“Heatballs”: German Technology Triumphs Again

According to Reuters (hattip Tim Blair), German scientists have discovered a new home heating technology that leverages the tendency of charged particles (in this case electrons) to transfer energy to a metal lattice when under the influence of an electromotive force. Although remarkably similar to old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, which were recently banned in the European Union, the devices can be easily distinguished therefrom by virtue of the fact that they are clearly marked “Heatball.”

According to the website set up to market the new devices, they are the,

Best invention since the lightbulb! …A heatball is an electrical resistance intended for heating. Heatball is action art! Heatball is resistance against regulations that are imposed without recourse to any democratic or parliamentary procedure, disenfranchising citizens.

Noting that a portion of the purchase price of each of the devices will be contributed to a fund to save the rainforests, the blurb continues,

Heatball is also a form of resistance against the senseless nature of measures to protect the environment. How is it possible to seriously believe that we can save the world’s climate by using energy efficient lightbulbs, while at the same time condoning the fact that the rainforests have been waiting in vain for their salvation for decades?

Making light of the absurd notion that the devices could be misused to produce light, the site adds,

In accordance with the instructions, the correct use of heatballs is to produce warmth. Would you use a toaster as a reading lamp? …The emission of light during the heating process is a result of the production technology. It is no reason for alarm, nor does it constitute legitimate grounds for a refund.

In the 20th century we found ways to beat Prohibition in the USA.  May our German friends have similar success with their Heatballs in the 21st.

H. L. Mencken and the Good-in-Itself

I just ran across an editorial by the Sage of Baltimore in his American Mercury that should be required reading for students of good and evil.  In the piece, which appeared in the issue of November 1926, Mencken encapsulates facts about the nature of morality that have been obvious to some of our best thinkers since at least the time of Aristotle, but about which academic and professional “experts” on the subject in the 21^st century seem hopelessly confused.   Specifically, in spite of all that we have learned recently about the wellsprings of morality in genetically programmed and innate mental traits, and the fact that these traits exist only because they evolved, a great number of these experts persist, implicitly or explicitly, in defending the “noble purpose” fallacy.   By this I refer to the illusion that Good is a real thing, existing independently of subjective impressions in the minds of individuals, and it has a goal or purpose, variously described as promoting “human flourishing” or some other chimera of that nature.

Mencken included his observations in a piece attacking Prohibition, which he considered an obscene assault on individual liberty.  In it he identifies the notion of Good as a real thing as the “categorical imperative.”  It is worth quoting his thoughts at length (bold and italics are mine):

That great statute has not only had the profound political effect of ereviving the old love of liberty in the hearts of the people, and their ancient willingness to run some risks for it; it has also had the still profounder philosophical effect of blowing up their old naïve faith in the categorical imperative. True enough, the name of the categorical imperative was a stranger to them, but nevertheless they once gave it full credit, and it was implicit in all the ethical schemes that bedeviled them, whether theological or merely constabulary. Right, in their view, was a definite entity, a Ding an sich (thing in itself), and as real as hot or cold. Wrong was equally clear and invariable. On this postulate all the gaudy nonsense of their law was based, and all the still gaudier nonsense of their theology. To question it was a sort of sin against the Holy Ghost, and indistinguishable from question democracy itself. But now they have learned to question it, and it seems to me that this learning has brought them many plain benefits, and vastly increased their intellectual dignity. For the first time in their history that have come to a surprised but not unpleasant understanding of the fact that the law, even the moral law, is after all only a human contrivance, and that what is put into it today may be taken out of it tomorrow. In other words, they have begun to realize that behind all categorical imperatives there stand concrete and highly human moralists, most of them with something to sell, and that the great and revolutionary discoveries of these moralists, when subjected to analysis, are very apt to turn out to be buncombe…

This rent in the moral fabric is greatly deplored by specialists in indignation, but it must be manifest to the judicious that it lets in a lot of welcome light. The whole imposture of law is salubriously illuminated, and with it the whole imposture of government. Hundreds of thousands – nay, millions – of simple men, hitherto in the habit of taking such things on faith, have begun to look into them a bit suspiciously – and suspicion, in that field, as in pathology and amour, is the beginning of wisdom. There is no slackening of belief, so far as I can make out, in those moral principles which ground themselves firmly upon human experience; swindlers, as everyone knows, are still reprehended, and the jail-doors clap upon them every day. But in the regions wherein morality itself becomes a sort of swindle, and the Good Man is indistinguishable from a Florida land speculator or a seller of Oklahoma oil stock – in these regions there is a growth of agnosticism, and even of infidelity, and out of it, in the long run, there will flow unmistakable benefits…

I long ago pointed out the colossal opportunity awaiting any Federal judge with enterprise enough to embrace it – and courage enough to face the blast of the Anti-Saloon League. Let him exhume the First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments from the cold, cold ground, let him loose a bold judicial whoop for the whole Bill of Rights, let him begin sending Prohibition agents to the hoosegow, whence they issued to afflict a free people – let him do these simple things, all within his lawful powers, all within the strict boundaries of his oath, and he will come to such fame as not even the late Valentino ever encompassed. (That has a familiar ring to it, doesn’t it?)…

The treatment that remains is to get the patient on his legs, and let him pursue his own devices, taking what he wants and rejecting what he wants. In other words, the remedy is to heave the categorical imperative out of the window, and with it all the ethical osteopaths and chiropractors who merchant it. It is perhaps easier, since Prohibition, to get new moral legislation on the books. The uplifters have learned how to crack their whips, and the legislators have learned how to jump. But it is vastly harder to get moral legislation obeyed. That far, at least, we have gone…

