Anti-Semitism – Helian Unbound

Immigration and the Free-Floating Morality of the Philosophers

The last two issues of the inimitable journal, Ethics, both include articles encapsulating the wisdom of two philosophers regarding the morality of immigration. As usual, neither author makes any attempt to establish the legitimacy, authority, or foundation of the moral principles they deem relevant. Apparently, we are just supposed to swallow whatever moral principles they concoct for us because, after all, they have Ph.D’s in the subject. As far as they’re concerned, it’s just as well, because no legitimacy, authority, or foundation can be established for things that don’t exist. The idea that there are such things as moral principles applicable to immigration in the modern world is absurd.

In fact, as alluded to by Darwin and elaborated by Westermarck, there are no moral principles at all other than the subjective variety spawned by emotions, assuming all sorts of kaleidoscopic forms as they percolate through the skulls of creatures with large brains. The idea that such principles can be true regardless of what anyone thinks of them is an illusion, spawned by the power of the emotions themselves. As Westermarck put it in a nutshell,

The presumed objectivity of moral judgments thus being a chimera, there can be no moral truth in the sense in which this term is generally understood. The ultimate reason for this is, that the moral concepts are based upon emotion, and that the contents of an emotion fall entirely outside the category of truth.

As might be expected given the ideological dogmas currently fashionable in academia, both of the authors mentioned above favor limited or no restrictions on immigration. Both have derived “moral principles” supporting their opinions. In an article entitled Race beyond Our Borders: Is Racial and Ethnic Immigration Selection Always Morally Wrong? that appeared in the January 2022 issue of Ethics, Sahar Akhtar, currently a visiting professor at Georgetown University, argues in favor of considering global status in determining whether it is moral for states to exclude some categories of people, but welcome others. For example, in the case of Israel, she writes,

We appeal to how the Jewish people were, and sometimes continue to be, subject to significant injustices in numerous states – but, importantly, not to how Jewish people have experienced such injustices within Israel. Given how the Jewish community was regarded as morally inferior in numerous states and systematically targeted and murdered in the Holocaust, it’s plausible that Jews constitute a vulnerable group in the global sense, in terms of the social bases of their self-respect. And Jewish populations might also constitute domestically vulnerable groups within some states today, including the United States, where there has been a recent rise in hate crimes against them. But what is not plausible is that they are vulnerable qua members of Israel. If anything, they are clearly the dominant domestic power in social, economic, and political terms. Thus, to understand why the Law of Return might be justified – however preliminarily – we implicitly refer to the Jewish people’s global status.

Thus, to determine whether it is permissible for them to welcome Jews but reject Moslems, the Jews of Israel are advised that they must consult the Moral Law. As usual, it is simply assumed that the applicable Moral Law exists and isn’t merely a subjective matter of opinion. Of course, it is somewhat obscure, and must be teased out based on a careful reading of the global status versus domestic status tea leaves. In spite of the fact that the leaders of Israel might become a bit impatient awaiting the outcome, this will have the happy effect of keeping a whole battalion of philosophers busy into the indefinite future. In her conclusion, Prof. Akhtar writes,

My goal was not to conclusively argue that certain selective criteria wrong or fail to wrong members or nonmembers, nor was it to argue for the overall (im)permissibility of any policy. My goal was instead mainly to develop the concept of global status and demonstrate its significance for selective immigration. In doing so, I hope to have laid some of the groundwork for applying anti-discrimination duties to states’ admission decisions.

It is certainly well that she didn’t attempt to conclusively demonstrate any of the moral rules applicable to immigration, because none exist. The idea that such things as moral duties exist relevant to a state’s immigration decisions is equally absurd.

The futility of modern philosophy is on full display here. Consider the fact that the physical bases for the existence of human moral behavior in the brain evolved at a time when no one had ever heard of such things as “global status,” or the existence of nation states with populations numbering in the millions, or, for that matter, that some principle of “anti-discrimination” extended to groups outside of one’s own. There is no basis at all for the conclusion that morality is even relevant here. As a general rule, it is always irrational to attempt to decide matters that one has sufficient time to actually think about by instead blindly responding to emotional reactions. That rule applies here, because morality is the outcome of emotional reactions in our species. I have no illusions on the subject. I realize perfectly well that it is the nature of our species to attempt the solution of complex problems via application of emotionally based rules. That doesn’t make it any less irrational.

It would behoove the leaders of Israel, and the rest of us as well, to ignore the “moral rules” concocted by the philosophers in determining national policy. One must consider what one’s ultimate goals are, and reason how one can best achieve them. Obviously, the irrational moral behavior of our species must be taken into account in the process, but that hardly implies a requirement to believe in imaginary “moral principles.” That is doubly true in the case of the rarefied stuff currently emanating from the academic hothouses of philosophy.

One finds the same kind of stuff in the second article, which appeared in the April issue of Ethics. Entitled Relational Equality and Immigration, it was submitted by Daniel Sharp, a postdoc at Maximilian University in Munich. The abstract says it all:

Egalitarians often claim that well-off states’ immigration restrictions create or reinforce objectionable inequality. Standard defenses of this claim appeal to the distributive consequences of exclusion. This article offers a relational egalitarian defense of more open borders. On this view, well-off states’ immigration restrictions are problematic because they accord the citizens of well-off states a troubling form of asymmetric power over the disadvantaged. This creates an objectionably unequal relationship between affluent states’ citizens and disadvantaged immigrants. I show that this argument offers a compelling diagnosis of a central problem with border control, defend the argument against objections, and explore its implications.

In other words, immigration decisions are to be decided based on moral rules that are implicitly assumed to be objectively true, derived from what philosophers agree is “objectionable” and “troubling.” The author imagines we will be “compelled” to agree with his emotional responses to border control.

So much for the futility of modern philosophers. I have no intention of paying any attention to their “compelling” versions of morality until they demonstrate at least a vague knowledge of what morality is and the reasons for its existence. Given the emotional origins of morality, it should never be made the basis of important policy decisions. That is doubly true when it comes to applying it to societies of a kind that didn’t exist when it evolved. It is highly unlikely that making decisions based on moral emotions in the world we live in now will have the same outcome it did in the prehistoric world of our ancestors.

What is the alternative? As I have suggested before, keep morality simple, and restrict it to routine social interactions when rationally analyzing each step we take would be impractical. However, it is not impractical to carefully reason about the decisions we make regarding such matters as border policy. These decisions should be made based on what our ultimate goals happen to be, and our conclusions about how we can best achieve them. If we happen to choose goals in life that are in harmony with the reasons that account for the existence of morality, not to mention the rest of our significant characteristics, then allowing open borders cannot be seen as other than an unmitigated disaster. If, on the other hand, one chooses as an ultimate goal strict adherence to some “moral law” suggested by the equalist dogmas currently fashionable in academia, regardless of how that may happen to affect the odds of one’s own survival, or the survival of one’s children, then the choice regarding borders may well be different.

