in relation to the mountains if that pattern is directed
towards them. But what is it for one thing to be thusly about something? I think we can
answer this by comparing symbols to something like guidelines on the tarmac used by a
pilot to land the plane. The lines hook up with the pilot in the cockpit (through his eyes
and his brain) and direct the plane to its landing position, which is where the pilot wants
to go. In the same way, mental symbols--our thoughts, feelings, images, and other
mental states--facilitate our negotiations with the outside world. They do this by their
useful associations with other mental states, as in a train of thought, and by their access
to our motor responses, so that we can intelligently move our body, guided by that inner
map. Mental symbols have those features because they’re made up of highly
interconnected brain states which, of course, have executive control over the body.

So what is it for a symbol to mean something? This kind of meaning has at least two
aspects. First, if you put certain symbols together under certain circumstances, such as
the time and place of their occurrence, their directedness towards something adds up to
a truth relation, as I’ve said, or else lives up to some other ideal, as in the case of
motivational symbols, which I’ll come to in a moment. By itself, this first criterion of
meaning is relatively trivial since, as the above thought experiment shows, any patterns
might match by chance or else might be interpreted as matching by some arbitrary
hermeneutic principle. Second, though, even when they’re not so put together, as in the
case of isolated words that aren’t used to form a sentence, symbols guide the symbol-
user’s use of that to which the symbols are directed, such as the referent. The semantic
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relation, then, is like a path extending from the symbol-user to something that might be
used, and the path features relevant tools that give the user options in dealing with what
the symbol potentially directs the user toward. Again, these other tools consist of the
associated symbols, each taking the user down a slightly different path, and also of the
symbol’s access to the user’s body, which allows action to be intelligently guided. A
symbol’s reference to something, then, is invisible because that meaning is a set of
potential relationships between symbol-user and the referent. Indeed, symbols tend to
be public property, so the referent isn’t just an idiosyncratic interpretation of what’s out
there, like the mountain range, but the conventionally relevant information pertaining to
mountains in general.

If a mental symbol is a tool, like a shovel, is it just the symbol that has this one-way
relation to something, called in this case the symbol’s meaning? In fact, all tools are
likewise directed towards something in what we can call an active-passive relationship.
Just like a fact-related symbol (a concept or belief), we use a shovel to achieve some
goal in the real world. Like a symbol, a shovel presents us with a way of interacting with
parts of the world, depending on the shovel’s capacities. A shovel is normally used to
dig holes, but it can be used for other purposes as well; moreover, like a symbol, a
shovel can be misused: for example, a shovel would make for a poor toothpick. Just as
the thought of shovels presents the thinker with an array of options, as the relevant
information streams across her inner vision like the Terminator’s cynical assessments of
its surroundings, an actual shovel triggers the user’s relevant know-how when the use
of the shovel becomes second nature to her. (On this point, see Andy Clark’s book,
Natural-Born Cyborgs, and the philosophical theory of the extended mind.) So the
opportunity to apply a symbol in various potential ways directs the user to the world,
while other, non-semantic tools direct the user to something in a similar sort of active-
passive relationship (the user does things to the used).

What gives neural activity or the word “shovel,” but not an actual shovel, semantic
content? Concepts and linguistic symbols are digital rather than analogue, meaning that
their physical or biological characteristics are irrelevant to the user, whereas a shovel’s
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size, shape, and so on are crucial to the user’s ability to carry out the shovel’s function.
True, as I said, mental representations can drive behavior only by physically tapping
into the brain’s motor center, but the user is typically quite unaware of the mechanisms
involved. When you think of shovels, you’re aware only of a rush of cognitive
associations, images, memories, and feelings. But when you pick up a shovel, your
know-how consists of your experience with the shovel’s physical properties: for
example, you have to learn which is the business end, how to bend your back to get
enough leverage, and so on. A non-symbolic tool’s active-passive relation to what’s
used by means of the tool is thus less ghostly, as it were, than the abstract relation
between a symbol and what the symbol is about. But note that the more complex the
technology, the more the lay user is inclined to assign the equivalent of a semantic
relation between the machine and whatever’s acted upon by the machine. That is, when
we’re mystified as to how a machine works, we treat the fulfillment of its function as a
kind of magic, attributing the machine’s effectiveness to ghostly forces or to angels or
other spirits. For example, a computer’s electrical connections to its peripherals might
as well be digital, semantic relations, since our bodies hardly come into contact with
most of the computer’s parts, just as we’re mostly ignorant of how the neural basis of a
thought works.

This second aspect of meaning is, of course, a pragmatic one, and it can be used to
distinguish facts from truth. Again, truth is a match between two patterns, where one of
those patterns consists of symbols, and symbols are tools that guide action, helping the
user to succeed in some fashion (to satisfy certain wants or needs). By contrast, facts
are how things are either before they’re so used or when something is considered
objectively, independent of any such particular use. For example, physical facts of
mountains pertain to what mountains would be like even were there no such thing as
symbols or their users. Facts pertaining to artificial kinds, like toys, clothing, or symbols
themselves, which wouldn’t exist without symbol-users, are what these kinds are like
regardless of any independent interpretation. In the case of a highly subjective item, like
an art work, there may be no facts of the matter but just a host of symbolic pathways
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leading to no common ground and just connecting symbol-users as they trade their
interpretations.

This way of distinguishing facts and truths raises the question of normativity, since the
practical aspect of symbols entails that some uses of symbols are more successful than
others. Thus, the symbols that relate creatures to facts depend on a separate, more
obviously normative class of symbols, which we can call desires. Suppose someone
wants to climb a mountain, but instead of acquiring useful gear for the endeavor, the
climber uses a shovel to dig his way underneath the mountain, saying “If I dig deep
enough, I might just climb this mountain.” In this case, there’s a mismatch between the
person’s goal and his means of achieving it. One of these means is his inner, cognitive
tool, his mental representation of mountains, which differs strangely from the standard
concept of mountains. If your goal is to stand on top of the mountain, you need a useful
mental representation to guide your planning and your actions. And if you fail miserably
in achieving your goal, there’s a greater chance that you lack the relevant concept in the
first place. Moreover, the more limited a species’ goals, that is, the simpler its habits and
its life cycle, the fewer symbols its members possess.

The pragmatic aspect of meaning, then, is normative, because actions depend on

intentions, and intentions spring from character or from disposition, which consists of a
mix of virtues and vices, according to an ethical or aesthetic ideal for judging such
things. Instrumentally speaking, the efficiency of tool-use can be evaluated just in case
the tool achieves the goal; that is, the tool’s value can be relative just to the specific
desire, so that the use is neutral with respect to any ideal that governs the value of
desires themselves. For example, a murderer’s use of a weapon can be more or less
effective in achieving his goal even though that goal is evil. But then there’s the deeper
rightness or wrongness of our goals. Goals motivate us to act and thus drive our use of
fact-directed symbols, charging them with meaning. Moreover, goals range from those
which are unique to each person to those of wider and wider social networks, such as
family, country, and the whole set of language speakers, including the long dead ones
whose past experiences help shape the present meaning of words; on top of those,
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there are the species-wide instincts we inherit from evolution. Each of these motivations
pressures the symbol-user to take up symbols and walk down the path that leads to
some use of the referent. The more general the motivation, the more well-worn the path
and the greater the impact on the symbol’s particular meaning. For example, the lay
concept of mountains includes just the stereotypical information that’s useful for fulfilling
most people’s potential use of mountians, including the facts that a mountain is an
abrupt rising of the earth’s surface, rising to an altitude greater than that of a hill, which
amount to a warning that you shouldn’t trifle with a mountain. After all, a mountain has
many other properties, but only the practically relevant ones, given most people’s
interests, are picked out by the standard concept of mountains. The word “mountain”
has several senses, though, and the context of the particular speaker’s interest will
decide in which sense the word or thought is intended.

Our mental tools can be divided roughly into beliefs and desires. Beliefs aim towards
facts, and the aiming is a matter of the belief’s usefulness in achieving some potential
objectives. The concept of mountains contains information that helps us deal with
mountains, and this information includes the concept’s associations with relevant
concepts, such as those of hills, rugged terrain, avalanches, and so on. By contrast,
desires aim towards not something in the actual world, but towards a possibility we’d
prefer to be factual. You can think about this in terms of possible worlds. If a belief is
true, it usefully connects the believer to part of the actual world, and if the belief is false
it connects the believer to a possible, counterfactual world. Some misuse of symbols
can be counterproductive or useful, depending on whether the symbol is used in a lie or
in a comforting delusion. Now, a desire connects the symbol-user not just to any
possible world, but to a preferred one, and the preference derives from a value, ideal, or
a vision of how the facts should be. Typically, a desire motivates the user to take some
action to conform the actual world with that vision, but some desires, like hopes, don’t
have that effect.

In any case, a belief, or an objective fact-directed symbol, is supposed to live up

to the ideal of truth, as it were, while a desire, or a preferred-fact-directed symbol,
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is governed by some other ideal. And the pragmatic aspect of beliefs connects
beliefs to desires: we use beliefs to guide our actions, because we prefer a
certain state of the world, and beliefs help us maintain or produce that state.

The Meaning of Asceticism

The normative aspect of meaning raises three issues that will lead us to consider
existential cosmicism. First, is there a goal presupposed by all human symbol-use,
which is partly what enables us to distinguish between symbols and non-symbols, and if
so, what’s that goal? Second, assuming there is such a goal, is the corresponding
notion of success deficient according to a higher ideal? Third, how can we explain the
emergence of normativity (of values, ideals, and so on) without committing the
naturalistic fallacy?

As I said, the particular context of each use of a symbol may affect its meaning, but
there’s an underlying role of symbols, which is the biological one. Our mental categories
are tools used by the genes to manipulate us to survive, reproduce, and transmit the
genetic information to the next generation. I discuss one such method of control in
“Cosmicism and Technology,” where I point out that the source of our anthropomorphic
projections onto alien nature, which usefully delude us, sparing us the ravages of
existential angst, is the associational aspect of our neural nets. We understand
something by relating it to what’s more familiar, and we’re most familiar with how we
appear to ourselves. Thus, one such underlying purpose of symbol-use is to protect the
genotype, by deluding the genes’ host: we instinctively and naively presume the world is
personal and humane. As in all biological purposes or functions, though, the
appearance of intelligent design is a trick of human perception. All of nature is
mysteriously neither alive nor lifeless, but undead like a zombie abomination. What this
means is that the use of people by our genes is merely apparent; there’s no ghost in the
machine, but spiritless matter is more active than any known biological life, having
mindlessly evolved the whole universe.
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Another such underlying purpose of symbol-use derives from reason: we play with
symbols in a social game of climbing to the apex of our dominance hierarchy, thus
again earning privileged positions for our progeny and our genetic lineage, and
distracting ourselves with those ulterior pseudomotives instead of taking a good look at
our existential predicament. Reason evolved as a tool for Machiavellian manipulation,
for spin-doctoring and the rhetorical art of persuasion, for the sake of protecting our
personal brand, that is, our status in the tribe. Thus, our typical thought patterns are rife
with biases and fallacies, as cognitive science shows.

The answer to the first question, then, is that there is such an underlying purpose, and
it’s well-symbolized by the fiction of the machines’ self-serving maintenance of the
matrix’s virtual reality. In effect, the primary users of symbols are the genes and the
other forces of natural selection, which build our bodies including our instincts to think
and react in ways that further the overriding process which is the evolution of biological
life. How is this relevant to the meaning of our thoughts? Well, if I’m right and meaning
is like the line on the tarmac that guides a pilot’s landing of the plane--except that a
thought is connected to a fact only by a ghostly version of such a line, namely by the
opportunity for the symbol-user to act on that fact, afforded by the thought’s ability to
control the user’s body--then a symbol is directed towards something mainly by our
naturally evolved opportunities. The force of natural selection is like a fleet of machines
that digs a maze of paths leading from each of us to various ports of call, and most of
our activity in life is confined to that pre-existing infrastructure. Our opportunities to
influence the world are naturally limited by how we tend to think and by what our bodies
can do, which limits are culturally and biologically set. Within those limits, we can
choose to take one path or another, as we put our symbols together in different
combinations to suit our parochial interests; we can modify the pre-established
landscape, changing the meaning of our symbols as cultures and languages develop,
digging new pathways and opening up new opportunities. But the main driving force of
symbol-use, which sets symbols apart from non-symbols, by giving symbols meaning
and thus a causal role in the symbol-user’s behavior, is that of natural selection, which
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is to say that there’s a foreign zombie hand reaching into everyone’s head, infecting us
with the plague of undeadness and coercing us to shamble along well-worn roads.

As to the second question, indeed I think there are higher ideals and thus what we
might call a transhuman use of symbols, that is, a way that truly sets us apart from most
animal species. Most thinking is done directly or indirectly in the service of our zombie
masters, the micro machines and environmental forces that build our bodies; these
thought patterns include the politically correct myths and conventions that distract and
delude us, appealing to our vanity even as the narratives act as blinders and leashes
around our necks. For thousands of years, though, there’s been the spiritual, mystical,
ascetic alternative, reformulated in existentialist terms after the World Wars. This
esoteric culture for detached, angst-ridden outcasts, misfits, seekers, and mentally
unbalanced freaks of nature is governed by anti-natural ethical or aesthetic standards
that put us at odds with the natural world and thus with ourselves. In religious terms, the
goal is to escape our cosmic prison, what I call the decaying corpse of the undead god,
and this liberation is accomplished by saying “No!” a thousand times to natural
impulses, to abstain from many biological and mainstream cultural endeavours, to
malfunction, as it were, condemning nature as a monstrosity and throwing a wrench into
the works.

Ascetic, existential rebellion against natural processes is ethical, because it calls for the
ultimate virtues of self-knowledge and integrity. Perhaps more importantly, this rebellion
is aesthetic in that it amounts to any creature’s supremely creative act. You might be
wondering, if nature is an undead monstrosity inhabited by mini undead monsters, how
could one way of life be better than another? Surely, then, it’s all just rot and decay, the
spiritless shuffling along of physically interacting chunks of matter, yielding more and
more complex patterns of monstrosity, from molecules to galaxies to alternate
dimensions and universes. But this is the point: one such emergence seems to be
nature’s ability to deny itself, to look upon itself in horror, through the mystic’s eyes, and
to reject our position as instruments in Mother Nature’s experiment on this planet. Plato
interpreted the rise of abstraction in normative terms, so that the more general the
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phenomenon the better it is, with mathematical objects, for example, being better than
particular physical things which he saw as copies of their categories. I would replace his
measure of abstraction with that of complexity, and instead of calling the increase in
emergent complexity generally good, I’d call it beautiful solely in the sense that an
emergent phenomenon is original and thus not clichéd. There should be no illusion that
what’s new is necessarily progressive. As John Gray says in Black Mass, that linear,
teleological way of telling history is an inheritance from Zoroastrianism. But the vertical
dimension of Plato’s hierarchy remains in a measure of complexity and thus of natural
originality and beauty.

The point is that whereas slavish adherence to our biofunctions is conformist, ascetic
rebellion is creative and thus aesthetically superior as a life option. In terms of symbol-
use, the ascetic goal of detaching, to some extent, from natural processes invests the
ascetic’s symbols with an ironic sort of self-destructive meaning, since the ascetic uses
symbols to formulate paradoxes (in myths and parables) that reveal how reason traps
and curses us; alternatively, the mystic may attempt to abstain from thinking, to free her
mind from the matrix of biologically- and culturally-imposed virtual reality. The mystical
ascetic or rebellious existentialist creates a higher plain in the pattern of her
renunciation, which is to say that any degree of asceticism is more creative than
conformity to processes that are explainable in strictly lower-level terms, such as
biological ones. Granted, rebellion against nature conforms to the metaphysical pattern
of nature’s evolution of emergent levels of complexity, and the universe does regularly
deny itself, in a sense, by creatively destroying parts of itself, as in the case of a black
hole that swallows star systems. But the emergence of what Schopenhauer calls the
denial of the will to live raises the stakes, because this denial occurs within the undead
god’s crown jewel which is the brain, the most complex, improbable, and thus original
and aesthetically praiseworthy object.

There’s more to be said, though, in comparing the conformist and the artistically
creative cultures. There is, I think, a tragedy in the machine’s simulation of a
supernatural spirit, and the emotional power of this tragedy in the case of rebellion
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against nature adds to the beauty of antiheroic life. What I mean is that the best
mythical way of thinking of the world’s creation, to which we’re led by our social instinct
which compels us to personify the impersonal, is to assume that God became corrupted
by his absolute power and destroyed himself out of horror at his self-reflection, creating
the universe literally out of his miraculously undying, mindlessly creative body. That’s
just a speculative myth, of course, although I think it’s more psychologically plausible
than the commonplace Creation myths. But the aesthetic point is that surely there can
be no greater tragedy than such an act of divine suicide, a tragedy which Christianity
effectively bastardizes and whitewashes. There’s honour in the idea of a great person’s
vindication after she falls, even if that vindication is tragic, given that the only way of
improving her situation is to destroy herself. I take this to be the best interpretation of
the idea of monotheism. (As to whether God “exists” or once “existed,” that’s merely a
childishly exoteric question, as I argue in “From Theism to Cosmicism.”)

An atheist is free to say, “Who cares?”--except that even an atheist is stuck with a
human brain that can’t help but rally around something she holds to be sacred, such as
human nature, which she instinctively anthropomorphizes just as the theist does with
respect to the First Cause. If the atheist can have her fun with secular humanism,
glorifying human nature and our scientific progress despite the fact that according to
Darwinism we’re a species of enslaved zombie, the atheist shouldn’t begrudge the
mystic her entertaining speculations about the ultimate cause. (Of course, when the
emotional power of myths drives people to evil behavior, as in the case of monotheistic
religions and scientistic cults like Nazism, the evil-doers should be spanked like naughty
children for failing to distinguish between reality and their bedtime stories.)

Anyway, the relevance of this tragic Creation myth is that human asceticism is like an
echo of that ultimately moving event, of the literal death of God. The idea is that an
omniscient and omnipotent being sees and does everything, but that instead of settling
into the life of an insipid father figure, God would have become cynical and repulsed by
all possibilities except for the most radical one of escaping his godhood through a form
of ironically-creative self-destruction. Such would be the fate of pure spirit, of the life we
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naively imagine we possess. Instead, we’re mere machines playing at life, zombies that
mistake our twitches and moans for noble gestures. The best we can do is to
simulate a novel level of reality. Our experiences of ourselves and of the outer world
are in fact models, which is to say simplifications of what we encounter. So too we
undead things can pretend that we were all along meant to be virtuous or beautiful; we
can choose to adopt anti-natural ideals that don’t figure so easily in the abominable
evolutionary process, which births new life by means of mass executions of all previous
generations.

The greatest of our simplifications is surely our simulation of God’s tragic denial of the
will to life. This calls not for suicide in the sense of the total extinction of life, since this
would cut the rebellion short, whereas our foe deserves to witness, as it were, the
prolongation of the act of extending our middle finger, just as the most probable God
wouldn’t have replaced himself with nothing at all, but would have transformed himself
into the mindlessly creative behemoth which is the natural universe. Likewise, the
ascetic who detaches from the more egregious biological and politically correct
processes sees herself as the shell she is, which frees her to become something new, a
creature that dares to perform the divine pattern of coming honourably face to face with
the ultimate horror of our existential predicament, and creatively transcending that
horror. God would have done this by the ultimate act of rebellion, by slaying the
Almighty and exchanging his supernatural personage with a natural and thus
entropically doomed, yet curiously creative and thus undying corpse. And a mere animal
can do this by imitating that pattern to some degree, at least, participating in the ancient
ascetic tradition.

Finally, I want to ask how all of this ethical and aesthetic talk avoids the naturalistic
fallacy. Recall that this fallacy is to say that a prescription of what we ought to do might
follow logically just from a description of how things are. There is supposed to be, then,
a dichotomy between facts and values. But Darwinism removes this dichotomy, just as it
renders obsolete the naïve distinction between life and non-life. Instead, there are just
simulations of life by spiritless things which are thus, intuitively speaking, neither living
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nor lifeless but undead. If spiritless matter can accomplish the work of the evidently-
absent God, creating all natural forms by mindless evolution and complexification, the
barrier between the logically separate spheres of facts and values is shattered. In a
pantheistic scheme, questions of value arise not just for creatures who are alive in the
technical, biological sense, but for the whole universe which likewise plays at being
alive, albeit with no brain and thus with no mind or intelligence. Hence the Eastern
mystic’s judgment that the whole apparent world is a hideous prison, a diabolical system
of manufacturing and tricking creatures, thus increasing the amount of suffering. Sure,
these ethical and aesthetic judgments are subjective, but they’re likewise subjective
when applied to human patterns of behavior; that is, these judgments all depend not just
on the observed patterns but on the cognitive tools brought to bear in interpreting them.
We instinctively personify what we observe, because we’re social mammals; thus, when
we philosophize, attempting to make a coherent whole out of scientific knowledge and
our everyday experience, we mythologize and rationalize our vain anthropomorphic
projections.

At any rate, the naturalistic fallacy presupposes a Cartesian dualism between facts and
values. That dualism is no longer tenable. Note, though, that those who avail
themselves of this monistic response to the charge of having committed that fallacy, are
all the closer to existential cosmicism, since the metaphysical oneness of everything
provides a basis for condemning what Descartes called the entirely lifeless machine of
the material world. With that judgment in mind, some sort of rebellion against nature is
in order. Hence the need for a viable--as opposed to crudely pseudoscientific or
childishly theistic--postmodern religion.

Conclusion

To summarize, there are facts, symbols and values. The metaphysical facts of nature
are horrifying, and our existential predicament is that reason curses us to discover them
and thus to suffer debilitating angst and alienation. Because we have a biological job to
do, the forces of natural selection save most of us from that fate, by putting blinders
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around our minds, designing our bodies to prefer the straight and narrow path along
which we act as clownish hosts of our genes. We tend to use mental symbols to bind us
to that path and to help us succeed in evolutionary terms while traversing it, surviving,
reproducing, raising a family, and climbing the social ladder. But there’s another, anti-
natural path, which calls for a higher class of interests and ideals, and by “higher” I
mean to say elevated in the hierarchy of complexity, which earns that level aesthetic
praise. The ideal that motivates most symbol-use and intelligent behavior derives from
the undead god whose forces of natural selection are set along the absurd path of
maintaining an endless flow of genes into the future. Most of us adopt that ideal, that
zombie moan of our monstrous god, as sacred, even if we rationalize such primitive
nature worship with a thousand popular delusions. Some of us choose, instead, to
sacrifice their happiness the way the living God would have been forced to, leaving for
dead the repellent parts of themselves, and rebelling--however futilely and to whatever
degree--against the natural order. The ascetic ideal, then, is the aesthetically-inviting
opportunity to create an original level of reality, a cosmic play of rebellion in which
nature’s crowning achievement, the clever ape, tears to shreds the monstrous hand that
feeds it.
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Morality and the Aesthetic Conception of Life

____________________________________________________

In a numerous writings here, I’ve distinguished between moral and aesthetic standards,
and referred to Nietzsche’s argument that slave morality becomes obsolete with the
embarrassment of theism by modern science and that this morality needs to be
replaced by a new, aesthetic conception of the ideal life. But what is the aesthetic
perspective and how is it superior to a moral one?

Morality and the Naturalistic Fallacy

Instead of following Nietzsche’s atheistic reason for abandoning what we think of as

morality, I’d like to give a different one. The problem I have in mind is that morality
comes to suffer inexorably in comparison with scientific knowledge. Here’s how this has
come about. In the first place, morality in the sense of rules for what people ought to do
or to avoid doing, arose in a social context, as people found themselves living in larger
and larger groups (as hunting and farming methods were improved, and so on).
Resolving conflicts by violence, prompted by each individual who deems himself
wronged, would defeat the point of living in society as opposed to the wild, which is
precisely to escape what Hobbes called the “war of all against all” in which each
creature’s life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And so members of society
stipulate certain modes of conduct to govern group behaviour. Note, for example, that
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the Ten Commandments presuppose a set of social circumstances: what’s forbidden is

the killing of another, the stealing of another’s possessions, the worship of other gods,
and what’s prescribed is the honouring of your parents and the performance of the
religious rituals that bind the society together (the Sabbath, for the ancient Jews). In this
respect, morality and religion functioned together, as ways of maintaining social
cohesion.

As cognitive scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out, reason evolved as a way of
measuring status in a social hierarchy, of persuading others in a Machiavellian,
egocentric fashion, as opposed to being a matter of impartial, objective logic or science
for discovering the absolute Truth. Just as religions were terribly biased in favour of
each self-interested tribe, reason was biased in favour of each individual who must
balance the tribe’s interests with his or her own. This state of affairs was eventually
unsettled by human curiosity, which led to the discovery of cognitive methods that
undermined rather than upheld social institutions such as the Catholic Church. With the
ascent of modern science, European rationalists elevated pure Reason as a
precondition of social progress, which is to say that these rationalists duly ridiculed
social conventions and overturned traditions. Modern rationalists learned how nature
actually works and developed technological means of applying that knowledge, which
created modern civilization, typically held, according to the scientistic fallacy, to be an
unqualified improvement on primitive, benighted ways of life.

Shortly after these developments, hyper-rationalists (empiricists, positivists, skeptics)

took modern science to be the standard for all beliefs, which means that, as David
Hume said, nonscientific writings should figuratively if not actually be set to the flames,
including metaphysical and theological texts. With progress in view--which is to say
liberalism in the classic sense, relative to which current “centrist” liberalism is a cover for
postmodern nihilism and a pragmatic ideology for enforcing the oligarchs' control of the
mob--rationalists thus became aware of the startling paradox that while the science-
centered worship of Reason generates social progress at one level by enabling higher
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degrees of happiness, with greater control of natural processes, this progressive society
threatens to destroy itself.

For along with pseudoscience, superstition, and theological dogma, morality appears to
be a set of beliefs not acquired by the approved scientific methods, which is to say
roughly, by observation or by mathematical logic, as Hume put it. As Hume pointed out,
moral statements about how we ought to act don’t follow rationally from scientific
statements about what the natural facts are or from analyses of concepts or definitions.
Just because humans actually want to live together instead of alone in the wild, for
example, doesn’t mean we should live peacefully, respecting our neighbours. All that
follows is the calculation that living peacefully is a more or less effective means of
holding society together, and thus a means of satisfying our desire to preserve society.
But the moral force is lost in this pragmatic translation of a moral imperative. And so
rationalism tends to reduce morality to pragmatism, which applies technoscientific
standards of knowledge-driven human empowerment, to the social sphere. Likewise,
just because we actually stipulate that stealing is wrong and assign a linguistic label to
that concept, doesn’t mean the stipulation is morally right; after all, evil people can
devise a concept for their antisocial purposes and if they’re sufficiently persuasive or
powerful, as in a dictatorship, the stipulation can become conventional (popular). Might
doesn’t make right, nor does popularity.

This is the essence of the naturalistic fallacy, which was discovered due to the hyper-
rationalist’s contrast of modern scientific beliefs (i.e. of certain mental representations
held to be true or false) with any other kind. Scientific statements are justified by
induction, deduction, appeal to the best explanation, or some other rational method,
whereas moral commandments, needed to maintain social order, are unscientific and
thus as suspicious as any anti-progressive dogma. Arguably, the current postmodern
period exhibits the social disharmony and fragmentation that result from greater
awareness of how the liberal’s scientistic notion of progress ironically threatens to
implode so-called advanced societies. Modern noble lies and science-centered myths
no longer enchant; on the contrary, they terrify when their radical implications are
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appreciated. As Nietzsche showed, rationalism destroys theism and morality, which

have always been needed to pacify clever, power-seeking animals like us. Rationalists
such as postmodern liberals attempt to compensate by combining their faith in Reason
with oligarchy-subservient consumerism, as though Nietzsche and Lovecraft had not
already shown that hyper-rationalism, the consistent application of reason in all walks of
life, renders a person insane, not to mention unhappy, and as though the cliché hadn’t
already been disseminated that money can’t buy happiness.

To be sure, modernists proposed other secular defenses of morality besides

pragmatism, such as Kant’s duty-based approach and Bentham’s utilitarianism. In each
case, the name of the game is Scientism and the game is to provide a pseudoscientific
justification of moral judgments, as though any normative statement follows from the
fact that our cognitive faculties work by generalizing (Kant) or from the pretense of
quantifying and calculating moral values such as happiness (Bentham). Because of the
naturalistic fallacy, these secular theories obfuscate or take as self-evident some initial
moral ideal, whether it be duty or happiness, since rational argument alone can’t justify
such an ideal. As for Aristotle’s virtue ethics, his theory relies on the quasi-teleological
notion of biological function, which makes his theory comparable to theistic divine
command theory. In either of the latter cases, we have anti-naturalistic
anthropocentrism, a projection of the human notion of purpose onto the whole of nature.

So much for traditional morality. Note, though, that the problem stems from morality’s
social aspect. The point of moral judgments was to regulate society by offering
incentives to compromise. Instead of preying on each other or acting as vigilantes, we
should strive to be good, to be in the moral right, even if that means we must sacrifice
for the group’s greater well-being. This social function invites reason to replace violence
as the mode of resolving conflicts. Rationalists become radicalized with the Scientific
Revolution, which leads to the discovery of the naturalistic fallacy, which in turn
delegitimizes morality.
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The Aesthetic Perspective

Aesthetics, however, lacks this social function and thus needn’t collapse under its
weight as does morality. Whereas moral rules are about how to behave in a group,
aesthetic judgments are individual reactions to certain qualities. Take, first, the aesthetic
distinction between ugliness and beauty. As the psychologist Rachel Herz shows, in
That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion, we each have a culturally
learned hostility to disgusting sensations, because these tend to remind us of our
mortality of which we’re terrified, and thus we associate them with poisonous foods
against which a universal form of disgust evolved as a warning mechanism. For
example, however politically incorrect this reaction might be, a malformed human body
revolts us because the offending spectacle shows that we’re produced by mindless
natural forces with which we can’t sympathize. Our sense of physical beauty is also
instinctive, evolving not just as the complement of our fear of ugliness, but as a way of
measuring the fitness of a potential mate, given certain outward indicators of health
such as symmetric, average, and youthful facial features and proportionality in waist-hip
ratio. In either case, the individual rather than the group is central to the aesthetic
sense--although indirectly the question of genetic fitness bears on the health of future
generations. Second, there’s the modern aesthetic preference for originality over the
cliché. Again, this distinction is about the individual, not the group--in this case, about
individual achievement; indeed, the ideal of originality is the antisocial one of
overcoming social pressures, including popular standards and all manner of received
wisdom, and daring to be different, to heroically pursue a creative vision.

Now, were you to try to rationally support your preference for beauty or for originality,
entering your judgment as the conclusion of a logical argument or a scientific
experiment, you’d run up against the naturalistic fallacy just as in the case of a moral
judgment. For example, you’d have to cite the fact that we have an inborn distaste for
certain sensations and thus naturally incline to their opposites, and then you’d have to
call a halt to the proceedings since no normative or value-laden statement follows just
from such a factual one. However, the intrusion of reason into the aesthetic sphere is
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arbitrary in a way that it isn’t in the moral one, and so there’s no self-destructive dialectic
in the former as there is in the latter. There’s no need to rationally prove the merit of an
aesthetic preference, just as there’s no need to compare the taste of an apple to that of
an orange. Taking up an aesthetic perspective is just the having of a taste for certain
sensations and a primitive opposition to others, the putting aside of our empirical
understanding of something as we attend to its surface features and to their subjective
impact on us; thus we distinguish between beauty and ugliness. In the case of clichés,
we hope for progress in the future and, buoyed by the undeniable advances in science
and technology, we’re ashamed of backwards institutions that bind geniuses in red tape;
we prefer originality as a sign of insight or vision and we loathe cliché as an indicator of
somnolence.

How Aesthetics Can Replace Morality

How, then, does aesthetics bear on morality? Well, if we put aside the preoccupation
with the goal of unifying society, we can recover moral distinctions in aesthetic terms.
Take, for example, the prohibition of parasitic behaviour, including murder, theft, rape,
and so on. All such behaviours are viscerally disgusting, if nothing else, because they
involve violence or sadden the victim, and the sight of blood, tears, or facial expressions
of pain alert us to our mortality and thus arouse our primal fear of death. Moreover,
parasitic behaviour counts as clichéd, because it blindly follows low-level natural law. A
parasitic person resorts to trickery, calculating, in effect, that he can preserve his genes
best by exploiting the docility of those who play by society’s rules, if only the parasite is
sufficiently sneaky to avoid getting caught. More generally, parasitism follows the iron-
clad biological principle that the vicious abuse the docile.

