Ingroups and Outgroups – Page 2

Tilting at Is/Ought Windmills with Steve Stewart-Williams

Many modern writers on the subject of morality are aware of its connection with emotional traits that exist by virtue of evolution by natural selection. Many of those also acknowledge that morality is a subjective phenomenon, and that good and evil have no existence independent of the minds that imagine them. In a sense, these thinkers have managed to claw their way back to the simple truths Darwin alluded to in his The Descent of Man after they were eclipsed for many years by the Blank Slate debacle. Once they’ve done so, however, a funny thing happens. With the lone exception of Edvard Westermarck who began writing on the subject more than a century ago, none of them, or at least none that I am aware of, has managed to appreciate the seemingly obvious logical implications of these truths. Having glimpsed them, they shrink back, as if stunned by what they’ve seen.

What are the logical implications I refer to? If morality exists by virtue of evolved emotional traits, then,

The traits in question evolved because they happened to increase the odds that individuals carrying the genes that gave rise to them would survive and reproduce.
As Darwin noted, evolution by natural selection is a random process. As a result, it is to be expected that the moral behavior that might evolve in intelligent species other than our own might potentially be quite different from ours.
It follows that morality is subjective, and has no objective existence. Good and evil do not exist as independent, objective things. Rather, they are imagined in the minds of individuals.
The responsible genes must have evolved at times radically different from the present, and even, at least in part, in species that were ancestral to our own.
It follows that morality did not evolve to serve the “purpose” or “function” of promoting the happiness or flourishing of our species, however construed.
There is no guarantee that the traits we associate with morality will have the same effect of enhancing the odds of survival of individuals in the environment we live in now as they did in the one in which the evolved.
It is irrational to blindly rely on these traits to regulate the interactions between and within groups vastly larger and/or utterly different in kind from groups that existed when they evolved.
It is irrational, not to mention potentially dangerous, to blindly rely on these traits to promote social goals that have no connection whatsoever with the reasons they exist to begin with.
It is irrational to assume that the universal tendency to apply a radically different morality to outgroups to the one we apply to our ingroup will disappear if we ignore the former.
It is no more rational to assume that the innate basis of human morality is uniform across all populations, than it is to assume that skin color will be the same across all populations. It is to be expected that there are similarities between different versions of morality, but also that there will be significant differences, which cannot be explained as mere artifacts of “culture.”

A good number of modern moral philosophers accept the first four items in the above list. Then, however, an odd thing happens. Far from accepting the seemingly obvious conclusions that follow from these four, as set forth in the rest of the list, they begin writing as if morality were an ideal vehicle for promoting whatever social goals they happen to favor. They begin speaking of things that they personally perceive as good or evil as if everyone else must necessarily also perceive them in the same way. In the end we find them speaking of these subjective goods and evils for all the world as if they were real, objective things. This powerful illusion, so characteristic of our species, reasserts itself, and the seemingly obvious implications of the evolved nature of morality are ignored.

Why has it been so difficult for modern philosophers to jettison the illusion of objective morality? The answer can be found by examining their ingroup. Most of the public intellectuals and philosophers who write about morality do so in academia and other milieus currently dominated by the “progressive Left.” In other words, they belong to an ingroup that tends to be extremely moralistic, and is typically defined by ideology. Members of such ingroups tend to deem themselves “good,” and anyone who disagrees with the ideology of their ingroup “evil,” in accordance with the nature of human beings since time immemorial. There is no essential difference in this regard between them and a group of hunter/gatherers who deem themselves “good,” and their neighbors in an adjoining territory “evil,” other than the arbitrary features that happen to distinguish ingroup from outgroup. As we have seen so often in the recent past, any member of such ingroups who dares to seriously question any of the shibboleths that define the ideological box these people live in can expect to be ostracized and have their careers destroyed. In short, there is a very powerful incentive not to wander too far off the ideological reservation, and to occasionally virtue signal loyalty to the ingroup.

Beyond that, those who imagine they possess the moral high ground also imagine that this gives them the right to dictate behavior to others. In other words, morality rationalizes power and status, and the desire for these things has always been a very powerful motivator of human behavior. Those who possess them aren’t inclined to give them up without a struggle. Today not only moral philosophers but a host of others base their right to dictate behavior to the rest of us on the illusion that their version of morality is “true.” If the illusion disappears, their power disappears with it. Hence, regardless of what they claim to believe about the evolutionary roots of morality, we commonly find them busily propping up the illusion.

Steve Stewart-Williams is an excellent example of the type referred to above. He devotes a great deal of attention to the subject of morality in his Darwin, God, and the Meaning of Life. On page 203 of my hard cover copy he even quotes E. O. Wilson’s argument “for the necessity of an evolutionary approach to morality.” On page 148 he says more or less that same thing as I pointed out in the fourth item in the above list, although without referring specifically to morality:

Our fear of snakes and spiders is an example of an aspect of human psychology that is poorly matched to modern living conditions, but which would have been useful in the environment of our hunter-gatherer ancestors – the environment in which these fears evolved.

In the following passage on page 291, Stewart-Williams seems to come out very explicitly in favor of the subjective nature of morality:

The second way that Darwin’s theory could undermine morality is that it could undermine the idea that there are objective moral truths – truths that exist independently of human minds, emotions and conventions. In the remaining pages of this book, I’m going to argue that evolutionary theory does indeed undermine this idea, and that morality is, in some sense, a human invention (or, more precisely, a joint project of human beings and natural selection). In other words, in the final analysis, nothing is right and nothing is wrong. This perspective is quite counterintuitive to most people (myself included).

It turns out that, as far as Stewart-Williams is concerned, this perspective is very counterintuitive indeed. Instead of drawing the seemingly obvious conclusions listed above that follow from the evolutionary roots of morality and its subjective nature, he spends much of the rest of the book alternately insisting that he believes in subjective morality, and then contradicting himself with comments that make no sense unless there is an objective moral law. Not surprisingly, this “objective moral law” turns out to be a vanilla version of the one that is currently fashionable in academia. Stewart-Williams realizes that the academic ingroup he belongs to is currently highly moralistic, and is likely to take a very dim view of anyone who seriously challenges the shibboleths that define its territorial boundaries. To placate the “public opinion” of his ingroup, he begins delivering himself of statements that really are “counterintuitive” if he believes in subjective morality as he claims. For starters, he starts dreaming up ways to hop over Hume’s is/ought barrier:

Hume’s law seems to show that facts about evolution can have no bearing on ethical issues, and that factual and ethical reasoning are completely independent domains of discourse. But it does not have this implication at all. The importance of the is-ought fallacy has been drastically overstated. Consider this argument again:

Efforts to aid the weak, sick, or poor go against nature.

Therefore, we ought not to aid the weak, sick or poor.

Clearly, the argument is not deductively valid. This could easily be remedied, however, by including an additional premise that would justify the leap from is to ought. After all, it is possible in principle to construct a valid argument from any premise to any conclusion, given the appropriate intervening premise.

Efforts to aid the weak, sick, or poor go against nature.

We ought not to go against nature.

Therefore, we ought not to aid the weak, sick, or poor.

The argument is now deductively valid, and thus if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true also.

Right. It kind of reminds me of an old Far Side cartoon, in which one mathematician is proudly displaying his proof of some obscure hypothesis to another mathematician. The second replies that he doesn’t quite follow the step in the proof labeled “Miracle happens.” If, as Stewart-Williams claims, morality is subjective, then the reason you can’t just hop over the is/ought barrier is because there is no ought to hop to on the other side. One cannot speak of an unqualified ought as he does above at all, because every ought is simply the expression of some individual’s emotionally motivated subjective opinion. Once you admit it is such an opinion, “valid arguments” of the type given above become entirely superfluous. The only “fact” involved is the experience of a subjective feeling which itself exists by virtue of an natural evolutionary process which has no function or purpose whatsoever. “Moral reasoning” is what happens when individuals attempt to interpret what they imagine these subjective feelings are trying to tell them.

Having justified himself in advance by virtue of this ineffectual quibbling about the is/ought barrier, Stewart-Williams rattles off a whole series of “oughts,” for all the world as if they were unquestionable, objective facts. For example, on page 255,

I think we can agree that preparing for the future generations is a highly desirable value to cultivate.

If morality is subjective, there cannot possibly be any “values,” whether “highly desirable” or not, to cultivate. He could say, “I think everyone else in the world shares my subjective opinion that we ought to prepare for future generations,” but, aside from being clearly false, that statement is entirely different from what he has actually written, implying the existence of “values” as objective things. On page 274, after making it quite clear that he personally considers the “moral dividing line” between humans and animals “is arbitrary,” and that he is opposed to “speciesism,” he writes,

So, the allocation of moral status to humans and humans alone is unjustified.