The next bit is a beautiful encapsulation of the inevitable difficulties even the most brilliant of our intrinsically moral species has in discussing and understanding morality.  Our responses to what we see as gross impostures almost inevitably have some moral coloring, even if the imposture we are rejecting has to do with morality itself:

Perhaps we are destined to go still farther. For years I have spilled ink denouncing the hypocrisy that runs, like a hair in a hot dog, through the otherwise beautiful fabric of American life. Now I begin to suspect on blue days that I have been chasing a categorical imperative of my own. Is hypocrisy, then, infamous per se? I can only confess that, at the moment, I am in some doubt. It seems to work. In the face of it, and theoretically impeded by it, there has been the great advance in ethical realism that I have been describing. Perhaps hypocrisy is an anesthetic that makes major moral operations possible; without it they might be intolerable. Perhaps it is a necessary function of democracy – a general assumption of the not-true, embracing many lesser but inevitable assumptions of the not-true. It may be that candor, like honor, would be fatal to the whole democratic process – that it presupposes a contempt for the general opinion, and no less for the general lack of opinion, that verges upon anarchy…

…one sees only that the ancient authority of the moral law has begun to crack. Not only the wicked, but also multitudes of the naturally virtuous, have brought the concept of duty into the light of reason. A law among us is no longer something to be obeyed automatically; it is something to be weighted and discussed, and maybe to be rejected. It seems to me that Prohibition is mainly responsible for that benign change. It has destroyed a very dubious and dangerous axiom by putting it into terms of the intolerable. That is a public service of high value, and even of a certain austere dignity. Let the band blow a blast or two in honor of the preposterous Mr. Volstead (Prohibition was referred to as the “Volstead Act”). He aimed at the bird of freedom (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and brought down a whole sky-full of buzzards (Buteo wowseris).

How refreshing and reassuring it is to read a piece like that at a time when moral “experts” can come up with some goal or purpose, arbitrary other than the fact that it must seem an attractive goal or purpose to most of the other members of the group to which the “expert” belongs, and claim with a perfectly straight face that, because the goal is desirable and attractive, it is, therefore, also “really Good,” and hence, by some strange, mysterious process, linked to the human emotional traits we associate with morality.  We still live in an asylum, and it’s probably worse than even Mencken thought.  For all that, occasionally a little light still shines through the cracks in the wall.

A College Professor Licks Boot

Apparently VDH isn’t the only one to feel the wrath of the secular priesthood lately.  Inside Higher Ed gives us a foretaste of what freedom of speech will look like once we have achieved “human flourishing.”  Here’s the blurb;

Eau Claire Professor Facing Punishment for Anti-Gay E-Mail

Administrators at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire say they will punish a professor who sent an e-mail discouraging students there from holding a gay film festival because he decries “attempts to legitimize (homosexuals’) addictions and compulsions,” the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram reported. The student had sent an e-mail to a group of employees last month asking for faculty support in publicizing the Eau Queer Film Festival, a new event that took place last week. In reply, the newspaper said, Tom Hilton, chairman of the university’s information systems department, sent what university administrators characterized as a “hurtful and condescending” reply, saying that gay people, “our fellow humans, deserve our best efforts to help them recover their lives. We only hurt them further when we choose to pretend that these walking wounded are OK the way they are, that their present injuries are the best they can hope for in life.” Hilton told the Telegram Leader that he had worded his e-mail “very badly” and said that he was sorry and would cooperate if the university punishes him.

Charming! If only he’d asked for the “Supreme Measure of Punishment” it would have been a perfect caricature of one of Stalin’s show trials, with the unfortunate professor in the role of a Trotskyite.  As Instapundit puts it, “Academia, where dissent flourishes.” When the grab bag of evolved human emotions we share with other animals, and collectively refer to as Morality, are jury-rigged to run modern human societies, whether university systems or states, this sort of abject groveling must be the inevitable result.  The process of natural selection culminating in human moral behavior never took into account the fact that liberty and freedom of speech might someday be critical to our survival, allowing us to grope towards finding a way to accommodate  behavioral traits that evolved hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago in small groups of hunter-gatherers to modern societies that are utterly alien to that primitive world.   Good never comes without Evil, and rulers who would defend the Good must punish the Evil that threatens it.  In our day that Evil comes in the form of heresy, the expression of opinions that are out of step with the prevailing moral paradigm.  Perfect morality implies perfect tyranny.

Would you learn more about how humans can be made to grovel and live on the intellectual level of ants?  You need look no further than the morality-based utopias of the past and present.  Read, for example, Roy Medvedev’s account of Stalinism in Let History Judge, or Yuan Gao’s account of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, or observe the behavior of the current population of North Korea, or consider the manner in which dignified professors in academia are made to crawl on their bellies.  Those societies are the real face of morality-based “human flourishing.”  I personally don’t consider them immoral.  I have no objective standard on which to base such a judgment.  As an individual, however, I would prefer not to live in one of them.  If there are other individuals who agree with me, it would behoove us to consider how we might best live together in the future in societies that account for moral behavior, but don’t enshrine it.