What’s original, morally speaking? One answer seems to be this, rebellion against
nature, as demonstrated by mystical ascetics and by so-called omegas (“dysfunctional,”
antisocial drop-outs). Of course, defined broadly enough, everything in the universe is
natural, so there’s no unnatural behaviour. But the freedom to refuse to play the
evolutionary game, on some level at least, is a surprising development, placing personal
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integrity and a unique sense of propriety above biological or social function. Again,
defined broadly, everything that happens in society, including the partial or complete
dropping out thereof, fulfills some social role. But in a more interesting sense, ascetics,
drop-outs, or at least jaded and apathetic postmodernists are socially dysfunctional,
threatening social collapse with their skepticism and misanthropy, because they’re
disenchanted with the promise of what they regard as inauthentic happiness from the
assimilation of consensus reality. Instead of succumbing to pressures from biological
urges or from the Matrix of conventional wisdom, these rebels dare to risk public
disapproval and to sacrifice those pleasures that require ignorance, opposing the whole
world like Job who called God down from his throne to account for the apparent injustice
within Creation.

This latter biblical allusion shows the need to distinguish between what we might call
theological and philosophical aesthetics. The story of Job is theological in that the bulk
of it assumes the exoteric, anthropocentric perspective, according to which there’s a
personal cause of nature who can be blamed in the first place. The story ends with a
hint of the esoteric, philosophical viewpoint, namely that of mysterianism or cosmicism,
according to which people aren’t central to the universe. Thus, God humiliates Job by
insulting him in his littleness and in his ignorance of the inhuman plan that any being
capable of creating the cosmos would likely devise. Of course, a full-blown cosmicist
tale, such as one penned by H. P. Lovecraft, would dispense with a personal First
Cause altogether and really rub our noses in our cosmic insignificance.

I raise this point because a modern aesthetic reconstruction of morality should value
originality, identifying the latter with the progressive genius that artistically overcomes
the horror of appreciating our existential predicament. A traditional, theological
reconstruction, however, might also celebrate originality while defining the latter as
anything made in God’s image, in which case moral behaviour becomes that which is
godlike. But originality isn’t simply rarity. The problem with a theological conception of
our creativity is that this creativity is highly limited since we must each conform to God’s
revealed plan. Even God’s creativity is often thought to be limited by his moral nature.
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At any rate, the theological notion of originality is opposed to the modern one, since the
latter always allows for the possibility that contravening a tradition is progressive.

The point, then, is that the aesthetic distinction between originality and cliché captures
the difference between heroic independence and conformity, which in turn can be used
to reconstruct basic moral values. This doesn’t mean that a shift from a moral to an
aesthetic perspective on normative questions is arbitrary or superficially semantic. On
the contrary, morality’s social context means that someone who thinks in (theologically
or scientistically) moral terms will be partial to conservative values, whereas someone
with a modern aesthetic perspective, at least, favours liberal, progressive, and indeed
antisocial ones. This isn’t to say that an aesthetic moralist preys on the traditional one,
since as I said, the aesthetic ideal precludes predatory behaviour. But unlike morality,
aesthetics also devalues conformity and compromise for group welfare; it’s just that,
while a predator refuses to compromise when satisfying his base, clichéd and thus
aesthetically repellent desires, an aesthetic moralist prioritizes his personal pursuit of a
creative vision above any need for moderation for the sake of preserving socially useful
delusions.

To see how this works, let’s take the example of altruism. Morally speaking,
selflessness is justified because God, Reason, or natural function commands it. Either
way, there’s a moral rule which everyone in society needs to follow. This framework
breaks down with the rise of science, once scientific knowledge came to be contrasted
with all other contenders; in particular, the rational defenses of moral imperatives
convince no one but cloistered academic philosophers, and the actual reigning values in
a postmodern capitalistic society aren’t just antisocial; they’re the grim social Darwinian
preconceptions of vain, duped consumers and of sociopathic oligarchs. The public
outcry against Wall Street stems not from moral opposition but from jealousy or from
fear of being the victim rather than the ruthless winner in the prevailing wild competition
between selfish agents.
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So what would the aesthetic moralist, which is to say someone who replaces moral with
aesthetic reasoning, say about altruism? On the one hand, self-sacrifice for someone
else’s benefit can be clichéd, especially if it follows straightforwardly from evolutionary
theory. Moreover, theistically motivated charity is hideous when it brings to mind the
thought of God, the latter being a transparent strategy for dealing with the fear of our
mortality. And yet the value of helping others follows from the ideal of originality when
the latter is construed as that of rebellion. After all, the motivation for avoiding clichés,
for being creative rather than conforming, is disgust for what passes for normal. There
would be no reason to progress were the present state of affairs ideal, and it’s because
someone with an artistic frame of mind is appalled by so much in nature that he or she
is driven to create something superior. But someone who’s antagonistic to so much of
what’s normal is bound to pity fellow victims of those commonplace abuses, and that
pity will motivate altruism. So whether the aesthetic defense of moral values preserves
altruism depends on how the altruistic act is motivated and performed.

Another difference between the moralistic and the aesthetic approach to how we should
live is found in the general outlooks. A moralist views a person as a follower of socially
useful rules. Modern morality is scientistic and so obscures the difference between a
rule and a natural law, giving morality the appearance of being scientific. By contrast, an
aesthetic moralist sympathizes with a person as a victim of some degree of suffering
who copes best by interpreting her actions as artworks. Artists are known for their civil
disobedience, but when moral values are understood as merely aesthetic, all human
endeavours are viewed from an artistic perspective. At her best, an artist is a creative
genius, obeying not political compromises, but her inner voice, her flashes of insight that
provide her a vision of what ought to be.

This is the essence of personal and social progress: such progress depends not on the
technoscientific standard of control, but on faith in the rightness of inspired novelty, on
the prospect that an uplifting and comforting home for poor humans can emerge even in
a universe of horribly undead natural forces. By elevating society above the individual,
the moralist restrains genius, turning the individual into a conformist. (Even Kant, who
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did much to illuminate human autonomy, says in effect that the individual is bound by
the dictates of the general form of Reason which is common to everyone.) Because our
existential situation is absurd and tragic, blind obedience ultimately to the avoidable
evolutionary processes that set the stage for our suffering is as disgraceful as the
treachery of those Jewish kapos who gained favour with the Nazis by collaborating with
them in concentration camps. The wrongness of conforming to natural norms, which
traditional moral rules tend to rationalize, is perceivable from an all-encompassing
aesthetic perspective, from the sense that compromising with society against your inner
creative promptings is distasteful.
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Case Studies of Aesthetic Morality: Abortion and Gay Marriage

____________________________________________________

In “Morality and Aesthetics,” I argue that an aesthetic conception of what we ought to do

should replace the moral view, since morality is as defunct as exoteric theism. The
aesthetic conception includes the distinctions between ugliness and beauty, and
between cliché and originality. The former distinction identifies ugliness as a startling
reminder of our existential situation, including our mortality which horrifies us. The latter
one amounts to the difference between conformity and rebellion, prescribing that we
should resist degrading natural processes and social traditions instead of succumbing to
them with no creative vision. From a broader aesthetic standpoint, each side of an issue
should be appraised according to artistic standards, and then a judgment should be
made as to which side is aesthetically preferable, just as though the appraiser were
evaluating two paintings side-by-side in a gallery. To clarify further how the aesthetic
norms would work outside of aesthetics proper (painting, sculpture, music, etc), I’d like
to apply what I said to two hot-button issues: abortion and gay marriage.

The Mediocre Art of the Pro-life and Pro-choice Positions

According to what I’ll call the Rule of Infotainment’s Antithetical Relation to Philosophy,
the more a philosophical issue appears in the news, the more the discussion of that
issue is characterized by confusion. There are at least two reasons for this. First, when
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an issue is discussed not just once but repeatedly in the mainstream media, especially
on the American 24-hour cable news stations (Fox, MSNBC, CNN), this indicates a high
public interest in the issue, but since the majority are opposed to, or ignorant of,
philosophical standards of argument, those people will degrade the discussion with their
biases and fallacies. To please their audience, the news stations will dutifully reflect the
public’s cognitive deficiencies, because of the second reason which is the following. As
is well-known, the corporate media are currently in the business mainly of entertaining
rather than investigating or educating, and so the media are more interested in pleasing
the intellectually lazy members of the public than in challenging them with rigorous
analyses. Both abortion and gay marriage are highly controversial and thus popular
subjects of conversation, especially in socially conservative places like the US, which
means that, as these issues are sliced and diced on the major cable news shows, the
quality of the public discussion of them is bound to be appalling. This is certainly the
case regarding abortion.

The moral issue of abortion is whether parents should be able to terminate their fetus or
whether the fetus has the right to live, in which case abortion amounts to murder. Now,
the expression “pro-life” is an abuse of language, one which is more clumsy than bold
since the abuse is unintentional. Obviously, the issue isn’t as general as the question of
life or death, since most of the anti-abortion folks are in favour of killing nonhuman
animals for food and don’t contend that all animals have a moral right to live. Even the
slogan “pro human life” would be a misnomer, since the anti-abortion side tends to
favour war and capital punishment. The slogan “pro innocent human life” would be
counterproductive, since it would call attention to the fact that whatever you think of a
fetus, it’s far too early to speak of whether a person has lived well or badly, before the
person has done anything. A fetus isn’t innocent as much as morally neutral, since the
fetus could develop into a saint or into an evil-doer.

The reason that one side nevertheless favours the slogan “pro-life” appears to be that
this slogan (very superficially) handles the primary retort which is stunningly hardly ever
heard in the mainstream media. This retort is that a fetus isn’t a person, that is, a
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member of the species Homo sapiens--especially if we’re talking about the first trimester
when the vast majority of abortions are performed in the US. The anti-abortion crowd
attempts to get around this fact by pretending that the issue is only whether a fetus is
alive in general--which it may well be in a biological sense, if something as simple as a
virus is considered thusly alive. Pro-lifers then equivocate, shifting from talk of life to talk
of human life, leaping to the conclusion that because a fetus is biologically alive (like a
virus), the fetus has the right to live (like a human person). Because this fallacy is here
so recklessly committed, it calls to mind our irrational nature and our slavery to instinct,
to genetic manipulation, and to social pressures, which in turn remind us of our
existential predicament.

Thus, the so-called pro-life side is hideous to look upon. Their hyperbolic outcries at
rallies, as well as the evasive talking-points of their professional defenders are like so
many grating noises from a fingernail running down a chalkboard. Their placards
depicting bloody infants are shamefully irrelevant, and because those placards are
created out of ignorance of the point at which most abortions occur, what’s shameful is
the pro-lifers’ lack of humility, given that we’re all bound to so err at times because of
our animal nature. That is to say, the anti-abortion side is guilty of the cliché of being
overwhelmed by natural and social forces instead of artistically using or rebelling
against them, even if only with a trace of humility or shame.

However, the anti-abortion side makes a comeback with its theistic response that even
a first trimester fetus is a human person, with the right to live, because this fetus is
supernaturally linked to an immaterial spirit. At first glance, the theistic invention of the
immortal spirit is a creative response to the fact of natural death. However, there’s a
difference between art and delusion. Art should benefit the user by uplifting her,
enabling her to overcome obstacles by opening up an elevated perspective. Delusions,
or fantasies that invite a retreat rather than a transformation of natural reality, are traps
that stultify rather than dignify the victim. Whether theism is aesthetically praiseworthy
or delusory is a big question I won’t try to answer here. Theism’s certainly irrational, but
that doesn’t settle the matter. At any rate, the artistic merit of inventing the spirit (or of
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interpreting consciousness as being spiritual in the theistic sense) and then of assigning
this essence of personhood to a speck of cells is questionable. The many fallacies
sustaining theistic notions do count against theism’s artistic value, for the above reason
regarding cliché. But theistic religion has clearly been crucial to social cohesion for
thousands of years. It’s possible that theism once had artistic merit but that presently
theism functions as a delusion, in which case the theistic notion of personhood wouldn’t
save the pro-life position, after all, aesthetically speaking.

What of the so-called pro-choice side? “Pro-choice” is an interesting label since it calls
attention to a weakness of the argument in favour of the choice to abort. The pro-choice
side says that since a first trimester fetus isn’t a person but merely part of the woman’s
body, the woman, together with her partner, have the right to choose what to do with
that body part. The opponent sometimes replies that even if no fetus is actually a full-
grown person, every fetus is potentially one. The pro-choicer then sometimes attempts
to parody this reply by saying that sperm released from masturbation is potentially a
person and so the pro-life crowd should be just as opposed to masturbation, which
would be absurd.

But this parody doesn’t work, because the probabilities involved in the two cases differ
by orders of magnitude: when one of the millions of sperm cells inseminates an egg and
the process of conception begins, so much work has been accomplished, including the
finding of a mate and the establishment of a pair bond, that the probability is very high
that the fetus would develop into a person--short of a spontaneous or artificial abortion;
biology deals in ceteris paribus laws, after all. Because of this high probability, a fetus is
properly regarded as an early stage of the fully-formed animal. But masturbation has no
such natural connection to conception; sperm by itself obviously won’t miraculously
become a person. The slogan “pro-choice,” then, concedes this point about the fetus’s
special status, since were the fetus more like sperm by itself, there would be no choice,
in the sense of a hard decision, of what to do with the fetus. It’s only because a fetus will
very probably become a person that the potential parents face a decision of which
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future to create, the one that includes or excludes an additional person. The moral
question, then, is whether personhood extends to this still-early stage of a person.

Consider this analogy. A woman is stabbed to death while she slumbers. Is that
murder? Well, the victim isn’t then actually using the faculties that make her a person
with moral rights, because she’s unconscious while she sleeps. But because sleep is a
normal recurrence for a person, the probability is extremely high that were she not then
stabbed, she would have awoken and behaved as a semi-rational, free, and conscious
person like anyone else. Granted, the probability is higher in the connection between
sleeping and waking than in the development of a fetus into a full-grown human, since
many factors can intervene between the stages in the latter process. But do the
probabilities here differ by orders of magnitude? Just as there are natural abortions of
fetuses, a person can die naturally in her sleep. Broadly speaking, though, just as a
sleeper will very probably awaken and act as a person who has moral rights, if anything
does, so too a first trimester human fetus (likewise a part of a process) will very
probably become a person, albeit after a number of years rather than hours. If killing a
sleeper is murder, why isn’t killing a human fetus?

Such are the moral quandaries which are seldom aired in canned mass media
presentations of the abortion issue. But I raise them here only to get at the aesthetic
merit of the pro-choice position. Given that the masturbation parody of the point about
potential personhood is spurious, and thus that the choice as to whether to abort the
fetus is at the very least a grave decision, if not an act of murder, whether abortion is
original or clichéd, superficially appealing or off-putting, depends on how the choice is
made. If a fetus is aborted because the woman is raped and doesn’t want to bear the
rapist’s child, the act of abortion resists the evolutionary forces that compel the beastly
male to prey on the weak and to spread his genes. That resistance is novel, a middle
finger surprisingly held up to the face of Mother Nature, a condemnation of natural
suffering by a self-aware being and a refusal to submit to the forces that impose that
suffering. That rebellion is of the essence of modern art.
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But suppose, as is more likely the case, the parents undertake the abortion with little or
no appreciation of the situation’s gravity, aborting the fetus as though undergoing
cosmetic surgery on a whim. Were abortion the tail-end of a process of promiscuous
sex, the act of abortion would be no such creative rebellion against oppressive forces;
on the contrary, the act would conform to one of the most prevalent patterns in human
life, being a technological enabler of a degrading lifestyle, like birth control. Of course,
individualistic societies have social revolutions which are thought to bestow rights on
men and women to do what they like as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. So the
received wisdom in liberal, modern societies is that if people choose to have a lot of
sex, they’re perfectly entitled. And so they might well morally be were it not for the fact
that morality is bunk, as determined by the same self-destructive naturalistic perspective
that ushers in the social revolutions in question. Looked at aesthetically, sex is
embarrassing, as I argue elsewhere. Those proud feminists who see no shame in
having abortions should be as open about their sex lives to which birth control and
abortion are only accomplices. When someone is proud of the freedom to abort a fetus,
but secretive about the details of his or her sex life, that person’s suffering from
cognitive dissonance. If you’re secretly ashamed of humping like an animal, like a
puppet of mindless genes that perpetuate themselves as the undead god which is the
natural cosmos unfolds to some inhuman end, you should be just as ashamed of, or at
least worried about, the enablers of sex.

To clarify, my point isn’t remotely that birth control or abortion should be banned. I’m
saying just that abortion can be as conformist and thus as aesthetically unappealing as
sex. When an art critic pans a work of art, the critic doesn’t try to ban the artist from
producing art. Rather, the critic lays out her reasons and lets others decide what to
think. Both moral and aesthetic values are separate from legal responsibility. Whether
action should be taken against anyone depends on legal institutions which are
intertwined as much with politics as with moral traditions. Moral or aesthetic values
determine how we live our private lives, and so just because an act is morally or
aesthetically dubious doesn’t mean there should be any legal or other public
consequence. On the contrary, the more natural and thus inhumane a society, the
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greater the discrepancy between the results of its legal system and the moral or
aesthetic recommendations.

What, though, is my final analysis of the two positions? Were the pro-life and pro-choice
stances reduced to works of art, and were I to compare them, side-by-side in a gallery,
as it were, I’d be unmoved by either of them since in neither case are the aesthetic
ideals unambiguously met. Neither stance inspires me with confidence that progress
can be made in alleviating our dismal condition. Granted, the pro-choice position is less
objectionable, but mediocre art is closer to failure than to success. One of the more
aesthetically appealing options is asceticism, which bypasses the whole issue.

Dubious Arguments Against Gay Marriage

What of the current hot topic of gay marriage? Once again, I’ll summarize the moral
arguments and then aesthetically evaluate them. From a modern perspective, there is
no issue of homosexuality or of gay marriage. As long as gays, lesbians, and others
with unusual sexual orientations are full-fledged people, capable of rational decision-
making, and they don’t harm anyone else by having long-term relationships capable of
being legally regulated, the modern verdict is surely that they have the right to marry.

Opponents say that when homosexuals adopt and raise children, the children are
harmed by not having a female and a male for parents. This is unlikely, though, since
the practice of raising a child in a household dominated by a single mother and a father
is uncommon in human history; more commonly, children have been raised by the
extended family or by the man’s multiple wives, so that the child’s impression of her
parents has been of a small community rather than just of mother and father figures. For
thousands of years, humans have been serially monogamous or, in most cases,
polygamous. Only in industrially advanced societies, in which communities are
fragmented and families are cut off and dehumanized by their local portals into the
world of electronic hallucinations, beamed from their TVs, computer screens, and
handheld devices, has the Western social breakdown been rationalized with the notion
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that a child should be reared primarily by one man and one woman. Half of Western
marriages end in divorce; teens in impoverished Western communities have
unprotected sex at ever-younger ages; and wealthier individuals follow the European
model of virtually arranging marriages to forge economic alliances and of indulging in
affairs out of lust. Conservatives hold up the 1950s American fantasy of the nuclear
family as the solution, whereas this fantasy is a source of the problem because it runs
against the most powerful instincts.

Another argument against gay marriage is that such marriage would cheapen the
heterosexual institution and further degrade the social fabric. In advanced Western
countries like the US, this argument is made most frequently by conservatives who live
under rocks, unaware of the postmodern state of affairs in which the younger
generations are hyper-skeptical of everything under the sun, including marriage. When
they do get married at all, rather than just shacking, younger Westerners tend to get
married for the legal benefits, not out of respect for the saccharine metanarratives spun
around the institution of marriage in romantic comedies or in ads for wedding dresses
and so forth. On the contrary, just as Jesus’ alleged birthday has been taken over by
businesses with purely commercial interests, the secular marriage industry is a
thoroughly commercial affair. A marriage is an excuse to throw a huge, fabulously
expensive party, and the materialistic pleasures of weddings would be enjoyable by the
relatives, friends, and associates regardless of the married couple’s sexual orientation.

No, the true source of opposition to gay marriage is religious. The prejudice in question
derives from the tribal societies that produced the Bible and the Koran and has
memetically made its way to present-day ignoramuses who know half as much about
their own holy scriptures as does the average atheist. Nevertheless, the fact is that the
Torah, Paul’s letters, and the Koran contain statements that are unequivocally opposed
to homosexual sex. Moreover, the Genesis account of Creation, common to the main
monotheistic religions, allegedly lays out God’s model for human social relations: God
created Adam and then he created Eve to alleviate Adam’s loneliness (“It is not good for
the man to be alone” (Gen.2:18), as Yahweh says), giving the impression that men and
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women are supposed to be sexually intimate just with each other, leaving no room for
homosexuality.

The embarrassing weaknesses of this line of argument are as shockingly numerous as

are the stars in a clear night sky. First, as Jack Miles shows in God: A Biography, the
notion that the Hebrew Bible presents God as a figure who even has a clue what he’s
doing from the outset, let alone as an omniscient mastermind who reveals a flawless life
manual for humanity, is woefully wrongheaded and refuted by nearly every biblical line.
Take, for example, the creation of Adam and Eve. God makes Adam first, then Adam
gets lonely, and God learns from this unsatisfactory result of his initial handiwork that
he’d better improve on what he’s made, and so he creates Eve. Thus, God didn’t always
have in mind the ideal of heterosexual union. Then, of course, the heterosexual pairing
of Adam and Eve proves self-destructive, as the two get entangled in intrigue with the
serpent, and God punishes them for their evidently flawed relationship, by condemning
them to a harsher life. What this means is that the alleged biblical blueprint for human
sexual relations is nothing of the kind; if anything, what we learn from Genesis is that
men and women shouldn’t live together, that the ideal human relationship--if there is
such a thing--is something God hadn’t conceived of when he first populated Eden with
people.

As for Leviticus, Christians can naturally exploit those biblical death threats against
homosexuals only with extreme prejudice and with cynical contempt for the bulk of the
Bible, since they ignore the comparable laws against blasphemy, apostasy, witchcraft,
adultery, and so on. On the one hand, Christians say that Jesus’ life and death made
Judaism obsolete; on the other, they cherry-pick useful passages from the Jewish
scriptures, purely for political reasons (in the US, the culture war distracts Republicans
from their Party’s key role in maintaining the American oligarchy). These conservative
Christians are thus much like the Pharisees whom Jesus condemned for being
preoccupied with their position in earthly hierarchies. As for Paul’s letters, I explain why
most Christians hold his teachings to be on equal ground with Jesus’, in “Christian
Chutzpah.” Jesus was a Gnostic, Essenic hippie who was opposed to what are now
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called “family values,” preferring asceticism which precludes such sexual controversies
as gay marriage.

Of course, the more obvious--and for more consistently-rational people, decisive--

objection to the exoteric scriptural influence on any present-day social phenomenon is
that there’s no good reason whatsoever to defer now to the opinions of Iron Age priests,
fishermen, and raving lunatics. If the Jewish and Christian conservative “thought” is that
social relations were ideal thousands of years ago, which is why we should model our
society on that of the ancient Israelites’, why don’t these conservatives emigrate from
modern nations like Israel or the US to impoverished, premodern zones like
Afghanistan, Pakistan or large parts of India or China? These so-called conservatives
want to have it both ways, taking advantage of the technoscientific fruits of modernism
and longing for archaic social arrangements. But conservatives are barred from fairly
having it thus, since technoscientific progress doesn’t happen in such tribal, oppressive
societies. Witness much of the Muslim world, which is consistently “conservative,” or
backward-looking, and duly impoverished for lack of modern advances.

Muslim conservatives at least have a modicum of intellectual integrity on their side when
they rage against homosexuality. Mind you, the refutation of their religious arguments
against gay marriage can come in the form of a finger pointed at the squalor of their
living conditions, together with the following sort of rebuke. “If your social conservatism
is so ideal for humanity, having been revealed by God, why is the more secular and
liberal standard of living in the West so much higher than that in socially conservative
Muslim countries? Why are modern secularists so much happier than impoverished
Muslims who have memorized the Koran and who follow it to the letter, bringing them
little more than a desert wasteland ruled by opulent Middle Eastern dictators? Sure,
these rulers are often supported by secular Western powers, but the point remains that
God would had to have foreseen that strict Islamic societies would be so easily
conquered by modern liberal ones. For all the problems with modernity, the evidence on
the ground is that, if anything, God favours liberal secularism, not Islamic orthodoxy,
which is why Muslims are currently so frustrated that they riot at the drop of a hat.”
 558

So much for the religious arguments against homosexual relationships. One final
objection before I turn to the aesthetic evaluation: social conservatives tend to conflate
biological with social laws, assuming both that God created nature, in which case
biological functions are normative, and that homosexuality is biologically dysfunctional.
The pseudoscientific conclusion is that gay marriage is wrong because it’s unnatural. I’ll
be brief with this. First, there’s homosexuality, as well as all manner of sexual
perversions, elsewhere in nature. See, for example, the recently released 1910 records
on the depraved acts of certain penguins, reported on Jerry Coyne’s blog, Why
Evolution is True. In a moment I’ll come to the reason for the difference between the
repressed conservative’s naïve outlook on sexuality and the reality of life in the wild.
Second, natural laws aren’t prescriptions and so biological “functions” aren’t normative.
The exoteric theistic conception of the ultimate creative force as personal is strictly for
children or for adults who will be manipulated as children by wily demagogues. Thus,
whatever the natural status of homosexuality, biology has no implications for how
people should live; moreover, exoteric theology is incompatible with evolutionary
biology, especially at the epistemological level.

Homophobia as an Aesthetic Judgment

What, though, is the natural status of homosexuality? This question brings me to the
main aesthetic point I want to make about gay marriage. From all of the above, it follows
that opposition to gay marriage is repugnant because the blatant cognitive defects of
that opposition indicate our smallness in the universe; any creatures who could reason
so poorly must be fodder for natural forces, and the social conservative’s arguments
against homosexuality should thus be panned for reminding us of that sad fact about
our position in nature.

But any headway a proponent of gay rights makes by so refuting the objections is
undone by the vacuity of moral argumentation in the postmodern context. As for the
aesthetic standing of homosexuality, then, the problem is that even though the
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abnormality of homosexuality doesn’t make this orientation immoral, this abnormality

may leave the impression that this orientation is ugly. Now, gays can be admired for
trying to improve their sociopolitical situation, for overcoming the stigma which people
attach to homosexuality. Perhaps the notion of Gay Pride is politically useful, to prevent
the abuse of gay people at the hands of so-called homophobic bullies. Gay Pride
parades and the prevalence of gay characters in sitcoms and movies have helped to
normalize those with abnormal sexual orientations. Even were homophobia a natural
and aesthetically telling reaction, this reaction would go too far were it to lead to the
assault or murder of gays--and it has so led. As I said above, I’m not addressing here
the question of legal rights. Legally, gays can obtain the right to marry if they can
empower lawmakers to write the appropriate laws. My issue here is the aesthetic status
of gay marriage.

The aesthetic problem I see with homosexuality is that the political strategies that seem
necessary to improve the gay person’s precarious position in heterosexual society run
counter to a realistic appreciation of how homosexuality exacerbates our existential
predicament. In evolutionary terms, there may be a complicated story about how this
abnormal sexual orientation is naturally selected, whether because gays somehow
increase the fitness of certain heterosexual people’s genes or because homosexuality is
a byproduct of some naturally selected trait. Either way, what’s evidently happened is
that in the case of our species, natural forces have thrown together a majority of
heterosexuals and a minority of homosexuals, supplying the former with a powerful
instinct to favour heterosexual unions for the sake of spreading genes, and this instinct
causes the oppression of gays. My question is whether this natural process is
aesthetically pleasing or off-putting, and I suspect that the answer for most people is the
latter.

This doesn’t mean that gays should stop fighting for their legal rights. But I do think
much of the hostility to Gay Pride parades and to any public flaunting of gay sexuality
stems from this negative aesthetic reaction to gay people’s apparent delusional
celebration of their sexuality. Again, I understand how this celebration can politically
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empower the gay community, but it seems to have the unintended consequence of
trivializing homosexuality’s existential significance. In short, gay people protest too
much: when they deliriously revel in their sexuality, they act as though they had not
been cursed, as it were, by mindless yet undead, naturally creative forces, to square off
against biochemically-biased heterosexuals, for precisely no greater rhyme or reason.

It’s well and good to exercise willpower in the Nietzschean fashion, to overcome
obstacles, putting on a brave face and affirming harsh facts. But this existential battle
requires in the first place a frank, no-nonsense assessment of where you naturally
stand. In all cases, that assessment causes angst and horror, because our natural
situation is absurd and tragic. How we creatively improve on our existential situation
proceeds from that point, but I fear that those with minority sexual orientations skip the
existential reckoning with their lot and leap to baseless enthusiasm. Perhaps they’re
wise to do so to prevent the victimization of gay people, but all delusions are naturally
off-putting. The paradigmatic delusion is the insane person’s which indicates a
fundamental detachment from reality and an escape into an imaginary world that
doesn’t redeem itself by enabling an uplifting transformation of the real one. To the
extent that Gay Pride resembles that sort of delusion and gay marriage is made
possible by that sociopolitical movement, gay marriage is marred, aesthetically
speaking.
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Comedy and Existential Cosmicism

____________________________________________________

In “Inkling of an Unembarrassing Postmodern Religion,” I suggest that a certain sense

of humour is needed to sustain a naturalistic spiritual perspective, one that’s viable
despite modern science’s disenchantment of the world. But what is comedy and how is
it relevant to existential cosmicism? I’ll address these questions in order.

What is Comedy?

There are several types of comedy, but the relevant one has been explained as an
instinctive response to the perception of cognitive incongruity. When a concept is used
to make sense of some real situation, but the concept doesn’t fit, there’s pleasure in
recognizing and rectifying the disharmony by supplying the appropriate concept. This is
the basis of irony, for example. Irony is a discrepancy between intended and literal
meaning. For example, suppose a dog owner is worried that his dog will bite people, so
he muzzles the dog when walking him, but then during the walk the dog owner is
mugged and the dog is rendered useless for defense. The owner intends to protect
bystanders and ultimately himself from the repercussions were his dog to harm
someone, since he would be responsible. But what the owner effectively does is harm
himself, by preventing his dog from attacking someone who should be attacked. (This
example is derived from a Sergio Aragones cartoon.) So the owner’s thought about
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walking his dog, that he’s being a responsible owner for protecting public safety, doesn’t
fit the facts of the situation he finds himself in. This sort of story is amusing, because in
recognizing the incongruity we see both the mistake and the correct way of thinking
about what happens: we recognize the dog owner’s faulty, doomed conception of what
he’s doing, and we add the correct conception, which is that by muzzling his dog the
owner unknowingly exerts much effort in sabotaging his welfare.

In his book, On the Problem of the Comic, Peter Marteinson develops the Incongruity
Theory, explaining that laughter restores the anthropomorphic hallucination of the world,
by distracting us from situations that demonstrate the world’s impersonality. Normally,
he says, we project social categories onto nature, personifying the world so that we feel
comfortable in it, treating the wilderness as society’s mere backyard, as it were. The
alternative is to worry about whether a horrible mistake has been made in some cosmic
boardroom, when creatures like us evolve who are predisposed to seek the comfort of
social belonging but who are intelligent enough to discover that they’re surrounded on
all sides by alien territories that stretch to infinity, by the entire natural universe outside
of our artificial dwellings.