The above makes sense only if morality is objective. If, as Stewart-Williams claimed earlier, it is actually subjective, it is impossible for anything to be either justified or unjustified, unless one qualifies the statement by admitting that it is merely an expression of personal opinion based on nothing more substantial than feelings that exist by virtue of natural selection. The statement, “So, the allocation of moral status to humans and humans alone is justified,” is every bit as valid as the one given above, by virtue of the fact that the validity of both is zero. Consider what we’re dealing with here; a bag of behavioral traits that exist purely because they happened to improve the odds that the responsible genes would survive and reproduce. I doubt that he is arguing that allocation of equal moral status to other animals will accomplish the same thing today. It’s likely to accomplish the exact opposite. As it stands, the statement is fundamentally irrational. All he is really saying is that he arbitrarily interprets certain emotional feelings to mean that humans and other animals must have equal moral status, and insists that everyone else must interpret their emotional feelings in the same way. A bit later, he doubles down, writing,

However, if we opt for a morality based on a brute human/non-human distinction, we know we’re getting it wrong – some animals will definitely be treated worse than they should be.

Again, absent objective morality, this statement is nonsense. If morality is subjective, it is impossible to make truth statements about it one way or the other. We cannot possibly “know” we are getting something wrong unless an objective criteria exists upon which to base that conclusion. On page 289 he tells us,

When we look at large-scale surveys of everyday believers, we find that in many ways atheists are actually more moral than believers. On average, they are less prejudiced, less racist, and less homophobic; more tolerant and compassionate; and more law-abiding. Admittedly, whether this means atheists are more moral depends on your personal convictions; if you think homophobia is a virtue, for instance, then you’d have to conclude that a greater number of religious than non-religious people possess this particular virtue. Nonetheless, a convincing case can be made that non-religious moral codes are often superior to those traditionally linked with theism. Consider Peter Singer’s Top Three ethical recommendations: do something for the poor of the world; do something for non-human animals; and do something for the environment. This is the ethic of an atheist, a man who accepts that life evolved and has no ultimate meaning or purpose. To my mind, it is vastly superior to moral systems emphasizing trivial issues (or non-issues) such as premarital sex, blasphemy, and the like. Morality is not just about deciding what’s right and wrong, good or bad. it involves getting your moral priorities straight.

Seldom does one find such a jumble of contradictions in one passage. Stewart-Williams tells us that, on the one hand, morality is subjective, and depends on “your personal convictions,” but, on the other hand, non-religious moral codes are superior to traditional ones linked with theism, and, if you don’t agree with the author, you “don’t have your moral priorities straight.” In other words, morality is subjective and objective at the same time. As an atheist, I’m flattered that he thinks I’m “more moral” than believers, but unfortunately there can be no rational basis for such a conclusion. What he is telling us is that we “ought to” jury rig moral emotions to accomplish ends that have no discernable connection with the reasons that those emotions exist to begin with. He calls this “getting our moral priorities straight.” Is it not abundantly obvious by now that exploiting moral emotions to accomplish social goal that could profoundly affect the lives of millions of people is not only counterproductive, but extremely dangerous? Have we really learned nothing from our experiences with Nazism and Communism? If we seek to stuff Singers three ethical recommendations down everyone’s throats as “good,” then everyone who disagrees with them automatically becomes “evil.” They are consigned to the outgroup. They become the Jews, or the “bourgeoisie.” Are we not yet sufficiently familiar with the often violent fate of outgroups in human history? Does he think he can simply wish away that aspect of human nature?

Perhaps the above passage is best interpreted as Stewart-Williams’ triple kowtow to the gatekeepers of his ideologically/morally defined ingroup. In the end, it is apparent that he has been no more capable of freeing himself of the illusion of objective morality than the rest of his academic tribe. He concludes the book with a bombastic passage that confirms this conclusion:

Of course, nothing can be said to argue that people are morally obliged to accept this ethic, for to do so would be inconsistent with the ideas that inspired it in the first place. It is an ethic that will be adopted – if at all – by those who find a certain stark beauty in kindness without reward, joy without purpose, and progress without lasting achievement.

No, I’m sorry. You can’t have your moral cake and eat it too. The only thing we can say with certainty about people who “adopt such an ethic” is that they are seriously delusional. They believe that the solution of all the complex social issues facing mankind is a mere matter of “correctly” tweaking a volatile mix of emotions whose origins have nothing whatever to do with the issues in question, and then just letting those emotions run wild to do their thing. As noted above, their thing” invariably involves dictating behavior to others, lending power and status to the would be dictators in the process.

Allow me to suggest a different version of “getting our moral priorities straight.” In my personal opinion, we ought to limit the sphere of influence of human morality to the bare essentials, namely the regulation of the day to day interactions of human beings that it would be impractical to regulate in any other way because of our limited intelligence. When it comes to matters such as Singers “three ethical recommendations,” or any other social issues involving large numbers of people, let us leave morality strictly out of it to the extent possible for such emotional creatures as ourselves, and lay our cards on the table. No matter what we happen to desire, in the end the fundamental reason we desire it is to satisfy innate feelings and emotions that exist because they evolved. By “laying our cards on the table,” I mean citing the particular emotions we wish to satisfy, making it perfectly clear in the process whether the manner in which those emotions are to be satisfied will have anything to do with the reasons the emotions evolved to begin with or not. It strikes me that something of the sort would be a great deal more rational and less dangerous than continuing to pursue our current approach of allowing such matters to be decided by whatever faction proves most effective at manipulating our moral emotions.

Morality Whimsy: Darwin and the Latter Day Philosophers

It’s hard to imagine how Darwin could have explained morality more clearly, given the Victorian context in which he wrote. In Chapter IV of his The Descent of Man he said in so many words that it is a subjective manifestation of human nature. However, as I pointed out in my last post, even the philosophers of the 19th century who understood natural selection couldn’t draw the obvious conclusions. None of them could free themselves of the illusion that Good and Evil are real, objective things, existing independently of human minds. This was reflected in the various systems of “evolutionary morality” they proposed. They typically assumed that evolved morality had a goal, or purpose, which was usually some version of human flourishing, moral perfection, or “the good of the species.” To all appearances, it never occurred to any of them that, as a natural process, evolution by natural selection cannot have a goal or a purpose. In the 20th century, moral philosophers began to accept some of the more obvious implications of Darwinism. In spite of that, they remained spellbound by the power of the illusion. The only significant exception I’m aware of was Edvard Westermarck, who pointed out some of the obvious implications of Darwin’s claim that morality exists by virtue of evolved behavioral traits as far back as 1906. He was forgotten, and we haven’t recovered the lost ground since.

Today we know a lot more about the mechanics of natural selection than they did in the 19th century. The study of morality suffered as much as any of the other behavioral sciences during the Blank Slate debacle, but we seem to be on the path to recovery, at least for the time being. Today many scientists and philosophers are at least vaguely aware of the fact, obvious as it was to Darwin, that human morality is a manifestation of innate behavioral traits. Some of them have even drawn some of the more obvious conclusions from that fact. However, we live in a highly moralistic era, especially in academia, and what we find written about morality today reflects this moralistic culture.

To illustrate how far we’ve come, and how far we have yet to go, let’s consider the work of the philosopher Michael Ruse, one of the current crop of evolutionary moralists. He has written much on the subject, but I will focus on a paper he co-authored with E. O. Wilson back in 1986 entitled Moral Philosophy as Applied Science and the book Taking Darwin Seriously, published in 1999. First, the good news. Ruse does take Darwin seriously when it comes to the illusion of objective morality:

…human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey.

We believe that implicit in the scientific interpretation of moral behavior is a conclusion of central importance to philosophy, namely that there can be no genuinely objective external ethical premises. Everything that we know about the evolutionary process indicates that no such extrasomatic guides exist.

As these passages imply, Ruse also rejected the Blank Slate:

The evidence from both genetic and cognitive studies demonstrates decisively that the human brain is not a tabula rasa.

The following passage just repeats what Darwin wrote over a century ago in Chapter IV of The Descent of Man:

It is easy to conceive of an alien intelligent species evolving rules its members consider highly moral but which are repugnant to human beings, such as cannibalism, incest, the love of darkness and decay, parricide, and the mutual eating of faeces. Many animal species perform some or all of these things, with gusto and in order to survive. If human beings had evolved from a stock other than savanna-dwelling, bipedal, carnivorous man-apes we might do the same, feeling inwardly certain that such behaviors are natural and correct. In short, ethical premises are the peculiar products of genetic history. And they can be understood solely as mechanisms that are adaptive for the species that possess them. It follows that the ethical code of one species cannot be translated into that of another. No abstract moral principles exist outside the particular nature of individual species.