A New York Intellectual’s Unwitting Expose; Human Nature Among the Ideologues

Norman Podhoretz is one of the New York literati who once belonged to a group of leftist intellectuals he called the Family. He wrote a series of books, including Making It, Breaking Ranks, and Ex-Friends, describing what happened when he underwent an ideological metamorphosis from leftist radical to neoconservative. In the process he created a wonderful anthropological study of human nature in the context of an ingroup defined by ideology. Behavior within that ingroup was similar to behavior within ingroups defined by race, class, religion, ethnicity, or any of the other often subtle differences that enable ingroups to distinguish themselves from the “others.” The only difference was that, in the case of Podhoretz’ Family, the ingroup was defined by loyalty to ideological dogmas. Podhoretz described a typical denizen as follows:

Such a person takes ideas as seriously as an orthodox religious person takes, or anyway used to take, doctrine or dogma. Though we cluck our enlightened modern tongues at such fanaticism, there is a reason why people have been excommunicated, and sometimes even put to death, by their fellow congregants for heretically disagreeing with the official understanding of a particular text or even of a single word. After all, to the true believer everything important – life in this world as well as life in the next – depends on obedience to these doctrines and dogmas, which in turn depends on an accurate interpretation of their meaning and which therefore makes the spread of heresy a threat of limitless proportions.

This fear and hatred of the heretic, together with the correlative passion to shut him up one way or the other, is (to say the least, and in doing so I am bending over backward) as much a character trait of so-called liberal intellectuals as it is of conservatives… For we have seen that “liberal” intellectuals who tell us that tolerance and pluralism are the highest values, who profess to believe that no culture is superior to any other, and who are on that account great supporters of “multiculturalism” will treat these very notions as sacred orthodoxies, will enforce agreement with them in every venue in which they have the power to do so (the universities being the prime example at the moment), and will severely punish any deviation that dares to make itself known.

Podhoretz may not have been aware of the genetic roots responsible for such behavior, but he was certainly good at describing it. His description of status seeking, virtue signaling, hatred of the outgroup, allergic reaction to heretics, etc., within the Family would be familiar to any student of urban street gangs. As anthropological studies go, his books have the added advantage of being unusually entertaining, if only by virtue of the fact that his ingroup included such lions of literature as Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Allen Ginsburg, and Lionel Trilling,

Podhoretz was editor of the influential cultural and intellectual magazine Commentary from 1960 to 1995. When he took over the magazine already represented the anti-Communist Left. However, he originally planned to take a more radically leftist line, based on the philosophy of Paul Goodman, a utopian anarchist. In his Growing Up Absurd, Goodman claimed that American society was stuck with a number of “incomplete revolutions.” To escape this “absurdity” it was necessary to complete the revolutions. Podhoretz seized on Goodman’s ideas as the “radical” solution to our social ills he was seeking, and immediately started a three-part serialization of his book in Commentary. Another major influence on Podhoretz at the time was Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown, a late Freudian tract intended to reveal “the psychoanalytical meaning of history.” It is depressing to read these books today in the knowledge that they were once taken perfectly seriously by people who imagined themselves to be the cream of the intellectual crop. Goodman certainly chose the right adjective for them – “absurd.”

In any case, as the decade wore on, the Left did become more radicalized, but not in the way foreseen by Podhoretz. What was known then as the New Left emerged, and began its gradual takeover of the cultural institutions of the country, a process that has continued to this day. When he came of age, most leftists had abandoned the Stalinism or Trotskyism they had flirted with in the 30’s and 40’s, and become largely “pro-American” and anti-Communist as the magnitude of the slaughter and misery in the Soviet Union under Stalin became impossible to ignore. However, as the war in Vietnam intensified, the dogs returned to their vomit, so to speak. Leftists increasingly became useful idiots – effectively pro-Communist whether they admitted it or not. As Israel revealed its ability to effectively defend itself, they also became increasingly anti-Semitic as well, a development that also continues to this day. Then, as now, anti-Semitism was fobbed off as “anti-Zionism,” but Podhoretz, a Jew as were many of the other members of the family, was not buying it. He may have been crazy enough to take Goodman and Brown seriously, but he was not crazy enough to believe that it was preferable to live in a totalitarian Communist state than in the “imperialist” United States, nor, in light of the Holocaust, was he crazy enough to believe that the creation of a Jewish state was “unjust.” In the following passage he describes his response when he first began to notice this shift in the Zeitgeist, in this case on the part of an erstwhile “friend”:

I was not afraid of Jason. I never hesitated to cut him off when he began making outrageous statements about others, and once I even made a drunken public scene in a restaurant when he compared the United States to Nazi Germany and Lyndon Johnson to Hitler. This comparison was later to become a commonplace of radical talk, but I had never heard it made before, and it so infuriated me that I literally roared in response.

Today, of course, one no longer roars. One simply concludes that those who habitually resort to Hitler comparisons are imbeciles, and leaves it at that. In any case, Podhoretz began publishing “heretical” articles in Commentary, rejecting these notions, and nibbling away that the shibboleths that defined what had once been his ingroup in the process. In the end, he became a full-blown neoconservative. The behavioral responses to Podhoretz “treason” to his ingroup should be familiar to all students of human behavior. His first book length challenge to his ingroup’s sense of its own purity and righteousness was Making It, published in 1967. As Podhoretz recalls,

In an article about Making It and its reception that was itself none too friendly to the book, Norman Mailer summed up the critical response as “brutal – coarse, intimate, snide, grasping, groping, slavering, slippery of reference, crude and naturally tasteless.” But, he added, “the public reception of Making It was nevertheless still on the side of charity if one compared the collective hooligan verdict to the earlier fulminations of the Inner Clan.” By the “Inner Clan,” Mailer meant the community of New York literary intellectuals I myself had called the Family. According to Mailer, what they had been saying in private about Making It even before it was published made the “horrors” of the public reception seem charitable and kind. “Just about everyone in the Establishment” – i.e., the Family – was “scandalized, shocked, livid, revolted, appalled, disheartened, and enraged.” They were “furious to the point of biting their white icy lips… No fate could prove undeserved for Norman, said the Family in thin quivering late-night hisses.”

Podhoretz notes that academia was the first of the cultural institutions of the country to succumb to the radical Gleichschaltung that has now established such firm control over virtually all the rest, to the point that it has become the new “normalcy.” In his words,

For by 1968 radicalism was so prevalent among college students that any professor who resisted it at the very least risked unpopularity and at the worst was in danger of outright abuse. Indeed it was in the universities that the “terror” first appeared and where it operated most effectively.

By the late 60’s the type of behavior that is now ubiquitous on university campuses was hardly a novelty. “De-platforming” was already part of the campus culture:

By 1968 SDS (the leftist Students for a Democratic Society) had moved from argument and example to shouting down speakers with whom it disagreed on the ground that only the “truth” had a right to be heard. And it also changed its position on violence… and a number of its members had gone beyond advocacy to actual practice in the form of bombings and other varieties of terrorism.

As Podhoretz documents, the War in Vietnam had originally been supported, and indeed started and continued by intellectuals and politicians on the left of the political spectrum. He noted that Robert Kennedy had been prominent among them:

Kennedy too then grew more and more radicalized as radicalism looked more and more like the winning side. Having been one of the architects of the war in Vietnam and a great believer in resistance to Communist power in general, he now managed to suggest that he opposed these policies both in the small and in the large.