A humourous situation arises when either natural facts disprove our anthropocentric
metaphors, which Marteinson calls a process of Deculturation, or one such metaphor
conflicts with another, which he calls Relativization. Returning to the dog owner, by
muzzling his dog he assumes he’s surrounded by civilized people who will appreciate
his safety precautions, whereas that’s proven to be a presumption by the existence of a
parasite who preys on society. The optimistic expectation is rendered dubious by its
conflict with natural reality. Relativization would be apparent from the clash between
social conventions: in some cultures dogs are pets, whereas in others they’re eaten or
used in combat sports. When we appreciate that societies have conflicting conventions
for personifying nature, we suspect that our culture is arbitrary and worthless--at least
from most foreign perspectives.
 563

Either way, the anthropomorphic view of the world is unsettled. However, laughter
rescues us from anxiety by causing us to forget the conflict that threatens the
contentment we feel from the childlike enchantments we cast on the world. Laughter
returns us to Eden, to a childlike conception of nature in which the self isn’t ruthlessly
distinguished from the rest of the world; instead, we project our psychological attributes
onto what modern science shows are impersonal forces and processes. As indicated in
the Genesis myth, in conceptualizing or “naming” things, we gain power over them in
that we lose fear of their otherness by bringing to bear the brain’s power of associative
thinking; that is, we metaphorically compare anything in the world to what we’re most
comfortable with, namely our conscious selves. When the world shakes us from this
dream world, from this mass hallucination or Matrix that sustains our beastly
preoccupations with procreation and personal happiness, and thus our enslavement to
our genetic program, we’re initially caught between a dark existential reaction and the
comedic, reassuring one. We see that our naïve personifications of the world falsify
natural reality, but instead of succumbing to horror or angst, we immediately reach for
the cure: we laugh the fear away.

The staccato beat and the ups and downs of pitch in laughter seem to express the role
of comedy in drawing us away from a constant threat. A humourous situation is one in
which we’re free to go back and forth between the mystical, scientific, objective view
from nowhere, which doesn’t indulge in childish enchantment of nature, and the
massively metaphorical perspective with its spillover socialization. The pleasure of
laughter is the experience of being easily, cheaply rescued, of feeling invulnerable and
in command. The world forces us to doubt the veracity of our anthropomorphic
projections, by deviating from our expectations or preferences, and we appreciate the
difference between the subjective and objective conceptions, but we restore the
subjective one, escaping from the philosophy-induced miseries of living with nature’s
inhumanity, with no illusions. We do this by finding humour in the difference between
the humanized and the alien worlds; we make fun of the incongruity instead of
dispensing with our folk metaphors; we laugh, and the laughter is like the song of the
Pied Piper, which leads children back to the cave of ignorance.
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Gallows Humour and Existential Cosmicism

The philosophical relevance of this kind of comedy should be clear. Laughter typically
distracts us so that we can instinctively reintegrate our anthropocentric metaphors with
natural reality. This prevents an outbreak of philosophical awakening. Indeed, the
modern, Scientistic Enlightenment is followed by postmodern trivialization and satire. In
the postmodern frame of mind, we mock the absurdities and tragedies that follow from
science’s demolition of the metaphors that keep us happy and productive, just as on the
micro scale, an individual defensively laughs when the undead cosmos, which is the
mindlessly creative universe, casts off the mask we hold over its horribly alien face.

Why, then, do I say that laughter has a positive role in a viable naturalistic religion, that
is, in a religion that doesn’t effectively advocate a retreat to delusion like all exoteric
branches of theism? I distinguish between delusion-reinforcing comedy, which is
opposed to noble spirituality, and grim, gallows humour, the sort we might imagine
displayed at the moment of our species’ extinction as depicted by Olaf Stapledon at the
end of Last and First Men. As explained above, the first type of humour soothes our
nerves as a prelude to restoring the degrading, childlike viewpoint. But the second type
soothes only to permit us to live heroically with the disenchanted outlook. In the first
case, comedy is an ignoble lie that distracts to restore a false sense of security, but in
the second case comedy is a noble lie that gives the weary cosmicist a break from
contemplating cosmic undeadness. The default mindset in bad humour is defined by the
mainstream Matrix, by the conventions that re-enchant nature with happy-talk and
fantasies of personification, whereas the default mindset in good humour is the
humiliating, ethically and aesthetically superior philosophical one that so taxes an
outcast, loser, or other omega person that she makes ironic use of irony, laughing
wistfully to preserve that which ordinary humour represses, which is the mystical
viewpoint.
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Both kinds of humour are means of escaping from the horror of impersonal cosmic
reality, but admirable humour requires visceral hostility to delusions and the will to rest
from ennobling philosophical contemplation only as needed to return to the burden in
the long run. With those philosophical commitments in the background, much light can
be made of our existential predicament, and this humour at our expense is like a
bagpipes tune played on the field of war, to inspire the troops to face their doom with
honour. Grim humour works the same as the ordinary kind, except that instead of
numbing us to the mismatch between our mainstream ways of thinking and the world’s
manifest inhumanity, grim laughter is bittersweet and reminds us instead of our mission
as creative rebels: to understand our position within the undead god and to artistically
make the best of it.
 566

Philosophy and Social Engineering

____________________________________________________

Most of what’s said in public consists of various kinds of lies, including half-truths, spin-
doctoring, lies of omission, self-delusions, exaggerations, equivocations, evasions,
distortions, white lies, frauds, and other pretenses. Often, a professional or public figure
has no beliefs on some issue but only uninformed opinion, and merely pretends to know
what she’s talking about to save face or to manipulate an audience. There’s an old
distinction, originating in Plato’s dialogues, between the philosopher and the sophist.
The philosopher loves knowledge more than opinion, while the sophist makes a
business of selling or otherwise persuading with useful works of rhetoric. The sophist
doesn’t lie exactly, but merely denies that truth is relevant to business. Regardless of
whether Plato’s distinction was biased in favour of Socrates, there’s a very important,
similar difference between two present-day characters, which I’ll call those of The
Philosopher and of The Social Engineer.

Philosophy, Humility, and Truth

By “philosopher,” I don’t mean an academic necessarily, whose profession is to teach

philosophy; I’m speaking rather of philosophy in a psychological sense. Psychologically,
some people are preoccupied with the task of creating a perfect map of reality. This sort
of philosopher may be intellectually curious or perhaps possessed of a religious faith
 567

that promises a convergence of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Alternatively, the

philosopher may have a sort of death wish, a suspicion that the ultimate truth will be
horrible to know, but that we should annihilate ourselves with that knowledge like moths
rushing to the flame.

Whatever her motivation, the philosopher assumes there’s a special relationship

between the rational mind and the rest of the world: such a mind can know the facts.
Although rational knowing here isn’t the biblical kind of knowing, which is to say a
sexual experience between persons, the philosopher assumes that the rational mind
does possess a sort of key that unlocks nature’s door or a mirror that reflects the world.
Just as convention dictates that men and women have a functionally correct relationship
between their sex organs, the philosopher assumes that the rational mind can be
properly or improperly related to the external world. Moreover, just as sexist cultures
dictate that men are active while women are passive, the philosopher’s metaphor
implies that the rational mind is masculine in aggressively seeking to know the world,
while the known world passively awaits our attentions (or seduces the scientist with
tantalizing clues to solving its mysteries, etc). The key or mirror in question is just the
symbol, the word or thought that carries a meaning. Put a set of symbols in the correct
order and the key unlocks the door, the mirror captures the light and the Truth shines
forth; that is, the sentence or thought agrees with an objective fact.

For centuries, Western and Eastern epistemologists have tried to explain the nature of
this relationship between the knowing mind and that which is rationally known. It’s hard
to see how the traditional metaphors that glorify rationality are justified in a naturalistic
worldview, according to which the rational person is just an especially clever animal, not
an immaterial spirit that transcends nature and obtains a transhistorical perspective on
the perfect, eternal Truth. As the postmodern hyper-skeptic says, were there no such
Truth to be known by natural beings, the philosopher’s myth of a correct relationship
between the rational mind and the external world would stand itself as a noble lie:
instead of searching for Truth, with no hidden agenda, the philosopher would serve a
power structure or play a social game. As is now well-known, though, this postmodern
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hyper-skepticism does away with itself since it presupposes the fundamental, natural
Truth that even rational people are mere power-seeking or playful animals.

Putting aside the question of whether the search for pure knowledge has a satisfying
epistemological explanation, there’s surely at least a distinctive philosophical character,
best exemplified by Plato’s Socrates. Unwilling to exchange knowledge for useful
fictions, Socrates ruthlessly exposed self-deception in himself and in anyone else. His
ultimate goal was to know himself. As is clearest from Eastern traditions, this goal was
part of the mystical project of appreciating our divinity as a precondition of freeing
ourselves from suffering. In the West, this religious aspect of philosophy has been de-
emphasized if not dropped altogether, and so the narrower philosophical point of self-
knowledge is to attain virtue as a precondition of knowing the truth--whatever the
ultimate nature of that truth. The idea is to purge your mind of the moral failings that are
fertile grounds for self-deception. In Buddhist terms, the philosopher destroys her ego,
abandoning her selfish impulses that cause her to cling to flattering delusions and to
forge an elaborate, wholly erroneous self-conception.

The upshot is that the philosopher must be humble to avoid the first level of fraud, which
is the level we each instinctively create for ourselves in our minds. Plato said that
Socrates knew most of all that he knew nothing. This means that Socrates relentlessly
pursued pretenses to knowledge that indicate overbearing pride and underlying
ignorance. Socrates had no interest in imposing his viewpoint on others, in
overpowering them with tricky rhetoric. Instead--and here the medium is the message--
he dialogued with others, cooperating with them in a constructive, shared search for the
truth, by asking ever-deepening questions that not only forced his partners to reassess
their beliefs, but that humiliated them in the process. Socrates destroyed egos along
with delusions. According to Plato, he was executed because his philosophical way of
life was socially subversive: as a matter of course, Socrates demolished the religious
and political fictions that maintained his society’s dominance hierarchy.
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Turning to the current scene, what confronts the Western philosopher when she
consumes mass culture is well-symbolized by the Wachowski brothers as the matrix, a
sort of phony reality. Politicians, lawyers, CEOs, doctors, academics, public school
teachers, salespeople, cashiers, novelists, filmmakers--people in all walks of
postmodern life simply lie most of the time. We lie to ourselves and to others. We lack
the humility to know ourselves as we truly are, to abandon our fantasies of
transcendence. Even the Wachowski brothers sometimes dumb-down the Gnostic
vision of their Matrix film trilogy by way of pandering to Christians.

With what are often called good intentions we tell half truths, to spare someone’s
feelings, but this pity depends on the liar’s conceit that she’s in a superior position.
Indeed, liars may be differently stationed in a social hierarchy, possessing more or less
power over others, but no person deserves to condescend to anyone else, because all
of our social games are equally foolish. To confirm this, just note how each generation
looks back on its ancients as embarrassingly childish by comparison. This isn’t because
of any social progress; instead, each generation arrogantly and myopically presumes
that it’s the most perfect one, that all foreign cultures are wrongheaded. And each
generation becomes the next one’s laughingstock. As Wittgenstein said, any language
game looks silly from an outsider’s perspective, because the rules of any game are
largely arbitrary.

(Were there an ideal map of normative, as opposed to empirical truth, or a perfect life
manual, then indeed cultures could follow or depart from those moral commandments.
But this notion of objective normative truth rests on the naturalistic fallacy of mistaking
normative for empirical truth. As best as epistemologists can tell, empirical truth is a
matter of correspondence between symbols and facts. So take the rule that we
shouldn’t steal, for example. To the extent that that rule’s construed as objectively true,
it’s no longer normative but is reduced to a mere report of a fact such as that an ancient
book proscribes stealing. Prescriptions of moral norms of conduct are neither true nor
false in that empirical sense, and should be assessed in other terms such as aesthetic
ones.)
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In any case, all cultural norms are absurd compared to less complex natural processes,
because those norms are relatively freely chosen, which is the extent to which we
rational beings do transcend, which is to say, stand alienated from, the rest of nature.
True, according to quantum mechanics, even physical laws may be likewise arbitrary
and spontaneous, popping into existence along with a cosmos from what physicists call
nothing. That would make physical laws inexplicable but not ridiculous, though, since
there would be no one to mock for gratuitously creating and then living under them.
What I mean is that even were all of nature ultimately as arbitrary and gratuitous as
human culture, only the latter could have normative failings: our indulgence in a
smorgasbord of cultural delusions reflects our variety of vices for which we’re at least
partly responsible. Often, we choose to escape precisely from rationally-obtained
knowledge, by distracting ourselves with cultural nonsense.

In centuries past, the flow of such nonsense was severely limited by the available
communications technologies. Today, of course, postmodern folk are victims of a
tsunami of lies, submerged in a noosphere of myths and fantasies, because our vices
that cause useful misconceptions are now empowered by the internet and those cultural
byproducts are spread by a host of dazzling high-tech gadgets. Everyone can publish
their own ravings, the present author included. And so the philosophical way of life
becomes more anachronistic. In Plato’s day, a philosopher could resist the relative
handful of cultural temptations to stroke his ego, pursuing the truth even at the cost of
his comfort or sanity. But in the so-called postmodern world, philosophy itself is the
laughingstock and humility is a rare commodity.

Social Engineering and Dehumanization

I want to consider now one such vice that gives rise to an antiphilosophical character,
which I’ll call that of The Social Engineer or Technocrat. The vice in question is just
commonplace greed, coupled with the resulting corruption from the power gained by
means of that motivation. An especially greedy and corrupted person may regard
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language not as a system of symbols that relates to an external world, but as a tool to
accomplish some work. When a technocrat or social engineer speaks, she may not lie
so much as transmit what she regards as a meaningless sequence of noises that
somehow has the desired effect of influencing her listener. Whereas the philosopher
wants a map of reality, the social engineer wants a lever for moving society in some
favoured direction. The philosopher asks everyone to humble themselves before the
prospect of discovering the ideal relationship between rational minds and the rest of the
universe. The social engineer proceeds beyond the call for humility, cynically
dehumanizing language users as so many pawns to be pushed around by skillfully-
deployed rhetoric.

In short, the philosopher is interested in semantics (the study of the meaning of

symbols) while the technocrat thinks only of a pragmatic form of syntax, of underlying
rules for using what suckers call symbols as instruments for physically manipulating
people. Indeed, the elevation of social engineering above philosophy in postmodern
societies is apparent from the memetic sophistry that some philosophical issue is “just
semantics.” Pragmatists love to belittle philosophy with this refrain, as though the
question of a symbol’s relation to something else were unimportant and all that matters
were the effect of language use. Just as engineers use technology to manipulate natural
processes, social engineers use language to transform society. While the philosopher’s
metaphorical key or map is also a form of technology and knowledge tends to be useful,
the philosopher is more a mystic than an instrumentalist, pursuing knowledge as an end
in itself. The social engineer is interested in knowledge only for its applications.

The point I want to stress here is that philosophy and social engineering represent
opposite ways of thinking. True philosophers in modern societies are as rare as
authentic Christians. If you want to know whether someone’s a true philosopher, first
confirm that that person prefers to discuss ideas rather than events or people; then
check whether she displays signs of ego in those discussions. If she’s more interested
in dominating than in collaborating, she lacks the humility that follows from self-
knowledge and from the dispelling of the initial, self-imposed delusions.
 572

Much more prevalent is the vacuous but highly potent chatter of technocrats and of the
drones who dwell in their matrix. The art of dominating people by mesmerizing them
with signals is likely only reinforced in elite institutions like Harvard Business School;
such institutions tend to attract or reward those who are already pragmatists with
technocratic skills. The technocrat is bound to have at best an atrophied conscience, if
not a sociopath’s absence of empathic feelings, since those feelings call to mind other
people’s humanity and thus one of our distinguishing features, which is our
sophisticated use of symbols. As I say, most professions in postmodern societies
reward those with a social engineer’s rather than a philosopher’s mindset, despite the
sometimes-heard warning that the problems such societies face call for those with
liberal arts training and not for mere systems managers. To be sure, the proliferation of
a philosophical mindset looks like a necessary condition of preventing our self-
destruction, but this hardly entails that those with institutional power have the wisdom to
nurture, say, philosophical humility or a disdain for ego-driven opinion.

The most obvious example of a social engineer is the politician. There’s hardly even any
hyperbole in speculating that neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama spoke
truthfully in any of their public statements while serving as President of the United
States. What I’m proposing, though, isn’t that politicians lie, since lying requires both
misdirection and a belief held to be true: the liar simply pretends to believe X whereas
she actually believes Y. No, my point is that politicians and other professionals exhibit a
deeper form of antiphilosophy, which is the pragmatist’s preoccupation with work rather
than with knowledge. The pragmatist wants to get jobs done and that requires physical
work: tools must be used to effect the desired change. So when a politician spins,
skillfully diverting a question at a press conference to recite a predigested list of talking
points, we disparage the extravagance of her vices when we label her a mere liar.
Lying is for petty malefactors; world-corrupting evil is perpetrated by those who
disdain the sphere of semantic interpretation in its totality, who view people as
machines and thus who think or speak never to humbly uncover and live by the
truth but solely to manipulate, to physically impact others and so dominate them.
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Karl Rove, who boasted to the author Ron Suskind that the neoconservatives are
Nietzschean overlords who create a series of worldviews solely to enslave the masses
in the “reality-based community,” revealed something of this technocratic mindset. (See
Suskind’s 2004 NY Times article, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W.
Bush.”)

Thus, listening to political figures as though they have any regard for knowledge or
respect for their people’s intelligence is foolish. Instead of fact-checking them, we
should study the impact of their cliché-ridden signals on masses of antiphilosophical
minds. Treating a political speech as fiction, too, misses the mark, since fiction, like
lying, works only when the listener or speaker, respectively, appreciates the difference
between reality and a counterfactual world. In their public roles, politicians as well as
pundits, lobbyists, lawyers, consumers, and increasingly doctors, college professors,
and many others are better compared to automatons, mechanically managing flows of
information along with people as so many quantifiable units of a social system.

Indeed, I’d go as far as to speculate that with this descent into postmodern technocracy,
we have a prerequisite for what the transhumanist calls our more complete merging with
technology. Before the posthuman can rise from our ashes, combining biological
functions and artificial conventions more fully even than social animals like us, we must
learn to think like machines so that we won’t resist living more closely with them. That
is, our minds must be reduced to computer programs, and so we must forgo our
dalliance with semantics, with our interests in meaning and truth; instead, we must
compute, calculate, and scheme or implement the calculations of others as partisan
functionaries. We must dehumanize ourselves to become the scaffolding for the
evolution of posthumans.

This raises the question of whether social engineering is just another arbitrary and thus
foolish cultural game or a natural process of our extinction. I won’t attempt here to settle
this question, except to say that the answer depends on whether people choose to think
like social engineers or whether the relevant vices naturally drive them to do so. If the
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former, the technocrat’s fear of semantics will one day appear as quaint, naïve, and
transparently wrongheaded as any other cultural expression, from the benefit of a
foreign vantage point. If the latter, a natural process may be afoot, one which isn’t
ridiculous so much as eerie.

A Dialogue

To clarify my distinction between the two modes of thought, here’s how I imagine a
dialogue proceeding between the two characters.

Philosopher (speaking to a politician): I’ve noticed that when you speak to journalists,
you seem to read from an invisible script and seldom actually answer the question put
to you. Have you calculated that your personal beliefs are unpopular and so you’d
rather not risk fallout with the public for airing those beliefs?

Technocratic Politician: My personal beliefs are private and irrelevant to my ability to

carry out my political duties.

P: Irrelevant? Who is it then who makes your political decisions? Do your inner
convictions have no bearing on how you face your challenges while in office? That
seems dubious, but I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise.

T: A leader who’s responsible for the welfare of millions of people can’t afford the luxury
of coming to settled opinions after much private reflection. That’s the dubious business
of philosophers with too much leisure time. I’m a busy man with no time to waste on
frivolous speculations.

P: So first your personal views are irrelevant and now you say you don’t even have any
such views? But surely you do have political principles and you’re just reluctant to
expose them for fear of being picked apart by the pundits and your political opponents.
 575

T: No, if you must know, principles and philosophical beliefs are for followers, not for
leaders. Leaders devise these memes and myths for public consumption to maintain a
social order, but the leaders themselves are too busy and savvy to pay much attention
to those tricks of the trade. You have no idea how much work I have to accomplish. Like
I said: not enough leisure time.

P: But weren’t you photographed last week playing golf? And didn’t you go on vacation
last month?

T: Those were working breaks from my superhuman schedule of meetings and

briefings! You have no idea the stress I’m under.

P: More stress than a person can bear, I imagine.

T: Indeed.

P: Does that mean that someone with your workload can’t afford to be a person while
working?

T: I’m not sure what you mean. Of course I’m still a person.

P: Are you sure? Can’t a person shut down her faculties? When we watch TV, we
vegetate and relax our higher cognitive processes. When we fight, adrenalin floods our
system and overcomes our fear and our sensitivity to pain, while a soldier may choose
to set aside his conscience and follow immoral orders. When making tough decisions on
the job, an employee may have to follow a script, like an actor, playing a role as a
functionary to get ahead in the rat race. Moreover, sociopaths are born without
consciences, while others may inherently lack other cognitive faculties. All of this is
possible because of the modular nature of the human mind. So are you sure you
haven’t dehumanized yourself?
 576

T: I leave it to your ilk to waste time speculating on the essence of human nature. I’m
much too busy.

P: Well, if you’re so busy, you must be highly skilled to perform your Herculean labours.
I wonder what particular skill you employ when you choose never to give a straight
answer to a journalist’s question.

T: Journalists thrive on sensationalism and on trapping politicians with gotcha

questions. They say they’re after news, but news reporting is only incidental to their
primary concern which is to maximize their ratings. A press conference is a business
transaction in which the public figure has the upper hand. I’m not interested in boosting
the ratings of some bottom feeding news agency for the masses’ transitory infotainment.
Instead, I use the media to broadcast my canned messages to help shape public
opinion and get me reelected. The whole thing’s practically automated, by this point. I
rarely even listen to journalists in my interviews. I merely scan their nonsense for key
words which are associated with my talking points, and when I hear the former I
regurgitate the latter-- always with a smile on my face, to keep the mood upbeat.

P: You’ve never, then, sat down and had an actual conversation for the public record
while in office, one human to another.

T: Certainly not. Politics isn’t war, it’s business, and businessmen don’t chitchat. Even
my private conversations with fellow members of state are all about strategy, saber
rattling, and other kinds of posturing. I send signals to position myself in a Machiavellian
power struggle and I calculate how to exploit circumstances to my benefit.

P: It seems like a computer could do the bulk of your work and a lot faster and more
efficiently too.
 577

T: Technically, perhaps, but practically no, since in a democracy, at least, people have
to feel comfortable with their political representatives and they’d never vote for a cold-
hearted, nihilistic machine. That’s why I always smile in public.

P: But you don’t actually have any fellow-feeling for your constituents; your smiles are
fake and you don’t behave as a fully-functional person while in office. So you might as
well be an automaton, a robot that looks like a human with a supercomputer for a brain.

T: As soon as they build one of those, you let me know and I’ll find another line of work.
But what’s with this interrogation, anyway? What do you think you’re proving?

P: I’m trying to understand why I could never be myself with someone like you while
you’re at work. Normally, I constructively criticize and exchange ideas, cooperating with
fellow knowledge-lovers to discover the truth of some matter. But your way of thinking is
entirely opposed to that philosophical practice. You’re really an antiphilosopher, a
machine dedicated solely to the ignoble purpose of your self-enrichment. You don’t
question the ugly, parasitic values implicit in your political “business.” I just didn’t
appreciate that corruption can take the form of such dehumanization.

T: Look at you, the high and mighty philosopher, flinging your value judgments my way
like they mean a damn, like anybody cares! I thought you’ve been paying attention to
the scientists who’ve discovered all the truth we can handle. You’re after knowledge for
its own sake, you say. What do you think knowledge is? Do you suppose that when you
indulge in your lofty meditations, your brain states reach out and grasp immaterial
structures of logic, like the philosopher Frege pontificated? That even though you’re just
an animal with a highly complex brain, you understand the real world by positioning your
mental symbols in some configuration that agrees somehow with the facts? There’s no
such agreement. Our thoughts store information obtained by our sense organs and they
cause us to move about the world in a more or less useful fashion. You’re a machine
and thus a businessman too, a social engineer like any animal negotiating a natural life;
 578

you’re just a much less successful one who’s jealous of his superior. Now if you don’t
mind, I’ve got to get back to work.
 579

Existential Cosmicism and Technology

____________________________________________________

The existential philosopher Heidegger distinguished between traditional and modern, or

roughly between low and high, technologies. The former, such as windmills or hand-
sewn clothing, work with nature and have aesthetic appeal as quasi-artworks, whereas
the latter, such as computers or nuclear power plants, challenge the sovereignty of
external forces, by storing energy to be used at our discretion. Scientific modes of
thinking prepare the way for modern technology by abstracting from the individuality of
everything in nature, from what Heidegger called their “thinghood”, objectifying and
dissecting (analyzing) natural phenomena and thus encouraging us to adopt an
instrumental, Machiavellian attitude towards them.

When we appreciate something’s uniqueness, we’re more likely to personalize it, since
people tend to be especially different from each other: our brains have different
experiences over time and there are practically endless ways for our neurons to store
that information, by forming unique interconnections. Thus, early forms of religion are
animistic, anthropomorphizing the natural world on the basis of the perceived
uniqueness shared by the likes of rivers, trees, or mountains, on the one hand, and
humans on the other. Modernists would say that the ancients thereby lacked our depth
of understanding of nature. The metaphor of standing under something is actually less
apt than that of standing apart from it. Modern scientists gain perspective by emotionally
 580

detaching from what they studied, thus withholding their sympathy. They employ
mathematics and other abstract modes of thinking to engage in extreme forms of
generalization, or “unification,” treating rivers, trees, and mountains, for example, all as
masses in motion. When things appear to lose their individuality, our sympathetic
reflexes are no longer triggered, because we don’t feel compelled to personify them and
thus we don’t extend to them anything like human rights. We thereby take up a nihilistic
stance towards the objectified phenomena, using technology to overpower nature
instead of incorporating nature's organic rhythms into our lifestyle.

Technology Humanizes Nature

This Heideggerian criticism of technology is compelling but it doesn’t go far enough, in

my view. There’s a deeper process at work in the use of all technologies, motivated by a
more general way of thinking than just scientific objectification. Our tendency to
personify is rooted simply in our inevitable resort to metaphors. When we categorize, we
group things and think of them as instances of a type, thus comparing them to each
other, perhaps anchoring the comparison to a simplified mental representation (a
stereotype or exemplar). Our most fundamental analogies extend our common and
familiar experiences--seeing, walking, eating, learning, dying, and so on--to less well-
known phenomena. That extension of human experience in our confrontation with the
nonhuman is the primary act of anthropomorphism, which means that virtually all of our
thoughts are fundamentally anthropomorphic. If you look at the historical basis of most
of our concepts, you’ll find a generalization based on an analogy between some quaint
human experience and something less familiar and thus apparently nonhuman, that is,
some broader natural phenomenon like a rainstorm or a stellar configuration.

Our great felicity with categories goes together with our use of even the humblest
technologies, including those that Heidegger would praise for working with rather than
against nature. All technologies import aspects of us to nonhuman phenomena, just as
even our most primitive cognitive act, our use of metaphors, tames the unfamiliar by
comparing it with everyday human experience. When we build even the simplest device,
 581

like an axe or a hut, we transform the nonhuman world and render it less forbidding and
alien. As the biologist Richard Dawkins or the communications theorist Marshall
McLuhan would say, we extend our phenotypes, meaning our bodies. But this isn’t just
because we supply a car, for example, with a front that looks like a human face or
because a gun or a camera improves on a particular body part such as the fist or the
eye. The extension common to all technologies is that of our brain’s innate body plan,
as pictured in the so-called cortical homunculus, with which we map out and instinctively
identify most strongly with our body parts, regarding anything not so mapped as foreign,
hostile, or disgusting. Thus, we don’t retreat even from our foulest body odours--or from
those of people with whom we form strong emotional bonds--as reflexively as we do
from those of strangers. We render the wilderness less terrifyingly strange just by
leaving our footprint in it, as it were, reshaping nature somehow according to our
designs so that, like proud children just released from arts and crafts class, we can hold
up our pet project and say, “Look what I made!” At least if we have a hand in making
something, we’re faced with the devil we know.

Existential Cosmicism and our Masks and Mirrors

And so all technology indicates the truth of the philosophy I’m calling existential
cosmicism. Existentialism emphasizes the need for a nonrational choice of how we
respond to the chilling facts of our natural position, and cosmicism tracks the cultural
implications of modern science in a Nietzschean fashion. Most animal species use
either no technology at all, besides that fashioned by their genes in response to their
environment, which is to say the physiological traits that each species evolves, or else a
handful of tricks to make life easier. Chimpanzees use sticks to pull ants from their
colonies, while certain octopi use coconut shells for shelter. With so little of themselves
in their environment, you might think most animals would be horrified and incapacitated
by the strange otherness of what lies so obviously at nearly their every turn, just on the
other side of their sense organs. But, of course, most species lack the self-destructive
curiosity or intelligence to recognize that otherness for what it is, since most species
lack the self-awareness to distinguish themselves definitively from everything else.
 582

By contrast, we create our human identity at an early age when we learn to draw that
Cartesian distinction between mind and material world. We appreciate that we’re born
into a pre-existing, nonhuman world that’s often hostile and peculiarly indifferent to our
plight, and we cope by humanizing that world, populating it with ghosts, goblins, and
gods from our imagination, shamelessly projecting images of us onto natural forces as
though we were in any sense central to the cosmos. The cosmicist insists that our
horrifying and tragic absurdity consists in our peripheral metaphysical status, in the
abyss between our self-image as VIPs and our natural identity as practically trapped
and cursed parasites, feasting on our monstrous host which is the undead god, the
mindlessly evolving and thus creative plenum that scientists call nature. Our explosion
of technology is the outward manifestation of that inner, cognitive revolution: our minds
explode with concepts, analogies, and projections, as we mentally dress the world in
human clothes, as it were, to mask its dreadful inhumaneness and revolting
monstrosity, and our busy hands put that frantic mental activity to work, turning our
mere ghostlike ideas into tangible transformations of the environment.

Horrified by the complement of our vainglorious sentience, of our original sin of playing
up the difference between us and the rest of the world, we rush to rectify our resulting
alienation. We reduce nature’s strangeness by those inner technologies, if you like, by
our mental representations which depend on anthropomorphic metaphors, but also by
outer, body-built technologies which physically humanize the bizarre outgrowths on
nature’s decaying corpse. For example, we don’t just let waterfalls fall, but need to get
the last word in, turning them into power sources or tourist attractions; nor do we
passively watch the sun’s rays sustain organic processes in the fulfillment of no purpose
whatsoever, but we wear hats to protect ourselves from the spill-over effects of
temporary blindness or skin cancer, we use deodorant to avoid sweating in our
sophisticated cultures, and we harness solar energy to power a variety of contraptions;
nor do we content ourselves with the childish mental projections of astrology, when we
look up at the inhuman heavens, but we hurl telescopes into space and land robots on
Mars; and so on and so forth. We make the cosmos our home by extending our minds
 583

and bodies into the outer reaches of the unknown: we give the nooks and crannies of
the undead god silly names that elevate us, since our experience of what it’s like to be
human anchors the metaphors, and we manually reshape our environment, physically
erasing nature’s monstrous visage with reminders of our more comprehensible
creativity, so that when we traverse any of our villages or cities, we walk through a
House of Mirrors. We look at a hut or a skyscraper instead of a cave or a mountain, and
we replace our fear of the cosmic creation of patterns from quantum chaos, with the
homeliness of intelligent design, of a person’s mind-controlled body which purposefully
tames and beautifies its surroundings.