The “Racism” of Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson has just been given a taste of what will be in store for those who aren’t quite in step with the orthodox dogmas of the religious Left once we’ve “turned up our moral knobs to include all mankind” and the new era of “human flourishing” has dawned.  The exploitation of human moral emotions to create new utopias always implies an “evil” as well as a “good.”  The “knobs” of our nature don’t allow us to turn on the one and turn off the other.  They always come as a package.  Hanson has dared to disagree with his “enlightened” colleagues in academia.  He is seriously out of step with the new orthodoxy.  He is a heretic, and, like all heretics before him, he is, therefore, “evil,” or, to use the currently fashionable alternative word for “evil,” employed by the priestly zealots who have just attacked him, he is a “racist.”

I personally don’t care to live in a world in which intelligent people who differ with the prevailing orthodoxies are silenced by the anthemas of secular religious bigots.  I have an alternative suggestion.  Let’s refrain from cobbling together another New Morality, and try reason instead.  It’s not exactly a novel idea.  You’ll find it in the pages of Aristotle’s Politics, Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.  The Founding Fathers of the US gave it their best shot, and the results weren’t entirely negative.  In fact, they were better than anything that had come before.  If we keep trying, taking care to account for but not indulge our moral emotions, we might do even better in the future.

Sam Harris: Still Chasing the Moral Butterfly

Sam Harris is at it again, chasing the gaudy butterfly of the good-in-itself. Somehow, although Aristotle patiently explained why Sam’s “latest scientific ideas” about morality wouldn’t work two and a half millenia ago, and it’s been 150 years since Darwin put the last nail in the coffin of the notion of disembodied good and evil swimming around out there in the luminiferous ether, Sam is still pretending that the blank slate never died. Forget the fact that morality is the expression of evolved behavioral traits. Forget its connection with predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain. Forget that it is utterly dependent on subjective emotions in the minds of individuals for its very existence. Sam still believes that the butterfly is out there, and that, if he can only catch it, he can just hitch it up to his wagon full of dubious notions about the “scientific good,” and, with a flash of its wings, it will magically transport us to Sam’s Brave New World of “human flourishing.” In an article that turned up on Huffpo he writes,

Secular liberals, on the other hand, tend to imagine that no objective answers to moral questions exist. While John Stuart Mill might conform to our cultural ideal of goodness better than Osama bin Laden does, most secularists suspect that Mill’s ideas about right and wrong reach no closer to the Truth. Multiculturalism, moral relativism, political correctness, tolerance even of intolerance — these are the familiar consequences of separating facts and values on the left.

Guess what, Sam, John Stuart Mill was much too smart to believe in anything as contrived as “objective answers to moral questions.” He clearly and explicitly rejected the notion of “scientific good,” or what he referred to as “transcendental morality,” existing as an independent thing. His utilitarian ideas were fine as reasonable hypotheses about the principles according to which modern human societies might best be governed. His mistake was in believing that he could just tack on morality to make everything work better. If he had written a little later, after Darwin’s ideas had time to sink in, I doubt that he would have made that mistake.  He was much too brilliant a man not to put two and two together.  As for secular liberals “tending to imagine that no objective answers to moral questions exist,” it’s neither here nor there, because they act as if they do regardless. Show me one secular liberal of any intellectual significance who doesn’t think his notion of the “good” is superior to Rush Limbaugh’s, and maybe I’ll change my mind.

Sam continues,

It should concern us that these two orientations are not equally empowering. Increasingly, secular democracies are left supine before the unreasoning zeal of old-time religion. The juxtaposition of conservative dogmatism and liberal doubt accounts for the decade that has been lost in the United States to a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research; it explains the years of political distraction we have suffered, and will continue to suffer, over issues like abortion and gay marriage; it lies at the bottom of current efforts to pass anti-blasphemy laws at the United Nations (which would make it illegal for the citizens of member states to criticize religion); it has hobbled the West in its generational war against radical Islam; and it may yet refashion the societies of Europe into a new Caliphate.

In other words, our “orientation” should not conform to the truth, but to what Sam thinks is “empowering” as a means to an end.  We must all become zealots of Sam’s new secular religion, not because anything as zany as disembodied “good” really exists, but because it’s necessary to pretend that it does to make sure that Europe doesn’t turn into a new Caliphate.  Continuing with this “utilitarian” theme, Sam writes,

Imagine that there are only two people living on earth: We can call them “Adam” and “Eve.” Clearly, we can ask how these two people might maximize their well-being. Are there wrong answers to this question? Of course. (Wrong answer #1: They could smash each other in the face with a large rock.) And while there are ways for their personal interests to be in conflict, it seems uncontroversial to say that a man and woman alone on this planet would be better off if they recognized their common interests — like getting food, building shelter and defending themselves against larger predators.

As I argue in my new book, even if there are a thousand different ways for these two people to thrive, there will be many ways for them not to thrive — and the differences between luxuriating on a peak of human happiness and languishing in a valley of internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood. Why would the difference between right and wrong answers suddenly disappear once we add 6.7 billion more people to this experiment?

In other words, here’s how the logic works:

a.  Adam and Eve make a rational decision to maximize their well-being.

b.  Adam and Eve discover via experiment that smashing each other in the face with rocks diminishes their well-being.

c.  Adam and Eve decide that they should therefore alter the DNA associated with the complex emotions responsible for their moral behavior in order to avoid throwing rocks at each other.