Ruse explicitly rejects the currently fashionable philosophical conceit that evolved morality somehow tracks “true” morality:

It is thus entirely correct to say that ethical laws can be changed, at the deepest level, by genetic evolution. This is obviously quite inconsistent with the notion of morality as a set of objective, eternal verities. Morality is rooted in contingent human nature, through and through.

Nor is it possible to uphold the true objectivity of morality by believing in the existence of an ultimate code, such that what is considered right corresponds to what is truly right – that the thoughts produced by the epigenetic rules parallel external premises.

Here “epigenetic rules” is a term Ruse and Wilson coined referring to the innate predispositions that are responsible for the existence of morality. In other words, they’re what the 19th century philosophers referred to as “instincts.” It was an unfortunate choice in view of the current bitter disputes about the significance of epigenetic inheritance. They would have done better to stick with the terms already in use.

So where is the fly in this promising ointment? To begin, Ruse isn’t quite on board with his own philosophy. In spite of his insistence on the subjective nature of morality, we constantly find him signaling to his morality-drenched academic peers that he’s “really good.” He suffers from the same morality addiction as the rest of them. Indeed, to get that monkey off his back, he would have to jump right out of his academic ingroup. For example,

Like Huxley, I find these views (Social Darwinism) taken to the extreme to be morally repellant. They are the epitome of all that is immoral, and anything but a guide to proper behavior… This philosophy I believe (generally) to be grossly immoral.

Children with the disease (Tay-Sachs) develop at first in a normal manner. Then at six months they start to collapse into zombies, and die by the age of four. I see nothing immoral about detecting and aborting such children. In fact, I believe we have a positively moral obligation to do so.

John Stuart Mill’s campaign for women’s rights was a good thing, as was Bertrand Russell’s opposition to nuclear weapons.

What we have in the case of Darwinian ethics is a denial of objectivity, which is surely a denial of metaphysical reality by another name, and an affirmation of subjectivity, which is no less a commitment to common sense, in which the subject plays an active creative part. If anything is common sense, it is that rape is simply, totally, wrong.

In spite of having affirmed that morality is a manifestation of innate predispositions, or “epigenetic rules,” Ruse can find nothing wrong with applying it to decide all sorts of issues that could not possibly have contributed to the evolution of those rules. Consider, for example, this passage, which also includes virtue signaling in the form of a wink and a nod to his liberal ingroup.

Darwinism is anything but a gospel for the extreme conservative. Apart from anything else, no one is saying that there are humans towards whom we have no sense of moral obligation whatsoever. Furthermore, the pretense that we need not bother about the Third World is self-refuting. If we ignore it, then through such effects as overpopulation, we shall soon find that it raises all sorts of difficult moral issues which do directly impinge on us.

In case we are left in any doubt about Ruse’s actual commitment to objective morality under a veneer of subjectivism, he adds,

My only hope is to have shown that a Darwinian approach to morality does not call for a repudiation of standards and values cherished by decent people of all nations.

It is beyond me where in Ruse’s philosophy one can find a definition of “decent people.” Indeed, his philosophy excludes the possibility that one can make unqualified reference to “decent people” unless “decency” exists as an independent object. In other words, his use of the term is a blatant non sequitur. All this makes no sense at all unless we are aware that Ruse imagines he has found a way to skip blithely around Hume’s is/ought barrier. It goes something like this:

If morality means anything, it means being prepared to hold out a helping hand to others. Christians, utilitarians, Kantians, and everyone else come together on this.

I guess I’m not one of the above. To me, morality refers to social behavior that is ultimately the result of evolved behavioral traits. The above is yet another example of Ruse’s tendency to objectivize a possible manifestation of that behavior as “good.” Next, we are optimistically informed that a universal human morality is possible based on the dubious assumption that there are no differences in the evolved traits on which it is based among human populations:

When it comes to general shared moral principles, the Darwinian stands firm. Humans share a common moral understanding. This universality is guaranteed by the shared genetic background of every member of Homo sapiens. The differences between us are far outweighed by the similarities. We (virtually) all have hands, eyes, ears, noses, and the same ultimate awareness. That is part of being human. There is, therefore, absolutely nothing arbitrary about morality, considered from the human perspective.

All this is so much hand waving. Given the evidence of vast differences in moral rules and behavior across human populations, the idea that there is absolutely nothing arbitrary about it is nonsense. No matter. Apparently based on this axiom of universality, a miracle happens. Ruse cuts the Gordian knot, and walks right around the is/ought barrier!

To use an American sporting metaphor, the Darwinian does an end-run around the is/ought barrier. He/she realizes that you cannot go through it, but argues that you can go around it, giving morality all of the justificatory insight possible.

In fact, all the “justificatory insight possible” amounts to zero. There is no plausible reason for the claim that the implausible assumption of universal “epigenetic rules” relevant to morality enables an “end-run” around the is/ought barrier. In other words, Ruse is just another modern philosopher attempting to have his cake and eat it, too.

Unfortunately, Ruse has left out a few things in his “universal moral understanding.” Among them is the outgroup. He never mentions its existence in any of his work I’ve read so far, and yet, if there is any universal aspect of human moral behavior, that is one of them. If what Ruse has written above about skipping around the is/ought barrier is true, then it becomes our duty to hate the outgroup with a blind, irrational fury. Beyond that, he never seriously takes into account the vast difference between the environment in which we now live, and the one in which the predispositions responsible for moral behavior evolved. If he did, it would immediately reduce his notion that morality is an appropriate tool for deciding issues about how to deal with the Third World to an absurdity.

Perhaps the most significant thing of all that Ruse has left out of his philosophizing is a very fundamental feature of human morality. We do not apply it to ourselves alone. We apply it to others as well. To the extent that one imagines that he has done an “end-run” around the is/ought barrier, he also imagines that he has acquired the right to dictate behavior to others. After all, who are we to dispute such a noted philosopher’s take on what our “universal human morality” consists of? That is my biggest problem with our latter day “evolutionary moralists.” In reality, they are just as addicted to objective morality as their 19th century precursors, and just as intent on explaining to the rest of us what we “ought” to do.

Do you like to have others dictate to you what you ought and ought not to do? I don’t. I know that we require some form of morality, because as a species we are too stupid to do without it. Under the circumstances, I prefer to keep it as simple as possible, and to reduce its sphere of influence as much as possible. It strikes me that expanding that sphere to include “the Third World,” or anything of the sort, is not only absurd, but extremely dangerous. I cannot give you any objective reason why you ought not to grovel before people who presume to dictate to you what you ought or ought not to do. I can only inform you that I prefer not to grovel myself. That, it seems to me, is one of the great advantages of grasping the truth about the subjective nature of morality. That truth does not imply moral chaos, or the impossibility of a society with “absolute” moral rules. It merely provides some insight into what such an “absolute” morality might look like in the context of whatever goals or purpose you’ve established for yourself in life.

In my next post I will review the work of another modern “evolutionary moralist” who, predictably, has been no more capable of shaking the objective morality illusion than Ruse. Things haven’t changed much since the 19th century. The symptoms of the addiction have just become more subtle.

Twitter suspends hbd chick

As her moniker would imply, hbd chick writes about human biodiversity, and many other topics in the arts and sciences that interest her. She used to run a great blog, but it became inactive because of health issues. For the last couple of years she has been holding up her end with frequent entertaining posts on Twitter. Now the Twitter Thought Police have suspended her. I don’t know what sham reason they’ve given for doing it. I’m sure “hate speech” would be appropriately cynical and arrogant, because she’s the furthest thing from a hater I can imagine. In my personal opinion, we “ought” to smash these monopolies. I will eagerly await the reaction of all the academic peddlers of “moral progress.” I hope she will find the strength to start blogging again.

UPDATE: Apparently hbd chick’s suspension has been lifted, at least for the time being. Twitter has not yet deigned to reveal what lame reason they had for suspending her in the first place.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. The fact that there is no objective morality most definitely does not mean that you are forbidden to fight back if you or someone you admire is attacked.

Here is a personal opinion: Denial of access to the social means of communication is denial of freedom of speech. These monopolies need to be destroyed.

Darwin and Morality

It’s not necessary to read all of Darwin’s books and manuscripts to learn what he had to say about morality. Just read Chapter IV of his The Descent of Man. If you haven’t seen those pages yet, they may be a revelation to you, because later generations of behavioral “scientists” have been very coy about mentioning them. They are decidedly out of step with the socialist and egalitarian ideologies that it became the goal of the 20th century behavioral “sciences” to “prove” as corollaries of the Blank Slate. As such they represent a high point in mankind’s search for truth and self-understanding. When it comes to morality, that search was quickly derailed by a combination of ideologically corrupted “science” and sellers of philosophical snake oil. Nearly a century and a half later, it remains derailed. There is little reason to hope that it will recover anytime soon.