We preserve our self-esteem by pretending that technology has merely the practical
function of efficiently achieving our goals, whereas the existential significance of
technology betrays that lofty pragmatism. Before we can be gods who magically
recreate the world in our image, we ought to be panic-stricken, all-too-clever critters that
have opened Pandora’s Box just by opening our eyes and beholding the alien
landscape. Technology, then, is a source of what existentialists call bad faith, but a
source that ironically has the potential to undercut the delusions that restrict us to an
aesthetically inferior way of life. We fuel our pride when we revel in the technoscientific
proof of our supernatural creativity, but when we reflect on technology’s primordial role
as a mirror that permits us to look out onto anything and see so many traces of
humanity instead of wild nature’s bloodcurdling monstrosity, that is, its undead
complexification, we’re steered away from pragmatic secular humanism, not to mention
anachronistic theism, and towards existential cosmicism.
 584

Games, Sports, and Mixed Martial Arts

____________________________________________________

In species of social animals, rules emerge to govern the animals’ behaviour,

complicating biological and other, more general natural laws. The more a species is
preoccupied with its social conventions, the more it develops a culture that makes no
sense from a foreigner’s perspective, the more the members tend to detach themselves
from natural reality, especially if they’re not informed by the link to nature provided by an
objective empirical investigation. Without that link, or when citizens favour antiscientific
sources of information, which marginalize science in decadent, self-centered and
xenophobic societies, the citizens can fiddle while Rome burns. In the latter years of the
ancient Roman Empire, gladiators engaged in mock combats and other brutal “games”
to distract the citizens from the signs of Rome’s collapse. Had the citizens then a crystal
ball in which they could have foreseen the horrors of the Dark Age that would follow the
collapse, they might have regarded the games as absurdly, even shamefully divorced
from reality. While the barbarians pounded at the gates, the uninformed or deluded
masses preferred the spectacle of more controlled warfare which maintained the illusion
of Roman hegemony. Just as the emperor dictated whatever happened on the mock
battlefield in the microcosm which was the Coliseum, with a mere raising or lowering of
his thumb, so too his military crushed foreign uprisings.
 585

Today, there are numerous mainstream sports, including tennis, golf, baseball, soccer,
football, hockey, basketball, curling, and cricket, which are relatively harmless
diversions, although their players are often injured. Then there are more brutal sports,
such as hunting, boxing, mixed martial arts (MMA), sumo wrestling, and dog or cock
fighting. What's the relationship between these kinds of sport, and what does that
relationship teach us about ourselves?

Games and Sports as Models of Nature

A game is a form of play or amusement, while a sport is a type of game that requires
bodily exertion. So chess, for example, is a game but not a sport. Chess is played
between minds, not bodies, and thus evolutionary history and the laws of biochemistry,
which determine a body’s aptitudes, are irrelevant to how that game is played. True,
psychological factors, such as memory capacity, account for differences in players’ skill
level, but these are incidental since chess is an artificial world, governed by arbitrary
rules and stipulations of meaning, and played on a game board that’s symbolically
detached from natural (non-human-made) reality. What distinguishes chess from a
mental patient’s insane fantasy is that chess is based on a metaphor that simplifies a
natural phenomenon, in this case warfare. A game, then, is like a scientific model in that
the game abstracts from some natural phenomenon, as a much-simplified analogy that
represents only a few key features of what’s modeled and filling in the rest of the picture
with stipulations. (In science, a stipulation of this kind is called a ceteris paribus
condition, which means that while a scientific model of DNA, for example, may not
perfectly replicate every actual feature of the DNA molecule, the model is adequate for
practical purposes as long as any significant factor left out of the model is assumed not
to impinge when the model is applied in a particular situation. Thus, everything in the
world outside of the model’s simplified picture is stipulated as being--somewhat
euphemistically--“equal,” which is to say, practically irrelevant for the purpose of
scientific understanding.)
 586

At the opposite end of the spectrum from chess, there are natural competitions played
out with a minimum of artificial rules and thus with greater dependence on natural
forces. Somewhere near this end are found certain combat sports, such as boxing or
MMA. These sports are still games rather than purely natural fights, because they’re
limited by an arbitrary number of rounds, they’re refereed, and they prohibit certain
moves such as strikes to the groin. Further towards the extreme end on this side of the
spectrum, in which natural laws take precedence over social conventions, would be the
ancient gladiatorial “games,” in which combatants fought to the death with fewer rules
than in more recent combat sports. (Again, perhaps the main arbitrary rule was that the
emperor alone decided who lived or died.) At the most extreme end, there are (mostly
illegal) dog or cock fights in which there are almost no artificial rules and natural laws or
biological probabilities dictate the outcome. Perhaps the only concessions to artificiality
in one of these “games” are the border of the pit in which the animals fight and
presumably the stipulation that the playing field is even, that the animals are released
simultaneously by their handlers at opposite ends. These human interventions and
inevitable abuses of the animals suffice, however, to render these fights unnatural,
which is to say aesthetically and ethically appalling.

The Meanings of Game-like Sports

More conventional and popular sports, like baseball or soccer (better known as football),
fall more towards the chess end of this spectrum. On the one hand, these games
require bodily exertion, which introduces natural law into the proceedings, but these
sports are highly regulated, meaning that the play is governed by many arbitrary rules.
Moreover, each of these sports models some more natural phenomenon, employing a
metaphor that lends meaning to the sport even if this meaning can fade as the
metaphor becomes stale over time. Thus, as the Al Capone character explains in the
famous scene of the film, The Untouchables, baseball is founded on a political
metaphor that celebrates the balance of individualism with socialism: the players stand
alone when at bat, but operate as a team when in the field. When Americans might
have felt more united, after the Great Depression or during honourable and necessary
 587

wars, baseball’s social metaphor might still have been poignant. In the current
Manichean United States, the metaphor is stale and so baseball’s no longer uplifting;
instead, the sport degenerates into a business that entertains with what most inured
players and spectators alike surely feel are meaningless rituals. (Perhaps the current
popularity of baseball in Japan indicates that its social metaphor still holds sway over
more unified Japanese society.)

In fact, apart from American football and what North Americans call soccer, most sports
in western societies have lost any deep meaning they may once have had. Granted,
each sport has its rabid fans, but the downside of any game-like sport, meaning any
sport governed more by artificial than natural laws, is that the sport depends on--at best-
-a loose analogy which is its sole meaningful connection to some natural process, and
metaphors inevitably lose their potency over time. Thus, the older the sport, the less
meaningful its vicissitudes to current players or spectators. Indeed, the metaphor that
originally motivates play (consciously or otherwise) according to some set of
conventions may be forgotten entirely so that the sport's later participants have no idea
what the sport is supposed to mean.

Currently, golf is viewed as a rich person’s sport. Partly this is because golf clubs and
regular access to golf courses are expensive, but this stereotype is also due to the
sport’s underlying presupposition of social class. The caddie represents a member of
the lower class who performs the grunt work, toiling in mills, mines, or factories and
providing a sort of launching pad for the oligarch, or godlike upper class member, to jet
from one part of the globe to another and at his leisure perhaps perform the miracle of a
hole-in-one. The golf course thus signifies the wilderness or the third world slum over
which the oligarch’s spirit sails with the golf ball towards its destiny in the relatively
miniscule hole, which is thus mostly removed from that tainted world. That is, the
disproportion between the puniness of the golf ball and of its resting place in the hole,
on the one hand, and the vast undulating course, on the other, symbolizes a dualistic
class ideology. Golf is thus about avoiding or exploiting circumstances for the solo
player’s exclusive benefit, ideally on the backs of lesser mortals. Regardless of whether
 588

golf was invented with this elitist ideology in mind, its popularity today especially with
successful businesspeople seems to indicate some such underlying meaning.

Basketball, hockey, and American football are formally, if not historically, variations on
what North Americans call soccer. In each case, teams guard their home territory and
earn points by invading their opponent’s home. The metaphor is that of warfare, with the
court, rink, or field representing the neutral battle zone, and the hoop, net, or goal posts
representing the civilian territory which economically empowers the soldiers, or the
players of each team. This metaphor is clear enough, but the popularity of each sport in
different countries reveals cultural differences between them. American football is
idolized within the US, which surely indicates the height of American martial values, that
is, that country’s romantic view of the glory of war, as well as its fetish for industrial
efficiency. As long as an American soldier is fully operational and outfitted with the
world’s supreme military hardware, the soldier is held sacred as a flawless instrument of
American hegemony, but as soon as the soldier returns from war with a limb missing or
in a casket, the spell is broken, the myth of America’s manifest destiny is reduced to so
much empty rhetoric, and so the soldier is generally shunned or hidden from view.

While African-Americans excel at most American sports, their dominance is most

complete in basketball. I’d venture to speculate, then, that to the extent that basketball
still resonates as a model of warfare, the war in question is presupposed to be that
which might be fought in the future between genetically-altered super soldiers. African-
Americans were originally brought to the US as slaves and were artificially bred, in part,
for manual labour. The most popular level of American basketball, in the NBA, features
mostly African-American giants who stun spectators by symbolically invading the
opponent’s home territory and leaping and dunking the ball in virtually superhuman
fashion. Again, to the extent that basketball has any emotional force as a game that
idealizes some aspect of real life, the sport is more a promissory note prophesying
future warfare in which superhuman soldiers will penetrate the foe’s civilian territory and
annihilate its people like angels of death descending from the clouds. A monstrous
 589

speculation, to be sure, but such are the predilections of social animals that even this
speculation is plausible.

As for hockey, which is naturally most popular in cold countries such as Canada or
Russia, the reasons for the shared popularity nevertheless differ, depending on the
country. Hockey is popular in Russia, because the sport models warfare and Russians
have a highly militaristic, imperial history. This is not so with respect to Canada, so in
Canada hockey’s popularity is explainable in terms of the sport’s substituting for war as
opposed to its modeling much in the way of actual Canadian war-waging. In this case,
Canadians are currently so pacific that the relatively tame violence in a hockey game
can satisfy whatever animalistic interest in bloodshed they nevertheless harbour. This is
surely also why fist-fighting in North American hockey is tolerated despite its superficial
absurdity, that is, its glaring irrelevance to the official game, and the politically correct
calls for its abolition. (Players aren’t ejected for fighting in the NHL, and although this
includes American teams, Canadian culture historically has had a larger impact on the
sport.)

And as for the sport which North Americans call soccer, the paradoxical overwhelming
popularity of this martial sport in Europe, Brazil, and in other, currently peaceful
societies is explainable if we attend to the curious persistence of a cowardly form of
cheating in that sport, which is the player’s pretending to be injured after a “challenge”
by another player, and his melodramatic flailing and collapse to garner the referee’s
sympathy and thus a penalty against the opposing team. You’d think no red-blooded
man could willingly emasculate himself in such a fashion, especially when in closely-
watched matches cameras tend to capture every detail with almost microscopic clarity,
revealing the ruse in exquisite slow motion. However, not only does such cowardice
succeed, unless the referee happens to have seen firsthand what transpired, but the
allegedly injured player typically limps off of the field or is even carried off in a stretcher
only to reemerge moments later, quite unharmed. And this whole practice persists,
game after game, year after year. Why?
 590

Because while this sport is fundamentally about mock warfare, peaceful populations
celebrate their ironic use of the sport to symbolize the subversion of the martial instinct
by the ruse of UN diplomacy. Without the unmanly cheating, a soccer/football game
would proceed as a straightforward (if hideous) model of war (since war itself is always
hideous). But when the tide of a game can turn with an opportune case of literally falling
down on the job, by an apparent clown dressed as a symbolic soldier, the subtext
becomes clear: the weakness of international law, backed as it is by no global military
power, can yet counteract our bloodlust. Just as liberals wish that the sophistry of a UN
speech against a nation that's on the precipice of war can prevent the war from
occurring, so too weak nations put their spin on the ancient form of soccer/football, by
introducing an element of chicanery into the play. And after a match, the players
ritualistically don each other’s shirts, signifying the oneness of humanity and further
circumventing the martial symbolism. No wonder more truculent countries like the US
find soccer distasteful!

The Superiority of Natural to Artificial Sports

To sum up, then, sports either lose their meaning entirely over time, as in US baseball;
retain their original meaning, as in US football; or gain new meaning as the metaphor is
tweaked to suit current circumstances, as in soccer in relatively peaceful societies. Even
when game-like sports currently excite their fans, however, the fans are more likely
reacting instinctively to the action than appreciating the sport’s deeper meaning.
Moreover, sports metaphors and rituals aren’t easily idolized in the postmodern climate
in which all metanarratives are distrusted. Still, game-like sports are formally the same
as religions and they serve for many so-called secularists as substitutes for traditional
forms of worship. Indeed, current mainstream sports, like baseball, basketball, and
hockey, are comparable to ancient Rome’s stale jingoistic, familial cults that only
formally unified the Romans without addressing their angst. As Rome declined, Roman
citizens naturally became more worried, but instead of offering wisdom in that time of
turmoil, their native myths were so many pieces of transparent political propaganda, as
in the imperial cults which deified Roman emperors. Seemingly to fill the vacuum, the
 591

more mystical Eastern religions, such as Gnosticism, swept across the West, attracting
many devotees. Simultaneously, between the first century BCE to the second century
CE, Romans flocked to the gladiatorial games.

Likewise, there are currently signs of Western decline and of discontent with the West’s
unofficial state religions. These religions include secular humanism, secularized and
emasculated Christianity, a sort of Stoic or pragmatic head-in-the-sand consumerism,
but also sports fanaticism. As I said, game-like sports offer dualistic myths and rituals
due to their artificiality and thus their detachment from natural reality. Fans enjoy the
illusion of escaping the tyranny of natural law, to a level of cultural complexity in which
humans rule literally by dictating laws that govern the course of events. At its best, a
game-like sport might function like a scientific model, presenting an idealization of some
natural phenomenon that directs our efforts to exploit the metaphor’s insight and
improve on the world. For example, in the case of a pure mind game, chess might
inspire sympathy for the grunts who perform the dirty work in wars, given the starkness
of the game’s contrast between pawns and the more powerful game pieces. More often,
though, game-like sports degenerate into empty, trivial formalities. Even when the
outcome of a match can’t be predicted, the mainstream sport fails to enchant for long
because its foundational metaphor loses touch with the realities of the fast-changing
postmodern world.

Moreover, just as the ancient Romans turned to Eastern mysticism for relief from their
angst-ridden doubts, Westerners now turn to New Age pseudoscience or to internet
conspiracy theories. And just as the Romans seemed distracted by the gladiatorial
games, MMA is currently the fastest growing Western sport. Partly, this surge of interest
is due, first, to an increase in male bloodlust in reaction to feminism, as speculated by
the novel and movie, Fight Club, and to the impossibility of successfully competing with
machines for labour-intensive jobs; and second, in the US, to the increasing cultural
impact of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. There are plenty of meatheads
who enjoy watching mixed martial arts purely for the action. These are the fans who
would always root for the overdog, because they want to see a human body physically
 592

destroyed, and they’re likely also fans of torture porn, a despicable subgenre of the
horror movie.

Still, mixed martial arts also have their well-known spiritual side, originating as they did
from the need for Shaolin monks to defend themselves against bandits. MMA
encourages the pursuit of numerous secular virtues such as courage, honour, discipline,
humility, and solidarity through camaraderie. More to the point, MMA falls on the
opposite side of pure games in the spectrum of mind games, sports, and natural
competitions. Recall that on the side of games like chess, natural forces have relatively
minimal impact on the playing field and natural laws are less relevant than conventions
that split the game off from nature. Games are thus dualistic and otherworldly, which
allow them to serve as substitutes for traditional religions. At the other end there are
natural conflicts like hunting and fighting with only minimal regulation or artificiality.
These conflicts are comparatively monistic and naturalistic, meaning that they
encourage the celebration of divinity within the natural world. That is to say, in so far as
naturalistic sports have religious potential, their underlying myths are pantheistic.

In the case of MMA, the combat’s significance is that its action proceeds without
politically correct censorship or other regulatory illusions. Again, the thrill of worshipping
our godlike power of creating cultural worlds, including the worlds that play out in game
space, is alluring from a Nietzschean perspective, and aesthetically or ethically uplifting
cultural products should be admired. But when a culture as a whole rots from the inside
and its idols fail to enchant or inspire, the pursuit of transcendence through dualistic
myths and rituals only furthers the social degeneration, and game-like sports become
escapist fantasies, idle hobbies, or corrupting businesses. Set against the tedious
formalities of baseball, the pitiful substitute for war in the case of Canadian hockey, the
underhanded apology for diplomacy in soccer (outside the US), the shameless
celebration of oligarchic privilege in golf, and the brutish glorification of war in basketball
and American football, the rise of MMA potentially advances what I’ve called an
unembarrassing, viable postmodern religion.
 593

In more game-like sports, athletes demonstrate awesome skills, but their victories are
rendered absurd or tragic because of the lack of any compelling myth to elevate their
competitions. In MMA, by contrast, the fighters succeed or fail more as beasts than
pseudogods; the fighters train hard, but their contests are much more natural than
artificial. A fight is essentially a series of violent physical collisions between body parts
until one of the bodies is unable to continue. MMA is still a sport rather than a purely
natural or wild conflict, because in the UFC and other MMA organizations, the fights are
regulated by referees, judges, doctors, rounds, time limits, and so on. But the creative
and destructive powers of nature shine through an MMA match, and an ideal religion
should prescribe reverence for that power, without muddying the waters with delusions.
 594

The Emptiness of Postmodern Art (and of its Consumers)

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The social critic Camille Paglia has lamented in an Oct 2012 On Point radio interview
that there’s currently a dearth of great, nourishing art in the West (see
onpoint.wbur.org). After their predecessors killed God, she says, postmodern secular
humanists have failed to replace theistic religion with a high culture featuring worthwhile
art. On the contrary, modern rationalism, with its paeans to technoscientific progress
towards utopia, gave way to postmodern cynicism, irony, and sneering at all ideals,
myths and faiths, including the longing for atheistic spirituality. Current Western art
tends to be trash, Paglia says, because postmodernists have no conviction that any
work can be a testament for all times.

The plot thickens with Scott Timberg’s Salon articles on the hard economic times for
culture producers in the creative industries, including the fine arts and publishing. (See
“The Creative Class is a Lie” and “No Sympathy for the Creative Class.”) In the United
States, most painters, musicians, dancers, novelists, and actors barely scrape by,
working multiple jobs or freelancing if they can find any work at all in their fields. The
internet was supposed to be a gift to the creative class, giving artists direct access to
their audience; indeed, there are some success stories, but they’re in a tiny minority and
the oddity is that the artist’s plight is virtually a secret in the culture at large. “Neil Young
and Bruce Springsteen,” Timberg says, “write anthems about the travails of the working
 595

man; we line up for the revival of ‘Death of a Salesman.’ John Mellencamp and Willie
Nelson hold festivals and fundraisers when farmers suffer. Taxpayers bail out the auto
industry and Wall Street and the banks. There’s a sense that manufacturing, or the
agrarian economy, is what this country is really about. But culture was, for a while, what
America did best: We produce and export creativity around the world. So why aren’t we
lamenting the plight of its practitioners?”

Timberg points to numerous causes in the US. Pragmatists and puritans object to art’s
uselessness or idolatry; the public worships celebrities and so has a distorted view of
the creative class; there’s a culture war fought between liberals and so-called anti-
elitists, and artists are on the losing side with the intellectuals; the technological
revolution has democratized the production of culture, leading people to err in inferring
that there’s likewise a democratization of talent, which in turn leads to resentment
towards successful artists since we assume that anyone can produce great art. Finally,
there’s socially Darwinian economics and the scientistic assumption that only what can
be measured is real and worthwhile; hence, many assume that if art can’t pay its own
way in the so-called free market, the artists ought to starve.

There are a number of fascinating questions here. First, is there such a thing as great
art, and if so, what is it? Second, is there currently any such art in the West, and if so
does that art matter? Third, is there a deeper cause of the creative class’s hardship, one
that’s tied to the function of art?

The Irrelevance of Great Postmodern Art

Regarding the first question, there’s little academic agreement about art’s function.
Surely, at a minimum, though, great art should be the result of some skill or talent.
Modernists valued originality as a sign of individual genius unrestrained by dogmatic
institutions. At best, though, newness is a necessary condition of great art, since there
are scribbles, noises, and hackworks that have never before been seen, heard, or read.
Also, the cult of originality takes for granted a teleological, progressivist view of history
 596

according to which what’s in the past is necessarily inferior to what will come. I prefer
Spengler’s more naturalistic, cyclical theory of culture, according to which all
civilizations come and go, passing through stages of vivacity and decline. Art should
also hold up a mirror to the society in which it’s produced and to the spirit of its time. But
this too doesn’t suffice for great art, since anything can be interpreted as indicating the
state of current culture or of human nature. Perhaps art should also point the way to a
solution to social ills. According to Paglia, for example, secular art should fulfill a
spiritual need that can no longer be fulfilled by theistic religion. Even if artists have no
clue about how to improve their culture, Paglia implies that viewing great art will
advance culture by improving the quality of its citizens.

This isn’t a complete theory of art, by any means, but we can take the combination of
those criteria as a rough guide and ask whether any current, postmodern art is great in
those respects. Much postmodern art seems arbitrary and indeed fraudulent as
opposed to demonstrating much skill. Some such art, however, in the attempt to push
the envelope, is perpetrated on a vast scale, incorporating tons of steel or gallons of
paint, showing off the artist’s skill, at least, in socializing or in otherwise raising the funds
to pursue such large-scale projects. And much postmodern art does indeed prove that
originality doesn’t suffice for greatness, since many postmodern paintings, for example,
consist of just such novel forms of scribbling.

The pointlessness or pretentiousness of this art does reflect the apathy and jadedness
of postmodern society, but this raises the further question of whether a corrupt society
can produce objectively, universally great art. If a culture is rotten and its art reflects that
degenerateness by being equally rotten, the art must surely be as poor, in a sense, as
the culture that spawns it. But perhaps art can be so rotten, as in the case of any
Michael Bay movie, that the depths to which the work sinks are as awesome as the
heights of the most elevated art. Perhaps art can be so disposable that it stands as an
odious warning of the end of human vice. In that respect, even the worst of postmodern
art can be permanently useful, albeit only ironically and paradoxically since the
“greatness” of this art would consist in the work’s encouragement to do much better. As
 597

for cultivating the viewer’s character, much postmodern art seems rather to reinforce the
conventional cynicism and relativism; certainly, most postmodern artists would merely
parrot obsolete liberal memes by way of recommending how Western societies might be
salvaged.

However, the technological revolution complicates the evaluation of current Western art.
The fact is that virtually every conceivable genre of art is now being produced and
indeed made freely available on the internet. If you go to the Last.fm radio website, for
example, you’ll find lists of musicians occupying micro niches within niches. There’s
electronic music, of course, but then there’s ambient music and then drone and then
dark ambient and drone doom and then drone metal; then there’s funeral doom, drone
doom metal, sludge, post-metal, stoner metal, sludgecore, sludge doom, and so on and
so forth for all other music genres. Something similar is so with respect to painting,
creative writing, and even acting. The internet has indeed allowed anyone to publish his
or her own art. There are, for example, an astonishing number of blogs on every
conceivable topic, including something as outlandish as existential cosmicism and the
undead god. There’s more art created now than anyone can imagine and so as a matter
of sheer probability you’d think that at least a fraction of this outpouring of art must be
great.

Even were there now such hidden gems, though, the new ways in which this art is
distributed raise the further question: Is all great art necessarily recognized as such?
The works of many great painters, for example, became famous only after the painters
died, having languished for years in obscurity, ignored or belittled by the art
establishment--and that was before the advent of the internet and the information glut
that afflicts consumers. There can be too much of a good thing; indeed, you can turn
what was once a boon--when it was hard to come by or consumed in moderation--into a
poison by consuming too much of it. An apple a day may be healthy, but twenty apples
every day is not. Perhaps, then, technology has made art so abundant that we’ve
become bored with it: not only have we peeked at the man behind the curtain, but we
know everything there is to know about him; we have his cell phone number and he’s at
 598

our beck and call. When you can find not just free music, but any conceivable kind of
music--and just by tapping a few keys--music may lose its charm. They say that the
more you pay for something the more value you ascribe to what you buy, to justify the
price, and thus the better you feel about paying so much for it. The corollary is that what
can be so easily attained will seem all the more disposable and thus not worth having.
(The stereotype of the loose woman works in the same way: when a woman is easily
seduced, the man loses respect for her since he assumes she’s worthless as a trophy
and likely won’t be faithful to him.)

This follows the pattern of Murphy’s Law: the harder something is to achieve, the more
it’s worth having and the fewer the people who achieve it, whereas the fewer the
troubles encountered in pursuing something, the less worthy the thing is and thus the
more the suckers who settle on something so unimportant. The point is that prior to the
democratization of art distribution by the printing press, television, and the internet,
when art was truly a delicacy for the elite, art was prized if only as a status symbol, like
a flat belly in the midst of so many MacDonald’s “restaurants.” Art in a postmodern
society has no such high status, because it’s consumed along with the air we breathe.
Thus, a democracy is usually the opposite of a meritocracy. Two heads are better than
one only if one of the heads isn’t a dunderhead that will spoil things for the pair. The
more heads you put into the mix, the more dunderheads you introduce and thus the
lower the standard that must be suffered for group cohesion. You’d think that the
dunderheads would be outweighed by the geniuses whose input would also be
increased, but this assumes that the dunderheads equal the geniuses in number and
influence. In those societies that are beset by poor public education systems and by
waves and waves of media misinformation emanating from the likes of Fox News and
talk radio, the dunderheads might well drown out the elites, which will shift the average
and lower the standards of art, consumer products, politics, and everything else that
depends on public demand.

To sum up, I suspect that there is great art now being produced in the West. This art is
the product of great skill and originality and it deals with important topics. The problem
 599

with postmodern art may lie not with the artists, then, but with the consumers: we
postmodernists are spoiled and we take our godlike knowledge and power for granted.
The internet is the fabled horn of plenty, and just as the spirits in the Christian heaven
would be insufferable, condescending pantywaists, so too our vices are exacerbated by
the environment we help create. We steal much of what we find on the internet because
we want the best deal possible, and that in turn is because we don’t make enough
money to be carefree with our purchases; we don’t earn a living wage, because we
settle for politicians who protect society’s naturally oligarchic structure, and we settle
because the candidates’ technocratic handlers exploit our biological biases and so
easily manipulate us. Then we enter a self-loathing phase as we realize we’re abusing a
doomed business model in which content creators offer the fruits of their labours for free
on the internet just on the off-chance that their work will go viral. Moreover, like
decadent aristocrats we’re surrounded by such opulence that we become corrupted. We
lose sight of the value of what’s in front of us because we equate its value with the ease
with which we can obtain it (just by clicking away at the mouse for a few seconds); thus,
we commit a form of the genetic fallacy. And so both the artists and the consumers
suffer: the latter impoverish the former, and the former punish the latter with haystacks
of mediocre art in which are buried perhaps some pins of great artworks.

The upshot, then, is that the quality of art is no longer decisive. Postmodernists are
jaded because we’ve seen too much: too much art, too many religions, too many
political scandals, too many celebrities, too many scientific discoveries, and on and on
and on. The problem isn’t that we obviously have more history behind us than any
previous generation; rather, we have much more information about that history, thanks
to technological advances which have democratized the flow of information in general
and not just the distribution of art. Our greater access to information has empowered
and thus corrupted us. (Just imagine what a debauched tyrant God would be.)
Wikipedia all by itself fulfills the adage that a little learning is dangerous: anyone on the
internet now can learn a little about anything under the sun, and so we’re boastful and
rude in our electronic mockeries of social interactions. Moreover, we’re inundated with
media-generated images, news stories, jingles, and sales pitches, and so we’re glutted;
 600

we’re sick of our cultural follies. We’ve become desensitized to both the best and the
worst of what we can accomplish. Somewhere in the cultural maelstrom may likely be
found artworks that nourish the soul, but who has the patience to sift the swarms of
inferior works or even the incentive to believe that nourishing anything is worthwhile or
that there’s such a thing as a soul in the first place? The problem isn’t so much that
art is dead, but that the postmodern art consumer is dead inside.

Art and the Culture War

Finally, I’d like to address the third question I raised, about the deeper cause. Timberg
says, suggestively, that “Serious art – novels, what you have in the galleries – brings
you back to reality and makes you look at your life. Serious art makes people
uncomfortable – and during these times, we don’t need more discomfort.” Again, he
says, “‘the tale of our times,’ O’Neill wrote in his piece on the silence of the new
depression, ‘is mostly being told by our unwillingness to tell it.’” I think Timberg here
points to a major cause of the contemporary Western artist’s struggle. In a degenerate
society, great art will reflect that abysmal condition and so present a message that the
majority is unwilling to hear. Likewise, in a corrupt political system, the politician who
“gaffes” by telling the politically incorrect truth will be despised and ridiculed as insane
or as otherwise not Serious, not to mention voted out of office. So the environment and
the conventions that spellbind us set up a vicious feedback loop, worsening trends that
begin with our innate weaknesses and sealing our minds within self-reinforcing
delusions. After all, the postmodern know-it-all, lost in pretentious irony and feigning the
weariness that would come with godhood is a mere poseur (see “How to Live without
Irony,” by Christy Wampole, at the NY Times). The universe outside our cultural
playgrounds is thoroughly inhuman and to appreciate that fact is to sink to your knees in
horror, to despair that your cherished ideals are farcically irrelevant, not to play idle
games with cultural dross.

We’re the killers of postmodern art as well as the victims of a paradoxically

artless culture. We have access to so much art that we might as well have access to
 601

none; we take it all for granted, losing the ability to assign things their proper value. We
don’t deserve timeless, transcendent art, because we wouldn’t appreciate it even if it fell
into our laps. We are smug, soulless, contemptible creatures; our modern ancestors bet
on Reason to replace religious Faith, and so we’ve inherited godlike technoscientific
power, but not the wisdom to apply that power well. Paglia is right when she says that
we lack but desperately need great art; however, the problem isn’t so much that this art
doesn’t exist, but that we haven’t the eyes to see it or the character to normatively
distinguish the great from the inferior. She blames postmodern art critics for their
pompous, juvenile and self-refuting relativism, but I suspect that academic
postmodernism is only a symptom of the disease.

The ultimate problem of postmodernity was prophesied over a century ago by

Nietzsche, who was an early postmodernist: when God dies, so does the basis of
theistic values, and without new myths--expressed by great art--to sustain
atheistic replacement ideals, functional atheists will revert to nihilism. Postmodern
art consumers are nihilistic: we don’t care about art in the first place, because our
culture is deluged with information of all kinds, and so we’re unwilling to take up a quest
to find the art that might save us or to pay much if anything for that art were we to
encounter it. We are philistines posing as connoisseurs, pragmatic system-managers
pretending to be high-cultured heralds of posthumanity. Our vaunted “high culture” is
the seepage, the flatulent discharge, the stink from the decay of our paltry portion of the
undead god. We are the frogs in the boiling pot, mesmerized by our melting flesh
and mistaking our decadence for good taste.

But more to the point, were some noble artists to sublimate the forces of that corruption
and to produce inspiring artworks, art that might catalyze a social process of
rejuvenation, and were that art so powerful as to be able to stir us even within the
depths of our personal cocoon of delusions, there’s yet another cocoon that would first
have to be cracked open: the collective version of the self-reinforcing delusion. There is
a largely automated social system that prevents subversive messages from reaching a
wide audience, and this filtering happens even on the internet with its democratic
 602

powers of liberating information. Contrary to conspiracy theorists, there is no cabal of

elites that controls this system of managing public opinion, although there is a minority
that surely benefits from the natural sorting process.

What happens is just that most social groups ultimately succumb to the Iron Law of
Oligarchy, and one aspect of this assignment of status in the pecking order is the
differential flow of information. The elites in charge have their top secret access to the
truth, while the masses are fed a diet of nonsense; more precisely, though, the masses
flock to gobble up their gruel, because they lack the skills and the social connections to
occupy a higher position in the power hierarchy. Even the movers and shakers can
watch Fox News or the dreck of the most-watched YouTube videos, but only those who
aren’t educated to think critically or who have nothing else to do because they’re stuck
with low-level jobs will mistake those disposable infotainments for revelations worthy of
the time to consume them. The social system runs according to natural laws that spell
out the patterns that result from complexification and evolution (synchronic and
diachronic processes). One such pattern is the emergence of oligarchy which distributes
power to stabilize a group of social animals. Democratic or libertarian social structures
merely free individuals to assume their natural positions in the power hierarchy.