Do you notice a disconnect between steps b and c?  So do I.  Hitler had some fine ideas about how to exploit human moral behavior to bring about the flourishing of the German people.  It resulted in the Holocaust and tens of millions of needless deaths.  Marx had another fine idea about how to exploit human moral behavior to bring about the flourishing of the workers.  That swell idea killed tens of millions more.  Now Sam wants us to swallow the idea that, if we just tinker with morality a little more carefully next time, we’ll finally get it right, and there will be a new dawn of human flourishing.  I have a better idea.  Next time we put our heads together to come up with better ways to live together, lets leave morality out of it.  If we really want to flourish, we’d best learn to thoroughly understand our moral behavior, and avoid trying to “adjust” it to suit the latest intellectual fashions.

Energy Update: Nuclear Falters, Coal Advances

Something over a year ago, the US government announced that four companies out of 17 that had applied for over a hundred billion dollars worth of federal loan guarantees for 21 proposed nuclear reactors had made what the Wall Street Journal called its “short list.”  At the time, Carl from Chicago, who occasionally writes for ChicagoBoyz, penned an article expressing his “confusion” at the choices.  Several seemingly logical candidates had been passed over, and, of the four picked, three were underfunded and had an assortment of legal and financial issues that made them dubious choices for coming up with the kind of capital needed to fund new construction.  As it turns out, the feds should have listened to Carl.  NRG, one of the two companies he picked as “least likely to succeed,” effectively dropped out of the game some time ago.  Now, as he puts it, “the other shoe has dropped.”  The other weak sister, Constellation Energy Group, just announced it is pulling out of negotiations to build the build the Calvert Cliffs 3 reactor in Maryland.

Rod Adams at Atomic Insights also commented on Constellation’s decision to walk.  Citing a related article in the Washington Post according to which,

Separately, administration officials said they had approved a $1.06 billion loan guarantee for an Oregon wind farm, the world’s largest, after project developers waged a vigorous lobbying campaign to bring the year-long application process to a conclusion.

Rod notes the gross disparity in the terms and conditions of loans offered to the two industries:

Just in case anyone wonders why the wind farm project accepted its loan guarantee while Constellation refused, the key is in understanding the terms and conditions.

For a project that would have produced 4,000 jobs for 4-5 years in Maryland, the companies involved were being told that they had to PAY the US government a non refundable fee of $880 MILLION dollars in order to BORROW $7.5 billion for a project where they would have to invest at least 20% of the project cost as their own equity, thus giving them at least $2.0 billion in reasons to make sure the project succeeded.

In contrast, the wind farm, which will produce 400 jobs for a relatively short period during construction, was able to obtain a $1.06 billion dollar loan with NO CREDIT SUBSIDY COST at all. The ARRA has provided all of the money required for the credit subsidy cost for politically defined “renewable” energy via a change in section 1705 of the Energy Policy Act. In addition, section 1603 of the ARRA provides a CASH GRANT in lieu of a production tax credit of 30% of the cost of the project via a check within 6 months after the project closes. The wind project thus gets a $1.06 billion loan with no closing cost and the sponsors have no equity in the project at all since they get their 20% down payment back with a 50% kicker less than a year after the project starts.

In a word, hype about a “nuclear renaissance” can be taken with a grain of salt, at least until the government gets its act together.  Meanwhile, the coal industry has reason to cheer.  New coal gasification plants are being built in the US even as we speak.  Among other things, they produce hydrogen, a long shot candidate as a non-polluting vehicle fuel to replace petroleum.  Ideas for getting the stuff out of coal without releasing tons of CO2 in the process remain sketchy.  Even more intriguingly, a firm is seriously looking into the possibility of building a coal liquefaction plant in Indiana.  Whether they decide the new plant is financially feasible or not, the fact that such a project has made it this far along in the planning process demonstrates how close coal has come to becoming a viable replacement for petroleum.  Given that the United States has over a quarter of the proved coal reserves in the entire world, and that those reserves are more than twice the size in terms of energy as the world’s remaining oil, that is a fact of no small significance.

Politicized Science: Harold Lewis Resigns from APS

Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has written a scathing letter of resignation to the American Physical Society protesting its collusion in what he calls the global warming scam, “…the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.”  The letter is a symptom of what happens when scientific hypothesis is conflated with ideological certainty.  There’s certainly enough of the latter to go around on both ends of the ideological spectrum.  However, the letter is overwrought and its conclusions are insupportable based on the evidence it cites. 

That evidence includes the Climategate documents, which are ugly enough in their own right, but hardly support a blanket accusation of charlatanism against the thousands of scientists working in the field of climate science.  Lewis also cites climate scientist Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph, long the subject of finger pointing on the right.  Mann tends to be his own worst enemy, vilifying anyone who opposes him as a “pseudo-scientist,” and claiming in the pages of Scientific American, hardly a paragon of scientific disinterestedness, that they are motivated by the prospect of “petroleum dollars,” even as he surfs along on the massive wave of cash that tends to flow in the direction of anyone who confirms the received wisdom about global warming.  That said, the idea that the book Lewis cites by A. W. Montfort or anything else I’ve seen “proves” that the “hockey stick” is an illusion is simply not supported by the facts.  Numerous other researchers have confirmed the substance of Mann’s findings, citing compelling evidence that is out there for anyone who cares to look at it.  Anyone who thinks the “hockey stick” is fiction needs to lay their confirmation bias aside for a few minutes and Google the facts.