The things Darwin had to say about morality were remarkably bold, given that he lived in Victorian England, and was married to an extremely pious Christian wife. Indeed, the first sentences of the chapter in question can be seen as reflection of this less than ideal environment:

I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as (Sir James) Mackintosh remarks, “has a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human action”; it is summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance.

Later authors have attempted to use this passage to prop up their artificial taboo against “anthropomorphism.” In fact, it is best understood as a brief genuflection to the prevailing “moral landscape.” In this heavily cherry-picked chapter, it’s best to read the whole thing. Darwin was anything but a carbon copy of the “co-discoverer” of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, who believed in evolution below the neck, but substituted spiritualistic mumbo-jumbo for the origin of the human mind and conscience. Darwin considered the human brain, mind, and moral sense as much the result of natural evolution as the rest of us. He realized that the same emotions responsible for the moral sense in humans exists in other animals as well. We are exceptional only in our ability to think about what our emotions are trying to tell us, and our ability to use language to communicate our thoughts to others. Darwin hardly considered this an unbridgeable gap, and thought it entirely possible that similarly advanced minds could evolve in other animals. As he put it,

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable – namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.

So much for human exceptionalism!

For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. The services may be of a definite and evidently instinctive nature; or there may be only a wish and readiness, as with most of the higher social animals, to aid their fellows in certain general ways.

In the above we find Darwin clearly distinguishing between the fixed instincts of, for example, insects, and the more “malleable” behavioral predispositions existing in humans and other social mammals. In other words, here Darwin is preemptively debunking the favorite mantra of later generations of Blank Slaters that acceptance of evolved behavioral traits amounts to “genetic determinism.”

But these feelings and services are by no means extended to all the individuals of the same species, only to those of the same association… We have now seen that actions are regarded by savages, and were probably so regarded by primeval man, as good or bad, solely as they obviously affect the welfare of the tribe, – not that of the species, nor that of an individual member of the tribe. This conclusion agrees well with the belief that the so-called moral sense is aboriginally derived from the social instincts, for both relate at first exclusively to the community.

In other words, there are ingroups and outgroups, a fact that it took nearly half a century for Sir Arthur Keith to resurrect and state as a coherent hypothesis. Modern philosophers and behavioral scientists alike have fallen into the extremely dangerous habit of ignoring this aspect of human moral behavior, preferring to emphasize our “altruism” instead.

Secondly, as soon as the mental faculties had become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual; and that feeling of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results, as we shall hereafter see, from any unsatisfied instinct, would arise, as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature, nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression. It is clear that many instinctive desires, such as that of hunger, are in their nature of short duration; and after being satisfied, are not readily or vividly recalled.

In other words, instead of being some unique human trait that suddenly evolved out of nothing, morality exists in nascent form in many other animals. The “unique” features of human morality are merely artifacts of these preexisting traits in creatures with unusually high intelligence.

It may well be first to premise that I do not wish to maintain that any strictly social animal, if its intellectual faculties were to become as active and as highly developed as in man, would acquire exactly the same moral sense as ours. In the same manner as various animals have some sense of beauty, though they admire widely different objects, so they might have a sense of right and wrong, though led by it to follow widely different lines of conduct. If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would gain in our supposed case, as it appears to me, some feeling of right or wrong, or a conscience.

How can one read such passages without admiring the genius of Darwin? No one else in his time even came close to writing anything of such brilliance and insight. Consider what is packed into the last of these short passages alone: 1) A blunt denial of human exceptionalism, 2) A debunking of objective morality, and 3) Dismissal of theories that existed then as now that “objective moral truth” somehow manages to “track” morality rooted in mental traits that exist by virtue of evolution by natural selection. Darwin goes on to cite many examples of analogs of human moral behavior in other animals, noting that,

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts, which in us would be called moral; and I agree with (Louis) Agassiz that dogs possess something very like a conscience.

As if in answer to later generations of behaviorists clutching their box mazes with their theories of “conditioning” he writes,

In many instances, however, it is probable that instincts are persistently followed from the mere force of inheritance, without the stimulus of either pleasure or pain. A young pointer, when it first scents game, apparently cannot help pointing. A squirrel in a cage who pats the nuts which it cannot eat as if to bury them in the ground, can hardly be thought to act thus, either from pleasure or pain. Hence the common assumption that men must be impelled to every action by experiencing some pleasure or pain may be erroneous.

Far from believing that evolution by natural selection would result in a universal moral sense, identical in all races, Darwin concluded that the obvious differences in human moral behavior confirmed his theory. As he put it,

Except through the principle of the transmission of moral tendencies, we cannot understand the differences believed to exist in this respect between the various races of mankind.

There is much more in this short chapter bearing on the evolution of human morality. It is truly a must read for anyone interested in the subject. In addition to what he wrote about evolved behavioral traits in man and animals in The Descent of Man, Darwin also wrote a chapter on the subject intended for publication in The Origin of Species. Unfortunately, the full manuscript did not appear in that book. However, Darwin passed it along with much other related material accumulated during the course of his life to his young collaborator, George Romanes. Romanes published the full chapter, along with much of the other material he had received from Darwin, in his Mental Evolution in Animals, which appeared shortly after Darwin’s death. The book is available online, and may be found by clicking the link on the title.

Many authors published theories of morality, supposedly based on Darwin’s theory of evolution, beginning shortly after publication of The Origin of Species. Almost all of them promoted some theory of objective morality, and either ignored or completely failed to grasp the significance of what Darwin had written on the subject. Edvard Westermarck appeared like a ray of light in the fog, publishing his brilliant The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas in 1906. Among major philosophers, he alone appeared to grasp the implications of what Darwin had written about morality. Like the fourth chapter of The Descent of Man, his book was forgotten, and no philosopher or scientist has appeared in the century plus since then who appears to grasp not only what Darwin wrote about the evolved roots of morality, but also the implications of what he wrote regarding the question of objective morality. The lucubrations of some of these “evolutionary moralists” are interesting in their own right, but I must leave them for a later post.

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.”

On the Gleichschaltung of Evolutionary Psychology

When Robert Ardrey began his debunking of the ideologically motivated dogmas that passed for the “science” of human behavior in 1961 with the publication of his first book, African Genesis, he knew perfectly well what was at stake. By that time what we now know as the Blank Slate orthodoxy had derailed any serious attempt by our species to achieve self-understanding for upwards of three decades. This debacle in the behavioral sciences paralyzed any serious attempt to understand the roots of human warfare and aggression, the sources of racism, anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, and the myriad other manifestations of our innate tendency to perceive others in terms of ingroups and outgroups, the nature of human territorialism and status-seeking behavior, and the wellsprings of human morality itself. A bit later, E. O. Wilson summed up our predicament as follows:

Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused about the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and the rest of life.

In the end, the Blank Slate collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, in spite of the now-familiar attempts to silence its opponents by vilification rather than logical argument. The science of evolutionary psychology emerged based explicitly on acceptance of the reality and importance of innate human behavioral traits. However, the ideological trends that resulted in the Blank Slate disaster to begin with haven’t disappeared. On the contrary, they have achieved nearly unchallenged control of the social means of communication, including the entertainment industry, the “mainstream” news media, Internet monopolies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, and, perhaps most importantly, academia. There an ingroup defined by ideology has emerged that has always viewed the new science with a jaundiced eye. By its very nature it challenges their assumptions of moral superiority, their cherished myths about the nature of human beings, and the viability of the various utopias they have always enjoyed concocting for the rest of us. As Marx might have put it, this clash of thesis and antithesis has led to a synthesis in evolutionary psychology that might be described as creeping Gleichschaltung. In other words, it is undergoing a slow process of getting “in step” with the controlling ideology. It no longer seriously challenges the dogmas of that ideology, and the “studies” emerging from the field are increasingly, if not yet exclusively, limited to subjects that are deemed ideologically “benign.” As a result, when it comes to addressing issues that are of real importance in terms of the survival and welfare of our species, the science of evolutionary psychology has become largely irrelevant.

Consider, for example, the sort of articles that one typically finds in the relevant journals. In the last four issues of Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences they have addressed such subjects as “Committed romantic relationships,” Long-term romantic relationships,” “The effect of predictable early childhood environments on sociosexuality in early adulthood,” “Daily relationship quality in same-sex couples,” “Modern-day female preferences for resources and provisioning by long-term mates,” “Behavioral reactions to emotional and sexual infidelity: mate abandonment versus mate retention,” and “An evolutionary perspective on orgasm.” Peering through the last four issues of Evolutionary Psychology Journal we find, “Mating goals moderate power’s effect on conspicuous consumption among women,” “In-law preferences in China: What parents look for in the parents of their children’s mates,” “Endorsement of social and personal values predicts the desirability of men and women as long-term partners,” “Adaptive memory: remembering potential mates,” “Passion, relational mobility, and proof of commitment,” “Do men produce high quality ejaculates when primed with thoughts of partner infidelity?” and “Displaying red and black on a first date: A field study using the ‘First Dates’ television series.”