And my point here is that postmodern societies in decline or at least in denial about their
deficiencies will make great art all the harder to find, to reinforce the delusions that
sustain the currently-unfashionable oligarchic structure. The bad art of infotainment
distracts the masses while the elite are free to buy and sell masterpieces of yesteryear.
Artists suffer, then, for the sake of social stability. After all, artists tend to be omega
men and women, alienated outsiders, outcasts and introverts whose detachment from
society allows them to see what the insiders and mainstream masses can miss. Secular
artists tend to be subversive because their art is the product of their mentally disturbed
personality, which prevents them from adapting to social conventions. Antisocial
outsiders have less at stake in protecting politically correct delusions, and so these
artists--painters, novelists, bloggers, poets, singers, independent film-makers,
unconventional architects--use their art as weapons against the social order that
 603

ostracizes them. In modern or postmodern societies, at least, in which there’s a sharp

divide between religious and secular forces, there’s typically a cold war between artists
and defenders of mainstream, nakedly or covertly oligarchic conventions. If Timberg is
right and most Western artists are in dire financial straits, this signifies that the
mainstream forces currently have the upper hand or at least that few people appreciate
subversive messages enough to pay much for them. Alternatively, the significance
might be that the masses crave an alternative to their cultural status quo, but that
Western art isn’t sufficiently subversive to meet that demand. Again, though, I think
there’s so much art out there now that any artistic taste can be satisfied. But taste
requires an appetite, a sign of inner life that’s rarer than you might think.
 604

Male-Bashing in Advertising: A Sordid Business

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For twenty years now, one of the highlights of North American advertising, especially on
television, is what many call its male-bashing. Invariably, when TV ads show men and
women together, the ads belittle men as ignorant, incompetent, loutish, or juvenile while
heralding women as wise, mature, long-suffering adults. (For examples, see the Top
Ten list from AskMen.com and for background see the 2005 NY Times article, “Men are
Becoming the Ad Target of the Gender Sneer”). Men are always the butt of the jokes
while women represent the smart consumers who are bound to follow the advertiser’s
advice and buy the product sold by the ad. Critics often remark that were these
stereotypes reversed, there would be a feminist uproar and the advertisers would be
lynched in the streets. Of course, in the ads of the 1950s and 40s, the stereotypes were
indeed exactly reversed, with women depicted as know-nothing children and men as the
responsible, all-knowing guardians. Those ads persisted because women had little
power then to affect the mass media. Then came the later feminist wave in the 1960s,
and women entered the workplace in droves. Over the last couple of decades, North
American women have started earning as much as men even in some white collar fields
and those women now outnumber men with college or university degrees. Women
currently have some sway over the culture industry, although they’ve hardly unseated
men from their positions of ultimate political and economic power. Why, then, are the
male-bashing ads still perpetrated and tolerated?
 605

Three reasons for their creation come to mind. First, taking into account what I just said,
that the current crop of grotesque sexist caricatures precisely reverses an earlier one,
the advertisers may be lazy, choosing a formula they know worked in the past, but
flipping the variables to accommodate recent social developments. This is surely part of
the truth, but it points to a second cause which is the advertiser’s interest in reflecting
reality. After all, feminism, competition with machines for traditionally male-dominated
jobs, and postmodern cynicism and resistance to patriarchal metanarratives have
emasculated and feminized men in wealthy, decadent societies. Advertisers are hardly
like scientists who are after knowledge for its own sake, but selling products requires at
least a modicum of concern to represent reality--although surely no more than the
minimum needed to avoid being branded as a bold-faced liar. There’s much talk
recently of men’s identity crisis, so ads may reflect that crisis, as advertisers burrow into
the consumer’s preconscious or unconscious and spin narratives that associate over-
produced products with the fulfillment of manufactured or uncontrolled urges,
respectively.

Still, the fact that the commercials are clearly exaggerations, at best, if not shameless
distortions, suggests a third cause which is that advertisers know that male-bashing ads
are somehow currently effective at selling the products. Now, assuming the ads work,
they mustn’t exclude any large, targeted mass of consumers such as adult men or
women. So perhaps surprisingly, men and women must approve of these ads. The
reasons why, though, aren’t so hard to discern. Although superficially, men should be
appalled by their caricatures throughout the mass media, and some men even speak
out against them (such as the radio personality Tom Leykis), the majority likely chalk up
their embarrassing cultural image as just another round of lies that women need to hear
to accommodate men’s actual vices, including men's higher sex drive (see “Sex Drive:
How do Men and Women Compare?” at webmd.com). Meanwhile, women are
especially susceptible to flattery; indeed, men’s lies to women are so obligatory, due to
the fact that the evolutionary (sexual) interests of men and women are at loggerheads,
that the stream of lies amounts to a ritual mating dance to pacify women by overriding
 606

their defense mechanisms, including their bullshit detector. The boldness of the lies may
indicate stoutness of heart, courage on the battlefield, or some other evolutionarily
significant virtue.

To sum up, male-bashing and women-glorification work now in advertising, because

those business tactics aren’t radical departures from the trusty methods of earlier,
misogynistic decades; the ads reflect the postmodern reality in which women are on a
comparative economic and cultural upswing while men are lost in limbo, although the
overall trend is one of dehumanization; and men are used to lying to please women,
while women are readily flattered as long as the lies are sufficiently creative and
distracting for women to subconsciously register the subtext that men still dominate.

The trouble with this analysis, though, is that it doesn’t touch on the advertiser’s
depravity. The underlying fact is that advertising is a sordid business, fit for treacherous,
parasitic worms. When I punish myself by imagining a day in the life of an advertiser,
here’s what I picture. The advertiser’s pit sinks deep into the earth as a volcanic
entrance to hell’s inferno. A demon collects his infernal files of esoteric data and other
apocalyptic devices to tempt the human masses and ensure their eventual downfall.
Slinking through a crack in the outcropping’s wall, the demon narrowly misses the
lashing tails and claws of fellow demons scampering to their orgiastic fight to the death.
Through flames and clouds of sulfur, the demon catches sight of children being
sacrificed to Mammon and chuckles as their blood boils on the rocks. The demon gets
to work and takes hold of one captive human after another, flogging them senseless
with his cruelly-fashioned whips. Then the demon lashes himself until he collapses and
requires a break, his howls of self-loathing adding to the cacophonous cries of the
damned.

No, I don’t care much for advertising.

 607

Sheldon Cooper: The Nerd’s Paradox

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The Big Bang Theory is a very highly rated comedy in Canada and the US, largely
because of the break-out character of Dr. Sheldon Cooper, played by Jim Parsons,
who’s won two Emmy’s and a Golden Globe for his performance. On the surface, the
show is about a group of nerdy friends in their late twenties, who are scientific geniuses
but with childish preoccupations that socially handicap them. Why are such a TV show
and the character of Sheldon Cooper, in particular, so popular?

Evading Angst and Subduing Technoscience

In the show, Sheldon has the most freakishly high intelligence in his group of friends,
but has also regressed most to a childhood state. He’s thus the show’s most
paradoxical character. He was a child prodigy with an IQ of 187, earning various
graduate degrees, including a Ph.D., while still a teenager. He became a professional
theoretical physicist, perhaps the most intellectually-challenging job, requiring a mastery
of cutting-edge mathematics and a grasp of the most exotic, inhuman concepts, which
are at the center of modern physics. He has an eidetic memory, which enables him to
know virtually everything about what he regards as nontrivial subjects, namely all
subjects that don’t involve adult social relationships.
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If knowledge is power, then, Sheldon should intimidate the rest of humanity with his
fearsome intelligence. But the opposite is true: Sheldon is routinely both pitied and
mocked by everyone, especially by his friends who know him best. The reason is that
Sheldon’s godlike intelligence is complemented by the fact that his emotions are those
of a child’s, making him psychologically a boy in a man’s body. He’s obsessed with
comic books, sci fi, video games, and trains; he likes to be sung to sleep and otherwise
mothered; he’s unable to drive a car so he has to be driven by his friends. Despite his
near-omniscience, which theoretically enables him to overcome any obstacle, his lack of
emotional development renders him unable to comprehend let alone succeed in the
field which adults care about most, the field of social interaction. Sheldon may suffer
from Asperger Syndrome or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, since he lacks empathy,
engages in restrictive and repetitive behaviours, and is socially awkward. Moreover, he
suffers from phobias of germs and of being touched, among others.

Sheldon is therefore effectively asexual, an alien or a god among human beings who,
instead of terrifying his intellectual inferiors, is routinely mocked by them. When his
friend Penny, who has lackluster intelligence, attempts to navigate his own scientific
areas of expertise, tackling basic questions about how the universe works, she fails
dismally but she’s neither pitied nor ridiculed for those failures, because she wields
power in social relationships, being an attractive young woman with much sexual
experience. The show thus presupposes the higher value of social relationships than of
technoscience, so that neither mastery of nor failure in the latter is assumed to matter.
Whereas in reality advances in science and technology radically reshape human life,
Sheldon’s scientific progress is never applauded or shown to be consequential.

The key to Sheldon’s character, I think, is that he’s born with his superhuman
intelligence. Instead of choosing to acquire knowledge, to eat the proverbial apple due
to the sin of wanting to exercise godlike self-control, Sheldon’s forced to endure near-
omniscience, due to his high IQ, his prodigious memory, and his mental illnesses which
alienate him, cloistering him in the Ivory Tower. This means that Sheldon’s social
failures can’t be interpreted as punishments for a sin of choosing to transcend a pre-
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established divine plan. The only responses to him that are left to us are pity and
ridicule: pity, for Sheldon who will never know the pleasures of sex and love, and
ridicule in playful retaliation for his childish selfishness, his temper tantrums, and his
social awkwardness. Sheldon’s essentially a victim: he’s cursed by reason and while
he’s blessed with compensatory characteristics that protect him from angst, those
characteristics also ostracize him. That is, the curse of reason is knowledge of our
existential predicament of being animals tantalized by the possibility of our godhood.
This knowledge causes angst, which we attempt to escape by distracting ourselves with
fantasies and other delusions, most commonly with theistic projections of our vanities.
Sheldon has an overabundance of the requisite knowledge, but he’s spared the
emotional devastation from the existential implications, because he’s insulated not by
theistic fantasies but by childlike ones. Those fantasies of superheroes, chivalry, and
toy collections, however, tragically deprive him of the fruits of adulthood.

For Sheldon’s part, he’s aware that society disapproves of his means of coping with a
god’s soul-crushing near-omniscience, but he in turn looks down on normal folks for
their petty or bestial pastimes. However, Sheldon’s condescension is undermined by his
own inchoate desire for normality. He has a child’s pride in his intellectual greatness
and is offended when he’s not properly rewarded. Indeed, the notion that knowledge is
rewarding is itself a childish one, often upheld as part of a pragmatic whitewash of the
Scientific Revolution. Knowledge, freedom, and consciousness are curses, not
blessings, because they’re necessarily embodied in animals which have only limited
means of fulfilling their potential. Although our high degree of those three powers
elevates us from the humdrum task of mere survival, empowering us with the leisure to
artificially manage our evolution, we poison our cultures with the delusions that derive
from our base origin. We lack the virtues to live with no illusions as intelligent, free,
conscious beings, because our animalistic fight or flight instinct and other primitive
neural mechanisms still establish upper bounds on our mental development. Primates
that evolved to fear insects and darkness interpret the alien outer vistas, opened up to
us by our talents for consciousness and intelligence, that is, the world beyond the one
we narrowly inhabit as hosts for genes, as rife with potential dangers. Just as our
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biological limits betray our godlike aspirations to control our lives and to create our own
sustainable worlds, Sheldon’s childlike baggage and escapist fantasies prevent his
complete transformation into a posthuman.

Sheldon’s character of the paradoxical nerd seems to have social utility, which would
explain his wild popularity. The TV show deconstructs the modern pretension of
progress through technoscience, by presenting a stunted version of the rationalist’s
hero. More specifically, the show posits that the genius needed for something like the
raising of the global living standards would have to be offset by some such
compensatory strategies as those employed by Sheldon and his scientific friends, who
have their own childish obsessions together with their tragic results (inability to talk to
women and over-dependence on mother). By laughing at the nerds on The Big Bang
Theory, postmodern sophisticates can pretend that technoscience poses no danger and
that their incredulity towards all metanarratives frees them from such pathetic traps. Of
course, neither reason for laughing is justified; indeed, the cartoonish comedy of The
Big Bang Theory is itself a distraction from the angst which awaits the use of even sub-
genius human intelligence. In any case, while the show’s nerds are harmless and even
emasculated by their means of coping with scientific knowledge, in reality science and
technology are hazardous both to the existence of life and to the maintenance of our
sanity. Moreover, while cynicism and apathy may enable the postmodernist to brush off
traditional myths as sociopolitical propaganda, she likely buys into the scientistic religion
of secular humanism, which includes faith in capitalism, democracy, and liberal social
values. This religion has its own pathetic rituals, such as subservience to somnolent
rules of political correctness.
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Pity and the Nerd: A Dialogue

Here’s how I imagine a dialogue going between roommates Sheldon and Leonard,
regarding romantic love. The setting is their apartment.

*****

Sheldon Cooper: Where are you going? Tonight’s Comic Book Night.

Leonard Hofstadter: I have a date, Sheldon.

SC: You’d rather be out with a woman than rummaging the comic book store? Hiding
what precious little intellect you have to avoid intimidating her on the off-chance that
your short stature will trigger the woman’s mothering instinct, which you can then exploit
in some twisted fashion to have coitus with her?

LH: That’s disgusting! You have no idea what you’re talking about. For a so-called
genius, it’s amazing how dumb you are about what’s most important.

SC: That being...?

LH: Like the song says, love is all you need. Romantic love, sexual intimacy. You’re just
a child with no comprehension of emotionally mature, adult life.

SC: Mmm, yes, a child with detailed knowledge of the physical processes that create
the chemicals that use love and sex to preserve the genes, a child who’s innocent of the
petty and beastly thought routines that you call emotional adulthood.

LH: Regardless of sex’s biological role, you’ve got no standing to criticize what you’ve
never personally experienced.
 612

SC: My my, Leonard, your anticipation of coitus this evening must be dulling your
cerebral cortex. Do I have to murder someone to know that murder is wrong? My
alienation from the hoi polloi allows me to study their behaviour objectively and see it for
what it really is, unclouded by politically correct sentimentality.

LH: Who are you kidding? You don’t socially interact on an adult level, because you’ve
got a thousand irrational fears, not to mention OCD which chains you to arbitrary rules
like your commandment to read comics on Comic Book Night. You’re a broken man and
most people feel sorry for you.

SC: Well now, is the inability to belittle oneself a weakness? I may rigidly adhere to the
rules I set for myself, but we’re all imprisoned by the laws of nature and I understand
that prison better than the blissfully-ignorant slaves of hormones. You may pity what you
call my brokenness, but that’s like a sinner criticizing God’s majesty. God pities lesser
beings and so do I.

LH: Get over yourself! You’re no god. You’re a mentally ill Texan and an arrogant child
who thinks he ought to rule the world because he’s really smart. But even if you were
omniscient, you wouldn’t have any wisdom.

SC: I’ll thank you to take that back, Leonard. You can call me a broken child, a sick,
unwise, Satanic pretender to God’s throne, but a Texan?! That’s going too far. Let’s
keep this conversation civil, if you please.

LH: I apologize. You’re not a Texan. But you are a pitiful child who’s never going to
experience love.

SC: Dear Leonard, the sentimental nonsense you emit when your hindbrain is
preoccupied with thoughts of sex! Why would I want to experience love? Instead, I can
perceive the universe’s grandeur, the beauty of the mathematical patterns that entail
your repeating of stale memes about the glory of an emotion needed for primitive pair-
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bonding. I can see the code that runs the Matrix and you’re mesmerized by hormonal
illusions that control your every move, including your going out on a date on Comic
Book Night!

LH: Which I’m now going to be late for, thanks to you. I’m glad we cleared this up.
You’re a keen observer of the human condition and when you’ve amassed all of your
knowledge, maybe you’ll have won a Nobel Prize and furthered scientific progress for all
humankind. But you’ll have floated around like a ghost or banged on the window of a toy
store like a child, unable to play because you don’t even know how to open the door.

SC: Well, when you put it that way, it sounds kind of sad. But I’d take a Nobel or a well-
crafted comic book over the sexual rigmarole any day. Enjoy your date, Leonard, and I’ll
return to my “childish” pursuit of unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity.
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The Abuse of Light in the Films of Spielberg and Michael Bay

____________________________________________________

Much can be learned about American culture by comparing the abuses of light in the
cinematography of Spielberg and Michael Bay films. In most of his movies, Spielberg
works with the cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, who favours an overabundance of
natural, white light. His shots are often overexposed so that the milky white light washes
out all of the surfaces in the scene. Given the attributes of Spielberg’s movies, including
the sentimental nostalgia for childhood, the touchy-feely morality of secularized
Judaism, and the over-reliance on storyboarding, this prevalence of white light
represents God’s immanence and the religious imperative to make Earth resemble
Heaven.

Meanwhile, Bay’s movies are conspicuous for their aversion to natural lighting,
especially in indoor scenes: there’s almost always a fully-saturated, candy-like blue or
yellowish-orange light source somewhere offstage, casting an artificial glaze over
everything. Given the features of his movies, including the militarism, the jingoism, the
crass subservience to macho stereotypes, the predominance of production values and
the lack of artistic vision, this artificial light represents hollow, amoral materialism and
the secular imperative to make all places resemble Las Vegas.
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Spielberg’s Compromised Judaism

With these two iconographic uses of light, you have the worst of American religious and
secular cultures. American Judaism and Christianity are so cut off from their mystical
origins, so drained of their spiritual purposes, and so compromised in their integration
with the secular forces of science, democracy, and capitalism, that their myths and
moral messages are hideous, grating imitations of healthier versions. It goes without
saying that a secularized Jew or Christian has no legs to stand on: they can chant their
creeds incessantly only because they’ve mastered the art of compartmentalizing their
thoughts and feelings, having now adapted to an environment consisting largely of
computers, which have readily-inspected separate directories to store their information.
These moderate religious folks don’t share the theistic mindset needed to breathe life
into their creeds, because they’ve at least unconsciously absorbed the scientific, secular
worldview. Accordingly, they save their myths only by interpreting them in literary rather
than in theological terms. Morality and families are sacred, the moderates will say,
because God carved his commandments into stone and handed them to Moses--except
which of these moderates can explain why that religious metaphor should be regarded
as any more special than the metaphors that are a dime a dozen in the thousands of
novels published each year? Does the old age of a tradition sanctify its content?
Obviously not, since the moderate religionist freely cherry-picks which religious tradition
to observe and which to discard as the obsolete labour of ancient, uninformed yokels.

The problem with moderate, secularized religions is simply one of awkwardness. It’s not
a question of having to face up to an honourable challenge to the secular lifestyle;
rather, the presence of wishy-washy, hypocritical, having-it-both-ways charlatans is just
aesthetically intolerable. Imagine you’re at a party, everyone is enjoying themselves,
and then a self-righteous hypocrite takes his face out of the punchbowl and his arms off
of a pair of half-naked ladies, and lectures the crowd about its sins, spouting the wisdom
and stale metaphors of cultures long departed, the alcoholic beverage still dripping
down his chin and his cheeks still flush with the anticipation of his imminent orgy. Again,
the trouble in this case has nothing to do with taking seriously the transparent nonsense
 616

emanating from that self-deluded fellow’s mouth; the difficulty is just in extricating
yourself from his vicinity so that his bad taste doesn’t somehow rub off on you.

Something similar can be said about democratic western politicians, who represent the
bottom of the barrel, ethically and intellectually speaking, given that ultimate political
and economic power resides--in this time of globalization--in the oligarch’s corridors
which interpenetrate government and the private sector. For example, an American
liberal’s chief difficulty today becomes not one of having to devise a plan to beat
Romney, Cain, Perry, or any of the other potential Republican presidential nominees;
the problem, rather, is in expending the energy needed to hold back your own
embarrassment for the Republicans. Of course, Republicans are in exactly the same
situation with regard to Obama. Obama’s high intelligence only makes his betrayal of
his initial liberal campaign more awkward and the bankruptcy of liberal rationalism more
conspicuous.

But to return to Spielberg’s movies, my point is that his light symbolism is mawkish and
sanctimonious, because his symbols depend on secularized Judaism, which has
nothing to teach either religious or nonreligious people, given the extent of its
compromises. Mind you, the shame of secularized Jews is likely indirect, since they
tend to see themselves in Straussian, elitist terms, purveying noble lies for the
unwashed masses and for social stability. Their cognitive dissonance lies, then, not in
any tension between their religious and nonreligious beliefs, since they have virtually no
religious beliefs to speak of, but in their pretense that they’re wiser than the rabble to
which they regularly lie as soon as they talk about religion or morality.

(Note that because I’m culturally a reformed Jew, I’m entitled, by the power conferred to
me by the Laws of Political Correctness, to slander Jews as freely as I like, just as
Herman Cain was the only one in polite society to be able to speak the N-word in the
name of Perry’s hunting camp. I, for one, dare not type the full N-word, lest the PC gods
smite me for failing to observe the superstition of idolatry. We must, after all, bow to
preposterously-misplaced fear of symptoms rather than of diseases. We must especially
 617

avoid speaking ill of Jews whose people suffered so much in their confrontation with
pure evil--unless you happen to be a Jew, and then you can say whatever you like
about them. There’s nothing like a naked double standard. In any case, I’m all for being
politically correct, by worshipping images and signs rather than what they represent.
How else will we remain clueless and incapable of preventing our downfall? The
conventions of political correctness must be respected as a means by which we’ll
extinguish ourselves and clear the path for a species to replace us.)

Bay’s Uncontrollable Misanthropy

As for Michael Bay’s abuse of light, this should be seen as just a hint of the depth of the
man’s loathing for his viewers. As far as I can tell, the subtext of each of his movies is
Bay’s feeling that the secular lifestyle of infinite consumption degrades us all and that
we’re all, in effect, currently writhing in hell. He therefore aims for his movies to be
execrable, to be the very worst form of art that anyone can currently perpetrate--and this
is no easy trick, since a movie that successfully translates a filmmaker’s boundless
misanthropy must have not a single redeeming quality, so that when the movie’s over
and the viewer leaves the theater, not a trace of anything of value can be left in the
viewer’s mind: not a memory of a funny, scary, sexy, or cool scene, not a resonance
with ideas dramatized by the movie--nothing. In this way, the lasting relationship
between Bay and his audience is strictly one-way: his audience members transfer their
money to the bank accounts that fund his nihilistic enterprise and he leaves them with a
representation of the void at the heart of American secular culture.

The key to the production of the worst of all possible art is shallowness, which is the
equivalent of religious moderation and which thus makes for the comparison with
Spielberg’s morality plays. There need be nothing wrong with a movie that criticizes
libertine or materialistic culture, if the movie commits to the criticism and carries it out
with good faith. Even were the criticism unmerited, such a movie would have the
redeeming feature of posing the challenge of discovering the movie’s weakness. But a
movie that commits to nothing, that rehearses tired action formulas purely for cheap,
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ephemeral thrills, appealing to the very lowest standards with regard to plot and
character, isn’t art so much as highway robbery.

Bay evidently got a taste for this shallowness from Bruckheimer’s seeming instruction to
his composers to abuse their musical instruments. Listen, for example, to the scores of
the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which feature repetitive blasts of a full-throated
orchestra (“duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, dum-dum-dum-dum, duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh,
dum-dum-dum-dum!”). This anti-music doesn’t discriminate by picking a horn or an
oboe or a violin to prevail for a moment, creating a shifting sonic pattern that humans
call music. Instead, his movies’ scores bang away at all of the instruments in the
orchestra simultaneously, committing to none of them and thus creating a vacuum that
celebrates the farce of parasitic consumerism.

Michael Bay, then, hates Americans for gobbling up his movies; at least, that's the most
plausible explanation of why he keeps punishing his audience, according to this satirical
rant. But again, were he to openly reveal that contempt, his movies would no longer be
the very worst possible, which is what they need to be to hold a mirror up to the
American black hole. His genius is in revealing nothing, saying nothing, showing
nothing; his movies are cotton candies that disintegrate when consumed.

Still, perhaps no one can perfectly hold such hatred in check, and so for what at first
seems no discernable reason, he paints most of his indoor scenes with melancholic
blue and queasy yellowish-orange artificial lights. These lights are artificial not just
because they’re electric, but because they’re unrealistic: the light sources themselves
are rarely shown and their hues are always fully saturated, meaning that their hues are
furthest from white so that the lights are like vampires hiding from the sun. Bay calls
attention to the fact that these lights are props, that he and his cinematographers--he
uses different ones from one movie to the next, so he seems to be the common
denominator--choose to reuse the same bizarre lighting, scene after scene and movie
after movie. He often pairs orange and blue lights in the same shot, hiding their sources
like Easter Eggs.
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The depressing cyans and nauseating yellowish-oranges indicate, then, not a subliminal
criticism of the scenes he puts together, but Bay’s seething, barely-controlled disgust
with the depraved world that holds him in such high esteem, with the audience that’s
entertained by nihilistic twaddle and is so numbed to the emptiness of their secular
culture that they’re even fleetingly thrilled by Bay’s chaotic action sequences and stirred
by his ham-handed reinforcement of sociopolitical conventions. What the lights seem to
mean for Bay is that his movies are supposed to depress or nauseate the viewer, but
that because the viewer instead flocks to see his movies, it’s the viewer’s emptiness
and taste that are so appalling. The sickly lights symbolize the viewer’s shallowness for
preferring such shallow movies.
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Woody Allen’s Curious Intellectualism

____________________________________________________

Woody Allen films are famous for their existential comedy. On the one hand, these films
tend to feature the Woody Allen character, a hyper-rational, neurotic atheist and
existentialist who fears death and regards life as absurdly unfair. On the other hand, this
character is highly sexual and instead of ascetically retreating from life, he finds humour
in tragic situations, expressing that humour in wry one-liners. Most of his films mine this
paradox, but Whatever Works, starring Larry David as the Woody Allen character,
called Boris, neatly summarizes what seems Allen’s personal philosophy. No familiarity
with this particular movie’s plot is needed to understand Boris’ concluding speech, since
this speech could have been inserted into nearly any of his movies.

Boris says, “I totally lucked out. It just shows what meaningless blind chance the
universe is. Everybody schemes and dreams to meet the right person, and I jump out a
window and land on her [his soul mate]. And a psychic yet! I mean, come on, talk about
the irrational heart [Boris is a hyper-rationalist physicist who loves her in spite of
himself]...I happen to hate New year's celebrations. Everybody desperate to have fun.
Trying to celebrate in some pathetic little way. Celebrate what? A step closer to the
grave? That's why I can't say enough times, whatever love you can get and give,
whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace,
whatever works. And don't kid yourself, it's by no means all up to your own human
 621

ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck than you'd like to admit. Christ, you
know the odds of your father's one sperm from the billions, finding the single egg that
made you? Don't think about it, you'll have a panic attack.”

This speech refers both to dark existentialism (the inevitability of death) and to the need
for happiness and sexuality, to life’s unfairness (success’ dependence on luck) and to
the possibility of grace. Evidently, the film’s title, “Whatever Works,” is meant to call to
mind a pragmatic amoralist’s libertinism, the license to exploit nature’s inhumanity, not
for evil but for good--which Allen assumes to be mainly the pursuit of personal pleasure
with a life partner. As evidenced by his cerebral, philosophical humour and his
scandalous love life, Woody Allen’s movies seem vehicles for preaching his personal
wisdom, if not autobiographies.

Woody Allen’s Philosophy

A philosophical evaluation of Woody Allen’s viewpoint should be distinguished from a

comedic one. The paradox set up by his films works comedically, I think, because a
sexually preoccupied hyper-rationalist is bound to stumble into one absurd situation
after another. Moreover, this character is only a caricature of Everyman, of the typical
person, since everyone is pulled in opposite directions by the evolved modules of our
brains, such as by our capacities for dispassionate logic and for blind subservience to
the genes’ prerogative to preserve themselves by our sexual reproduction.

For example, as a hyper-rationalist, the Allen character is neurotically fearful of germs,

diseases, and of the body in general as triggers of existential horror: the body decays
and nature allows this to happen because each person means nothing; natural forces
bless mindless genetic code with immortality, not sentient creatures, which means we’re
all alienated strangers whose high comfort level is predicated on fantasy and delusion.
The hyper-rationalist is cursed with the inability to be fully enchanted by reassuring,
egocentric myths and so incurs a measure of insanity from staring too long into the
abyss. Thus the Allen character’s multiple neuroses. However, this character is also
 622

highly sexually active, longing for love. This inner conflict leads to hypocrisy and to all
manner of schemes to balance his reason with his instinct, what Plato calls our higher
and lower natures. Thus, the spectacle of the effeminate intellectual, who is all brains
and no brawn, nevertheless gearing up to serve his genes in the battle for sex; to
perform his bestial duties while recognizing the absurdity of the whole human
enterprise; to succumb to the banal glorification of romantic love while ridiculing all other
social conventions, including religious and moral ones--all of this can be quite
amusing.

But what of the philosophical merit of Woody Allen’s convictions? Should existentialists,
cosmicists, and skeptics prefer a life of hedonism or at least of romantic love, to one of
honour-bound renunciation of the more blatant natural processes? If we reduce Boris’
speech to its implicit argument, we find something like this: “(1) Nature is far from
heaven and is in fact absurdly unfair to us due to its mindlessness. (2) Assuming we
want to be happy and to do good, therefore, we need to take that piece of dark wisdom
into account, go with the flow and be pragmatic in our quest for love, which is the
greatest cause of happiness.” This argument raises the question, though, of whether the
first assumption in (2) ought to be granted, that is, of whether the antecedent clause of
the hypothetical imperative, “If you still want to be happy under our dire circumstances,
you ought to be desperate and pragmatic in finding love,” is justified. Should a hyper-
skeptic’s ultimate goal be happiness? I’ve argued in the Introduction that the answer is
No, and in “Curse of Reason” I argue that the objective, decentralized perspective
afforded by the use of reason tends to produce feelings of alienation rather than of
contentment.

In any case, I want to point out that affirming the fact that most people do desire
romantic love and happiness in general is different from positively evaluating those
desires in light of an ethical or aesthetic ideal. Moreover, while someone who has those
desires may find the implicit instrumental imperative in Woody Allen movies useful, this
leaves unanswered the deeper question of whether those desires ought to be
prioritized. Certainly, there’s the naturalistic fallacy in inferring that just because we feel
 623

strongly about something, as a matter of fact, therefore those feelings are right or
otherwise normatively justified. Now, a hyper-rationalist like the Allen character should
be expected to criticize any ethical or aesthetic standard, including one that’s brought
up against the pursuit of happiness. For example, were a Gnostic hermit to argue that
sex is bad because it entangles the participants in nature which itself is a bad place,
Woody Allen would mock that religious perspective with a classic one-liner. However,
the Allen character is no postmodern nihilist. Far from rejecting all normative principles,
he affirms the values of romantic love and of happiness in general. So the question I’m
raising is whether Woody Allen’s normative principle is superior, say, to a more ascetic
one that favours a less traditional lifestyle.

Indeed, the question can be reframed in comedic terms, since comedy is at least partly
an aesthetic matter. Aesthetically and comedically, then, the question is which lifestyle
is the ugliest/most ridiculous, that of the Allen character (the hyper-rational neurotic who
struggles to find love and contentment) or that of, say, a detached Buddhist, omega
man, or ascetic cosmicist? And on just this point, Woody Allen’s body of work counts
against the philosophical validity of his thesis, since in film after film he exhibits the
incoherence/ridiculousness of his protagonist’s values. Even as the Allen character
trashes a host of opposing viewpoints, that character is himself shown to be foolish,
over and over again. The very nerdish physical appearance of Woody Allen, juxtaposed
with his struggles to be manly, provokes laughter. The question, then, is whether, say,
an ascetic’s renunciation of natural urges is as ridiculous as the Woody Allen character.
To be sure, the prospect of an existentialist rebelling against a mindless cosmos that
must fail to be impressed or ashamed of generating tortured souls, has comedic
potential. But suppose the existentialist rebels in good faith, in accordance only with his
own aesthetic sensibility and not with any hope of striking a blow against what he
believes is a nonexistent deity. In that case, is the artificial rejection of the most natural
course as laughable as the thought of the Allen character having sex?

This raises a side question, since the attempt to retain sanity and social functionality, by
placing faith in politically correct myths, may itself be construed as an artificial reaction
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to the natural impulse to sexually reproduce. That is, a blatant natural impulse is the one
shared by all mammals to have sex and to raise offspring. Humans have that biological
impulse but also reason, and the discrepancy between them produces culture, which is
a rarer, artificial world emerging from more common processes. Most of culture is
dominated by social conventions, including religious and moral ones, which conventions
tend to be delusions requiring irrational leaps of faith. The antisocial skeptic or
existential outsider, who rejects mainstream goals in favour of some less popular ideal,
can be compared, then, not just with the Allen character but with the hero of mainstream
society who maintains her social functionality by antiphilosophical means. Which
strategy for coping with the horror of our biological function is aesthetically most
pleasing or ethically most laudatory, the reliance on delusions to fulfill that function more
efficiently, given its indignity from a hyper-rational perspective, or the refusal to perform
that function and a withdrawal from faith-based social enterprises?