The fact that, as in the many other instances documented by Bjorn Lomborg in his “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” environmental scientists have grossly exaggerated the level of certainty that the evidence will bear regarding the severity, effects, and potential outcomes of global warming does not warrant the conclusion, stated with equally irrational certainty on the political right, that the phenomenon doesn’t exist, or doesn’t represent a potential danger.  There are now more than 6 billion of us floating along on a fragile little spaceship that happens to be the only spaceship we have.  It would be wise to refrain from gratuitously damaging it as long as we still need it to survive.

It would also be wise for climatologists to refrain from claiming that they are certain about future outcomes it’s impossible to be certain about.  Such predicted outcomes are based on the results of mathematical models.  No mathematical model is perfect, and that is certainly true of mathematical models designed to predict the behavior of systems as complicated as the earth’s climate, which has billions of degrees of freedom and for which we have nothing like sufficient accurate data to support deterministic conclusions.  Climate models are subject to all the weaknesses that the great systems analyst Peter Maybeck cited for mathematical models in general.  In the first place, such models are approximations, not perfect reflections of reality.  Secondly, climate is affected by disturbances which we can neither control nor model deterministically.  Finally, we have nothing close to perfect and complete data about the system we are trying to model.

That said, it would be just as wrong to dismiss the results of climate models as totally baseless and fallacious as it is to claim deterministic certainty for their predictions.  The best ones are stochastic, or probabilistic models that account for the uncertainties cited above using systematic approaches that minimize their effects in ways that can be shown to be mathematically optimal, such as the Kalman filter.   So-called ensemble forecasts are examples of how uncertainties in initial conditions can be handled in large climate computer codes.  In such models, ensembles of initial conditions are chosen, each representing a plausible initial state of the atmosphere given our estimates of the uncertainties based on observation and analysis.  The trajectories of many such ensembles are then followed to create a projection of likely outcomes.  It often happens that many of those outcomes are grouped in close proximity to each other.  Some of the trajectories may diverge markedly from the rest, and there is no guarantee that they don’t actually represent the correct outcomes, but probability will favor the conclusion that the real outcome will fall near the most likely point.  Such models do not and cannot predict certain outcomes.  They do, however, have what computational physicists call “skill,” the ability to predict outcomes with a reasonable level of confidence that those outcomes will be correct.

Such stochastic models are not crude and unreliable, nor can their results be dismissed with a wave of the hand.  The outcomes they predict may not come to pass, but given the potential consequences, it would be foolhardy to ignore the danger, or, as Professor Lewis has done, dismiss that danger as “pseudo-science.”  

It may be that, given the bunker mentality of the ideologues on the left and right, it has become virtually impossible to really do something about the problem.  The rapid expansion of coal-fired generating capacity in China alone lends credence to the conclusion that we will continue to burn fossil fuels until they are finally exhausted.  Obvious solutions such as the rapid expansion of nuclear generating capacity are blocked by the very “environmentalists” who claim that global warming is the paramount environmental threat to mankind.  Under the circumstances, it would be well for governments to consider contingencies for dealing with global warming if the worst of our fears are realized.

Morality and the Metamorphosis of Secular Religion

Secular religions have taken the place of spiritual ones among many “progressive” intellectuals.  As I noted in an earlier post, they are distinguishable by an irrational belief in a disembodied “Good” as opposed to a more traditional “God.”  Communism was the quintessential example of such a religion, but there are many other variants, just as there are many Christian sects. 

There are many similarities between the true believers of both types of faith.  For example, pathologically pious secular zealots imagine themselves as saviors of mankind in this world, just as their spiritual brethren imagine themselves as saviors of souls in the next world.  Armed with an invincible faith in their intellectual superiority over other mortals, they would guide the rest of us benighted souls who would really prefer that they just leave us alone to a brave new world of “human flourishing,” just as earlier zealots felt duty-bound to herd us all towards the pearly gates. 

For many years, Communism was the most viral and toxic variant of either type of religion on the planet.  Since its demise, that honor has passed to radical Islam.  As Eric Hofer noted in “The True Believer,” there are remarkable psychological similarities among the zealots of all faiths, regardless of the particular dogmas that inspire them.  His observations have been abundantly confirmed in recent years, as “progressive” true believers, left high and dry by the collapse of Communism, have begun a counter-intuitive flirting with radical Islam like so many moths fascinated by a candle.  For them it represents, in a sense, the only game in town.

Secular religions are as vulnerable to the advance of human knowledge as the spiritual ones.  Fanatics of both types have a similar allergic reaction to the truth if it happens to challenge their dogmas.  For the secular faithful, one such dogma has long been the perfectibility of human beings, dependent on a belief that human behavioral traits are almost infinitely malleable.  Hypotheses to the effect that our behavior, including our moral behavior, is actually profoundly influenced by innate predispositions hard-wired in our brains flew in the face of this aspect of the secular narrative.  The faithful reacted furiously to such ideas, resisting them in the teeth of more than abundant confirming evidence until, in recent years, the weight of evidence became overwhelming.  Their intuitions were right; they had good reason to do so.

In fact, acceptance of innate behavior has been every bit as devastating to irrational belief in “The Good” as Darwin’s great theory was to irrational belief in God.  With respect to moral behavior, in particular, increasingly frequent and spectacular demonstrations of the physical and chemical basis of the associated emotions, the locations of their origins in the brain down to the level of neurons, and the precise bits of our genome that give rise to them, as well as the observation of analogous moral behavior in animals, have made it abundantly obvious that “The Good” is an artifact of moral emotions similar to those in other species, unremarkable except for the fact that they are experienced and cognitively interpreted in the minds of creatures of exceptionally high intelligence.  Our perception of “The Good” is entirely dependent for its existence on evolved traits that were added to our repertoire because, at various times in the distant past with no resemblance to the present, they happened to promote our survival.  As such, it cannot exist as a thing in itself, independent of individual human minds. 