All very interesting stuff, I’m sure, but the last time I checked humanity wasn’t faced with an existential threat due to cluelessness about the mechanics of reproduction. Articles that might actually bear on our chances of avoiding self-destruction, on the other hand, are few and far between. In short, evolutionary psychology has been effectively neutered. Ostensibly, it’s only remaining purpose is to pad the curriculum vitae of the professoriat in the publish or perish world of academia.

Does it really matter? Probably not much. The claims of any branch of psychology to be a genuine science have always been rather tenuous, and must remain so as long as our knowledge of how the mind works and how consciousness can exist remains so limited. Real knowledge of how the brain gives rise to innate behavioral predispositions, and how they are perceived and interpreted by our “rational” consciousness is far more likely to be forthcoming from fields like neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary biology than evolutionary psychology. Meanwhile, we are free of the Blank Slate straitjacket, at least temporarily. We must no longer endure the sight of the court jesters of the Blank Slate striking heroic poses as paragons of “science,” and uttering cringeworthy imbecilities that are taken perfectly seriously by a fawning mass media. Consider, for example, the following gems from clown-in-chief Ashley Montagu:

All the field observers agree that these creatures (chimpanzees and other great apes) are amiable and quite unaggressive, and there is not the least reason to suppose that man’s pre-human primate ancestors were in any way different.

The fact is, that with the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless.

…man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings.

In fact, I also think it very doubtful that any of the great apes have any instincts. On the contrary, it seems that as social animals they must learn from others everything they come to know and do. Their capacities for learning are simply more limited than those of Homo sapiens.

In his heyday Montagu could rave on like that nonstop, and be taken perfectly seriously, not only by the media, but by the vast majority of the “scientists” in the behavioral disciplines. Anyone who begged to differ was shouted down as a racist and a fascist. We can take heart in the fact that we’ve made at least some progress since then. Today one finds articles about human “instincts” in the popular media, and even academic journals, as if the subject had never been the least bit controversial. True, the same “progressives” who brought us the Blank Slate now have evolutionary psychology firmly in hand, and are keeping it on a very short leash. For all that, one can now at least study the subject of innate human behavior without fear that undue interest in the subject is likely to bring one’s career to an abrupt end. Who knows? With concurrent advances in our knowledge of the actual physics of the mind and consciousness, we may eventually begin to understand ourselves.

Morality and the Spiritualism of the Atheists

I’m an atheist. I concluded there was no God when I was 12 years old, and never looked back. Apparently many others have come to the same conclusion in western democratic societies where there is access to diverse opinions on the subject, and where social sanctions and threats of force against atheists are no longer as intimidating as they once were. Belief in traditional religions is gradually diminishing in such societies. However, they have hardly been replaced by “pure reason.” They have merely been replaced by a new form of “spiritualism.” Indeed, I would maintain that most atheists today have as strong a belief in imaginary things as the religious believers they so often despise. They believe in the “ghosts” of good and evil.

Most atheists today may be found on the left of the ideological spectrum. A characteristic trait of leftists today is the assumption that they occupy the moral high ground. That assumption can only be maintained by belief in a delusion, a form of spiritualism, if you will – that there actually is a moral high ground. Ironically, while atheists are typically blind to the fact that they are delusional in this way, it is often perfectly obvious to religious believers. Indeed, this insight has led some of them to draw conclusions about the current moral state of society similar to my own. Perhaps the most obvious conclusion is that atheists have no objective basis for claiming that one thing is “good” and another thing is “evil.” For example, as noted by Tom Trinko at American Thinker in an article entitled “Imagine a World with No Religion,”

Take the Golden Rule, for example. It says, “Do onto others what you’d have them do onto you.” Faithless people often point out that one doesn’t need to believe in God to believe in that rule. That’s true. The problem is that without God, there can’t be any objective moral code.

My reply would be, that’s quite true, and since there is no God, there isn’t any objective moral code, either. However, most atheists, far from being “moral relativists,” are highly moralistic. As a consequence, they are dumbfounded by anything like Trinko’s remark. It pulls the moral rug right out from under their feet. Typically, they try to get around the problem by appealing to moral emotions. For example, they might say something like, “What? Don’t you think it’s really bad to torture puppies to death?”, or, “What? Don’t you believe that Hitler was really evil?” I certainly have a powerful emotional response to Hitler and tortured puppies. However, no matter how powerful those emotions are, I realize that they can’t magically conjure objects into being that exist independently of my subjective mind. Most leftists, and hence, most so-called atheists, actually do believe in the existence of such objects, which they call “good” and “evil,” whether they admit it explicitly or not. Regardless, they speak and act as if the objects were real.

The kinds of speech and actions I’m talking about are ubiquitous and obvious. For example, many of these “atheists” assume a dictatorial right to demand that others conform to novel versions of “good” and “evil” they may have concocted yesterday or the day before. If those others refuse to conform, they exhibit all the now familiar symptoms of outrage and virtuous indignation. Do rational people imagine that they are gods with the right to demand that others obey whatever their latest whims happen to be? Do they assume that their subjective, emotional whims somehow immediately endow them with a legitimate authority to demand that others behave in certain ways and not in others? I certainly hope that no rational person would act that way. However, that is exactly the way that many so-called atheists act. To the extent that we may consider them rational at all, then, we must assume that they actually believe that whatever versions of “good” or “evil” they happen to favor at the moment are “things” that somehow exist on their own, independently of their subjective minds. In other words, they believe in ghosts.

Does this make any difference? I suggest that it makes a huge difference. I personally don’t enjoy being constantly subjected to moralistic bullying. I doubt that many people enjoy jumping through hoops to conform to the whims of others. I submit that it may behoove those of us who don’t like being bullied to finally call out this type of irrational, quasi-religious behavior for what it really is.

It also makes a huge difference because this form of belief in imaginary objects has led us directly into the moral chaos we find ourselves in today. New versions of “absolute morality” are now popping up on an almost daily basis. Obviously, we can’t conform to all of them at once, and must therefore put up with the inconvenience of either keeping our mouths shut or risk being furiously condemned as “evil” by whatever faction we happen to offend. Again, traditional theists are a great deal more clear-sighted than “atheists” about this sort of thing. For example, in an article entitled, “Moral relativism can lead to ethical anarchy,” Christian believer Phil Schurrer, a professor at Bowling Green State University, writes,

…the lack of a uniform standard of what constitutes right and wrong based on Natural Law leads to the moral anarchy we see today.

Prof. Schurrer is right about the fact that we live in a world of moral anarchy. I also happen to agree with him that most of us would find it useful and beneficial if we could come up with a “uniform standard of what constitutes right and wrong.” Where I differ with him is on the rationality of attempting to base that standard on “Natural Law,” because there is no such thing. For religious believers, “Natural Law” is law passed down by God, and since there is no God, there can be no “Natural Law,” either. How, then, can we come up with such a uniform moral code?

I certainly can’t suggest a standard based on what is “really good” or “really bad” because I don’t believe in the existence of such objects. I can only tell you what I would personally consider expedient. It would be a standard that takes into account what I consider to be some essential facts. These are as follows.

What we refer to as morality is an artifact of “human nature,” or, in other words, innate predispositions that affect our behavior.
These predispositions exist because they evolved by natural selection.
They evolved by natural selection because they happened to improve the odds that the genes responsible for their existence would survive and reproduce at the time and in the environment in which they evolved.
We are now living at a different time, and in a different environment, and it cannot be assumed that blindly responding to the predispositions in question will have the same outcome now as it did when those predispositions evolved. Indeed, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that such behavior can be extremely dangerous.
Outcomes of these predispositions include a tendency to judge the behavior of others as “good” or “evil.” These categories are typically deemed to be absolute, and to exist independently of the conscious minds that imagine them.
Human morality is dual in nature. Others are perceived in terms of ingroups and outgroups, with different standards applying to what is deemed “good” or “evil” behavior towards those others depending on the category to which they are imagined to belong.

I could certainly expand on this list, but the above are certainly some of the most salient and essential facts about human morality. If they are true, then it is possible to make at least some preliminary suggestions about how a “uniform standard” might look. It would be as simple as possible. It would be derived to minimize the dangers referred to above, with particular attention to the dangers arising from ingroup/outgroup behavior. It would be limited in scope to interactions between individuals and small groups in cases where the rational analysis of alternatives is impractical due to time constraints, etc. It would be in harmony with innate human behavioral traits, or “human nature.” It is our nature to perceive good and evil as real objective things, even though they are not. This implies there would be no “moral relativism.” Once in place, the moral code would be treated as an absolute standard, in conformity with the way in which moral standards are usually perceived. One might think of it as a “moral constitution.” As with political constitutions, there would necessarily be some means of amending it if necessary. However, it would not be open to arbitrary innovations spawned by the emotional whims of noisy minorities.