Melancholia and the Noble Lie

Instead of trying to settle these questions here, I just want to clarify the problem by
contrasting the Woody Allen movie with a more cosmicist one, called Melancholia,
written and directed by Lars von Trier. It’s worth summarizing this movie’s plot, so if you
haven’t seen the movie, you might want to stop reading at this point. The movie’s about
two ways of coping with the world’s apocalyptic end due to a planet’s colliding with
Earth, those of a normal, happy person and of a melancholic depressive. The two main
characters are sisters, one of whom tries to be normal in the movie’s first half, by getting
married but who fails and ruins her wedding by her carelessness, while the other tries to
be normal in the second half in spite of the imminent apocalypse but whose poise is lost
as she gains more respect for her sister’s cosmic perspective. According to that
perspective, natural life is altogether wrong and so the social conventions she can’t
follow due to her mental illness are guilty by association. Indeed, this perspective is
shown to be a mystical insight. The depressed sister, Justine, somehow knows the
number of beans in a glass at her wedding, a point she reveals to lend credence to her
condemnation of terrestrial life. Moreover, Justine has a psychic connection with the
 625

incoming planet, which is actually named Melancholia. She knows it will strike the Earth,
whereas the scientific community is in optimistic denial. The two planets symbolize the
two sisters, who in turn symbolize abnormality and normality, or soul-destroying cosmic
insight and delusional bliss. Earth is filled with normal, relatively happy people who are
rudely awakened by the surprise arrival of the planet Melancholia, which does destroy
them.

The upshot, I take it, is that the melancholy misfit is actually more in touch with cosmic
reality, but that this loftier affinity isn’t apparent when the rules of normal human
interactions are in force, creating a fantasy world for human happiness in the face of the
abyss of existential truth. Only when natural forces stir themselves, mocking our vain
illusions and pitiful defense mechanisms, mindlessly dooming us, is the mystic’s
misanthropy fully vindicated. But the point isn’t that the mystic would be entitled to say “I
told you so,” during the apocalypse; that is, the deeper point isn’t about having an
arcane theory of nature which allows the doomsayer to predict horrible events. Instead,
the movie poses the question of how we should live, given the plausibility of a natural
apocalypse. Even when most people are relatively comfortable and functional, when our
planet isn’t actually threatened with destruction, the movie posits that nothing but
chance prevents natural forces from aligning themselves to our detriment.
Acknowledging that cosmicism, the question is the one I raised earlier, about which
lifestyle is more appropriate to our existential situation. Whose character and life
choices are more appealing in light of the fact that a natural apocalypse is much more
likely than divine salvation, those of a miserable, socially dysfunctional mystic or of a
happy, “well-adjusted” and “upstanding citizen”?

So whereas Woody Allen exploits rationalism, naturalism, and existential cosmicism to

undermine all follies except his treasured one of romantic love, von Trier follows those
philosophical assumptions to their logical conclusions. Both filmmakers affirm science-
centered, atheistic philosophical naturalism, a position that calls for a Lovecraftian dread
of our cosmic insignificance and for something like a Nietzschean shift from morality
polluted by theism to a more viable, aesthetic basis of values. But Allen stops short, and
 626

the fact that a consistent upholding of existential cosmicism wouldn’t lend itself to the
creation of mainstream comedy only raises the question of why Woody Allen is
interested in that genre in the first place. His earliest films are farces that are actually
more consistent with the philosophy that’s implicit in all of his movies. And some of his
more serious movies, such as Crimes and Misdemeanors, are likewise free of
sentimental attachment to Jewish or to other rationalizations of our biological role.
Generally, though, Allen regards quirky romantic love as our saving grace.

In Melancholia, by contrast, there’s no such salvation for the tragic hero who’s
condemned to anxiety and alienation due to her attunement to cosmic reality rather than
to the politically correct dream world. In his defense, I suppose Allen would point to what
Boris above calls “the irrational heart.” Allen’s rationalism leads him only to affirm the
natural fact that we have a divided nature, that we’re logical and pragmatic free agents
but also beastly captives of biological processes. Rationalism leads Allen to dispense
with many delusions, but he arbitrarily sides with the irrational heart when he defends
conventional happiness. The reason this is arbitrary is that the Allen character is a
hyper-rationalist, which accounts for his neuroses. A hyper-rationalist analyzes
obsessively and so attains terrifying esoteric knowledge which isolates him from society.
Thus, the Allen character seems to recoil from the prospect of complete estrangement
from those with mere exoteric understanding of their natural situation.

Perhaps this character merely feigns wholehearted commitment to what little normality
he can muster, like the sociopathic serial killer, Dexter, in the series of novels and the
HBO show. Perhaps, that is, Allen indulges in romantic games to appear less
threatening to those who depend on myths that burst like balloons upon rational
scrutiny. As the political philosopher Leo Strauss points out, philosophers and
theologians have historically hidden their antisocial conclusions, reserving them for the
brave, enlightened minority who need the majority to accept noble lies for the sake of
social stability which benefits both groups. Of course, the Allen character’s deference to
the irrational heart is meant to excuse the film-maker’s scandalous affair effectively with
his stepdaughter, Soon-Yi. But perhaps Allen’s peculiar love life indicates that he’s
 627

ambivalent about the conventional ideal, that he’s not just ill-equipped--as a hyper-
rational nerd--to succeed in that field, but that his heart’s not in maintaining that front for
existential angst, after all. In that case, the Woody Allen stereotype of the neurotic
intellectual who nevertheless commits himself to certain conventional ideals would be a
noble lie, a way of humanizing the transhuman cosmicist or the subhuman neurotic, of
reassuring the masses that these products of postmodernism aren’t monsters in their
midst, monsters that, as Melancholia shows, more nearly mirror the alien face of Mother
Nature.
 628

Sacrificial Offering to Our Lord, The Dentist

____________________________________________________

Undergoing a dental cleaning is well-known as being a painful experience, but

assuming the hygienist doesn’t mishandle her instruments and accidentally cut your lip,
no one’s to blame for the pain caused by the scraping of plaque from your teeth with
blunt metal tools. On the contrary, this pain serves the greater good of keeping your
teeth and gums healthy. However, there’s a subtler but more profound form of suffering
inflicted on these occasions--and by the dentist himself rather than by the hygienist. (All
the hygienists I’ve ever seen have been women, while all the dentists have been men,
but this is neither here nor there.)

Assuming your teeth are healthy, the dentist nevertheless perpetrates the scam of his
“Examination and Diagnosis,” as it’s called on the bill. What happens is the following.
You lie back in the dentist’s chair for about an hour while the hygienist uses various
instruments to remove the plaque buildup and then to polish your teeth. So far no
swindle, but just pain for the greater good. Then the dentist drops in, looks inside your
mouth for about twenty seconds, absentmindedly touching your teeth a few times with
one of his metal instruments, and he pronounces your teeth healthy and walks out.
Those twenty seconds of his “work” cost you $30 CAD on top of the fee for the teeth
cleaning. You can protest at the outset that you don’t need to see the dentist himself,
since you know your teeth have always been fine and there’s been no recent change.
 629

But from my experience, dentists will insist that you undergo their personal
“examinations” at least every once in awhile or else the office will refuse to accept you
as a patient even for a cleaning. So a hidden cost of having your teeth professionally
cleaned is that you’ve got to let the dentist perform a cursory look-see; hence I speak of
the extortion, which is to say, of the wresting of money by an abuse of authority. Unlike
the removal of plaque, the dentist’s examination serves no greater good unless, of
course, you have a history of problems with your teeth, such as cavities, which requires
expert monitoring.

Just recently I was humiliated by an appalling case of this extortion. Typically, you see,
the dentist employs certain tactics to mitigate the psychological trauma he inflicts by
stealing your money while holding you essentially helpless. He’ll distract your attention
by making chitchat and affecting an upbeat mood. Ideally, he’ll make you laugh a few
times with his witty remarks. Next, he’ll give you the impression that you’re getting your
money’s worth from him, by spitting out a few actual observations and technical
recommendations, perhaps peppered with scientific jargon. Again, if your teeth have
always been perfectly healthy, as mine have, everything the dentist says at this point
will be strictly useless. But a talented dentist can still charm you by pointing out some
trivia about your physiology, such as where your saliva glands are located. This way,
you won’t feel so bad about what’s essentially a robbery that’s enabled by collusion
among dentists.

The other day, though, my dentist decided to make use of no such techniques for my
benefit. On the contrary, to begin with, he was nowhere to be found for ten or so
minutes after the cleaning. Thus began the humiliation. Just think of it: the dentist can’t
even be bothered to show up on time to receive the gift you’re about to hand him of $30
(or to be precise, $28); your money means so little to him, because his medical training
has evidently entitled him to profit from this sort of scam so many times, that one such
gift is a mere pittance. Worse, he knows that you know that he’s about to take your
money and give you absolutely nothing in return, and that your only recourse is to go
without professional cleaning of your teeth, which can cause serious health problems for
 630

you as you age, or so they say. Anyone smart enough to earn a medical degree will be
smart enough to anticipate the psychological effect on the patient, first, of scamming
you out of $30, but also of forcing you to sit in the dentist’s chair and wait for his
Highness to manifest from the ethereal plane on which he resides so that he can
receive your sacrificial offering. Thus, I’d have expected him on this occasion to resort
to an overabundance of compensatory techniques, beginning with an effusive apology
for being late. I was treated with no such apology.

Did the dentist maintain an upbeat mood to distract me while he practically reached into
my wallet and extracted his shakedown money? My humiliation was mitigated by no
such artificial lightening of the atmosphere. He merely swooped in, asked how my teeth
are doing, and informed me that he was now going to look them over. Did he tell any
joke or engage in other chitchat? None at all. Any jargon-ridden observations about my
bone structure or whatnot? Nope. The hygienist even told him she’d taken two
radiographs of my teeth (which cost an additional $30!) and he replied simply that he
looked at them, declining to take that opportunity to expound on how this bone is
connected to that bone. Did he offer any encouraging statements of the obvious such
as, “Keep doing what you’re doing, keep flossing”? No, all he ended up saying was,
“They look fine,” meaning my teeth. He said this and then he hurried out of the room,
presumably to avoid any awkwardness of having to look his victim in the eye, but
possibly also because he was late for his afternoon bath in wine. What of the
“examination” itself? Its duration was exactly sixteen seconds, which I mentally counted,
during which time he peered at my teeth while uselessly tapping at them a handful of
times with a metal instrument. That tapping was his sole deference to decorum, since
by thus feigning to effect some physical treatment, a dentist can give you the impression
that your gift of $30 is at least going to a man who works for a living.

Naturally, after this humiliation I felt drained like I’d just been leeched by a vampire.
Before entering the dentist’s cave I’d been hungry for lunch. Without the usual
sugarcoating, though, the bitter pill not just of offering up tribute to a false god, but of
enduring the trauma of sitting through the transparent charade stripped even of its
 631

customary pretenses, deprived me also of my appetite. I felt sick to my stomach, and

this had nothing to do with the teeth cleaning. But to quote the Sam Roberts song, End
of the Empire, “You can take what you want from me, but you better believe that I can
see you.”

Clarifications

I assure you, every word of my sad narrative is true. That's exactly what happened, and
I wrote it as soon as I got home in lieu of burning that dental office to the ground. The
dental hygienist has since referred me to a gum specialist who gets to charge even
more money for the exact same cleaning, because there are grades of divinity after all:
the number of years spent in training amount to years of angelic hibernation, so that
when a gum specialist emerges, his wings aglow with swirling supernatural energies,
the tribute he's due must surpass that offered up to a lesser angel. Even when the
dentist doesn't favour you with his presence, his splendour has coattails, as it were, and
so the work of his familiars, the hygienists, is more precious.

I've had my teeth cleaned dozens of times, so I can compare the dental examinations
and judge the extent to which they're cursory. It's not just the time taken, but whether
the dentist makes relevant comments as he goes along with his inspection, calling out
what he sees or doesn't see (thus at least making the effort to prove he's not a fraud).
This dentist, who doesn't know me and who's replaced the retiree, did absolutely none
of that. If it's possible to give a halfhearted, worthless dental examination and still
charge full price for it, I assure you that's just what he did.

Obviously, dentists are busy fleecing some of their customers, so they can't be at my
beck and call. On the contrary, the patients are mere human sacrifices who suffer so
that the dentist may seem more divine by comparison. But again, I've had dozens of
dental examinations over the years. I've never had to wait that long, and were you to
analyze the injustice, breaking it down into parts, you’d miss the forest for the trees. You
have to add the longest waiting period to the shortest, most cursory examination. And,
 632

of course, you have to add the full price paid. Then you get the overwhelming sense
that the dentist was effectively stealing from me: he knew I didn't need an examination,
he knew in five seconds that there was nothing there to see, and he knew that he
overcharges for these short visits. He was disgusted with himself, which is why he left
without looking his victim in the eye. I just hope he enjoys his life of luxury which is paid
for in part, at least, by his dishonest work.

Is a dental cleaning needed? Well, I know that I get plaque buildup over time even
though I floss and brush every day. And if you let the plaque build up, you can lose your
teeth from gum decay. So I think the cleanings have helped me, which is why I have no
problem paying for them. The amount of work done by the hygienist compared to that
done by the dentist in his "examinations" puts the dentist to shame.

Again, obviously if someone has teeth problems, a dentist is the one to fix them and
then his expertise is invaluable. I'm talking about those who have healthy teeth but who
are forced to have those expensive exams along with the cleanings. I've asked dentists
in the past if I could have just the cleanings, since my teeth (as opposed to my gums)
have always been healthy (no cavities, etc). They've always refused.
 633

Mental Disorder as Monstrosity

____________________________________________________

The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) defines
“mental disorder” as “a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or
pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress...or
disability...or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an
important loss of freedom. In addition, this syndrome or pattern must not be merely an
expectable and culturally sanctioned response to a particular event, for example, the
death of a loved one...Neither deviant behavior (e.g. political, religious, or sexual) nor
conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are mental disorders
unless the deviance or conflict is a symptom of a dysfunction in the individual, as
described above” (xxxi, my emphases).

The American Psychiatric Association currently proposes to change this definition in

DSM-V to a “behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an
individual, that is based in a decrement or problem in one or more aspects of mental
functioning, including but not limited to global functioning (e.g., consciousness,
orientation, intellect, or temperament) or specific functioning (e.g., attention, memory,
emotion, psychomotor, perception, thought); that is not merely an expectable response
to common stressors and losses (for example, the loss of a loved one) or a culturally
sanctioned response to a particular event (for example, trance states in religious
 634

rituals); and that is not primarily a consequence of social deviance or conflict with
society” (my emphases and semicolons).

The APA explains that the proposed changes in the definition are meant mainly to shift
the focus to the underlying cause and symptoms of a mental condition, leaving the
condition’s consequences to the treatment-planning rather than to the diagnostic stage.
But as I’ve emphasized, both definitions (1) use quasi-normative language of “disability,”
“dysfunction,” “loss,” “decrement” (that is, loss from diminution or decrease), or
“problem,” and (2) specifically rule out socially deviant behaviour as mentally disordered
unless that behaviour is caused by a dysfunction. These two parts of the definitions
conflict with each other.

The Incoherence of the DSM Definitions

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, there are no normative implications of strictly biological
statements. Hence, no normative distinction between mental health and disorder
follows, for example, from an evolutionary explanation of a trait’s origin. Any normative
connotation, when speaking of a so-called biological or physiological “function,” is the
result either of a useful shortcut for informal communication or of confusion from the
lingering pre-Darwinian, theistic paradigm. For example, biologists can speak informally
of the heart’s function of circulating blood, in which case a dysfunctional heart is one
that “fails” to circulate blood. The more precise, formal way of speaking, however,
eliminates any such trace of normativity. Thus, the biologist says that statistically
normal, as opposed to in any way correct, hearts are those descending from certain
naturally selected genes. In short, modern biology reduces the normative to the normal,
and explains the appearance of design in prevalent biological patterns in terms of an
environmental-genetic sorting process that naturally eliminates certain species and
preserves others, depending on which have the adaptations necessary to survive under
prevailing conditions. The biological notion of normality is entirely quantitative rather
than qualitative, meaning that no normative evaluation follows from the biological theory
 635

itself, although people are free to interpret the theory according to their independent
moral or aesthetic standards.

(Note that naturally selected effects may be abnormal or rare as long as they’re caused
by genetically determined traits that characterize the members of a species. For
example, a cheetah sprints but doesn’t always thereby catch its prey; still, catching prey
may be the naturally selected result of a cheetah’s sprint, or the sprint’s so-called
“function,” assuming that some ancestral catching of prey by that means helps explain
the present cheetah’s capacity to sprint, in terms of natural selection. The underlying
notion of normality is statistical rather than normative, because what’s relevant to
biology is the causal relationship between environment, genes, and body types, and the
behavioural effects that are selected for must be caused by traits possessed by most
members of a species. This is because natural selection is a mechanism meant to
explain how the differences between species originate, and a species is defined by
what’s shared by its members.)

The relevance of this talk of biological function is just that the psychiatrist can’t cash her
notion of mental disorder in biological terms (without falling back on a theological
interpretation which is no part of scientific theory or practice). Why not? Because a
mental disorder is the opposite of mental health, and these concepts are normative, the
one being bad and the other good, whereas the biological notion of function is
replaceable by a non-normative, statistical concept that has to do with the
environment’s selection of genes that produce body types.

Now, there are only two other sources of the normative: an individual’s or a society’s
subjective evaluation of something. The definition of “mental disorder” must inherit its
normativity, then, from one of these sources. Suppose the difference between mental
health and disorder were to depend on the individual’s evaluation. In this case, one
person’s interpretation could differ from another’s, with the result that there would be as
many standards of mental health as there are beholders of the good. For example, one
person might regard empathy as healthy while someone else might admire the
 636

sociopath’s freedom from altruistic emotions. Assuming the goodness of mental health
were to lie just in the values possessed by the individual who evaluates something, and
the empathic and sociopathic individuals were to retain their opposing values, there
would be absolutely nothing to resolve their conflict, no way to prove that one evaluation
is more correct than the other. Such would be the effect of locating the subjective nature
of normative evaluation in the mere individual.

Assuming that that chaos would be unpalatable to the psychiatrist, the source of the
definition’s normativity must be the social convention that can overrule an individual’s
evaluation as deviant or otherwise wrong. In this case, though, we run smack into the
definition’s stipulation that behaviour caused by a mental disorder is precisely not the
same as that which merely runs afoul of society (i.e. that’s culturally prohibited or
deviant or that results from a conflict between an individual and society). The
psychiatrist would seem, therefore, to face a dilemma: either give up all pretense of
normativity in the (pseudo)scientific concepts of mental health and disorder or else
identify mental disorder as an abnormal pattern that’s rejected by mere social
convention.

Taking the dilemma’s first horn, there would be no reason to medically treat someone
with a mental disorder, no standard of which the disordered person falls short. A retreat
to pragmatism here would be fruitless since an appeal to what’s useful, such as
protection of people from the dangers posed by a disorder, would have to presuppose
the rightness of that goal; otherwise, there would be no prescription to motivate the
medical treatment. At most, the psychiatrist could say, quite hypothetically, that if
society wants to protect itself or the disordered individual, the individual should be
turned over to psychiatrists for treatment. If society wants to accomplish that goal and
so forces the individual to undergo treatment, we’d have here only a causal explanation
of the treatment, not a justification of it. This is because there would as yet be no
evaluation of the societal goal. Assuming the goal were conventionally rather than
personally justified, the concept of a mental disorder would once again be normative
and we’d find ourselves back in a conflict with the DSM distinction between mental
 637

disorder and social deviance. The pragmatic justification for treating a mental condition
would still call upon a normative interpretation of that condition as bad in so far as the
condition endangers certain people, and this interpretation would be sanctioned by
society at large. Thus, a mental disorder would be a mental condition that works against
a social objective, in which case the disorder would depend on a conflict between an
individual and society, contrary to the DSM definitions.

Taking the dilemma’s second horn, according to which mental disorders are bad and
the badness is solely a matter of a cultural standard, were a culture to regard, say,
homosexuality as an unhealthy mental condition, the homosexual would need to be
diagnosed as having a mental disorder. This is, of course, how psychiatry used to
operate: the Western psychiatric condemnation of homosexuality used to follow from
the religiously conservative cultures in Europe and the US, the pseudoscientific
rationalizations offered by the psychiatrist for that enforcement of a social prejudice
notwithstanding. As Western cultures became more secular and scientistic (democratic,
capitalistic, politically correct), Western psychiatrists withdrew homosexuality from their
list of mental disorders, contenting themselves in their DSM with an implicit labeling of
homosexuality as socially deviant but not disordered. However, precisely that distinction
must go if the psychiatrist means to affirm the normative aspect of mental disorders or
at least presupposes a justification of medical treatment for certain mental conditions.

Mental Disorder as Monstrosity

As a matter of fact, people do generally believe that average mental states are healthy
and good while abnormal ones are unhealthy and bad. Indeed, that’s an
understatement. In Western societies, mental health is associated with the all-
consuming goal of materialistic happiness (pun intended), and most mental illnesses
are regarded not merely as bad but as horrible. The mentally ill are feared and shunned
as freaks or monsters. The common reason for trying to eliminate mental illness,
despite the mere cultural basis of the value judgment and thus the variation between
 638

cultural (as well as individual) standards of health, is that we loathe monsters, which
causes us to demonize frightening or revolting abnormalities.

Regardless of which patterns are culturally sanctioned, what mental disorders have in
common is their freakishness, and this is the politically incorrect reality that underlies
the psychiatric enterprise. Instead of destroying monsters, we enlightened modern folk
treat them as suffering from an illness, because we understand that their harmful
behaviour has physiological causes that can be re-engineered with drugs or therapy.
So-called healthy behaviours have physiological causes too, some of which are likewise
engineered by drugs (culturally sanctioned stimulants like nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine)
or by religious or commercial propaganda. Mental disorder is hardly just a matter of
physiological causes that overwhelm the will; instead, those mental conditions are
targeted for medical treatment which terrify or sicken a society, and that social
condemnation is indispensable to psychiatry. Without the horror felt for certain
psychological abnormalities, there would be no list of mental disorders and thus nothing
for the psychiatrist to do; rather, there would be merely unusual mental conditions with
no impetus to eliminate them.

Why are certain mental abnormalities terrifying or revolting? Superficially, the reason is
just that they threaten people with harm and we naturally prefer to be safe. But some
mental disorders are much less dangerous than others. What they all have in common
is their relative strangeness, which threatens to upset the familiar world in which we’re
most comfortable. Whether it’s a bizarre phobia, a split personality, or the lack of certain
emotions, a mental disorder represents an encroachment on human nature by alien,
inhumane forces. Our physiology sometimes breaks down or mutates because there’s
no one at the helm of our evolution; our presence on the planet and our flourishing are
accidental and subject to change. The natural forces that build us aren’t committed to
maintaining us as we are in the most trustworthy way, by having feelings for us, since
those forces are impersonal. What’s terrifying or repulsive about mental disorders, then,
is the impersonality of their causes, which reminds us of what I call our grim existential
situation. The rarity of mental disorders surprises us and so wakens us from our stupor
 639

in a world of the familiar, and threatens to remind us of the fragility even of mental
health and of the arbitrariness of our social standards.

In addition, there’s the ambiguity of strange abnormalities, since they can be interpreted
as inferior or as superior to normal human attributes. A fictional monster can be
subhuman or divine, a degraded human form or a superhuman god. This is why disgust
for monsters should be distinguished from fear of them. Those movie monsters, for
example, which disgust us, such as the fly monster shown above, are often insectile
and so remind us of cognitively inferior creatures. Those monsters which terrify us, such
as the Thing shown above, are often clearly superior to normal humans in some
capacity, such as brute strength or intelligence. So mental abnormalities may cause
revulsion or fear, depending on whether they’re interpreted as regressive or as more
neutrally transgressive or even progressive.

Of course, the official psychiatric view is that all mental disorders are disabilities rather
than superior abilities, but just because an abnormality endangers people or deviates
from social standards, doesn’t mean the condition represents a teleological step
backward. The most striking example of a potentially godlike mental abnormality is the
psychopath’s lack of a conscience which often enables that “disordered” individual to
rise to a position of great wealth and power, lording it over whole populations with his
shameless expertise in manipulating people’s emotions. (See, for example, Babiak’s
and Hare’s book, Snakes in Suits.) It’s not so farfetched to assume that a
disproportionate number of powerful persons throughout history have been psychopaths
or sociopaths of one type or another. From cult leaders to monarchs to politicians to
corporate titans, these mentally “disabled” persons still manage to perform historically
decisive, if amoral, feats. We fear the power of such emotionless predators, just as we’d
fear a god or an extraterrestrial intelligence that lacks human sentiments. This ambiguity
of monsters is another reason society condemns mental abnormalities: we worry about
the mutability of our social norms, when natural forces contravene them by producing
the abnormalities, but we also fear that our standards are inferior to those of a
potentially higher form of life.
 640

While their intentions are surely to cure their patients, to prevent them from harming
themselves or others, and to make them happier, one effect of psychiatric treatment of
abnormal people is to maintain the illusion that the mentally average masses are on
friendly terms with natural forces. The mentally ill are segregated and hidden in asylums
or treated with drugs that stupefy them, so that average people needn’t be alarmed by
witnessing strange behaviour and so that the conventions of what it means to be a
healthy person can appear unchallenged. Only when you’re familiar with the breadth of
possible mental arrangements can you appreciate the groundlessness of psychological
norms. Just as a mental abnormality can be ameliorated by therapy or drugs, so too can
a mentally normal person become radicalized by those means.

Curiously, there are at least two trends that bring mental disorder to the fore, despite the
psychiatrist’s efforts to hide the monsters and to whitewash the existential implications
of mental strangeness with a pseudoscientific, cryptonormative understanding of it.
First, as Adam Curtis shows in his BBC documentary, The Trap: Parts One and Two,
the rise of materialistic individualism, by the power of commercial propaganda, had the
unintended consequence that the psychiatrist came to defer to the patient’s concerns
about her own mental health, instead of imposing a top-down ideal. Just as corporations
sold products that no one needs, by tenuously associating them with unconscious
cravings, Western psychiatrists replaced their authoritative criteria for mental illness,
which were shown by David Rosenhan's experiments to be pseudoscientific, with
objective, behaviouristic criteria that catered to the individual’s personal model of
normality. Thus, the normative interpretations of mental capacities were relativized to
the self-policing individual consumer, not just to society. This was a boon for the
business of psychiatry since it greatly multiplied the cases of mental disorders which
had to be treated.

Second, as medical science advances and pharmaceutical companies become more

powerful, psychiatrists find themselves serving the supplier’s need to sell an ever-
increasing store of drugs. Thus, medical conditions are invented to provide an incentive
 641

for purchasing the available treatments. Although the advertisements for these drugs
are invariably sanitized, with no depiction of strange behaviour caused by mental
abnormality, a barrage of such ads over the last two decades in wealthy countries
nevertheless refers to physiological or mood disorders, such as attention deficit disorder
or depression. Whether it’s an increase in demand for medical treatment or in the
supply of that treatment, then, each development renders the standard of mental health
more dubious.

In summary, the DSM definitions of “mental” disorder” are revealingly incoherent. They
indicate that psychiatrists harbour quasi-normative assumptions about mental
conditions which are incompatible with their scientific pretensions. Moreover, they
inherit those assumptions not from evolutionary theory, despite that theory’s reference
to biological functions, but from social values which are the main sources of normative
judgments of goodness and badness. Again, admitting that the distinction between
mental health and disorder derives from something as subjective and questionable as
social convention would threaten psychiatry’s status as a science. After all, the cultural
norms in question are propped up by horror from the existential impact of strange
abnormalities on average people’s delusions of their security and superiority. Thus,
psychiatrists stipulate that mental disorders aren’t due merely to a conflict between
individual and society. But the psychiatrist can’t have it both ways.
 642

The Question of Antinatalism

____________________________________________________

Picture a barren winter landscape with not a person in sight. You might find it hard not
to mitigate the desolation by imagining, perhaps on the outskirts of that expanse of
snow and bare trees, a cabin with smoke emanating from its chimney, thus indicating
that this hypothetical absence of humanity is only partial, that all is not lost for us. We
recoil from the thought of a universe with absolutely no human beings in it; more
precisely, what bothers us is the thought that there might be a time after humankind.
This is to say that we can tolerate reflecting on the time before human history and even
on the age of Earth before the rise of mammals, since we know in the back of our minds
that those ancient periods laid out the conditions for our emergence; moreover, we can
even ponder the lifeless void, the billions upon billions of star systems that currently
have no inhabited planets, because we know that simultaneously there’s this one planet
that we call home. But try imagining our universe as it would have been had humans
never evolved or else picture our planet after the apocalyptic end of our species. No
cabin on the outskirts and no potential for our reemergence; no hope for our eventual
triumph, but just the final end, the last breath and the last heartbeat before the universe
soldiers on without us and the tree still falls with no one to hear it.

There’s a group of people who, for moral reasons, would actually prefer a world with no
people in it. They even have a strategy for bringing that world about: we should cease
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procreating so that we intentionally die out as a species. These grim folks are called
antinatalists, “antinatalism” meaning the opposition to human birth. There are roughly
two kinds of antinatalism (AN), what I’ll call the misanthropic and the compassionate
kinds. Both kinds prescribe the termination of human life by stopping the procreative
replenishment of our species. But while the misanthropic antinatalist is motivated by
contempt for human nature, the compassionate sort is opposed to suffering and thus
takes the suicide of our species to be only a dire means towards the elimination of that
mental state. (Compassionate antinatalists are often called “philanthropic,” but this is a
confusing name, since although the Greek roots of that word mean love of people, the
English word implies a concern for human advancement, whereas an antinatalist’s
compassion is perfectly tragic.) Moreover, both kinds of AN have a moral defense: the
misanthrope wants to extinguish humans because of our wickedness or our morally
significant deficiencies, while the lover of people wants to eliminate, once and for all, the
evil of human suffering.

An Arch-Villain’s Doomsday Scheme

You’re likely already familiar with the outlook of misanthropic AN, from comic books and
pulp science fiction: the cartoon super-villain is a classic misanthrope, or hater of
humans, often building a doomsday weapon to destroy humankind, leaving himself as
the planet’s sole possessor. But the cartoon villain typically allows his plan to be foiled,
whether by hiring buffoons for henchmen or by giving away the details of his plan to the
hero in a gratuitous monologue, to fulfill the subtextual logic of sadomasochism: the
dominator needs victims to satisfy his sadistic impulses, so to finally kill off all weaklings
and rivals, by way of a sadistic frenzy, is to err on sadistic grounds. Sadism is a form of
parasitism. But the misanthropic antinatalist isn’t sadistic; instead, she’s opposed to
human nature and thus to all people including herself. Thus, the misanthrope would
participate in her scheme by not sexually reproducing, as opposed to hiding her children
in the last generation so that they could inherit the world. Mind you, the sadist too, after
cleansing the planet of everyone else, would likely commit suicide for having foolishly
failed to maintain the parasitic ideal of sadism. Indeed, the misanthrope and the cartoon
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villain have much else in common, especially if the super-villain justifies his actions by
regarding himself as superhuman: both have contempt for humans in general, both
have a plan for our extinction, and although the misanthropic antinatalist’s plan isn’t
particularly invasive, the misanthrope needn’t be merely an antinatalist. That is, if you
think all human beings are depraved and worthy of death, you needn’t tiptoe around the
issue by, say, writing pamphlets to convince people to hate themselves, to doubt the
chance of human progress, and thus to refrain from procreating; instead, you might take
the bull by the horns and devise a coercive doomsday scenario. After all, if people are
evil or so myopic that we lack the right to propagate our species, our freedom and
rationality needn’t be respected.