Our moral emotions have and will continue to have an undeniable psychological power over virtually every one of us.  However, we have now learned much about the nature of those emotions, the causes that give rise to them in the brain, and the evolutionary nature of their origins.  It is no longer plausible or rational to claim that they have any transcendental significance as objective things independent of and existing for reasons unrelated to those origins.  That does not mean that the dogmas of secular religions will cease to exist.  It does mean that belief in those dogmas is no longer compatible with scientific fact or reason.  As a result, it will become increasingly necessary for secular true believers to defend them as spiritual true believers have done in the past; with obscurantism.

As noted in earlier posts, we have already begun to see this in the case of the “blank slate.”  The true believers have been forced to abandon it, at least in its most absurd incarnations, but have created a whole new narrative to replace it.  For example, the most brilliant, influential and articulate opponents of the “blank slate” in the 60s and 70s pointed out that there were negative aspects of innate human behavior that we would do well to understand if we were to have any hope of avoiding the endless repetition of warfare, violence, and mayhem in human history.  These are aspects of human behavior that are distinctly out of tune with the latest secular narrative.  As a result, regardless of the fact that thinkers like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey were right and their opponents were wrong regarding one issue of overarching significance they were debating, the hypothesis of innate behavior, they are studiously ignored by modern secular zealots.  It is as if they never existed or, if they did, their ideas could be dismissed with a wave of the hand as “utterly and totally wrong.”  We are assured that “The Good” can still be achieved if we are just a bit more judicious about “adjusting the knobs” of our moral behavior, ushering in a wonderful new era of “human flourishing” in spite of the abundance of historical disasters associated with such noble plans, and their increasingly obvious disconnect with reality.  In the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary, “The Good,” lives on, an independent, objective thing dangling out there in never-never land.

The “proofs” offered up for the existence of “The Good” by the priests of secular religions yield nothing to the miscellaneous “proofs” of the existence of God devised over the years for their unabashed rejection of intellectual clarity and common sense.  Here’s an example taken from true believer Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”:

But just because our brains are prepared to think in certain ways, it does not follow that the objects of those thoughts are fictitious. Many of our faculties evolved to mesh with real entities in the world. Our perception of depth is the product of complicated circuitry in the brain, circuitry that is absent from other species. But that does not mean that there aren’t real trees and cliffs out there, or that the world is as flat as a pancake. And so it may be with more abstract entities. humans, like many animals, appear to have an innate sense of number, which can be explained by the advantages of reasoning about numerosity during our evolutionary history. (For example, if three bears go into a cave and two come out, is it safe to enter?) But the mere fact that a number faculty evolved does not mean that numbers are hallucinations. According to the Platonist conception of number favored by many mathematicians and philosophers, entities such as numbers and shapes have an existence independent of minds. The number three is not invented out of whole cloth; it has real properties that can be discovered and explored. No rational creature equipped with circuitry to understand the concept “two” and the concept of addition could discover that two plus one equals anything other than three. That is why we expect similar bodies of mathematical results to emerge from different cultures or even different planets. If so, the number sense evolved to grasp abstract truths in the world that exist independently of the minds that grasp them.

Perhaps the same argument can be made for morality. According to the theory of moral realism, right and wrong exist, and have an inherent logic that licenses some moral arguments and not others.

Voila!  “The Good” ascends triumphant from its humble origin.  Like Pinocchio, it sheds its subjective strings and dances about before our noses, a real, honest-to-goodness thing-in-itself.  Let this serve as a lesson to you, dear reader.  Never let a secular religious zealot draw you into a conversation about the real existence of the number two.

Meanwhile, the Brave New World beckons!  A manifesto has just been released by attendees at the recent Edge Conference on “The New Science of Morality.”  Referred to by its signatories as a “Consensus Statement,” it includes eight sections, the first seven of which are a brief summary of what passes as the state-of-the-art in our scientific understanding of morality.  However, the eighth is a somewhat diffident incarnation of the latest version of the holy scriptures:

Moral systems support human flourishing, to varying degrees

The emergence of morality allowed much larger groups of people to live together and reap the benefits of trust, trade, shared security, long term planning, and a variety of other non-zero-sum interactions. Some moral systems do this better than others, and therefore it is possible to make some comparative judgments.

The existence of moral diversity as an empirical fact does not support an “anything-goes” version of moral relativism in which all moral systems must be judged to be equally good. We note, however, that moral evaluations across cultures must be made cautiously because there are multiple justifiable visions of flourishing and wellbeing, even within Western societies. Furthermore, because of the power of moral intuitions to influence reasoning, social scientists studying morality are at risk of being biased by their own culturally shaped values and desires.

It’s not quite as self-assured as something that, say, Calvin or Jonathan Edwards might have written, but you get the drift.  I’m sorry, dear reader, but it won’t help to suggest to these people that we might all “flourish” better if religious zealots, whether secular or spiritual, would refrain from foisting their dogmas on the rest of us.  The pathologically pious have ye always with you.  We’ve already had an abundant taste of how earlier versions of their sure-fire nostrums worked with Nazism, Communism, the Holy Inquisition, and a host of others.  Let us take heed, lest, sharing the fate of the millions of victims of earlier versions of “The Good” in the 20th century, the next time we “flourish” becomes our last.