How would such a system be implemented? It’s certainly unlikely that any state will attempt it any time in the foreseeable future. Perhaps it might happen gradually, just as changes to the “moral landscape” have usually happened in the past. For that to happen, however, it would be necessary for significant numbers of people to finally understand what morality is, and why it exists. And that is where, as an atheist, I must part company with Mr. Trinko, Prof. Schurrer, and the rest of the religious right. Progress towards a uniform morality that most of us would find a great deal more useful and beneficial than the versions currently on tap, regardless of what goals or purposes we happen to be pursuing in life, cannot be based on the illusion that a “natural law” exists that has been handed down by an imaginary God, any more than it can be based on the emotional whims of leftist bullies. It must be based on a realistic understanding of what kind of animals we are, and how we came to be. However, such self knowledge will remain inaccessible until we shed the shackles of religion. Perhaps, as they witness many of the traditional churches increasingly becoming leftist political clubs before their eyes, people on the right of the political spectrum will begin to find it less difficult to free themselves from those shackles. I hope so. I think that an Ansatz based on simple, traditional moral rules, such as the Ten Commandments, is more likely to lead to a rational morality than one based on furious rants over who should be allowed to use what bathrooms. In other words, I am more optimistic that a useful reform of morality will come from the right rather than the left of the ideological spectrum, as it now stands. Most leftists today are much too heavily invested in indulging their moral emotions to escape from the world of illusion they live in. To all appearances they seriously believe that blindly responding to these emotions will somehow magically result in “moral progress” and “human flourishing.” Conservatives, on the other hand, are unlikely to accomplish anything useful in terms of a rational morality until they free themselves of the “God delusion.” It would seem, then, that for such a moral “revolution” to happen, it will be necessary for those on both the left and the right to shed their belief in “spirits.”

On the Illusion of Moral Relativism

As recently as 2009 the eminent historian Paul Johnson informed his readers that he made “…the triumph of moral relativism the central theme of my history of the 20th century, Modern Times, first published in 1983.” More recently, however, obituaries of moral relativism have turned up here and there. For example one appeared in The American Spectator back in 2012, fittingly entitled Moral Relativism, R.I.P. It was echoed a few years later by a piece in The Atlantic that announced The Death of Moral Relativism.” There’s just one problem with these hopeful announcements. Genuine moral relativists are as rare as unicorns.

True, many have proclaimed their moral relativism. To that I can only reply, watch their behavior. You will soon find each and every one of these “relativists” making morally loaded pronouncements about this or that social evil, wrong-headed political faction, or less than virtuous individual. In other words, their “moral relativism” is of a rather odd variety that occasionally makes it hard to distinguish their behavior from that of the more zealous moral bigots. Scratch the surface of any so-called “moral relativist,” and you will often find a moralistic bully. We are not moral relativists because it is not in the nature of our species to be moral relativists. The wellsprings of human morality are innate. One cannot arbitrarily turn them on or off by embracing this or that philosophy, or reading this or that book.

I am, perhaps, the closest thing to a moral relativist you will ever find, but when my moral emotions kick in, I’m not much different from anyone else. Just ask my dog. When she’s riding with me she’ll often glance my way with a concerned look as I curse the lax morals of other drivers. No doubt she’s often wondered whether the canine’s symbiotic relationship with our species was such a good idea after all. I know perfectly well the kind of people Paul Johnson was thinking of when he spoke of “moral relativists.” However, I’ve watched the behavior of the same types my whole life. If there’s one thing they all have in common, it’s a pronounced tendency to dictate morality to everyone else. They are anything but “amoral,” or “moral relativists.” The difference between them and Johnson is mainly a difference in their choice of outgroups.

Edvard Westermarck may have chosen the title Ethical Relativity for his brilliant analysis of human morality, yet he was well aware of the human tendency to perceive good and evil as real, independent things. The title of his book did not imply that moral (or ethical) relativism was practical for our species. Rather, he pointed out that morality is a manifestation of our package of innate behavioral predispositions, and that it follows that objective moral truths do not exist. In doing so he was pointing out a fundamental truth. Recognition of that truth will not result in an orgy of amoral behavior. On the contrary, it is the only way out of the extremely dangerous moral chaos we find ourselves in today.

The moral conundrum we find ourselves in is a result of the inability of natural selection to keep up with the rapidly increasingly complexity and size of human societies. For example, a key aspect of human moral behavior is its dual nature – our tendency to perceive others in terms of ingroups and outgroups. We commonly associate “good” traits with our ingroup, and “evil” ones with our outgroup. That aspect of our behavior enhanced the odds that we would survive and reproduce at a time when there was no ambiguity about who belonged in these categories. The ingroup was our own tribe, and the outgroup was the next tribe over. Our mutual antagonism tended to make us spread out and avoid starvation due to over-exploitation of a small territory. We became adept at detecting subtle differences between “us” and “them” at a time when it was unlikely that neighboring tribes differed by anything as pronounced as race or even language. Today we have given bad names to all sorts of destructive manifestations of outgroup identification without ever grasping the fundamental truth that the relevant behavior is innate, and no one is immune to it. Racism, anti-Semitism, bigotry, you name it. They’re all fundamentally the same. Those who condemn others for one manifestation of the behavior will almost invariably be found doing the same thing themselves, the only difference being who they have identified as the outgroup.

Not unexpectedly, behavior that accomplished one thing in the Pleistocene does not necessarily accomplish the same thing today. The disconnect is often absurd, leading in some cases to what I’ve referred to as morality inversions – moral behavior that promotes suicide rather than survival. That has not prevented those who are happily tripping down the path to their own extinction from proclaiming their moral superiority and raining down pious anathemas on anyone who doesn’t agree. Meanwhile, new versions of morality are concocted on an almost daily basis, each one pretending to objective validity, complete with a built in right to dictate “goods” and “bads” that never occurred to anyone just a few years ago.

There don’t appear to be any easy solutions to the moral mess we find ourselves in. It would certainly help if more of us could accept the fact that morality is an artifact of natural selection, and that, as a consequence, objective good and evil are figments of our imaginations. Perhaps then we could come up with some version of “absolute” morality that would be in tune with our moral emotions and at the same time allow us to interact in a manner that minimizes both the harm we do to each other and our exposure to the tiresome innovations of moralistic bullies. That doesn’t appear likely to happen anytime soon, though. The careers of too many moral pontificators and “experts on ethics” depend on maintaining the illusion. Meanwhile, we find evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and neuroscientists who should know better openly proclaiming the innate sources of moral behavior in one breath, and extolling some idiosyncratic version of “moral progress” and “human flourishing” in the next. As one of Evelyn Waugh’s “bright young things” might have said, it’s just too shy-making.

There is a silver lining to the picture, though. At least you don’t have to worry about “moral relativism” anymore.

On the Need to Suppress Freedom of Speech in the Interest of “Moral Progress”

In my last post I noted that, objectively speaking, there can be no such thing as “moral progress,” and that pursuing such a nonexistent thing as a goal is potentially dangerous. The reasons for this have to do with the way some of our innate behavioral traits manifest themselves in environments unlike the ones in which they evolved. As I pointed out in the post,

It is certainly possible to identify aspects of the expression of moral emotions that all human populations have in common, but particular aspects of those emotions can vary significantly between individuals, and between populations. It follows that we will never agree on what our “goals as a society” should be. Some subset of the individuals in a society may agree on the goals of “moral progress,” but what of those who don’t? Inevitably, they will be the evil ones, the “deplorables,” the outgroup whose opinions can be ignored because they are “morally bad.”

This dual nature of human morality based on our universal and powerful tendency to perceive others in terms of ingroups and outgroups is reason enough in itself to reject the notion of “moral progress.” We have tried to outlaw various manifestations of the behavior by giving them bad names, such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, bigotry, and so on. The result of such attempts has invariably been the creation of yet more outgroups. The hatred doesn’t disappear. Instead, it simply pops up again, even more virulent than before, but directed at some alternative outgroup that hasn’t yet been declared off limits.

A good illustration of how this works in practice just turned up in the Washington Post in an article entitled, “When free speech becomes a political weapon.” The author, Jennifer Delton, expresses concern about the threat of freedom of speech to “moral progress.” According to Delton, when freedom of speech is accorded to “evil” people, it is transmuted into “freedom of speech.” By this she means that it becomes a “political weapon,” which is then used by the “evil” people to impede “moral progress.”