Is there any rational justification, though, of misanthropic AN? Calling everyone “evil” or
“weak” seems just to empty these words of meaning, rendering them weasel words,
since there’s sufficient variety of human behaviour to warrant distinctions between evil
and good, weak and strong people; of course Ghandi wasn’t as bad as Hitler, for
example. Perhaps humans are all evil compared to a race of angels, and weak
compared to a species of super-powerful aliens, but even so we would all fall short to
different degrees. Now, weakness isn’t necessarily a moral failing, and so pity for us
might be more appropriate than contempt. Here, then, misanthropy has something in
common with the Christian notion of original sin. The Christian says we have morally
relevant innate weaknesses, such as our finitude and our animal instincts, since these
inevitably cause suffering. When we blame suffering on physical or biological
processes, though, we tend to childishly personify the latter. If we’re not responsible for
the type of bodies that are bioengineered for us, there’s no sense in condemning that
body type as the cause of all the evil of which we’re capable. We can understand cause
and effect without moralizing them. Moreover, once you reduce the badness of some
event to some cause of the event other than the choice of the person who’s morally
responsible, you once again empty the word “bad” of meaning, since there’s no principle
for halting the reduction. For example, the Christian is forced to condemn God for
creating our body type or for putting the serpent in Eden along with Adam and Eve; in
this case, Christianity leads to self-contradiction, since now the morally perfect person
 645

must be “responsible” for original “sin”--except that this contradiction lies only on the
surface, since the words used in the formulation are emptied of content.

In any event, what of the misanthropic antinatalist’s reasoning? There doesn’t seem any
sense in preferring a world without people, since such a world would be morally neutral;
only people, our actions, and the results of those actions are subject to a conventional
normative evaluation. If you’re struck by nature’s general undeadness, and so you think
in pantheistic terms, you can anthropomorphize the natural development of forms, but
still it’s hard to see how a humanless world would be better than the alternative;
pantheism should replace conventional moral categories with such standards as awe
and horror. The mindless creativity of pantheistic nature is terrible, with or without
people, and if humans aren’t sufficiently noble, nature is nevertheless bound to evolve
worse people elsewhere. Exterminating some of nature’s handiwork would hardly tip the
moral balance against the monstrous creativity of the cosmos; even were humans the
only sentient, language-using creatures ever to evolve, ending our life cycle wouldn’t
punish natural forces, just as beating up a zombie would perform no retaliatory function.

Instead, the misanthrope’s point would seem to be just that we should eliminate what’s
wrong as much as possible, just as you might wash away a stain from a shirt. But this
analogy raises a problem, which is that we clean a stained shirt for the purpose of
looking presentable in public, whereas the termination of our species could serve no
purpose at all, since no one would survive to take advantage of the cleansing. Perhaps
the misanthropist reasons that natural forces would remain, and our extermination
would make space for the emergence of a superior species. But this would be
preposterous overkill, since neither space nor time is limited in the universe. There are
trillions of star systems and of years in which natural forces can conduct their
experiments, and there’s no reason to think Earth or this relatively puny age in which we
live is cosmically special. Nature will dispose of us at her leisure or we’ll do so
unintentionally, at any rate, so there doesn’t seem any need to rush matters or to make
a concerted effort and ban human birth. The misanthropic antinatalist seems to think
that every moment in which humans draw breath is one in which our abominable
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activities are suffered to continue, but there’s no one keeping score or suffering our
vices besides us, and with our demise would be lost as well the only known source of
thanksgiving for the last of our follies.

The misanthropist here would fail to live up to the grandeur of her apparent role model,
the cartoonish super-villain, since she’d think like a bean-counting bureaucrat,
pretending she’s tallied up nature’s resources and the degree of our worthlessness, and
so can prescribe our extinction only to make natural creativity more efficient. Note that
in Star Wars, for example, the technocrats are only the henchmen, not the evil geniuses
themselves (Darth Vader and the Emperor). Hatred of humanity would seem to require
a more sinister and demented vision than just that of a balanced equation. Although the
Architect in the Matrix trilogy is indeed such a bloodless bureaucrat, the arch villain
shown at the end of the third movie, who represents the will of the AI machines, loses
its temper, shouting that the machines need nothing, thus demonstrating the requisite
insanity for an evil genius. The villain Davros in Doctor Who has a truly hideous agenda
of annihilating not just all life but every particle in existence, thus abolishing all of
Creation. In one of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope novels, the villains plot to destroy the
world as a means of forcing God to reveal himself. These schemes have at least an
instrumental logic, since they use destruction in the service of a twisted ideal. The
misanthropic antinatalist would need some such ideal for the extinction of our species to
be somehow worthwhile. Assuming one of our contemptible features is our theism, the
misanthrope can’t appeal to God as the benefactor of our demise, and natural forces
wouldn’t thank the antinatalist nor would they need her help in their grand cycle of
creation and destruction. As far as I can tell, then, misanthropic antinatalism isn’t so
much a rational viewpoint as it is an emotional venting of a melancholy character
or mood.

Killing with Kindness

The second kind of AN might be more compelling since it’s based on the standard moral
disapproval of unnecessary pain. The idea is that this suffering is wrong, and people
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suffer so much that out of compassion for the sufferers the unborn would become, we
should decline to have children even though this would mean the end of humanity and
possibly even of all highly intelligent life in the universe. All that matters in the hedonic
calculus is the maximization of happiness and the minimization of harm, and so if
human suffering is unavoidable and overwhelming, the argument runs, we should take
radical measures to prevent the misery we’d otherwise inflict on our descendants.

There’s an obvious objection to this argument, which is that, as long as we’re morally
concerned with happiness and harm, we might as well check whether harm really is so
overwhelming that all human life is effectively hell on Earth and ought to come to an
end. It turns out, of course, that unnecessary pain overwhelms joy and other positive or
neutral mental states only for a small minority of people. Even poor people living in huts
and eating grubs tend not to be miserable, and indeed studies show that they can be
happier than the wealthy whose lives are more stressful (see “Why Rich People Really
aren’t Happier” at fool.com). Almost everyone experiences a mix of pleasure, pain, and
neutral sensations; extreme pleasures and pains are relatively rare, and so if anything,
agony, despondence, and other excruciating pains are experienced less than tolerable
and preferable mental states. In fact, compassionate AN presupposes that this is so,
since compassion is shown only to creatures who can appreciate the favour, which
means creatures who have the intelligence to recognize and benefit from the gesture
and thus also to extricate themselves from dangerous situations, thus sparing
themselves many unnecessary pains. Indeed, there must be much in our life that makes
it worth living; otherwise, we wouldn’t deserve the antinatalist’s compassion. This
provides us with the likeliest reason why most people don’t kill themselves. Only those
who really do experience more pain than anything else are motivated to struggle with
their instinctive will to live and to see the continuation of our species. The rest of us are
content to be preoccupied by our daily routines in which we pass the time feeling
nothing like joy or anguish. Thus, the compassionate antinatalist’s premise seems false:
human life is not generally so bad that we’re morally obligated to spare our descendants
the torture of living.
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In his book, Better Never to Have Been, the philosopher David Benatar makes the most
rigorous case available for compassionate AN. Benatar argues that merely coming into
existence is always a great harm and that procreating is therefore immoral. To support
this radical point of view, he anticipates the above response and argues in Chapter Two
that pleasure and pain are asymmetric: while there would be neither unnecessary pain
nor pleasure in the world we’d leave behind were we to take the antinatalist’s advice,
stop having children, and thus extinguish our species, the absence of the pain would be
good while the absence of pleasure would not be so bad. In other words, he argues,
eliminating harm is more important than promoting pleasure. Were this so,
compassionate antinatalism might indeed nullify the above objection, since then even
were the experience of harm rare, the pains we do tend to feel might suffice to make the
act of procreation immoral.

But as DeGrazia argues in his scholarly reply to Benatar’s book, “Is it Wrong to Impose
the Harms of Human Life?” Benatar’s arguments in favour of his asymmetry premise
are not compelling. For example, Benatar says that the absence of harm when there’s
no person around in the first place would be counterfactually preferred, meaning
preferred by anyone who would have been put in the position that would have caused
the harm. But the exact same reasoning applies to pleasure: given the standard moral
ideal which the compassionate antinatalist assumes, anyone would prefer to promote
pleasure just as much as she’d prefer to eliminate harm. So there’s no significant
asymmetry here. In the possible world with no people in it, the absence of pleasure
would be as bad as the absence of harm would be good; in other words, our positive
mental states are as morally important as our negative ones. And without the
asymmetry, Benatar’s argument is refuted by the commonsense objection given above,
about the fact that pain tends not to be the principal part of human experience and so a
general ban on human birth would be grotesquely disproportionate to the threat’s scope.
 649

Happiness is Unbecoming

I’d add that the standard moral preference for happiness should be replaced by the
existential standard that puts a premium on such harms as angst, dread, and horror,
since these are prerequisites of personal authenticity. So even were we to concede that
human life is first and foremost harm, it doesn’t follow that having children is immoral.
On the contrary, just as we have an existential obligation to remind people of the harsh
facts of natural life, so that they can deal authentically with those facts instead of
ignoring them, we might be obligated to have children even knowing that this increases
the total level of suffering, since the suffering has a positive existential role. From an
aesthetic perspective, our suffering is tragically heroic and thus redeemed. Anxiety and
alienation are made inevitable by the curses of reason and of consciousness, and we
don’t deserve a heaven free from harm, because we’re pitiful and often despicable
creatures. Thus, from an existentialist’s moral perspective, suffering stoically and
enhancing our tragedy by helping to repopulate our kind are better than fleeing from that
responsibility and depriving the universe of our magnificent ordeal. In fact, the
recommendation that we commit to the extinction of our species is the very stuff of
existential inauthenticity. Just as the flight to cognitive delusions makes for an
inauthentic individual, so too a species that kills itself off by renouncing its ability to
reproduce is collectively inauthentic. “Inauthentic” here means a failure to live up to the
existentialist’s moral standard, by grappling with the philosophical problem of our
existence. The reasons for our horror are inexhaustible and so we need to grapple
continually with life’s meaninglessness, which requires more and more generations.

My point is that the existentialist effectively grants the compassionate antinatalist’s

premise, about the magnitude of our suffering, but denies her conclusion, since the
existentialist rejects the moral principle that happiness ought to be our highest goal.
Thus, the compassionate antinatalist’s argument is logically invalid. Given precisely the
inevitability of severe harms in human life, such as the fears of death and of our
aloneness, we ought not to pretend that happiness is our highest purpose. On the
contrary, happiness is the aim only of existentially inauthentic people. And so let the
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newborns descend into our torture chamber! We will have all the more opportunities to
live up to the aesthetic ideal and bravely turn our lives into dramatic works of art. Harm,
in the sense of unnecessary, unjust pain, is mitigated if it’s redeemed by artistic use. We
shouldn’t give up the chance to endure hardship, but should adopt the existential
standard of authenticity and so psychologically overcome the harms. Note that just
because harm has a positive existential role doesn’t turn the harm into a benefit or the
suffering into pleasure. Suffering from our awareness of our existential predicament
gives us the opportunity to be authentic, but this isn’t exactly an advantage; an authentic
person’s life remains a tragedy even if we can tolerate to look upon it because of the
grace with which the person faces her plight head-on.

A Slippery Slope to the Evil Genius

There’s another problem with compassionate AN. The argument is supposed to be that
we have a duty not to inflict harm on anyone, including our children, and since harm is
of paramount importance, we shouldn’t procreate even if this entails something as
monumental as the end of humanity. The compassionate antinatalist’s reasoning here is
utopian in the sense that she’s willing to accept a necessary evil (the extinction of our
species) for the sake of a greater good (the absence of harm). This reasoning can be
parodied: if the antinatalist is so compassionate and can’t bear to see anyone suffer,
why prevent only the unborn from suffering by not allowing them to come into existence
in the first place, when she can stop those who are already living from suffering by, say,
killing them in their sleep? Why not suffocate infants to spare them future misery, when
the antinatalist believes that babies would have been better off had they never been
born? Granted, killing isn’t the same as not procreating, but the antinatalist seems to
stand on a slippery slope here, since her willingness to allow our species to die out
betrays the representation, at least, of such extreme compassion for sufferers and
hatred for suffering, that killing as a necessary evil would be adding a mere drop to the
sea of necessary evil in which the antinatalist already swims. The antinatalist tolerates
the effect of our collective death as a species, so why not tolerate our individual deaths?
And if we won’t take matters into our own hands and commit suicide, why should the
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antinatalist care were someone else to do the dirty work? In her ideal scenario, in which
human beings are no more, there would be no judges, juries, or prisons, and nothing for
social laws to regulate. The compassionate antinatalist certainly won’t want to cause
anyone harm, but killing can be done painlessly and even if killing causes a moment of
pain, that moment would be a necessary evil to prevent the much greater pain in the
person’s future. Killing one person would harm the dead person’s friends and relatives,
but this widening harm could be cut short by killing those friends and relatives in turn.

In short, compassionate AN seems in danger of reducing to a functional, if not to a

psychological, equivalent of misanthropic AN. Whereas the compassionate antinatalist
would prefer not to kill, whereas the misanthrope should leap at the chance of launching
a doomsday weapon, compassion can be so extreme that it drives the antinatalist to
adopt the misanthrope’s method as a necessary evil. All that stops the compassionate
antinatalist, I think, are the practical concerns: she knows there aren’t enough
antinatalists to make our current generation the last one, and so she’ll be concerned
about harming herself and her friends and relatives, by getting caught and sent to prison
as a murderer. This explains why compassionate antinatalists tend not to be murderers,
and yet my point is about the highly instrumental logic of compassionate AN. This
version of AN seems unstable, in that it tolerates the worst means imaginable, namely
the end of our species, to achieve an alleged greater good. Again, then, the arguments
in favour of compassionate AN notwithstanding, what distinguishes the two varieties of
AN seem to be matters of character or mood. The misanthrope hates people while the
compassionate person loves people and hates the harm that comes to them. But the
latter kind of antinatalist should act as though she stands with the misanthrope in hating
people, because she’s willing to talk seriously about our planned extinction, which is,
after all, also the cartoon super-villain’s goal.

The Horror of Parenting

However, I don’t think AN should be dismissed in its entirety. At least, there’s a limited
form of AN that follows from the existential and cosmicist ideas in which I’ve been
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trafficking in these philosophical rants. My argument for this limited form is just that
existentialists, cosmicists, mystics, ascetics, philosophers, omega men and women,
mentally disturbed introverts, and other enlightened folks and outsiders would likely
make for poor parents and thus shouldn’t procreate, for their sake and for that of their
potential children (unless they give their children up for adoption).

Instead of supporting this argument with more abstract, blanket assertions, allow me to
testify from personal experience. I have a nephew who’s one and half, with whom I visit
on a weekly basis so that I’ve had a snapshot view of his development. He’s an
adorable, bright little guy with an infectious laugh. He loves cheesy macaroni, which he
eats by holding all of his fingers in his mouth at once, and setting his bare feet on the
table when he’s eating to get a rise out of his mother. He has many toys and if you blow
soap bubbles for him he’ll cry before letting you stop, and he’ll need you to succeed,
because he hasn’t the knack for blowing slowly and steadily through the small plastic
hoop; instead, he invariably blows slightly at the wrong angle, still smiling afterward and
crying out “bubbie!” which is his word for “bubbles,” even when his efforts produce no
bubbles. If you time it right, though, you can blow bubbles at the same time and he
won’t know the difference; he just wants to see the bubbles and doesn’t have any
interest yet in taking credit for the skill required to make them happen. My nephew has a
Wheaten Terrier who looks like Falkor from the movie, The Neverending Story, and who
likes to snatch food from my nephew’s hand, which makes him cry. In short, my nephew
has a normal, Western middleclass upbringing, and whenever I see him he brings a
smile to my face. But I can’t help but also feel sickened by the juxtaposition of such
flagrant innocence and the undeadness of the world that throws up such children, rudely
betrays the memory of their innocence by toying with them as they grow up, and
eventually receives their corpses to nourish other creatures--perhaps centuries from
now--in their similarly foolish endeavours.

I recall when my nephew was enjoying a bubble bath before going to bed. He had tired
himself out playing with his large Lego blocks, pushing around his toy truck, and
banging away at his xylophone. He mostly babbled, as he still does, but he knew some
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words and when he sat in the tub, playing with his plastic water toys with a guileless grin
on his face, he exclaimed that he was happy; that is, in between his babbling, he
actually said “I’m happy!” My heart sank even as I kept up a fake smile. Imagine the
naivety required, first of all, to be overjoyed as a result of having a bubble bath, but also
to reassure the smiling onlookers who encouraged him, with such an unambiguous
indication of how great he was feeling. He was wonderfully happy and why wouldn’t he
be? But he gave me flashbacks of when I was much younger and happier in my
ignorance. I recalled that I also loved blowing soap bubbles in the backyard, watching
them float away in the breeze. And now I’m compelled to write about the horror of
human life. My nephew was delirious sitting in his bathtub, but how foolish such glee
seems from a philosophical perspective! What disappointments and miseries will my
nephew suffer as an adult so that if he retains a memory of that brief moment of bliss,
he’ll be forced to yearn nostalgically for a return to innocence?

How perfectly absurd is human childhood! A child’s life is a microcosm of an adult’s,

except that instead of being manipulated by the child’s parents and by their carefully-
controlled environment, an adult is duped by natural forces and by mass culture. A child
is comically selfish and helpless just as an adult is in the wider world. A child is pitifully
naïve, just as most people are about where they stand in nature. Children are distracted
by toys just as are adults. Recently my nephew needed an early diaper change and
afterward his father brought him down to the main floor. My nephew was wailing all the
way, tears flowing down his chubby cheeks. The biblical Job couldn’t have cried any
harder over the shambles of his life. What had happened was just that my nephew’s
routine had been broken and he thought he was being taken away from his toys and
forced to go to sleep, to face the darkness of his room alone, without his parents to
watch over him. His father put a pacifier in his mouth and he immediately quieted. He
waddled over to his toys where I was sitting, the tear tracks staining his cheeks, his
eyes red, and the pacifier still in his mouth, and he picked toys out of his toy drawers
and handed them to me one by one, as though he hadn’t yet gotten over the trauma of
having his diaper changed and of facing an early bedtime, and needed more time to
collect his thoughts but could use my help warming up his toys for him.
 654

What’s my point? Just that I don’t have the strength to raise a child, to stomach being
nauseated by pity every moment I’d be forced to confront such transparent horror in my
child’s ridiculous naivety and then in his loss of innocence, in his being barred from
Eden to wander and toil as a godforsaken adult. And while I’m pretty philosophical I’m
hardly enlightened, so it seems the more philosophical you are, the less you should
be a parent. Years ago I played a computer game called Black and White, which allows
the player to run a simulated city through an avatar animal which you train as might a
parent train her child. The avatar might defecate in a bush, and you’d have to choose
whether to spoil the creature or beat it; the creature develops differently depending on
the choices you make in its formative period, growing into either a virtuous hero or a
monstrous villain. I remember thinking that that game must simulate some aspects of
being a parent, and that real parenthood must take all the greater toll on the parents’
stamina. I’m not talking about the physical endurance needed to stay up at all hours to
accommodate a crying baby or to work hard to earn enough to pay for the child’s food
and toys. No, I’m referring to the mental walls that must collapse when you’re forced to
recognize the existential analogy between child and adult, and thus to be disheartened
by your child’s every foolish act, realizing that adult games, be their political, religious,
or sexual, are no less silly and futile. In fact, my nephew’s parents do seem continually
exhausted, although they’re not particularly philosophical. So how much more
emotionally unbearable must be childrearing for the sensitive introvert, the melancholy
atheist, or the detached mystic?

My argument for AN, then, is that the more enlightened people, who lack the upbeat
attitude sustained by delusions, should not have children--for their good and for that of
their potential offspring. They’ve made their bed by waking up to reality and they should
lie in it by forgoing the perverse privilege of conjuring fresh versions of themselves to be
tortured as adults in their parents’ stead. The enlightened are fit to renounce natural
processes, not to partake in them as though they were existentially clueless animals.
But this is only a limited justification of AN. For one thing, as I say elsewhere, the
existential cosmicist is rewarded when less philosophical people procreate and keep
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society going, since the antics of the deluded masses provide the material for grim
comedy which cheers up the more philosophical minority. Thus, we need that steady
stream of babies.
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Revenge of the Omega Men

____________________________________________________

Human societies tend to develop the same underlying structure as that of most other
social species. Differences in physical strength and in social connections between many
animals solidify at the emergent social level, forming a dominance hierarchy, or pecking
order, in which the strongest members or the possessors of the most powerful alliances
in the group are given privileged access to food and sex, thus ensuring the proliferation
of the most useful genetic lineages. Ethologists speak of alpha, beta, and omega males,
as well as others, to denote the different positions in such a power hierarchy. This
classification has filtered down to popular culture, where it’s now prevalent on websites
exploring dating, the so-called Game of seducing women, and men’s issues. By way of
evolutionary pop psychology, in which quasi-scientific just-so-stories from biology are
concocted to explain the nuances of human behaviour, men and women rank men in
those ethological terms and speculate on the psychological ramifications of being, say,
an alpha man.

Alpha, Beta, and Omega Men

Here, for example, is what I’ve gleaned from perusing some of those websites about
how alpha, beta, and omega men understand each other and themselves. (See, for
example, Roissy’s blog, Chateau Heurtiste, and the AskMen.com and Slate.com
 657

articles, “5 Signs You Are an Omega Male” and “Omega Males and the Women Who
Hate Them.”) Ethologically, an alpha male is at the top of his dominance hierarchy,
leading the group, eating first when food is obtained, and given exclusive or otherwise
special access to the females. In the Game sub-culture, scientistic men contend that
successful sexual hookups and even marriages can be literally engineered with insights
from evolutionary psychology, reducing human interactions to moves in a game and
concomitantly objectifying the players. Alpha men are often lauded as the winners of
this game, because they’ve mastered the trick of wresting sex from the greatest quantity
of the highest quality of women. Arguably, though, an alpha’s victory is naturally
delusory, since his superficial pleasures mask his slavery to his self-imposed, often
fallacious imperative to serve in the process of spreading his genes, at the cost of losing
out on the richer pleasures from a long-term sexual relationship, which the alpha male is
ill-equipped to earn.

Thus, alpha males or wannabe ones define “alpha man” in praiseworthy terms, as a
supremely confident and independent man who leads other men in business or battle
and attracts the most beautiful women. Sometimes, the alpha man is given a
Nietzschean gloss, in which case this superhero creates his own values rather than
succumbing to conventions for weaker people. The adventurous, conquering alpha
knows what’s right and true, and pursues those ends regardless of the collateral
damage. In sexual matters, the alpha ideal is that of the libertine or hedonist, of
experiencing the greatest variety and quantity of sexual pleasures, which necessitates
breaking the hearts of many jealous women. In business, the alpha ideal is the
oligarchic one of amassing the greatest personal fortune, substituting Machiavellian
tricks for those of Casanova and typically backstabbing competitors, exploiting slave
labourers, defrauding the consuming masses, and ravaging the natural environment.

Again, ethologically, the beta male is second-in-charge of a group, a backup leader and
the alpha’s wingman or sidekick, and is given only secondary access to the resources of
food and wombs. In pop culture, beta men often view themselves as superior to alphas,
since the beta understands the superficiality of the alpha’s successes and has the
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character strengths to pursue long-term romantic relationships. The beta lacks flash,
macho charisma, or sexual virtuosity, but is a woman’s safer choice as a mate,
providing a more stable environment for her to raise a family. A beta plays tortoise to
the alpha’s hare, persevering rather than dominating. Admirers of alphas, however,
regard betas as feminized traitors to masculinity, belittling themselves in the process of
catering to women’s demand for stable monogamous relationships; moreover, the beta
eventually fails his woman as well, since she’ll tire of her reliable but boring beta man,
longing for the excitement that only an alpha generates. According to alphas, women
want men who are opposed to women, whose domineering, authoritarian tendencies
are antidotes to women’s weakness for chaotic emotionalism. Women are supposed to
prefer their opposites, namely masculine men, not effeminate listeners or feministic Yes
men who surrender all their power to please women who are naturally incapable of
leading.

Finally, ethologically speaking, omega males are last in line to survive in the group,
eating last and given little if any access to the females. Omegas are physically the
weakest and also the most inept at forming social bonds, thus demonstrating the
inferiority of their genes, from a narrow gene’s-eye-view; that is, the omega’s phenotype
is least able to serve its genotype as a vehicle for the genes’ proliferation, since the
omega can’t solve the puzzle of prospering in a society and thus attracting mates. As a
purveyor of so much propaganda for the rat race, pop culture has a more once-sided
definition of “omega man.” Admirers of alphas and of betas alike hold the omega in
contempt for opting out of the social Game merely to conceal his character defects
which render him incapable of succeeding in conventional terms. The omega has no
ambition, courage, wealth, power, or sex appeal. The omega is mentally ill or weak-
willed, a complete failure, a loser, the dud at the bottom of the pile, the dregs at the
bottom of the glass, an albatross around a welfare state’s neck.
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Fallacious Social Conservatism

There is, then, a split between alphas and betas, and a separate opposition between
alphas and betas, on the one hand, and omegas on the other. Alphas and betas
disagree about how best to succeed in society and especially with women. Sharing the
assumption, however, that men ought to accept conventions and either attempt to earn
a decent living and raise a family (for betas) or amass a fortune and a harem (for
alphas), alphas and betas, as well as the women who partner with them, recoil from the
omegas’ hostility to society itself. For unlike betas, omegas aren’t subservient to alphas,
but are loners and outsiders who nevertheless find themselves within a group. Alphas,
betas, and their women, which is to say most members of society, are conservative in
conforming to the realities of the social hierarchy and thus of their animal nature.
Because that reality wounds our pride, though, we surround ourselves with myths to
preoccupy us, and so these heroic alphas and stable betas pretend that their victories
are meaningful, that their successes are worthwhile according to loftier ideals they
imagine to rationalize the baseness of their life missions.

Naked, sexist conservatism is heard especially in the odes sung to alphas, in the
anachronistic laments of women’s helplessness, of their flightiness and need for strong
men. The confluence of social conservatism and evolutionary pop psychology is no
accident. After all, the difference between the ethologist’s classification of the members
of power hierarchies, and the popular adoption of those categories is that the latter adds
a usually fallacious normative judgment of the value of such a dominance hierarchy.
The ethologist merely describes what tends to happen in social groups, whereas pop
culture commits the naturalistic fallacy in assuming that alpha or beta men are more or
less good, but are certainly better than omega men, because the goals pursued by the
former and rejected by the latter are worthy.

Note that the point isn’t just that dominance hierarchies are naturally necessary for most
animal species, including ours, since the existence of omegas even in nonhumans
proves that this isn’t so, as does our much greater flexibility and originality, compared to
 660

other mammals. No, to generate the praise for alphas or betas and the loathing of
omegas, you need a value judgment that doesn’t follow from any scientific theory
whatsoever. When this appraisal of men’s lives is merely tacked on to the ethologist’s
classification scheme, and when this appraisal inherits its legitimacy from its weak
association with the biological science, without independent justification of its social
ideal, the pop psychologist fallaciously infers a prescription from a description. Just
because animals do tend to form a society with a certain structure, dividing into
subgroups, doesn’t mean this structure or the subgroups ought to be praised or
condemned. But as I’ve explained elsewhere, the political conservative likewise
worships the most primitive state of social affairs, which is the dominance hierarchy, her
noble lies to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus, there's a happy marriage between the
dating culture’s latent social conservatism and its abuse of evolutionary psychology.

To be sure, the popular normative ranking of alphas, betas, and omegas needn’t be
fallacious. You could justify the normative judgments with a narrative that glorifies the
adventures of seducing women and of conquering lesser men. Only were such a
narrative to reduce to a statement of the mere fact that most men instinctively do
engage in those behaviours, without an additional normative principle informing the
narrative, would the narrative commit the naturalistic fallacy. Any such principle seems
seldom defended by participants in the dominance hierarchy.

Modern Omegas as Secular Mystical Ascetics

More to the point, such a principle would have to contend with the omega’s
longstanding and indeed nominally venerated case against social norms. After all, what
doesn’t seem much appreciated in Western societies is that so-called omega men are
secular counterparts of the mystical ascetics who’ve been revered especially in Eastern
societies. Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain ascetics, as well as Gnostics, ancient Jewish
hermits and Christian monks renounced worldly pleasures as degrading or illusory,
often with elaborate theological rationales. I say “nominally venerated,” because
Western societies are all strongly influenced by Christianity, which happens to be a
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paradoxical religion that prescribes asceticism, celibacy, pacifism, socialism, and

effective anarchy, but that became politically successful when its leaders compromised
on all of these fronts with antithetical secular powers. Thus, Western alphas and betas
often have to pretend to worship Jesus, whose character was obviously that of an
omega man, even as they sneer at contemporary omegas. (Recall Jesus’ declaration
that--as I paraphrase it--in the Kingdom of God the first, the alphas, will be last and the
last, the omegas, will be first.) Ascetics have no place in secular postmodern societies,
although the American beat generation and hippies, as well as the communists of the
last century expressed similar anti-natural or transhuman sentiments. Still, introverts or
men with few if any advantages in the social Game, who thus have little incentive to
compete in it, seem to reach conclusions similar to the religious mystic’s, about the
indignities of the popular social condition and the delusions needed to sustain the
secular pursuit of happiness.

This is to say that intentional dropouts and losers are normatively superior to alpha and
beta men, according to some religious, mystical, ethical, or aesthetic ideals. Recall that
the difference between betas and omegas has to do with their motivation, not with their
behaviour, since betas may fail just as badly as omegas in finding a mate or earning a
living. But betas accept the natural social system, whereas omegas reject it. This makes
for an analogy between omega men and traditional ascetic mystics, in which case
omegas can at least avail themselves of some secular or other version of the traditional
normative principles justifying the renunciation of worldly pleasures. Conformist runners
of the rat race who are repulsed by omega men typically have only the naturalistic
fallacy to give that condemnation a semblance of respectability.

Perhaps the most prevalent criticism of what’s effectively the omega’s secular
asceticism is that his so-called principles or higher ideals are just rationalizations,
disguises that allow the omega to save face and even feel superior to more powerful
people. First and foremost, runs this response, the omega is a physically and socially
inferior male specimen, which facts cause the omega to fail to live up to social
expectations. This lowly man will be physically unattractive and single, perhaps even
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involuntarily celibate, as well as poor and unemployed or underemployed. Any mystical,

ethical, or aesthetic justification of that wretched state of affairs is beside the point for
non-omegas; indeed, the attempt to save face by such underhanded means, instead of
admitting to personal inadequacy and leaving more successful members of society
alone is just one more pitiful, time-wasting exercise that sinks the omega man deeper
and deeper into his own fantasy world. As put by the AskMen article, cited above,

An omega male likes to think he’s marching to the beat of his own drum, but the
reality is he just can’t keep time with everybody else. While we don’t want to
advocate conformity, we do think there are certain facts of life that every guy has
to recognize. Being a man means engaging with the world as it really is.

The description of omega men as unattractive, single, and poor is surely accurate.
Indeed, its accuracy should be stipulated since in a free society, some men will fail to
compete well, due to their inadequacies or poor choices, and will suffer the
consequences; these men can be called betas or omegas, depending on whether they
give up on meeting conventional expectations. But there are two fallacies in the
foregoing response to the omega’s rejection of social norms. First, when you speak of
the mystical, ethical, or aesthetic reasons for that rejection as rationalizations, you’re
assuming that the character defects cause the ideology. Just as likely, though, an
omega’s character may develop in response to a confrontation with the absurdities and
tragedies which have for millennia inspired the omega’s ascetic worldview. Even the
omega’s physical ugliness may be exacerbated by harsh experience, in that the omega
will lack both the interest and the funds to look his best, and that disinterest and poverty
may result from experience of our existential predicament.

Second, when you say that the omega’s world-weary ideals are worthless because of
their association with the omega’s personal defects, you’re committing the genetic
fallacy of reducing the ideal’s epistemic merit to the quality of its presumed source.
Thus, even were the mystical, cosmicist, or existential worldview caused by the
omega’s failures and personal weaknesses, that causal connection wouldn’t by itself
 663

entail the worthlessness of that worldview. On the contrary, supposing that social
conventions were somehow bankrupt, we should surely expect that those who would
discover that surprising and unpleasant fact wouldn’t be the conformists who strive to
live up to those norms, by raising a family and earning enough money to live
comfortably; those folks would sooner take such norms at face value than question
them. No, those who would discover fundamental problems with a society would more
likely be the alienated individuals who wouldn’t reflexively defend the popular lifestyle on
a partisan basis. Of course, if you do accept the validity of social norms, you can
pragmatically dismiss the omega’s worldview as a likely contributor to social failure, but
that would beg the question at issue, which is whether those norms ought to be
followed.