However, in one of the rapid changes in party line familiar to those who’ve read the history of Communism in the Soviet Union and memorialized by George Orwell in 1984, the hawks suddenly became doves:

…a point was soon reached where speakers supporting the war were either refused a platform or shouted down when they attempted to speak. A speaker whose criticisms were insufficiently violent could even expect a hard time, as I myself discovered when a heckler at Wayne State in Detroit accused me, to the clear delight of the audience, of not being “that much” against the war because in expressing my opposition to the American role I had also expressed my usual reservations about the virtues of the Communist side.

Of course, there was no Internet in the 60’s, so “de-platforming” assumed a form commensurate with the technology available at the time. Podhoretz describes it as follows:

The word “terror,” like everything else about the sixties, was overheated. No one was arrested or imprisoned or executed; no one was even fired from a job (though there were undoubtedly some who lost out on job opportunities or on assignments or on advances from book publishers they might otherwise have had). The sanctions of this particular reign of “terror” were much milder: one’s reputation was besmirched, with unrestrained viciousness in conversation and, when the occasion arose, by means of innuendo in print. People were written off with the stroke of an epithet – “fink” or “racist” or “fascist” as the case might be – and anyone so written off would have difficulty getting a fair hearing for anything he might have to say. Conversely, anyone who went against the Movement party line soon discovered that the likely penalty was dismissal from the field of discussion.

Seeing others ruthless dismissed in this way was enough to prevent most people from voicing serious criticisms of the radical line and – such is the nature of intellectual cowardice – it was enough in some instances to prevent them even from allowing themselves to entertain critical thoughts.

The “terror” is more powerful and pervasive today than it ever was in the 60’s, and it’s ability to “dismiss from the field of discussion” is far more effective. As a result, denizens of the leftist ingroup or those who depend on them for their livelihood tend to be very cautious about rocking the boat. That’s why young, pre-tenure professors include ritualistic denunciations of the established heretics in their fields before they dare to even give a slight nudge to the approved dogmas. Indeed, I’ve documented similar behavior by academics approaching retirement on this blog, so much do they fear ostracism by their own “Families.” Podhoretz noticed the same behavior early on by one of his erstwhile friends:

As the bad boy of American letters – itself an honorific status in the climate of the sixties – he (Normal Mailer) still held a license to provoke and he rarely hesitated to use it, even if it sometimes meant making a fool of himself in the eyes of his own admirers. But there were limits he instinctively knew how to observe; and he observed them. He might excoriate his fellow radicals on a particular point; he might discomfit them with unexpected sympathies (for right-wing politicians, say, or National Guardsmen on the other side of a demonstration) and equally surprising antipathies (homosexuality and masturbation, for example, he insisted on stigmatizing as vices); he might even on occasion describe himself as (dread word) a conservative. But always in the end came the reassuring gesture, the wink of complicity, the subtle signing of the radical loyalty oath.

So much for Podhoretz description of the behavioral traits of the denizens of an ideologically defined ingroup. I highly recommend all of the three books noted above, not only as an unwitting but wonderfully accurate studies of “human nature,” but as very entertaining descriptions of some of the many famous personalities Podhoretz crossed paths with during his long career. One of them was Jackie Kennedy, who happened to show up at his door one day in the company of his friend, Richard Goodwin, “who had worked in various capacities for President Kennedy.”

She and I had never met before, but we seemed to strike an instant rapport, and at her initiative I soon began seeing her on a fairly regular basis. We often had tea alone together in her apartment on Fifth Avenue where I would give her the lowdown on the literary world and the New York intellectual community – who was good, who was overrated, who was amusing, who was really brilliant – and she would reciprocate with the dirt about Washington society. She was not in Mary McCarthy‘s league as a bitchy gossip (who was?), but she did very well in her own seemingly soft style. I enjoyed these exchanges, and she (an extremely good listener) seemed to get a kick out of them too.

Elsewhere Podhoretz describes McCarthy as “our leading bitch intellectual.” Alas, she was an unrepentant radical, too, and even did a Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, but I still consider her one of our most brilliant novelists. I guess there’s no accounting for taste when it comes to ingroups.

On the “Immorality” of Einstein

Morality exists because of “human nature.” In other words, it is a manifestation of innate behavioral traits that themselves exist by virtue of evolution by natural selection. It follows that morality has no goal, no purpose, and no function, because in order to have those qualities it must necessarily have been created by some entity capable intending a goal, purpose, or function for it. There was no such entity. In human beings, the traits in question spawn the whimsical illusion that purely imaginary things that exist only in the subjective minds of individuals, such as good, evil, rights, values, etc., actually exist as independent objects. The belief in these mirages is extremely powerful. Occasionally a philosopher here and there will assert a belief in “moral relativity,” but in the end one always finds them, to quote a pithy Biblical phrase, returning like dogs to their own vomit. After all their fine phrases, one finds them picking sides, sagely informing us that some individual or group is “good,” and some other ones “evil,” and that we “ought” to do one thing and “ought not” to do another.

What does all this have to do with Einstein? Well, recently he was accused of expressing impure thoughts in some correspondence he imagined would be private. The nutshell version can be found in a recent article in the Guardian entitled, Einstein’s travel diaries reveal ‘shocking’ xenophobia. Among other things, Einstein wrote that the Chinese he saw were “industrious, filthy, obtuse people,” and “even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.” He, “…noticed how little difference there is between men and women,” adding, “I don’t understand what kind of fatal attraction Chinese women possess which enthralls the corresponding men to such an extent that they are incapable of defending themselves against the formidable blessing of offspring.” He was more approving of the Japanese, noting that they were “unostentatious, decent, altogether very appealing,” and that he found “Pure souls as nowhere else among people. One has to love and admire this country.”

It goes without saying that only a moron could seriously find such comments “shocking” in the context of their time. In the first place, Einstein was categorizing people into groups, as all human beings do, because we lack the mental capacity to store individual vignettes of all the billions of people on the planet. He then pointed out certain things about these groups that he honestly imagined to be true. He nowhere expressed hatred of any of the people he described, nor did he anywhere claim that the traits he described were “innate” or had a “biological origin,” as falsely claimed by the author of the article. He associated them with the Chinese “race,” but might just as easily been describing cultural characteristics at a given time as anything innate. Furthermore, “race” at the time that Einstein wrote could be understood quite differently from the way it is now. In the 19th century, for example, the British and Afrikaners in South Africa were commonly described as different “races.” Today we have learned some hard lessons about the potential harm of broadly associating negative qualities to entire populations, but in the context of the time they were written, ideas similar to the ones expressed by Einstein were entirely commonplace.

In light of the above, consider the public response to the recent revelations about the content of Einstein’s private papers. It is a testimony to the gross absurdity of human moral behavior in the context of an environment radically different from the one in which it evolved. Einstein is actually accused by some of being a “racist,” a “xenophobe,” a “misogynist,” or, in short, a “bad” man. Admirers of Einstein have responded by citing all the good-sounding reasons for the claim that Einstein was actually a “good” man. These responses are equivalent to debating whether Einstein was “really a green unicorn,” or “really a blue unicorn.” The problem with that is, of course, that there are no unicorns to begin with. The same is true of objective morality. It doesn’t exist. Einstein wasn’t “good,” nor was he “bad,” because these categories do not exist as independent objects. They are subjective, and exist only in our imaginations. They are imagined to be real because there was a selective advantage to imagining them to be real in a given environment. That environment no longer exists. These are simple statements of fact.