As is often the case, Delton defines her ingroup in terms of ideology. “Good” people are those whose ingroup is defined by the same ideological shibboleths as hers, and “evil” people are those belonging to outgroups whose members challenge those shibboleths. More precisely, “Good” people are those whose beliefs are in harmony with “the internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism that marks the thinking of educated elites of both parties.” She cites Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as an example of the practical application of these ideals.

In common with most humans, Delton perceives her “Good” as an objective thing. In other words, she considers “internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism” to be “good in itself,” regardless of whether it is thought to be good or not. Obviously, it never occurs to her to explore the evolutionary reasons for this common illusion. Digging down through layers of cultural and environmental impedimenta to discover the innate predisposition(s) that are the “root cause” of her perception of “the Good” is certainly a project that would never occur to her. Still less would it occur to her to consider the question, interesting from a biological, if not a moral point of view, of whether her response to the emotions in question enhance or reduce the odds that the responsible genes that she happens to carry will survive and reproduce. Instead, she merely cites the authority of the “educated elites of both parties,” and leaves it at that.

Since the only “truly good” things are the “Goods” that define her ideology, it follows that any other supposed rights or principles are not good in themselves, and can be dispensed with to the extent that they threaten those things that are. Freedom of speech belongs in this category. As Delton puts it, referring to the New Deal,

Liberals would be chumps to let a principled commitment to “freedom of speech” undercut the pragmatic goal of political survival, which was the only way to ensure progress in civil rights and social welfare.

In this case, Delton is referring to the decision by an earlier generation of “Good” liberals to end their support of freedom of speech for Communists. This was to be done, not because the Communists had murdered millions of people, and enslaved millions more, or because they sought to use freedom of speech to destroy the system that defended that freedom. Indeed, Delton doesn’t perceive Communists as an outgroup at all. Instead, Communists were to be deprived of freedom of speech because they were being used as tools by those who were “really evil.” In Delton’s words,

Their presence in liberal organizations made liberals vulnerable to Republican and conservative attacks. So those liberals interested in political success (and in preserving the New Deal) drove them out of politics.

If freedom of speech could be legitimately denied to Communists because they were a mere annoyance, it must be doubly legitimate to deny it to conservatives, who are “truly evil.” However, Delton isn’t brazen enough, or at least not brazen enough yet, to say, “I think freedom of speech should be denied to conservatives,” which is what she actually means. Instead, she falls back on the distinction between freedom of speech and “freedom of speech.” Of course, that begs the question, “What’s the difference?” According to Delton,

Philosopher Sidney Hook hinged his argument about speech on the distinction between the free flow of ideas, which the First Amendment protected, and actions, which it did not. He said liberals had no problem with Communists’ ideas, which they were free to expound upon and disseminate. The problem lay in their organized actions, which involved, “all sorts of stratagems, maneuvers, and illegal methods, evasions and subterfuges” developed by Lenin to subvert democracy.”

There’s no need to wade through swamps of philosophical mumbo-jumbo in a vain attempt to understand the obscure chain of events by which the “free flow of ideas” is transmogrified into “all sorts of stratagems, maneuvers, and illegal methods, evasions, and subterfuges.” That Gordian knot is easily cut if you simply assume that the former applies to speech by those who belong to Ms. Delton’s ingroup, and the latter to speech by those who do not. So it is that any attempt by “evil” people, that is, those who don’t quite see eye to eye with Ms. Delton touching on the universal benefits of “internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism,” to assert and defend their freedom of speech becomes a “right to create political spectacle and instigate violence.” Apparently more or less the same logic is used to defend the assertion that attractive women who don’t wear a burka “create a public spectacle and instigate rape.”

Ms. Delton makes sure that her readers realize that anyone who disagrees with her opinion is evil. Having compared them to Communists, she doubles down by claiming that they are Nazis on top of that:

It was one thing to defend the American Nazi Party’s right to march in Skokie, Ill. in 1977, when the liberal establishment and mainstream media were still intact and the American Nazi Party was a marginal fringe group. The group was offensive, but neither its actions nor its ideas posed a threat to the political or social order, which was stable. The situation is different today, with an erratic President Trump in the White House, elites in disarray and white nationalism on the rise.

I note in passing the degree of panic such hyperbole reveals on the left of the political spectrum in response to the recent election. After dragging in the Communists and the di rigueur Nazis, Delton throws in some pejoratives to insure that even the most obtuse won’t fail to grasp that “conservatives = evil!”

Quoting Voltaire is not going to preserve anyone’s liberties – least of all those populations most vulnerable to vicious racist, misogynist and anti-Semitic attacks.

Note that racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism are merely different forms of outgroup identification that have been deemed by common agreement to be evil. However, they are all symptoms of the same phenomenon; blind hatred of outgroups in the context of an environment radically different from the one in which that innately motivated behavior evolved. Ms. Delton is no less a bigot merely because her hatred is directed at an outgroup based on ideology rather than race, sex, or religion, and one that doesn’t yet happen to be among those that are considered “off limits.” Of course, there is an alternative explanation. The people she hates may really be trying their very best to do things that they consciously believe are evil. They may really be mortified if they pass the day without committing three or four bad deeds. I wouldn’t put it past Ms. Delton to believe as much. However, I have my doubts.

The point here isn’t that Mr. Delton is a bad person. The identification of something she happens to want with “objective good” is a delusion common to almost every other human being on the planet. I merely point out that the delusion can be inconvenient if you happen to value your right to speak freely, and downright deadly if you happen to be a Jew or a “bourgeois” in the wrong place at the wrong time. It follows that it would behoove us to at least be aware of the danger.

I note in passing that the most extreme forms of the delusion are currently found among individuals who are on the left of the ideological spectrum. That has not always been the case, and is, of course, no basis for concluding that leftists are “really evil.” However, we can consider why this is the case. I think part of the reason is that leftists like Ms. Delton imagined that they were safely in control of the tools needed to shape popular opinion, including the academy, the media, and the entertainment industry. The results of the election were a terrible shock to many of them. Ever since they have been frantically trying to think up ways to nullify those results and reassert their status and power. Part of that project includes plugging the leaks that allowed thought crime to poison the minds of impressionable “deplorables” to begin with. That entails denying access to a public forum to anyone who disagrees with “good” ideology, if necessary with the aid of modern day “antifa” storm troopers.

It is very unlikely that my little blog will convince enough people that “moral progress” is an illusion to matter. It is much too delicious for human beings to believe in their own moral righteousness, and on the Left that sentiment has now become, for all practical purposes, an indispensable fetish, comparable to a form of religious fanaticism. At best, I can point out the danger of the all but universal faith in “moral progress,” and advise my readers that, if they value freedom of speech, it is likely they will have to fight for it.

The “Islamophobia” of Richard Dawkins; Have We Reached Peak Insanity Yet?

KPFA radio in Berkeley recently invited Richard Dawkins to discuss his latest book, Science in the Soul: Collected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.” Now, however, he has been disinvited. The reason given by the sponsors, along with an abject apology that is now a familiar feature of such self-humiliation rituals, was as follows:

We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people. KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech. While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech. We apologize for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins views much earlier. We also apologize to all those inconvenienced by this cancellation.

Really? KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech? Right! The kind of free speech a Communist apparatchik in eastern Europe would have joyfully embraced in the 1950’s. Whether you like Richard Dawkins or not, there is no denying that the author of books such as The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion is one of foremost scientific writers and thinkers of our time. Denial of a public forum to someone like him is a particularly egregious form of censorship, and the very opposite of “support for serious free speech.” The idea that KPFA has a problem with hurtful and offensive speech is beyond ludicrous. As I write this, the lead story on their website includes the following:

Trump is Appallingly Ignorant on Healthcare; Puts Greed Above Human Lives; David Cay Johnston: GOP Budget Redistributes Money to the Rich; Helps Make U.S. a Police State; Rights Advocates: Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity Set Up as a Pretext for Voter Suppression; Trump and the Russian Money Trail: Trump’s Ties to Oligarchs Go Back Decades; Married to the Mob: Investigative Journalist Craig Unger on What Trump Owes the Russian Mafia.

Nothing Dawkins has ever written about Islam even comes close to being as “hurtful” and “offensive” as the above. Obviously KPFA has no problem whatsoever with hurtful and offensive language per se. They do have a problem with any criticism, no matter how mild, and how truthful, of any of the identity groups that are deemed “good,” and are therefore protected by the regressive Left ingroup.