John Stuart Mill and the “Blank Slate”

Categorization enables us to simplify the world sufficiently for us to think and reason about it.  However, like the rest of our mental equipment, it isn’t perfect, and can occasionally lead us astray, as when we try to categorize things that are, by their nature, highly individual or original.   Our most brilliant thinkers are an example thereof.  There are certainly similarities among them, but it can be very misleading to try to label them and fit them into philosophical pigeon holes.  To the extent that they are worth reading, they tend to be unique.  One cannot understand them or learn anything from them by virtue of the fact that someone includes them in this or that school of thought.  It is necessary to read their work. 

I ran across a particularly egregious example of the pitfalls of this form of categorization in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. The “blank slate” is the theory that prevailed among psychologists, anthropologists, and other experts in human behavior for much of the 20th century, according to which, for all practical purposes, human behavior and morality are learned, and there is no human nature other than what is acquired via experience and culture.  In its modern incarnation the theory was always an absurdity, and belonged more in the realm of ideological narratives such as “scientific” Marxism-Leninism than of science.  The “expert” defenders of blank slate orthodoxy in the 60′s and 70′s are better understood as the high priests of a secular religion than as proponents of a scientific hypothesis that turned out to be incorrect.  In general, Pinker has done a brilliant job of debunking them and explaining the reasons for their fanatical defense of an idea that had long been palpably ridiculous.  His book is well worth reading, although not without its flaws.  One of them is the manner in which he lumps some of mankind’s greatest thinkers together with the hidebound ideologues of the “blank slate.” 

Pinker shares a vice of the pedants who run philosophy departments in academia, in that he imagines direct chains of thought linking the ideas of highly original and individual thinkers who lived in times utterly different from each other informed by vastly different levels of scientific and general knowledge into neatly arranged systems.  Thus, as he tells it, the modern version of the blank slate was invented by John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers.  Then Locke begat John Stuart Mill, John Stuart Mill begat John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, and Watson begat latter day ideologues like Ashley Montagu and Richard Lewontin.  These are strange bedfellows indeed.  Let’s consider the case of Mill.  Pinker quotes him at length, citing his notion of intuitional philosophy.  According to Pinker,

By “intuitional philosophy” Mill was referring to Continental intellectuals who maintained (among other things) that the categories of reason were innate. Mill wanted to attack their theory of psychology at the root to combat what he thought were its conservative social implications. He refined a theory of learning called associationism (previously formulated by Locke) that tried to explain human intelligence without granting it any innate organization. According to this theory, the blank slate is inscribed with sensations, which Locke called “ideas” and modern psychologists call “features.” Ideas that repreatedly appear in succession (such as the redness, roundness, and sweetness of an apple) become associated, so that any one of them can call to mind the others. And similar objects in the world activate overlapping sets of ideas in the mind. For example, after many dogs present themselves to the senses, the features that they share (fur, barking, four legs, and so on) hang together to stand for the category “dog.”

The associationism of Locke and Mill has been recognizable in psychology ever since. It became the core of most models of learning, especially in the approach called behaviorism, which dominated psychology from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Voila!  With this trivialization of the ideas of a brilliant thinker, Pinker mashes him into a soup with the likes of Montagu and Lewontin.  There’s just one problem.  Mill is poles apart from the 60s blank slaters intellectually.  Where his mind was open, their minds were nailed down tightly in ideological boxes.  Where he was original, they were dogmatists.  Where they demonized anyone who disagreed with them, he always admitted the possibility that he could be wrong.  Where they were fanatical defenders of the blank slate in its most extreme forms, he freely admitted the possibility of innate predispositions. 

How do we know Mill was a brilliant thinker?  For one thing, unlike 999 out of 1000 of the “experts” in morality, he, in the words of E. O. Wilson, “laid his cards on the table” when he was discussing it.  Unlike so many others who pontificate wisely about morality, he did not consider it beneath his dignity to explain to the rest of us on exactly what basis he presumed to base his claims for the legitimacy of his conclusions regarding why we should do some things but not others.  He knew the difference between the subjective nature of morality as it actually exists and morality as a “good-in-itself,” for which he admitted he saw no rational basis.  As he put it in Utilitarianism:

The ultimate sanction, therefore, of all morality (external motives apart) being a subjective feeling in our own minds, I see nothing embarrassing to those whose standard is utility, in the question, what is the sanction of that particular standard? We may answer, the same as of all other moral standards – the conscientious feelings of mankind.

Note that by invoking the “conscientious feelings of mankind,” Mill has already distanced himself from the blank slate purists.  In the following sentences, he explicitly embraces a theory of human nature of which these moral feelings are a part:

…the feelings exist, a fact in human nature, the reality of which, and the great power with which they are capable of acting on those in whom they have been duly cultivated, are proved by experience. No reason has ever been shown why they may not be cultivated to as great intensity in connection with the utilitarian, as with any other rule of morals.

In other words, Mill’s error was not in rejecting human nature per se, but in assuming that it was more malleable than subsequent research has revealed it to be in reality.  Unlike our current “experts” in human behavior, including Pinker, who, having finally rejected the blank slate, remain mesmerized by the chimera of the “good-in-itself,” Mill suffered from no such delusions.  In his words,

There is, I am aware, a disposition to believe that a person who sees in moral obligation a transcendental fact, an objective reality belonging to the province of “Things in themselves”, is likely to be more obedient to it than one who believes it to be entirely subjective, having its seat in human consciousness only.