As so often happens in such cases, one side accuses the other of “moral relativity.” In his response to this story at the Instapundit website, for example, Ed Driscoll wrote, “A century later, is the age of moral relativity about to devour the legacy of the man who invented the real theory of relativity?” The problem here is most definitely not moral relativity. In fact, it is the opposite – the illusion of objective morality. The people attacking Einstein are moral absolutists. If that were not true, what could possibly be the point of attacking him? A genuine moral relativist would simply conclude that Einstein’s personal version of morality was different from theirs, and leave it at that. That is not what is happening here. Instead, Einstein is accused of violating “moral laws,” the most fashionable and up-to-date versions of which were concocted long after he was in his grave. In spite of that, these “moral laws” are treated as if they represented objective facts. Einstein was “bad” for violating them even though he had no way of knowing that these “moral laws” would exist nearly a century after he wrote his journals. Is it not obvious that judging Einstein in this way would be utterly irrational unless these newly minted “moral laws” were deemed to be absolute, with a magical existence of their own, independent of what goes on in the subjective minds of individuals?

Consider what is actually meant by this accusation of “racism.” Normally a racist is defined as one who considers others to be innately evil or inferior by virtue of their race, and who hates and despises them by virtue of that fact. It is simply one manifestation of the universal human tendency to perceive others in terms of ingroups and outgroups. When this type of behavior evolved, there was no ambiguity about the identity of the outgroup. It was simply the next tribe over. The perception of “outgroup” could therefore be determined by very subtle differences without affecting the selective value of the behavior. Now, however, with our vastly increased ability to travel long distances and communicate with others all over the world, we are quite capable of identifying others as “outgroup” whom we never would have heard of or come in contact with in our hunter-gatherer days. As a result, the behavior has become “dysfunctional.” It no longer accomplishes the same thing it did when it evolved. Racism is merely one of the many manifestations of this now dysfunctional trait that has been determined by hard experience to be harmful in the environment we live in today. As a result, it has been deemed “bad.” Without understanding the underlying innate traits that give rise to the behavior, however, this attempt to patch up human moral behavior is of very limited value.

The above becomes obvious if we examine the behavior of those who are in the habit of accusing others of racism. They are hardly immune to similar manifestations of bigotry. They simply define their outgroups based on criteria other than race. The outgroup is always there, and it is hated and despised just the same. Indeed, they may hate and despise their outgroups a great deal more violently and irrationally than those they accuse of racism ever did, but are oblivious to the possibility that their behavior may be similarly “bad” merely because they perceive their outgroup in terms of ideology, for example, rather than race. Extreme examples of hatred of outgroups defined by ideology are easy to find on the Internet. For example,

Actor Jim Carrey is quoted as saying, “40 percent of the U.S. doesn’t care if Trump deports people and kidnaps their babies as political hostages.
Actor Peter Fonda suggested to his followers on Twitter that they should “rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles.” The brother of Jane Fonda also called for violence against Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and called White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders a “c**t.”
An unidentified FBI agent is quoted as saying in a government report that, “Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS.”
According to New York Times editorialist Roxanne Gay, “Having a major character on a prominent television show as a Trump supporter normalizes racism and misogyny and xenophobia.”

Such alternative forms of bigotry are often more harmful than garden variety racism itself merely by virtue of the fact that they have not yet been included in one of the forms of outgroup identification that has already been generally recognized as “bad.” The underlying behavior responsible for the extreme hatred typified by the above statements won’t change, and if we whack the racism mole, or the anti-Semitism mole, or the homophobia mole, other moles will pop up to take their places. The Carreys and Fondas and Roxanne Gays of the world will continue to hate their ideological outgroup as furiously as ever, until it occurs to someone to assign as “ism” to their idiosyncratic version of outgroup hatred, and people finally realize that they are no less bigoted than the “racists” they delight in hating. Then a new “mole” will pop up with a new, improved version of outgroup hatred. We will never control the underlying behavior and minimize the harm it does until we understand the innate reasons it exists to begin with. In other words, it won’t go away until we learn to understand ourselves.

And what of Einstein, not to mention the likes of Columbus, Washington, Madison, and Jefferson? True, these men did more for the welfare of all mankind than any combination of their Social Justice Warrior accusers you could come up with, but for the time being, admiring them is forbidden. After all, these men were “bad.”

Morality and the Ideophobes

In our last episode I pointed out that, while some of the most noteworthy public intellectuals of the day occasionally pay lip service to the connection between morality and evolution by natural selection, they act and speak as if they believed the opposite. If morality is an expression of evolved traits, it is necessarily subjective. The individuals mentioned speak as if, and probably believe, that it is objective. What do I mean by that? As the Finnish philosopher Edvard Westermarck put it,

The supposed objectivity of moral values, as understood in this treatise (his Ethical Relativity, ed.) implies that they have a real existence apart from any reference to a human mind, that what is said to be good or bad, right or wrong, cannot be reduced merely to what people think to be good or bad, right or wrong. It makes morality a matter of truth and falsity, and to say that a judgment is true obviously means something different from the statement that it is thought to be true.

All of the individuals mentioned in my last post are aware that there is a connection between morality and its evolutionary roots. If pressed, some of them will even admit the obvious consequence of this fact; that morality must be subjective. However, neither they nor any other public intellectual that I am aware of actually behaves or speaks as if that consequence meant anything or, indeed, as if it were even true. One can find abundant evidence that this is true simply by reading their own statements, some of which I quoted. For example, according the Daniel Dennett, Trump supporters are “guilty.” Richard Dawkins speaks of the man in pejorative terms that imply a moral judgment rather than rational analysis of his actions. Sam Harris claims that Trump is “unethical,” and Jonathan Haidt says that he is “morally wrong,” without any qualification to the effect that they are just making subjective judgments, and that the subjective judgments of others may be different and, for that matter, just as “legitimate” as theirs.

A commenter suggested that I was merely quoting tweets, and that the statements may have been taken out of context, or would have reflected the above qualifications if more space had been allowed. Unfortunately, I have never seen a single example of an instance where one of the quoted individuals made a similar statement, and then qualified it as suggested. They invariably speak as if they were stating objective facts when making such moral judgments, with the implied assumption that individuals who don’t agree with them are “bad.”

A quick check of the Internet will reveal that there are legions of writers out there commenting on the subjective nature of morality. Not a single one I am aware of seems to realize that, if morality is subjective, their moral judgments lack any objective normative power or legitimacy whatsoever when applied to others. Indeed, one commonly finds them claiming that morality is subjective, and as a consequence one is “morally obligated” to do one thing, and “morally obligated” not to do another, in the very same article, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are stating a glaring non sequitur.

None of this should be too surprising. We are not a particularly rational species. We give ourselves far more credit for being “wise” than is really due. Most of us simply react to atavistic urges, and seek to satisfy them. Our imaginations portray Good and Evil to us as real, objective things, and so we thoughtlessly assume that they are. It is in our nature to be judgmental, and we take great joy in applying these imagined standards to others. Unfortunately, this willy-nilly assigning of others to the above imaginary categories is very unlikely to accomplish the same thing today as it did when the responsible behavioral predispositions evolved. I would go further. I would claim that this kind of behavior is not only not “adaptive.” In fact, it has become extremely dangerous.