Returning to the above quotation, the classic reply to the realist’s insistence that, in this
case, “Being a man means engaging with the world as it really is,” is voiced by the
idealist Eleanor Arroway in the film Contact, the reply being that the world is what we
make of it. More apt, though, the omega will maintain that even when we’re not
responsible for social roles, because those roles are put upon us by natural forces,
we’re responsible for our choice of how we deal with those realities, such as our
sexuality and our ego-driven quest for personal pleasure. Alphas and betas don’t
“engage with” reality, in the sense of battling with those forces as our enemies, since
their goal of personal happiness requires that they bless their inner nature. Only the
omega man engages with reality in that sense, by denouncing the natural causes of our
suffering as horrible outrages, and by withstanding the social pressures to betray that
existential realization and to lower his guard. The omega is always at war with his
animal nature and thus always engaged with natural reality itself, not with the politically
correct delusions and mass hallucinations that distract the alpha and beta men.

As for the insinuation that the omega isn’t a real man, unlike the alpha or beta man, if
“real man” means the one defined by scientific theories, then we’re assuming that a
human is a naturally selected mammal; a vehicle for transmitting genes in the
furtherance of a mindless, morally neutral biochemical process; a mortal cursed with the
 664

intelligence to understand all too well the likelihood of our species’ doom, the ultimate
fruitlessness of our individual efforts, and the inevitability of our body’s decay. In that
case, surely the omega man should take that emasculating insult as an unintentional
compliment. Perhaps the omega is an inchoate transhuman, whose stubborn
renunciation of natural reality is a precondition of a radical alteration of that reality which
requires an inner transformation of hitherto “real” men and women. Only an alienated
outsider could be motivated to combat all the evils of the natural dominance hierarchy,
and thus to preclude the need for distinctions between alpha, beta, and omega men.

Conclusion

To clarify, I’m not so foolish as to recommend that all men be omegas. What I maintain
is that the popular dismissal of omega men as weak-willed losers is complicated by the
comparison of these losers with the perennial class of mystical ascetics. The problem
with modern omega men is that the traditional defense of asceticism has few roots in
Western societies, and so these drop-outs are doubly alienated--from natural forces and
from non-omegas. More than anyone else, omega men (and women too!) need a
version of mysticism that’s compatible with modern science and with philosophical
naturalism. Certain forms of Buddhism are popular options, as are New Age
bastardizations of Gnostic and Eastern religious traditions. Elsewhere, I point to some
common elements of such a synthesis, highlighting existentialism and Lovecraft’s
cosmicism. With or without a philosophy of secular asceticism, secular society will
inevitably produce losers along with its winners. But with such a philosophy, the losers
may be buoyed and the winners may be compelled at least to relinquish their feelings of
complacency.
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Defending Existential Cosmicism

____________________________________________________

In my writings I’ve sought to carve up some sacred cows, including happiness and sex,
theism and New Atheism, liberalism and conservatism. In their place I recommend a
pretty dark worldview, although not a wholly dark one. This worldview is informed by
existentialism and by cosmicism as well as philosophical naturalism. The gist of
existentialism is that we choose how we confront harsh truths about ourselves and our
place in the universe, and that the mainstream choice is to retreat to self-serving
delusions. “Cosmicism” is H.P. Lovecraft’s name for the science-inspired suspicion that
our values, hopes, and dreams are all pathetic in the grand scheme, that our knowledge
of the ultimate truth of how the universe works would deprive us of our sanity.

Probably the most common objection to my sort of hostility to Western culture takes the
form of a stream of personal attacks: existential cosmicists are romantic idealists, often
stuck in a juvenile stage of personal development, substituting a suitably dark fantasy
for the tauntingly pleasant reality; moreover, the criticism goes, these idealists merely
devise an elaborate philosophical rationalization for their personal failures in life, which
is to say that existential cosmicists tend to be either losers (poor, unattractive sufferers)
or else spoiled whiners, complaining about their anomie instead of seizing their
opportunities, participating in society, and not over-thinking everything.
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There are several criticisms here of existential cosmicism (EC), which can be conflated,
so I’ll tease them apart and explain them more fully before responding to them.

Opposing Existential Cosmicism

Romanticism: Romanticism was the aesthetic movement that began as a recoiling

from such cultural impacts of the Scientific Revolution as utilitarianism, pragmatism, and
secular humanism. Instead of thinking of nature purely as quantifiable bits of matter that
can be exploited, romantics deified the cosmos, portraying natural forces as worthy of
awe, horror, and thus respect. Indeed, the pragmatist who deifies humans--especially
for our scientific and engineering capabilities--borrows a theistic conceit which modern
science itself has embarrassed, namely the notion that we’re similar to the First Cause,
to the Creator of the universe. For the pragmatist whose ultimate value is usefulness,
nature is a machine that can be reengineered to suit our purposes, and the more we
control natural forces, the more godlike we become. Ironically, the romantic takes more
seriously the upshot of modern science, holding up as more sacred the sea of natural
forces than the hapless creatures who come and go as waves in that sea.

The criticism of my view, though, would be that EC is an hysterical overreaction to the

success of technoscience, a sort of misplaced pity for the ecosystem we might destroy
in our effort to transform it, and a nostalgic preference for mystery. The romantic
denigrates our rational powers to preserve a terror of nature that's supposed to follow
from our presumed inability to fully explain the universe. We fear most what we don’t
understand, and if we can’t understand everything, such as consciousness or why
there’s something rather than nothing, we must always be humble. This humility has
social and political consequences; in particular, the romantic tends to oppose the
arrogance of unbridled capitalism. And so the criticism is ultimately a personal attack:
romanticism is a rationalization of failure, whereas scientistic culture celebrates our
success, or at least our bold plan of carrying on as gods now that we’ve deposed the
false god, thanks to modern science. Thus, if EC is romantic, so much the worse for EC.
 667

Now, cosmicism is romantic in the historical sense I’ve outlined. In these rants, I’ve
criticized the arrogance of scientistic culture, speaking of the curse of reason, the
delusions of hyper-rationalism, and so on. But “romanticism” isn’t a pejorative term,
which is to say that applying the label doesn’t amount to a criticism. Just because
cosmicism can be traced to a reaction to the Scientific Revolution doesn’t mean
cosmicism is wrong. On the contrary, as I’ve suggested, the cosmicist may be closer to
modern science than is the scientistic humanist. As suggested, the criticism that’s
implicit in any accusation that cosmicism is romantic lies on other, personal grounds to
which I now turn.

Childish Naivety: I think the root of the foregoing objection to EC is a disagreement

about what to make of the power of technoscience. Secular humanists are immensely
proud of that power and they have contempt for traditional superstitions and for the
prospect of any other retrograde brake on technoscientific progress. Their scorn for
religion isn’t due so much to an intellectual difference of opinion on technical questions
of theology and cosmology, but on awe felt for human secular achievements and on a
revolutionary’s adventurous impulse to follow the technoscientific enterprise to its
ultimate end, which may be our apotheosis or our self-destruction. Modern Western
rationalists were revolutionary in wresting power from the Catholic Church, replacing
that unsustainable medieval oligarchy with a stealth variety that’s more compatible with
modern knowledge. Secular humanists want to be on the winning team, and they regard
the power of technoscience as a sure sign that a science-centered ideology is best. By
contrast, for example, religious fundamentalism isn’t just dangerous to the modern
social order, but wildly impractical and thus contrary to the all-consuming desire for
technoscientific progress.

Likewise, one of the existential cosmicist’s sins is supposed to be naivety: EC would

undermine people’s confidence in their secular pursuits and thus slow social progress,
hampering the humanist’s effort to adapt us to the demands of ever-“advancing” science
and technology. For the secular humanist, progress requires trust that the gains of that
advance will outweigh the costs, that godlike knowledge and power in the hands of
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clever mammals will be worth the sacrifices of modern oligarchy, wild (“free”) economic
competition, and the lowering of aesthetic standards due to democracy and the rise of
the corporate monoculture (or anticulture). If we’ll need to sacrifice in modern societies,
says the secular humanist, at least we can be placated with the addictive joys of
consuming material goods and of having sex with abandon, cheering on our liberal or
conservative politicians as partisan team-players who submerge our individuality in the
hive mind. In my philosophical rants I’ve cast aspersions on some of the ideals that
motivate this secular faith, and so the objection is that I’m incredibly naïve, as though
anything human-made could alter our modern course. Why waste time on impractical
and indeed counterproductive musings, instead of struggling more single-mindedly to
succeed like most other people, to reap the material rewards?

Cowardly Escapism: The critic’s answer is that EC is a cowardly attempt to escape

from adult responsibilities. Modern civilization is supposedly more mature than more
ignorant, ancient ones, and thus those who follow the received wisdom of modernity
demonstrate their greater maturity. Outsiders, drop-outs, and other omega losers who
gainsay secular culture, may lack the self-confidence needed to succeed in the adult
businesses of earning a living and raising a family, let alone of making our collective
way in the natural universe.

Bitter Rationalization: The diagnosis may be, then, that EC is a rationalization for
character defects and for personal failures. The existential cosmicist may seek to drag
secular society down to his level, since misery loves company. Instead of blaming his
personal weaknesses, the antisocial outsider may seek a scapegoat or attempt to save
face by waging a holy war of iconoclasm. Instead of admitting to being a mere pathetic
loser who bitterly and jealously seeks to rob people of their peace of mind, the
existential cosmicist puffs himself up, deeming himself a crusader on a mission to
enlighten everyone, to show them that the secular activities he fails at (material
success, raising a family, being a productive member of society by accepting certain
conventions) are degrading compared to allegedly nobler ones.
 669

The opponent’s hypothesis, then, has two parts. First, the expectation is that the
existential cosmicist suffers from crippling personal weaknesses, such as physical
ugliness, mental disability, or business, social, or sexual incapacities. Second, the
opponent would explain this by saying that EC is a rationalization that effectively
conceals those weaknesses or transforms them into twisted successes, and in this way
the social outcast sustains a modicum of pride despite the dismal state of his affairs.

These sorts of personal attacks, launched reflexively by defenders of modern secular

societies against not just existential cosmicists but other radical critics, merely put into
words the so-called realist’s disgust with anything thought to be idle and impractical. I
assume these charges would spring to the minds of most people were they to read my
writings (although those who actually locate and choose to read them might tend to
agree with them, since those who spend time reading philosophical articles on the
internet likely already share an outsider’s mindset). The average secular humanist
would be repulsed by a presumed stink of failure that wafts from my rants or from any
diatribe against popular culture.

After all, you’d never hear a Casanova speaking ill of sexuality; nor a highly successful
family man, who aims to be happy in the secular sense, rejecting the ideals of consumer
society as delusions; nor Barack Obama or George W. Bush publicly abandoning their
respective political principles. No, those who engage in radical criticism are naturally
expected to be outsiders as opposed to the winners whose welfare depends on their
constructive engagement with the very society in question. The outcast’s hostility to
modern ideals is foolish, on the politically correct view, since were the poisonous
attitude of EC more common, it would spoil the only life we have. Worst of all, EC is
counterproductive, running up against the ideology of humanistic progress. Thus, the
existential cosmicist is a laughable Don Quixote figure, engaging in a naïve, futile
project instead of relishing the freedom and other boons made possible by modernity.
 670

Correlation and Causation

I think these personal attacks need to be critiqued, meaning that I agree with them up to
a point, but that we should appreciate where they go wrong from their plausible
assumptions. Again, it stands to reason that radical critics are outsiders who fail, more
or less, in the terms set by the society they oppose. Nietzsche, the early existentialist,
and Lovecraft, the cosmicist, certainly suffered from breakdowns or financial failures. It
stands to reason that those who excel in certain enveavours will pursue them for as
long as they retain their skills. But this is to speak only of correlations between success
and a positive outlook on the grounds for that success, and between weakness and
failure, on the one hand, and skepticism about the tasks you do poorly in, on the other.
Those who are strong in certain areas will excel in them and be proud of their
accomplishments, since they’ll look favourably on the world that rewards their gifts or
their choice to practice and so eventually to triumph. Meanwhile, those who are cursed
with weaknesses, be they physical, mental, or social, and who shoulder the full blame
for their predicament likely won’t be long for this world; they’ll succumb to shame from
their self-imposed stigma and do themselves in. The losers who persist, therefore, must
have some coping mechanism that keeps them alive and kicking, such as an EC
ideology that finds more than enough blame to go around, as it were--indeed a whole
cosmos to loathe.

But correlation isn’t causation. Where the opponent of EC errs, then, is in assuming that
the reason for the correlation is that the existential cosmicist (or Gnostic, religious
fundamentalist, ascetic, socialist, or any other radical critic of modern Western society)
merely rationalizes those personal weaknesses, that the weaknesses not only cause
the EC ideology, but that they are EC’s only sources, that EC is nothing but a face-
saving mechanism. There are, of course, other possibilities. For one thing, cause and
effect here may be reversed: perhaps the ideology of EC comes first to some people at
a young age, and that unrelenting skepticism then causes them to fail at business,
social networking, and intimate relationships; that is, hostility to certain social norms
should naturally take someone out of the running, causing her either consciously or
 671

otherwise to withdraw from conventional walks of life. Then again, even if the personal
weaknesses come first, they may be only partial causes of EC, which is to say that
those weaknesses may also afford the outsider a detached perspective from which
society’s ills can more clearly be seen, so that EC has a philosophical as well as a
psychological basis.

Indeed, the opponent of EC has a curious double standard. She’d credit the success of
insiders--in part at least--to their personal strengths (their attractiveness, ambition,
talents, family connections, and so on), maintaining that those strengths collectively
make possible the gloriously progressive modern civilization. This opponent would also
blame the failures of outcasts on their personal weaknesses, as I’ve explained, but
she’d be stingier with her assessment of the fruit of those “weaknesses,” as it were; that
is, the so-called strengths of physical attractiveness, ambition, and so on bring about
secular happiness, an enviable sex life, and the whole Age of Reason, but the opposite
qualities, such as ugliness, mental “dysfunction”, cynicism, and antisocial tendencies
are assumed to cause only the poverty and alienation of these few outcasts. No, if we’re
speaking here of causality, of natural processes whereby certain types of people
differentially alter their environments, the radically hostile mindset seems to produce or
sustain not just a handful of people’s suffering, but a mental representation of an ideal
way in which the world might be, based on an unflinching recognition of reality and an
aesthetically sensitive reaction to that reality. Granted, the labours of healthy, productive
people add up to the construction of an actual society, but insightful outsiders may have
the vantage point to coldly calculate the difference between that society and the one
that should replace it.

EC may indeed serve as an elaborate mechanism for coping with bitter

disappointments, at least for some outsiders and losers. But failure in life seems to have
a silver lining, which is that bitterness, ugliness, introversion, and poverty may force the
loser to adopt a detached, alienated position, to look upon society from an external
vantage point and thus to be able to objectively catalogue our absurdities and tragedies.
Just as an anthropologist gains unique insight when studying a foreign culture, insight
 672

unavailable to members of the tribe who can’t afford to be skeptical of their cultural
conventions, the loser should have a unique perspective on the culture she needn’t
accept for her own good. The very personal weaknesses that disgust the successful,
well-loved, upstanding member of a modern society may be the primary means of
attaining the ultimate philosophical insight.

Indeed, the greatest of these outsiders have usually been lauded and even worshipped
for precisely that reason. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an outsider (due to his skin colour)
when he said he dreamed of the day when freedom would ring for everyone regardless
of their race, gender, or physical appearance. Gandhi was physically weak and frugal
when he led the Indian nationalist movement against British colonialism in India.
Likewise, the biblical character of Jesus was an impoverished Jew in Roman-occupied
Judea when he contrasted that imperial society with what he called the kingdom of God.
Again, the legendary character of the Buddha was a wandering spiritual teacher,
detached from conventional concerns of family and wealth, when he contrasted the
illusory world of individual things with the interconnected, ego-annihilating reality. And,
lastly, to take a more recent example, the fictional character of Batman secretly
renounces the ideals of corrupt Gotham City, leading a double life in which he pretends
to honour those ideals as a preeminently upstanding citizen, while using his wealth
mainly in a heroic war against social corruption. Notice that in each of these cases, the
hero is born to relative wealth and luxury, only later to renounce it as a result of a
higher, moral calling. King earned a doctoral degree from Boston University, Gandhi a
law degree in London; Jesus was God in utopian Heaven, who degraded himself by
becoming a man; the Buddha was a prince who gave up his palaces to live as an
ascetic; and although Batman retains his inherited wealth and secular ambition, he
employs them only as covers for his subversive agenda as a superhero.

My point is obviously not that the average loser is as heroic or divine as any of these
personages. Again, the most heroic outsiders seem to voluntarily withdraw from the
game as opposed to having their outsider status forced on them by their failures. Still,
the famous prophets, gurus, and heroes fulfill the same ascetic ideal that lifts up less
 673

influential outsiders, and happen to be esteemed by losers and winners alike. Granted,
many materialists only pretend to worship the colossal loser, Jesus, for example, or else
worship him because they assume his resurrection and eventual triumph negate the
resentful message he conveyed while he suffered as a hermit. But the fact that some of
those who fail in the mainstream, materialistic, biologically-determined sense are
nevertheless held as sacred by great multitudes surely indicates that opponents of
inspired, radical social critiques might just want to suppress disheartening truths about
the society they’ve embraced. The insiders may fear that they live in corrupt Gotham
after all, that they’ve pledged themselves to delusions and that the outsider tends to
understand the world at a deeper level. The personal attacks function, then, as
distractions, having no logical force as they stand but only the practical goal of shaming
the loser to put an end to the rants.

Teleological Maturity

There’s another questionable aspect of these attacks, besides their confusion of

correlation with causation, which is the notion that idealists are less mature than
pragmatists who tend to achieve more in materialistic terms because they (the
pragmatists) dedicate themselves to that more “realistic” task. At root here is the
naturalistic fallacy, the inference that because certain goals are normal, therefore
they’re normative, that because we’re genetically predisposed to seeking a mate and
earning enough money to raise a family, therefore we’re supposed to achieve those
ends so that those who fail are malformed or stuck in some earlier stage of
development. Now, all of this requires theism, a set of ideas which is laughably
preposterous. Theism, you’ll recall, is the vainglorious delusion that human nature is
fundamental to the universe, that there would be no cosmos without an almighty person
who thinks and acts like us, who allegedly created everything around us. Were there
such a creator god, his creation would have a function, just as we give our creations
functions, which is to say jobs they ought to perform. But when Darwin showed that the
intelligent design of organisms is illusory, he also discredited the normative
 674

interpretation of biological phenomena. Thus it became fallacious to infer a value from a

biological, naturally selected fact.

And yet the upstanding citizen pities the ascetic and alienated outsider as immature, as
failing not just to satisfy social expectations but to grow into a complete human being,
leading a so-called rich, full life. In turn, the ascetic outsider, the omega person who is
last in all mainstream estimations, is disgusted with the winner’s delusions of grandeur.
Instead of trotting out an archaic teleological presupposition according to which we have
a natural purpose even though our creators, namely natural forces, are thoroughly
undead, the opponent of EC should appreciate that people are differently equipped.
Some are beautiful, ambitious, and gullible, and thus well-disposed to succeed in the
matrix sustained by politically correct delusions that prevent mass outbreaks of
debilitating angst. Others are unattractive, socially awkward, inept at business, but
philosophically curious. These others will likely not acquire much wealth nor attract
many friends or mates, and if they nevertheless long to be happy, they’re just the sort
who will foolishly kill themselves. Again, the losers who remain will develop in a different
direction: rather than being immature in some cryptotheistic sense, they’ll devalue
mainstream expectations, preferring a more or less ascetic life of contemplating the
comical results of our instinct to personalize the thoroughly impersonal natural order. If
an outsider doesn’t belong to the consumer culture, doesn’t share the hedonistic desire
for a rich, full life, the opponent of EC merely begs the question when she calls the
existential cosmicist a loser or a failure. To be sure, relative to mainstream conventions,
an ascetic with little income or social life fails miserably, but whether those conventions
are best is just the question at issue.

Finally, I want to consider the question of bitterness. Does the existential cosmicist opt
out of a normal life due to bitterness, that is, to a begrudging admission that this person
is ill-equipped to succeed in that respect, which causes her to lash out blindly at the
word like a wounded animal? Blaming the world primarily for your personal
disappointment is highly egoistic, as though you were central to the universe and nature
owes you a favour. Still, bitterness is close to what I’d call an ethically proper response
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to suffering, namely disgust for what’s distasteful. The difference is that the bitter person
takes her suffering personally, whereas someone whose ego has been so overwhelmed
by failure that she laughs at her own pathetic defense mechanisms holds the world in
contempt with greater detachment. What revolts the existential cosmicist isn’t that she
lacks what many others possess or that the world won’t hear her prayers for a greater
fortune. No, she understands that her failures are brought about largely by her inherited
inabilities and peculiar predilections (what closet teleologists call “weaknesses” and
“malfunctions”), and by her eventual decision to renounce the mainstream way of life.
Nevertheless, her aesthetic sense is assaulted by the hideous imbalance between
nature’s inhumaneness and our human nature. That we sentient, intelligent beings
should have been produced not by a loving god but by an entropically decaying yet
mindlessly creative, buzzing chaos of quantum fluctuations isn’t beautiful at all, but
appalling for its tragic and absurd implications.
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Afterward:
We’re the Squishy Monsters!
____________________________________________________

In myths, movies, and other forms of fiction, there are two prominent kinds of monsters:
pointy and squishy ones. The pointy ones, with fangs, claws, or other sharp edges,
represent the insect and the alien, the nonhuman that crawls out of its lair from
elsewhere, creeps up your arm and bites you (werewolves, vampires, Giger's aliens,
etc). Insects have the archetypal alien form, with their nonhuman body size, population,
number of limbs, and exoskeleton that gives them sharp outer edges. The meaning of
squishy monsters, like blobs of jelly, large and bulbous octopi bodies, or aliens with
oversized heads and no sharp edges, is more complicated. Superficially, these
monsters too scare us because of their inhumanity, but this depends on an identification
of us with our seemingly immaterial consciousness. Ghosts and godlike intelligences of
pure energy might then represent our own immaterial essence, our so-called spirit. To
the extent that we think of ourselves as immaterial spirits, manifesting as
consciousness, Plato’s hierarchy comes into play, in which the ideal Forms of imperfect,
material copies reside in heaven while the copies swarm in the material plane,
distracting intelligent beings and imprisoning them in the cave of ignorance. The squishy
monster would thus be as alien to our true form as would the sharp-edged monster,
since in the Gnostic scheme either would represent the Platonic baseness of materiality
and either would be equally loathsome as a symbol of our jailer.
 677

After the Scientific Revolution and the waning of anthropocentric teleology, according to
which all of nature is objectively subject to a plan that's laid out in a heaven of ideal
models, we’re led to think of ourselves in more corporeal terms. Moreover, scientists
confirmed that the brain is our control center and that our eyes are extensions of our
brains. The brain and eyes are quintessentially squishy organs, and although the brain
is protected by a hard skull, by itself the brain is a pitifully fragile vessel. One of our
predominant postmodern fears, then, is of the evident mismatch between the godlike
powers of our intelligence, freedom, and consciousness, and our incarnation in fragile
bodies with delicate internal organs. That is, we fear that assuming we're identical with
our physical bodies, these bodies must not be prisons, after all, since there would be no
captive spirit, no ghost in the machine, no traveler from a heavenly dimension who's lost
among the cages of incarnated forms. Instead, the spilling of our blood and the rotting of
our organs would terminate our life, in which case our intelligence, freedom, and
consciousness must have misled us to assume otherwise. The postmodern fear, then,
is that we’re godlike only in our delusions of grandeur, that we’re actually absurd
animals whose life is sustained by eminently vulnerable bodies, next to what natural
forces can throw at us. True, we dominate the planet with our own exoskeletons of
skyscrapers, vehicles, weapons, and other hard-edged technologies. But at the core of
our planetary power, at the helm of our army of machines, we’re naked apes who need
to mitigate the curse of reason with escapist fantasies.

Reason empowers us to control natural forces to our benefit, but also potentially
horrifies us by showing us what we really are: the very "science fictional" squishy
monsters that terrify us! If we are essentially our flimsy, wrinkled, gelatinous brains with
the tentacles of our nerve endings reaching down our brainstem to control our body’s
extremities, a monster like the Dalek of Doctor Who (a slimy, puny alien encased in a
powerful machine), the tentacled green alien in The Simpsons, or the mindless blob
from classic science fiction surely revolts us because it reminds us so much of
ourselves. We’re the slimy, squishy, fragile creatures with tentacles that frantically push
buttons on our machines to protect us but also to enslave whatever we encounter. Not
 678

only are we those pitiful creatures, but we’re monstrous in our enthrallment to pragmatic
reason, which coldly enforces our survival instinct--now with institutions like free
markets and stealth oligarchic democracies--even if the end results are social
dominance hierarchies, the extinction of all other species, and the ecosystem’s
destruction. Moreover, we’re estranged from the rest of nature by our peculiar abilities
and we’re alienated especially from ourselves, clinging to fantasies of immortality and
transcendence even after science has pulled back the curtain and exposed our true
nature.

We humans are the squishy, monstrous aliens! When we confront images of such
creatures in the media, our fear and revulsion are due to our unwillingness to look
ourselves in the mirror; we prefer to avoid the angst that’s our true birthright as animals
cursed with “godlike” powers of intelligence, freedom, and consciousness. We’re free to
turn our rationality and our scientific methods of investigation on ourselves, to cut
through fairytales, intuitive myths, and other feel-good narratives to discover what turns
out to be the horrible truth, and we’re sentient so that that truth can fully register with us
as its imprint is burned in our brain, mocking our preferred self-image. We escape angst
by externalizing the cause of our dread; we pretend that instead of beholding our
monstrous visage in the cultural mirror, we’re merely titillated by tales of fictitious
monsters and aliens that lie “under the bridge,” in a place “far, far away,” underground,
on another planet, in a spaceship, in “another dimension,” or anywhere else but under
our own skin.

In the tale of the beauty and the beast, this clash between our appearance and inner
reality is reduced to the mundane conflicts between the sexes or social classes, as the
beautiful woman/upper class learns to love the man/lower class in spite of his or its
uncouth tendencies and primitive outbursts. In The Tempest, Prospero, who represents
our godlike creative intellect, learns to accept the beastly Caliban as his own (“This
thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”). According to Jungian psychology, we each
have a shadow side of our character that undermines our persona, or public image, and
 679

we need to confront and accept our shadow so that we can develop into authentic,
whole individuals.

There is, however, no wholesome union between our biological reality and our preferred
status as beautiful children of God or as worthy lords of creation. On the contrary, the
natural facts of what we are and how we act as a species are full-fledged horrors
enabled by our escapist fantasies. Far from undermining socially-useful delusions,
science and other forces of modernity have created the self-destructive postmodern
society, lost in aimless pragmatism, stultifying relativism and decadence, its birth rate
paltry, its leaders functionary technocrats or demagogues, and its culture a
corresponding panoply of scientistic or more retrograde rationalizations of oligarchic
excesses. Were we to accept our monstrous, alienated identity and abandon our
soothing narratives, there’s every indication that postmodern society would lose its
collective sanity and implode. Premodern, theocratic societies in the Middle East are
currently imploding in the so-called Arab Spring, but even if they manage to reform
themselves like the compromising Church, pacifying their reactionary fundamentalists,
their reformation would likely usher in the secular delusions of scientism to bolster the
ensuing "enlightened" voters and stealth oligarchs.

Transhumanists expect that technology will eventually enable us to radically merge with
technology, such as by downloading our minds into new, powerful and immortal bodies.
Even were this feasible, we might then escape the horror of our naturally selected form
but pass on the preoccupations that cause our monstrous behaviour and our angst.
Were the transformation sufficiently radical, the result would be the death of humans
unless there were some continuity between the two species, such as a gradual
development of humans into posthumans. Any such continuity, though, would permit
regression, which is why postmodern humans still have primitive, prehuman tendencies
due to the fact that our brain structures slowly evolved. A posthuman, then, would either
still be outwardly, if not inwardly, monstrous and thus subject to angst from the disparity
between its ideals and its practices, or else would bear witness to our execution rather
than embodying our resurrection. At any rate, the transhumanist combines Gnostic
 680

horror of cosmic imprisonment with scientistic assurance of social progress through

technoscience. The horror is justified, the scientism less so.

What should be done about this ultimate self-loathing? I know of no near-term or

obvious methods for postmodern (relatively well-informed) folk to avoid horror from the
knowledge of our existential predicament, other than methods that depend on delusions
and thus violate ethical or inspiring aesthetic standards. The method actually practiced
on a mass scale involves, as I said, the scapegoating of fictional monsters and aliens,
that is, the pretense that there are no real ones, but only the harmless, entertaining
fictions. Were we to admit that those imaginary freaks are merely pale imitations of
living and breathing, walking and talking monstrous aliens, and that each one of us,
beginning with our revolting biological essence and ending in our collective sociopathic
abuse of the planet and of each other, is such a freak, our politically correct charades
would come crushing down and a great time of reckoning would be at hand. For
example, the elected politician’s invoking of optimistic, civic mantras about our dignity
and greatness would lose its power to stupefy. At a minimum, conscientious,
courageous, and informed persons should foreswear the most egregious, degrading
forms of self-deception. Being a squishy monster is bad enough, but a deluded coward
who flees from self-awareness to a world of make-believe is even more nauseating.
 681

Dirge in the Undead God

____________________________________________________

The undead Creator writhes and lurches

God of all but unsung in churches
Entombed in vacuum its limbs decay
Flesh the stuff of the Milky Way
Commanded by moans the cosmos unfurls,
Drooling worlds in Fibonacci swirls
Unaware, its galactic muscles flex
Black maws swallowing its Hydra-like necks
Chambers of its sprawling heart, the stars
Send life-blood to the god’s avatars

The pawns of Earth, proud and impious

Deem themselves divine, ticks in God’s carcass
Before their eyes the lifeless body moves
Stars shine, wind blows, and rain falls, which proves
That nature’s God, no spirit required
The monstrous plenum from the first expired
 682

The Creator evolved a head, the Earth

Yet the minds therein are tasked not to birth
Whole worlds but to behold the rotting face,
Tattered wings, shattered carapace
Could a noble soul be found confined
To carrion or mustn’t that soul be resigned
To horror and folly, as a senile old man
Dines on the dung in his foul bedpan?
Or as a mad fish, loathing the sea,
Flops on land comically free?

Come meet the blessed mortal heroes

Gallant in squaring off against their foes?
Saintly with worry for another’s pain?
More likely competing for private gain
Not--as boasted--Lords of Nature
But vicious beasts without the fur
Fucking in secret, ashamed of their stripes
Jealous plumbers groping for others’ pipes

Traces of the Dragon’s alien form

From ghostly flights of the quantum swarm--
Arcana named only in wizards’ scrolls--
To a map of dramatic social roles
Enter alpha, beta, omega males
And history hidden by fairy-tales
Alphas lead by preying on the weak
Feminized betas follow while the bleak
Truth is glimpsed by omega drop-outs
By anxious mystics brought low by doubts
All concealed by elaborate dances
White lies, puffery and PC trances
 683

See now stage left for their shared cameo

As nebulas nursing newborn stars glow
As worlds in the multiverse like flowers grow
As those carrying God’s coffin know woe
Libs and cons squabble for show
Each bowing before the chief beasts
Serving up the oligarchs’ grotesque feasts
Libs trust in the quaint modern myth
Of Reason, Freedom and our precious pith
Reduced to bean counters and sad cuckolds
As the postmodern wasteland unfolds
They condescend with pragmatic nods;
Cons con shamelessly with myths of old gods
With tales of Yahweh counting your head’s hairs
Or Allah demanding you kneel on carpet squares
While the truer gods rule from skyscrapers
Wasting their wealth but praised for their capers
Luxuriating on a golden toilet
While hordes of dupes languish in debt
Punished for the plutocrat’s insane bet
Fun and games next to the existential threat
Of worlds falling as beads of undead sweat

Hear then the song of the truth-blasted seer

No warning or call to action but a rave
An ironic prayer to God’s decaying ear
A rattling of chains binding cosmos and slave
A peeling of soporific veneer
Flames flicker dimly in our abode, the Cave
But they’re beamed from the suns themselves I fear
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And we poor witnesses live in our grave

Flesh leaps and struts as a mobile bier
But laugh at the honour of being lodged in God’s rear