Mill, rejecting transcendental morality himself, notes the obvious fallacy in its claim to superior moral authority:

Does the belief that moral obligation has its seat outside the mind make the feeling of it too strong to be got rid of? The fact is so far otherwise, that all moralists admit and lament the ease wwith which, in the generality of minds, conscience can be silenced or stifled.

As we have already seen in the above, far from embracing the blank slate, Mill states his explicit belief in the existence of human nature.  How, then, do Pinker and the rest come up with the idea that he was the great progenitor and godfather of the blank slate.  Perhaps from statements like the following:

On the other hand, if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason the less natural.

Note that what Mill is referring to here is not human nature, but “moral feelings,” by which he means emotions, themselves grounded in human nature, in association with an explicit code of moral behavior.  Let us allow him to elaborate on this for himself:

…the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural outgrowth from it.

But there is this basis of powerful natural sentiment; and this it is which, when once the general happiness is recognized as the ethical standard, will constitute the strength of the utilitarian morality. This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature.

The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body.

The powerful sentiment, and apparently clear perception, which that word (Justice) recalls with a rapidity and certainty resumbling an instinct, have seemed to the majority of thinkers to point to an inherent quality in things; to show that the Just must have an existence in Nature as something absolute – generally distinct from every variety of the Expedient, and, in idea, opposed to it, though (as is commonly acknowledged) never, in the long run, disjoined from it in fact. In the case of this, as of our other moral sentiments, there is no necessary connection between the question of its origin, and that of its binding force. That a feeling is bestowed on us by Nature, does not necessarily legitimate all its promptings. The feeling of justice might be a peculiar instinct, and might yet require, like our other instincts, to be controlled and enlightened by a higher reason.

In other words, far from rejecting innate behavior associated with morality, Mill embraced it.  He neither doubted nor rejected the notions of human nature and innate predisposition.  It was his misfortune to live just a bit too soon for the full import of Darwin’s great theory to sink in.  As a result, he could not imagine the true nature of the moral instincts whose existence he explicitly recognized, nor appreciate the fact that it would be a great deal more difficult than he expected to get them to attach themselves seemlessly to his Utilitarian prescriptions.  I firmly believe that, had he been born 20 years later, the truth would have dawned on him.

As for Pinker’s notion that Mill’s ideas were somehow primarily intended to “combat conservative social implications” of the thought of continental intellectuals is similarly far from the truth, and a further bowdlerization of his ideas.  He was certainly engaged politically, but with the rather substantial difference from the high priests of the blank slate that his mind was always open to new ideas and new arguments, and he didn’t automatically assume someone was evil and guilty of some terrible political crime simply by virtue of the fact that the person in question disagreed with him.

The best antidote to Pinker’s wooden portrayal of Mill is to read him.  As a writer he is clear and easy to understand, the very opposite of the likes of Kant and Hegel.  His work is of lasting value today.  If he’d known what we now know about morality, he probably would have realized that attempting to link his utilitarian prescriptions to a new moral code wouldn’t work, and would likely be dangerous.  On the other hand, the ideas set forth in works like On Liberty and Utilitarianism, divorced of their moralistic trappings, are worth serious consideration as possible means of promoting the happiness and welfare of human beings as individuals in the societies of the future.  I vote in favor of giving them a try.

On the Nature of Morality

The behavioral traits we associate with morality are elicited by mental processes that have evolved over tens of millions of years. Human morality is not fundamentally different from morality in other animals, and depends for its existence on similar mental processes.  Its apparent uniqueness in our species is only due to our superior cognitive abilities rather than to any fundamental difference in the nature of these mental processes themselves.  Our morality is the manifestation of the complex emotions associated with these mental processes in an animal with high intelligence. That intelligence has enabled us to theorize about and interpret our moral emotions in countless ways, but the innate features of our brains that give rise to those emotions remain similar to those in other animals with highly developed brains. The aspects of our nature associated with morality are not infinitely malleable, cannot be changed or adjusted at will, and they predispose us to behave socially and to interpret the social behavior of others in certain ways and not in others.

None of the traits associated with morality evolved in societies anything like modern states, or in environments anything like those in which the vast majority of human beings live today. Morality does not serve any purpose because purpose implies a builder or designer. Morality exists solely because, at times in the distant past, the physical characteristics of the brain that give rise to it had a selective advantage. They made it more likely that the genetic material carried by individuals would survive and reproduce. Any notion of “moral progress” not associated with the selective advantage of genetic material carried by individuals is an oxymoron. Progress towards what? That which has no purpose can have no goal towards which progress can be measured.

There is no such thing as objective good or objective evil, existing independently of subjective mental processes in the minds of individuals. Outside of the context of individual minds, these categories are meaningless, nor would they continue to exist if the minds that give rise to them ceased to exist. Attempts to exploit morality to achieve social goals in the modern world are not only extremely dangerous, but necessarily embrace the myth that good and evil do have an independent, objective existence in themselves.

If what I have written above is true, it will not become false by virtue of the fact that it does not agree with some religion or ideology. It does not imply the inevitability of an amoral, dog eat dog world, or of social chaos, or of exploitation, or of poverty, or of any other form of human misery. If anything, it implies the contrary, because we are more likely to achieve any goals we set for ourselves if we base our actions on fact than if we base them on fiction.