The source of the danger is what I call “ideophobia.” So far, at least, it hasn’t had a commonly recognized name, but it is by far the most dangerous form of all the different flavors of “bigotry” that afflict us today. By “bigotry” I really mean outgroup identification. We all do it, without exception. Some of the most dangerous manifestations of it exist in just those individuals who imagine they are immune to it. All of us hate, despise, and are disgusted by the individuals in whatever outgroup happens to suit our fancy. The outgroup may be defined by race, religion, ethnic group, nationality, and even sex. I suspect, however, that by far the most common form of outgroup (and ingroup) identification today is by ideology.

Members of ideologically defined ingroups have certain ideas and beliefs in common. Taken together, they form the intellectual shack the ingroup in question lives in. The outgroup consists of those who disagree with these core beliefs, and especially those who define their own ingroup by opposing beliefs. Ideophobes hate and despise such individuals. They indulge in a form of bigotry that is all the more dangerous because it has gone so long without a name. Occasionally they will imagine that they advocate universal human brotherhood, and “human flourishing.” In reality, “brotherhood” is the last thing ideophobes want when it comes to “thought crime.” They do not disagree rationally and calmly. They hate the “other,” to the point of reacting with satisfaction and even glee if the “other” suffers physical harm. They often imagine themselves to be great advocates of diversity, and yet are blithely unaware of the utter lack of it in the educational, media, entertainment, and other institutions they control when it comes to diversity of opinion. As for the ideological memes of the ingroup, they expect rigid uniformity. What Dennett, Dawkins, Harris and Haidt thought they were doing was upholding virtue. What they were really doing is better called “virtue signaling.” They were assuring the other members of their ingroup that they “think right” about some of its defining “correct thoughts,” and registering the appropriate allergic reaction to the outgroup.

I cannot claim that ideophobia is objectively immoral. I do believe, however, that it is extremely dangerous, not only to me, but to everyone else on the planet. I propose that it’s high time that we recognized the phenomenon as a manifestation of human nature that has long outlived its usefulness. We need to recognize that ideophobia is essentially the same thing as racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, or what have you. The only difference is in the identifying characteristics of the outgroup. The kind of behavior described is a part of what we are, and will remain a part of what we are. That does not mean that it can’t be controlled.

What evidence do I have that this type of behavior is dangerous? There were two outstanding examples in the 20th century. The Communists murdered 100 million people, give or take, weighted in the direction of the most intelligent and capable members of society, because they belonged to their outgroup, commonly referred to as the “bourgeoisie.” The Nazis murdered tens of millions of Jews, Slavs, gypsies, and members of any other ethnicity that they didn’t recognize as belonging to their own “Aryan” ingroup. There are countless examples of similar mayhem, going back to the beginnings of recorded history, and ample evidence that the same thing was going on much earlier. As many of the Communists and Nazis discovered, what goes around comes around. Millions of them became victims of their own irrational hatred.

No doubt Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, Haidt and legions of others like them see themselves as paragons of morality and rationality. I have my doubts. With the exception of Haidt, they have made no attempt to determine why those they consider “deplorables” think the way they do, or to calmly analyze what might be their desires and goals, and to search for common ground and understanding. As for Haidt, his declaration that the goals of his outgroup are “morally wrong” flies in the face of all the fine theories he recently discussed in his The Righteous Mind. I would be very interested to learn how he thinks he can square this circle. Neither he nor any of the others have given much thought to whether the predispositions that inspire their own desires and goals will accomplish the same thing now as when they evolved, and appear unconcerned about the real chance that they will accomplish the opposite. They have not bothered to consider whether it even matters, and why, or whether the members of their outgroup may be acting a great deal more consistently in that respect than they do. Instead, they have relegated those who disagree with them to the outgroup, slamming shut the door on rational discussion.

In short, they have chosen ideophobia. It is a dangerous choice, and may turn out to be a very dangerous one, assuming we value survival. I personally would prefer that we all learn to understand and seek to control the worst manifestations of our dual system of morality; our tendency to recognize ingroups and outgroups and apply different standards of good and evil to individuals depending on the category to which they belong. I doubt that anything of the sort will happen any time soon, though. Meanwhile, we are already witnessing the first violent manifestations of this latest version of outgroup identification. It’s hard to say how extreme it will become before the intellectual fashions change again. Perhaps the best we can do is sit back and collect the data.

Ingroups and Outgroups Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere!

Every day in every way things are getting better and better. Well, all right, maybe that’s a stretch, but now and then, things actually do take a turn for the better, at least from my point of view. Take this interview of Oliver Scott Curry at the This View of Life website, for example. Here’s a young guy who gets human nature, and gets morality, and isn’t in the least bit afraid to talk about them as matter-of-factly as if he were discussing the weather. Have a look at some of the things this guy says:

MICHAEL PRICE (Interviewer): What can evolutionary approaches tell us about human moral systems that other approaches cannot tell us? That is, what unique and novel insights about morality does an evolutionary approach provide?

OLIVER SCOTT CURRY: Well, everything. It can tell us what morality is, where it comes from, and how it works. No other approach can do that. The evolutionary approach tells us that morality is a set of biological and cultural strategies for solving problems of cooperation and conflict. We have a range of moral instincts that are natural selection’s attempts to solve these problems. They are sophisticated versions of the kind of social instincts seen in other species…Above all, the evolutionary approach demystifies morality and brings it down to earth. It tells us that morality is just another adaptation that can be studied in the same way as any other aspect of our biology or psychology.

PRICE: The ordinary view in biology is that adaptations evolve primarily to promote individual fitness (survival and reproduction of self/kin). Do you believe that this view is correct with regard to the human biological adaptations that generate moral rules? Does this view imply that individuals moralize primarily to promote their own fitness interests (as opposed to promoting, e.g., group welfare)? (TVOL editor David Sloan Wilson is one of the foremost advocates of group selection, ed.)

CURRY: No. Adaptations evolve to promote the replication of genes; natural selection cannot work any other way. Genes replicate by means of the effects that they have on the world; these effects include the formation of things like chromosomes, multicellular individuals, and groups. (My understanding is that everyone agrees about this, although there is some debate about whether groups are sufficiently coherent to constitute vehicles [1].)

PRICE: What work by others on the evolution of morality (or just on morality in general) have you found most enlightening?

CURRY: David Hume’s work has been particularly inspiring. In many ways he is the great-great-great granddaddy of evolutionary psychology. He almost stumbled upon the theory of evolution. He undertook a comparative “anatomy of the mind” that showed “the correspondence of passions in men and animals.” His “bundle theory of the self” hints at massive modularity. His A Treatise of Human Nature [2] introduced “the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects,” and discusses relatedness, certainty of paternity, coordination and convention, reciprocal exchange, costly signals, dominance and submission, and the origins of property. He even anticipated by-product theories of religion, describing religious ideas as “the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape” [3]. Remarkable.