If the whole “Islamophobia” charade hasn’t reached peak insanity, it must be approaching it very quickly. Recently a flash mob of Moslems rioted and sexually assaulted several women at a fair in the German City of Schorndorf. I could find not a single headline or byline in the German legacy media the day after the event that identified the attackers as other than “youth.” The US media were similarly coy about identifying the Minnesota policeman who shot and killed an Australian woman who was unarmed, dressed in pajamas, and merely trying to report a sexual assault, as a Somali Moslem. One could cite countless other examples of the legacy media “protecting” the rest of us from the truth in this way. Any criticism of Islam, no matter how mild, is deemed “Islamophobia.”

The weird nexus between the regressive Left and Islam is remarkable in its own right. Many of the former tend to be fascinated by radical mass movements that peddle promises of a paradise to come. Communism was a natural fit, but its formerly powerful appeal has been drowned in oceans of blood. Now, at least for the time being, the only game in town for those whose tastes run to rabid fanaticism on behalf of messianic worldviews is radical Islam. Hence this odd couple’s incongruous love affair.

Is there really even such a thing as completely irrational and unjustified “Islamophobia,” or is there really some reasonable basis for being wary of Moslems and their ongoing penetration of western societies? After all, freedom of religion is considered a fundamental principle in most western democracies. One of the best known statements thereof is the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and became state law in 1786. The text included the following:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

However, according to another clause in the law,

That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.

Well, principles have broken out into overt acts against peace and good order on numerous occasions, most notably on September 11, 2001. The usual rationalization of this fact is that Islam is a “religion of peace,” and the persons committing these acts simply don’t understand their own religion. This is a dubious assertion in view of the fact that the “persons committing these acts” have often been schooled in Islamic madrassas, and have been steeped in the religion their whole lives, whereas the peddlers of the “religion of peace” nostrum have seldom even read the Quran.

The idea that Islam is a “religion of peace” is absurd on the face of it. The populations of Egypt and the rest of North Africa as well as much of the Middle East, including Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel were formerly predominantly Christian, Jewish, and/or Zoroastrian. They did not become Moslem by peaceful penetration, but by the most extensive and successful campaign of military aggression and colonialism the world has ever seen. At one time Spain and much of southeastern Europe as well as Sicily, Crete, Cyprus and many other large and small Mediterranean islands also fell victim to Moslem aggression, but managed to expel their conquerors, sometimes with and sometimes without outside help.

As for the Quran itself, it hardly supports the notion that Islam is a “religion of peace.” One can certainly cherry pick verses that seem to suggest that Moslems and infidels can live at peace with one another. However, these periods of peace are, at best, only breathing spells in a campaign of violence that must continue until the whole world is Moslem. Peace is certainly not an option if Moslems have the upper hand. For example, from verse 38 of Sura 57,

Be not fainthearted then; and invite not the infidels to peace when ye have the upper hand: for God is with you, and will not defraud you of the recompense of your works.

and verse 4 of the same Sura,

When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads till ye have made a great slaughter among them, and of the rest make fast the fetters.

From Sura 9, verse 124,

Believers! wage war against such of the infidels as are your neighbors, and let them find you rigorous: and know that God is with those who fear him.

and finally, from Sura 8, verse 40,

Fight against them till strife be at an end, and the religion be all of it God’s.

Homosexuals are condemned to hellfire in several places. See, for example, Sura 27, Verses 55-60. The Quran condones slavery, and particularly the sexual slavery of women. See for example, Sura 23, Verse 6, which praises those,

who restrain their appetites, save with their wives, or the slaves whom their right hands possess.

and, from Sura 4, Verse 28,

Forbidden to you also are married women, except those who are in your hands as slaves; This is the law of God for you.

Western feminists are strangely silent about the plight of their sisters in Moslem countries in spite of such passages such as the following from Sura 4 (Women), Verse 38,

Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God hath gifted the one above the other.

And, according to Sura 4, Verse 12,

God commandeth you to give the male the portion of two females.

Christians, or at any rate those who associate the word “begotten” with Christ and those who believe in the Trinity are considered so evil that they will burn in hell forever. For example, from Sura 10, verses 69-71,

They say, “God hath begotten children.” No! by His glory! He is the self-sufficient. All that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth is His! Have ye warranty for that assertion? What! speak ye of God that which ye know not? Say: “Verily, they who devise this lie concerning God shall fare ill.” A portion have they in this world! Then to Us they return! Then make We them to taste the vehement torment, for they were unbelievers.

As for the Trinity, from Sura 9, Verse 6,

Attack those who join gods with God in all, as they attack you in all: and know that God is with those who fear Him.

and from Sura 5, Verse 77,

They surely are infidels who say, “God is the third of three:” for there is no God but one God: and if they refrain not from what they say, a grievous chastisement shall light on such of them as are infidels.

Moslems are explicitly forbidden from taking Jews or Christians as friends, hardly a promising recommendation for a thriving, multicultural society. For example, from Sura 5, Verse 56,

O believers! take not the Jews or Christians as friends. They are but one another’s friends. If any one of you taketh them for his friends, he surely is one of them! God will not guide the evil doers.

and, from Sura 4, Verse 91,

They desire that ye should be infidels as they are infidels, and that ye should be alike. Take therefore none of them for friends.

There are several other similar passages in the Quran. Moslems, who are quick to claim freedom of religion for themselves, deny it to others, and particularly to those who may have been born to Moslem parents but reject Moslem teachings. For example, from Sura 3, Verses 84-85,

As for those who become infidels, after having believed, and then increase their infidelity – their repentance shall never be accepted. These! they are the erring ones. As for those who are infidels, and die infidels, from no one of them shall as much gold as the earth could contain be accepted, though he should offer it in ransom. These! a grievous punishment awaiteth them; and they shall have none to help them.

Early Moslem visitors to western countries were often nonplussed by the existence of parliaments and other secular legislative bodies. After all, the law had been handed down by Muhammed in the form of Sharia. Surveys consistently show that large percentages of Moslems still believe that Sharia should be the basis of all law. In other words, Islam is not just another religion. Its dogmas apply as much in the realm of politics as they do in theology. As Milo Yiannopoulos wrote in his book, Dangerous,

Islam is not like other religions. It’s more inherently prescriptive and it’s much more political.

He also notes the disconnect between the principles the Left is supposed to stand for and its support for Islam:

There is nothing else which better exposes the modern Left’s rank hypocrisy, their disregard for the facts, and their hatred for the West and all it stands for than their attitude to Islam. Every noble principle the Left claims to uphold, from rights for women to gay liberation, even diversity itself, dies on the altar of its sycophantic defense of Islam.

I doubt that any sincere Moslem, at least to the extent that he is honest, could claim that any of the above is “hurtful,” or “offensive,” unless they are “hurt” and “offended” by facts. It is simply a truthful accounting of relevant historical events and a summary of some of the things the Quran actually teaches. The Left can dream as much as it wants about a future border-free paradise of perfect equality and human brotherhood. That dream will be shattered by a much grimmer reality in any country where Moslems get the upper hand.

Leftist are masters at manipulating moral emotions to get what they want. They claim that the rest of us are “immoral” for resisting the “paradise” they have in store for us. That’s why, when it comes to morality, its always a good idea to go back to basics. Always consider why the moral emotions exist to begin with. They exist because they happened to enhance the odds that the genes responsible for their existence would survive and reproduce. Those genes are the root cause for the existence of all human moralities, in all their gaudy variations.

Does tolerating the unlimited immigration of culturally and/or genetically alien hordes enhance or diminish the odds that those same genes will survive and reproduce in the existing population? The answer is the latter – it will diminish the odds. It will lead to all the social disorder potentially ending in civil war that history has taught us to expect when ingroups are brought in close proximity to their outgroups. Beyond that, it will greatly increase the environmental damage the Left claims to be so concerned about, exacerbating it by further increasing what are clearly already excessive populations in terms of the health of the planet we all depend on for survival. In fact, if one takes the facts of human nature into account, enabling such unlimited immigration is nothing short of suicidal.

Of course, there is nothing inherently “evil” about the Left’s version of morality. In the end, it amounts to manipulating moral emotions to accomplish ends that are the exact opposite of the reasons those emotions exist to begin with. I personally prefer to pursue goals that are in harmony with those reasons, if only for the sake of consistency. Objectively speaking, that doesn’t make me morally better or morally worse than the most Islamophilic Leftist you can imagine. However, it strikes me that any life form that pursues its own destruction is dysfunctional, and I find it unaesthetic to consider myself dysfunctional. In short, I haven’t adopted the Left’s version of morality for the same reason that I don’t try to walk on my hands instead of my feet, or smell with my ears instead of my nose.

As for Dawkins, he’s said some “hurtful” and “offensive” things about all religions, not just Islam. However, regardless of who they happen to “hurt,” or “offend,” those things may just happen to be true. Whether in reading his books or listening to his talks, it would be useful to at least consider that possibility.