Remarkable, indeed! Curry just rattles off stuff that’s been hidden in plain sight for the last 100 years, but that would have brought his career to a screeching halt not that long ago. Beginning in the 1920’s, the obscurantists of the Blank Slate controlled the message about human nature in both the scientific and popular media for more than 50 years. They imposed a stifling orthodoxy on the behavioral sciences that rendered much of the work in those fields as useless and irrelevant as the thousands of tomes about Marxism that were published during the heyday of the Soviet Union. Their grip was only broken when a few brave authors stood up to them, and it became obvious to any 10-year-old that their “science” was absurd. This should never, ever be forgotten in our hubris over the triumphs of science. When the “men of science” start declaring that they have a monopoly on the truth, and that anyone who disagrees with them is not only wrong, but evil, it’s reasonable to suspect that what they’re promoting isn’t the truth, but an ideological narrative.

It’s refreshing, indeed, to hear from someone who, in spite of the fact that he clearly understands where morality comes from, doesn’t immediately contradict that knowledge by spouting nonsense about moral “truths.” At least in this interview, I find nothing like Sam Harris’ delusions about “scientific moral truths,” or Jonathan Haidt’s delusions about “anthropocentric moral truths, or Joshua Greene’s delusions about “utilitarian moral truths.” I can but hope that Curry will never join them in their wild goose chase after the will-o’-the-wisp of “human flourishing.”

At the end of the interview, Curry reveals that he’s also aware of another aspect of human morality that makes many otherwise sober evolutionary psychologists squirm; our tendency to see the world in terms of ingroups and outgroups. When Price questions him about the most important unsolved scientific puzzles in evolutionary moral psychology he replies that one of the questions that keeps him up at night is, “Why are people so quick to divide the world into ‘us and them’? Why not just have a bigger us? (I’d like to see an answer rooted in three-player game theory.)”

Hey, three-player game theory is fine with me, as long as we finally realize that the ingroup-outgroup thing is a fundamental aspect of human moral behavior, and one that it would behoove us to deal with rationally assuming we entertain hopes for the survival of our species. As it happens, that’s easier said than done. The academic milieu that is home to so many of the moral theorists and philosophers of our day has long been steeped in an extremely moralistic culture; basically a secular version of the Puritanism of the 16th and 17th centuries, accompanied by all the manifestations of self-righteous piety familiar to historians of that era. It is arguably more difficult for such people to give up any rational basis for their addiction to virtuous indignation and the striking of highly ostentatious pious poses than it is for them to give up sex. For them, the “real” Good must prevail. As a result we have such gaudy and delusional “solutions” to the problem as Joshua Greene’s proposal that we simply stifle our moral emotions in favor of his “real” utilitarian morality, Sam Harris’ more practical approach of simply dumping everyone who doesn’t accept his “scientific” morality into a brand new outgroup, and various schemes for “expanding” our ingroup to include all mankind.

Sorry, it won’t work. Ingroups and outgroups ain’t goin’ nowhere. Stifle racism, and religious bigotry will take its place. Stifle religious bigotry, and homophobia will jump in to take over. Stifle all those things, and there will always be a few deluded souls around who dare to disagree with you. They, in their turn, will become your new outgroup. The outgroup have ye always with you. Better understand the problem than pretend it’s not there.

As for Curry’s suggestion that we declare Hume the father of evolutionary psychology, nothing could please me more.

Paradigm Shifts and the “Science” of Religion

We’ve witnessed a remarkable paradigm shift in the behavioral sciences in the last couple of decades in the aftermath of the collapse of Blank Slate orthodoxy. A similar one has happened in politics with the collapse of Communism. A significant fraction of our species are attracted to messianic ideologies as moths to a flame. For many years, Communism was the brightest flame around. However, it suffered from the Achilles heal of all secular religions. It promised paradise, not in the realms of the spirit, but here on earth. Predictably, it couldn’t deliver, and so eventually collapsed.

That left something of a vacuum for those hankering to be the saviors of mankind. No new secular religion was waiting in the wings to take up the slack. But nature abhores a vacuum, so they had to make do with one of the traditional, spiritual religions; Islam. The resulting ideological paradigm shift has presented us with one of the most remarkable political spectacles history has to offer. On the ideological left, former Marxist true believers, militant atheists who scorned religion as the opiate of the masses, are being displaced by a new generation of activists who find to their dismay that radical Islam is, at least for the time being, the only game in town. The result has been a grotesque love affair between the would be liberators of the oppressed masses and one of the more obscurantist forms of religious fundamentalism on the planet. Those who once despised religious belief have now become some of its most outspoken apologists.

I found one of the more comical manifestations of this strange love affair in an article, embellished with all the jargon, references, and other stigmata characteristic of the stuff that appears in academic journals, posted on the website of the reliably leftist BBC. Entitled God and War: An Audit & An Exploration, it purports to debunk the New Atheist claim that religion is a prominent cause of war. Taking an attitude towards religion that would have been an embarrassment to any self-respecting progressive in the heyday of socialism, it notes that “…at a philosophical level, the main religious traditions have little truck with war or violence. All advocate peace as the norm and see genuine spirituality as involving a disavowal of violence.” It continues,

One organising feature of this article is what it calls the ‘Religious War Audit’. BBC asked us to see how many wars had been caused by religion. After reviewing historical analyses by a diverse array of specialists, we concluded that there have been few genuinely religious wars in the last 100 years. The Israel/Arab wars from 1948 to now, often painted in the media and other places as wars over religion, or wars arising from religious differences, have in fact been wars of nationalism, liberation of territory or self-defense.

This is a typical feature of the recent crop of articles emanating from the apologists for religion on the left. Just as good Marxists or defenders of “Confederate Heritage” will tell you that the U.S. Civil War wasn’t really about slavery, even though at the time it actually happened the leaders and population of the south, the leaders and population of the north, foreign observers of U.S. politics, and, no doubt, any aliens who happened to be hovering around in their flying saucers would have agreed it was about slavery, they tell us that many of the wars that merely seem to the casual observer to be about religion are really caused by nationalism, imperialism, territorialism, etc., etc. If nothing else it’s a safe strategy. Take any war you like and, no matter how much the actual participants had deluded themselves into believing they were fighting about religion, any historian worth her salt will be able to “prove,” based on abundant citations, references, and historical source material, that it wasn’t about religion at all. Ostensibly secular wars can be transmogrified into “religious” wars just as easily.

As the article cherry picks the historical record, so it cherry picks the holy books of the various religions to show how “peaceful” they are. Predictably, this is especially true of the Quran. For example, quoting from the article,

The Islamic tradition provides for limits on the use of force in war similar to those found in the Christian tradition: ‘Never transgress limits, or take your enemy by surprise or perfidy, or inflict atrocities or mutilation, or kill infants’; and ‘Never kill a woman, a weak infant, or a debilitated old person; nor burn palms, uproot trees, or pull down houses’. The Koran also provides for the humane treatment of prisoners of war: ‘And they feed, for the love of God, the indigent, the orphan, and the captive’ [Koran 76:8-9].

As with most religions, one can “prove” the opposite by a judicious choice of verses. For example,

Quran 5:33

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement.

Quran 8:12

I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.

After this exegesis of the holy books, the article provides a pair of tables purporting to show that the role of religion in the wars prior to and during the 20^th century has been minimal. In the case of the 20^th century, for example, the role of religion is supposedly zero on a scale of 0 to 5 for World War I and one on the same scale for World War II. In fact, in the case of WWI, the war was explicitly declared a religious war (jihad) by the religious leaders of Turkey, one of the major combatants. Many tens of thousands of Jews were murdered, frozen and starved in pogroms or as they were forcibly removed from areas stretching back many miles from the front lines by the Orthodox Christian rulers of Russia, and over a million Christian Armenians were murdered by the Moslem rulers of Turkey. By all accounts, the assurance that the war was not religious did little to relieve their suffering.

In the case of World War II, the role of religion depends entirely on how you define religion. I doubt that our brains have any hard-wired ability to distinguish immortal gods from mortal ones. At least as far as evolutionary biology is concerned, the distinction between traditional spiritual religions and modern secular ones, such as Nazism and Communism is, then, entirely artificial. Every essential element of the former has its analog in the latter. From that perspective, World War II was almost entirely a “religious war.”

Suppose, however, that we refrain from such unseemly quibbling, nod apologetically to the many millions even the authors agree have been killed over the years in religious wars, and accept the authors’ premise that, for all that, warfare really has played a “minimal” role in promoting warfare. Alas, the role of individuals in shaping historical events can be great indeed. After reading page after page establishing the benign role of religion in modern society, the authors inform us, to our dismay, that there is reason for concern, after all. An evil religious zealot of truly gargantuan power and influence appeared on the scene quite recently, almost single-handedly setting at naught the calming influence of religion as an instrument of peace. And who might this evil bogeyman be? Think, dear reader! The article we are discussing emanated from the left of the ideological spectrum. That’s right! The warmongering jihadi in question is none other than George W. Bush! Quoting a noted psychologist, the authors inform us with a shudder that,

…however much Bush may sometimes seem like a buffoon, he is also powered by massive, suppressed anger towards anyone who challenges the extreme, fanatical beliefs shared by him and a significant slice of his citizens – in surveys, half of them also agree with the statement “the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.”

Gee, and I always thought he seemed like such a nice guy. How wrong I was! Reading on we find,

He hated his father for putting his whole life in the shade and for emotionally blackmailing him. He hated his mother for physically and mentally badgering him to fulfill her wishes. But the hatred also explains his radical transformation into an authoritarian fundamentalist. By totally identifying with an extreme version of their strict, religion-fuelled beliefs, he jailed his rebellious self. From now on, his unconscious hatred for them was channeled into a fanatical moral crusade to rid the world of evil.

Damn! Now I finally understand why my sister never liked the guy. The authors provide us with the laconic conclusion,

As the commander in chief, Bush dominates US foreign policy especially in regards to the war on terrorism that is presently the US government’s major military commitment. His plans, however influenced by advisors, arise from his personal view of the world and his concepts of justice, retribution and peace. Clearly his past and his relationships impact these views and ultimately help shape those of the American state. Therefore individual leaders’ psychology is perhaps an underrated area of study in the debate on God and war and could do with further analysis.

What an understatement! Why, that crazed religious fanatic had his finger on the nuclear trigger for eight years!

How wonderfully ironic! After spending so much time and effort to create an ideologically driven mirage of religion as benign and peaceful, in the end the authors upset their own apple cart because they couldn’t stifle their ideologically driven need to portray Bush as the personification of evil, complete with all the religious fundamentalist trappings. By their own account, religion nearly inspired, not merely a war, but the mother of all wars, a nuclear holocaust that might have exterminated our species once and for all. “Further analysis” indeed! Maybe we should have listened to the New Atheists after all!

Israel and the Other Holocaust

Perhaps it would be better to say “one of the other holocausts” instead of “the other holocaust.” There have, after all, been many. However, the one that Jews of eastern and central Europe suffered during and immediately after World War I was probably more costly in terms of lives and suffering than any other save the Nazi inferno. Accounts of it may be found in numerous sources. The following are taken from the memoirs of Maurice Paleologue, French ambassador to Russia during the war (my translation from the German version). The first is from the entry of March 1, 1915:

The Jews of Poland and Lithuania have suffered terrible persecution since the beginning of the war. During the month of August (1914) they were forced to leave the zone near the border as quickly as possible. After a short time, these mandatory expulsions, carried out with excessive haste an cruelty, were applied further east with each passing day. Eventually, the entire Israelite population from Grodno, Lomza, Plozk, Kutno, Lodz, Pietrokov, Kielce, Radom, and Lublin was forced into the interior of the country in the direction of Podolia and Volhynia. Everywhere the expulsions were accompanied by acts of violence and plunder, carried out under the approving gaze of the authorities. One could see hundreds of thousands of unfortunates, driven aimlessly through the snow, driven on like cattle by bands of cossacks, in extreme want, abandoned in train stations, open fields, and the outskirts of cities, dying of hunger, exhaustion, and cold. And to improve their morale, everywhere they went these miserable people encountered the same feelings of hatred and rejection, the same accusations of expionage and treason. Never in all its painful history has Israel suffered a more tragic expulsion. And yet, there are 200,000 Jewish soldiers fighting bravely in the ranks of the Russian army!

and, from the entry of August 5, 1915,

With every retreat of the Russian army, the police continue the expulsion of Jews. Wherever it occurs, the expulsions are carried out with the usual excessive haste, as mindless as they are cruel. Those affected are informed at the last minute; they have neither time nor opportunity to take anything along. They are hurriedly packed into train cars; they are forced onto the road like herds of cattle; they are informed of their destination, which is then changed 20 times along the way. And wherever the order is given for them to leave a city, the orthodox population descends on the ghetto and plunders it. Forced back in the direction of Podolia, Volhynia, Bessarabia, and the Ukraine, they are given over to terrible suffering. The total number of the expelled has reached 800,000.

These expulsions were accompanied by bloody pogroms, lasting through the Civil War years, in which tens of thousands of Jews were murdered in cold blood. Descriptions of those carried out in the Odessa area may be found, for example, in Ivan Bunin’s Cursed Days.

In the years immediately following World War II, as hundreds of thousands of homeless Jews continued to wander about Europe, it seemed obvious to President Truman and many other leaders on this side of the iron curtain that the best solution to the problem was the creation of a Jewish State. There they would have at least a fighting chance of defending themselves against the holocausts of the future. It is interesting to consider, with the benefit of hindsight, whether the founding of the state of Israel really was a good idea after all. However, while the existence of human moral emotions certainly cannot be ignored in answering that question, they should certainly not be consulted to arrive at that answer.

Consider, for example, the contortions of the “progressive” ideologues as they chased the chimera of “the Good” as applied to the state of Israel. In the beginning, the Jews were the “good guys,” as seen, for example, in films like “Exodus.” Now, after demonstrating on several occasions that they are quite capable of defending themselves, they have become the “bad guys,” a much more familiar role for the Jews, who have always had the misfortune of being a “natural” outgroup wherever the diaspora has taken them. They are accused of favoring “apartheid,” in spite of Israel’s large Arab population, and the decimation of Jewish minorities in many of the states of north Africa and the Middle East. They are the ones guilty of “ethnic cleansing,” even as genuine ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is accepted without a murmur. They are accused of atrocities against civilians, even as their enemies deliberately fire thousands of rockets at civilian population centers, and so on, and so on.

All this demonstrates once again, as have a virtually infinite number of similar experiments throughout human history, that decisions of this sort should not be based on morality. The reason for this seems abundantly obvious. The moral emotions from which all moral systems are ultimately derived evolved at a time when entities such as the state of Israel, or anything else resembling a modern state, for that matter, simply did not exist. On what, then, should they be based, if we exclude the wonderfully satisfying but grossly destructive and unreliable moral emotions? Why, the human ability to reason, by default. It is, admittedly, a very weak reed to lean on, but it’s the only one we really have.

Papal Bigotry

Apparently the pope showed the now blunted fangs of the other “Religion of Peace” in an address to the Queen during his visit to the UK. The BBC quotes him as follows:

Even in our own lifetimes we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus a reductive vision of a person and his destiny.

The pope would do well to reflect on the record of the church he represents before he starts inveighing against “atheist extremism.” For example, it was responsible for the expulsion of Jews from the very country he was speaking in, not to mention his home country of Germany, as well as France, Spain and Portugal. It was responsible for countless pogroms against Jews throughout its bloody history, murdering hundreds of thousands of them in massacres in Germany and many other European countries. Other than that, it was directly responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of women as “witches,” countless bloody acts of repression against religious minorities, and the butchery of millions more in the wars it directly inspired.

As for the Nazis, the pope would do well to read “Mein Kampf.” After all, it was written in his mother tongue. In it Hitler invoked God many times, claiming, for example, that in fighting the Jews, he was doing the “Lord’s work.”

The political right has a tradition of bigotry in matters of religion, most recently revealed in the prevailing fashion of blaming atheists for Nazism and Communism. If the Nazis were atheist, how is it that Hitler constantly invoked God in his writings and speeches? How is it that the millions of little memorial brochures the Nazis sent to the families of fallen soldiers with a picture of the deceased on one side always had Christian symbols and verses on the other? Why did Nazi belt buckles and medals carry the inscription “God with us?”

Both Nazism and Communism were secular religions, differing from earlier versions only because they were unwise enough to promise heaven on earth, rather than pie in the sky when you die. They were recognized as such by numerous contemporary writers, who often spoke of Communist and Nazi leaders as so many popes, bishops and priests.

The Nazis and Communists didn’t murder because they were atheists. They murdered because they were Nazis and Communists. That remains a major distinction between atheists and Christians. Atheists have never murdered simply by virtue of the fact that they don’t believe in God. Christians have murdered millions by virtue of the fact that they do.

Jewish expulsions — Jewish Expulsions in the Name of Christianity

Have you Hugged a Tea Partier Lately?

It has always been obvious to anyone with an open mind that innate predispositions have a very significant impact on human behavior. These traits of ours have long been referred to as “human nature.” It is a remarkable manifestation of human behavior in its own right that the tribe of professional and academic psychologists somehow managed to ignore this truth through much of the 20th century. When thinkers like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz started drawing attention to the fact that the fine behaviorist costume of the emperor of psychology was imaginary, and he was actually strutting around naked, they reacted with rage. Since those days, they have have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the real world by accummulating mountains of evidence, at least to the point of recognizing the existence of innate behavior. However, Ardrey and Lorenz also pointed out that certain of these innate behavioral traits, and, in particular, those associated with what we call morality, did not necessarily tend to “niceness,” and “kindness.” To this day, the assorted psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists who have finally acknowledged innate behavior continue to studiously avoid recognizing this equally obvious fact, apparently dismissing a 5000 year history of human warfare and slaughter of “the others,” as a mere unfortunate coincidence. Instead, ignoring the implications of their acceptance of innate behavior, and dismissing anyone who objects as a “reductionist,” they continue to cobble away on their Brave New Worlds of “human flourishing,” in which a new morality, decked out in the latest fashion of the secular religion now prevailing on college campuses, will guide us into a glorious future of universal human brotherhood. I have one question for all these architects of a bright new human future. Have you hugged a Tea Partier lately?

I rather doubt it. Don Surber makes the point rather nicely in a recent post about would be terrorist James Lee entitled, “What if he were a Tea Partier…” When it comes to the Tea Party movement, confirmation bias on the left is running full blast. Any bit of anecdotal evidence, any act by some deranged individual who can, however remotely, be associated with the movement is frantically seized on as “proof” that all the tens of millions of Tea Partiers are racist, facist, ultra-conservative extremists, or what have you. In a word, they are all “evil.”

The explanation for this phenomenon would have been obvious to Ardrey and Lorenz. They referred to it as the Amity/Enmity Complex, described in an earlier work by Sir Arthur Keith as follows:

Human nature has a dual constitution; to hate as well as to love are parts of it; and conscience may enforce hate as a duty just as it enforces the duty of love. Conscience has a two-fold role in the soldier: it is his duty to save and protect his own people and equally his duty to destroy their enemies… Thus conscience serves both codes of group behavior; it gives sanction to practices of the code of enmity as well as the code of amity.

Enmity towards “the others” is not something we humans can “unlearn,” or turn off at the flick of a switch. If we are to control it, we must first recognize its existence, and then proceed rationally to find ways to deal with it. If we succeed, then perhaps it won’t be necessary to constantly repeat, over and over and over again, such horrific manifestations as the slaughter of millions of Jews by the Nazis, or millions of “bourgeoisie” by the Communists. It will not do to cobble some fine new morality, because Enmity is a part of our morality. It is a part of our morality that must and will manifest itself, one way or the other, and it isn’t going anywhere because leftist academics choose to ignore it. It is a part of them, as well as the rest of us, and to see it they need only look in the mirror.

If the paragons of the left really propose to leave hatred and hostility behind with just a few more salutary tweeks to their New Morality, isn’t it fair to ask, why all the furious denunciations of tens of millions of people over an isolated sign here, or the acts of a deranged madman there, or the unpardonable sin of being “overwhelmingly white?” Where’s the love? If these avatars of human flourishing via a new era of “kindness” and “niceness” really propose to free us of the demons of our evolutionary past by ignoring them, why all the viciousness, why all the irrational spite aroused against tens of millions by the real or imagined acts of a few, why all the eager fixation on the “evils” of this latest convenient “out-group?” Tell me, my friends, have you hugged a Tea Partier lately?

The “Israeli” Jack the Knife; Lying by Omission

I read four or five accounts of the arrest of serial killer Elias Abuelazam in the local and national mainstream media, and in none of them was he identified as other than an “Israeli.” Apparently the editors thought the fact that he happens to be an Arab Christian, and not a Jew, ~~didn’t fit the narrative~~ was not significant enough to mention. These people seem to believe they can still play the same games they did back in the 60’s and 70’s when they had an effective monopoly as gatekeepers of public information. It’s as if they haven’t noticed that times have changed, and there are now powerful alternative voices that will nail them every time. They keep losing credibility and market share, but it just doesn’t seem to matter to them. Perhaps they’ve finally tired of the “objectivity” charade, and have decided to content themselves with preaching to the choir.