Trump – Helian Unbound

Morality in the Age of Trump

When it comes to morality, you might say Trump’s presidency was a “study” on a vast scale. If there are aliens out there watching us, I’m sure they found it instructive as far as that aspect of human behavior is concerned.

I haven’t posted for a while, so let’s recapitulate what morality actually is. In fact, it’s exactly what Darwin said it was; a manifestation in a highly intelligent animal of innate behavioral traits similar to those observed in many other species. Those traits exist by virtue of natural selection; they happened to improve the odds that the individual bearing the responsible genes would survive and reproduce. Edvard Westermarck pointed out some of the more significant implications of this fact in his “Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas,” published in 1906. More than a century has passed since his book appeared, and no one has improved on it since. Some of the more significant passages are as follows:

The moral concepts are essentially generalizations of tendencies in certain phenomena to call forth moral emotions.

We are not willing to admit that our moral convictions are a mere matter of taste, and we are inclined to regard convictions differing from our own as errors.

The error we commit by attributing objectivity to moral estimates becomes particularly conspicuous when we consider that these estimates have not only a certain quality, but a certain quantity. There are different degrees of badness and goodness, a duty may be more or less stringent, a merit may be smaller or greater. These quantitative differences are due to the emotional origin of all moral concepts.

As clearness and distinctness of the conception of an object easily produces the belief in its truth, so the intensity of a moral emotion makes him who feels it disposed to objectivize the moral estimate to which it gives rise, in other words, to assign to it universal validity. The enthusiast is more likely than anybody else to regard his judgments as true, and so is the moral enthusiast with reference to his moral judgments. The intensity of his emotions makes him the victim of an illusion.

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

The “enthusiasts” Westermarck referred to flourished in the era of Trump, and were as delusional as ever. This was particularly true in the case of the ubiquitous ingroup/outgroup aspect of human morality first noted by Herbert Spencer, and discussed in depth by Sir Arthur Keith in his “A New Theory of Human Evolution.” For four years the headlines of the media controlled by Trump’s enemies were dominated on an almost daily basis by furious denunciations of the President as a morally bad man. Look through these headlines and you will find virtually every negative attribute commonly attributed to the “other” since the dawn of recorded history. Trump was an outsider. As such, it was easy for Washington insiders of both parties to perceive him as “other,” and relegate him to their respective outgroups. Some of the most furious denunciations of Trump as a “bad” man came from within his own party.

It is noteworthy that ingroup/outgroup behavior, along with all of the other traits we commonly lump together under the rubric of morality, evolved at a time radically different from the present. Presumably, when it evolved it tended to discourage small groups of hunter-gatherers from clustering too close to each other, and exhausting the resources available in a given area. Obviously, it no longer serves the same purpose in modern societies. Among other things, it has been a prime motivator for the warfare that has so frequently blighted our history, the source of endless bloodshed over arcane differences of opinion in matters of religion that are now long forgotten, and the motivator of mass murder against convenient outgroups such as the Jews in the case of the Nazis, and the “bourgeoisie” in the case of the Communists. This is hardly the only aspect of human moral behavior that accomplishes more or less the opposite in modern societies from what it did in the time of our stone age ancestors.

It would seem to be high time for us to finally accept and come to grips with the emotional nature of our morality, but there are few signs of that happening. Many modern philosophers and intellectuals claim to believe that morality is subjective. I am not aware of a single one who acts as if they believe it. What we actually observe among them is a tribute to the power of our moral emotions.

In the case of Trump, one would expect that prominent intellectuals who are convinced defenders of the theory of evolution by natural selection, claim to be aware of the Darwinian origins of morality and, hence, its subjective nature, and have, in some cases, actually written books about the subject, would at least be somewhat reticent to publish moral judgments of anyone as if they were stating objective facts. Chimerically, in the case of Trump, we see precisely the opposite. Consider, for example, the case of Richard Dawkins, who admitted the evolutionary origins of morality in his “The Selfish Gene.” According to Dawkins,

Is Twitter’s ban of Trump a worrying Free Speech issue? On reflection I think not because

(a) Trump went far beyond expression of opinion (which should be protected) to outright lies, demonstrable falsehoods. Falsehoods, moreover which were calculated to

(b) incite violence.

Dawkins pronounces this moral judgment of Trump as if it were objectively true that Trump is evil. He does not qualify it as a personal opinion, but demands that Trump be punished. Obviously, as a prominent atheist, Dawkins lacks even the fig leaf of a God as an authority for stating his emotional reaction to Trump as a moral “fact.” The rationalizations on which he bases his judgment are garden variety instances of outgroup identification; that the “other” is a liar, and incites violence. Ironically, such charges are actually more credible in the case of Dawkins himself.

For example, in his The God Delusion he repeats the “demonstrable lie” that Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, ever said, “We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand.” Indeed, even the false quote is wrong. The “correct” original claim is that Watt said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.” In fact, Watt never said any such thing, and Bill Moyers and others who have repeated the claim have been forced to retract it. It is hard to believe that Dawkins isn’t aware of this “demonstrable lie,” yet as far as I know he has never corrected it. As far as “inciting violence” is concerned, Dawkins’ repeated description of evangelicals in the U.S. as the “American Taliban” are ostensibly far better calculated to inspire violence against them than anything Trump ever said.

According to Jerry Coyne, another prominent Darwinian who has publicly stated his belief that morality is subjective,

Though there are arguments on both sides, I tend to approve of both the House impeaching Trump and the Senate trying him, even though they won’t secure a conviction. The symbolic act is a powerful one, which, though it may be divisive, will only divide those who support America’s democratic values from those who support fascism. Congress needs to make a statement, and impeachment, even without conviction, is a statement.

Here, Coyne not only claims that Trump is evil without qualification as a matter of objective fact, but makes a similar claim about the tens of millions who support him. They are all “fascists.”

Jonathan Haidt, the most “conservative” of all the prominent supposedly Darwinian moralists, is no exception. In his words,

The psychologists I spoke to before Trump was elected overwhelmingly said that the diagnosis they would make based on what they saw is narcissistic personality disorder. And I think we’ve seen that continuously since his election, that he tends to make everything about him. And so that is pretty much the opposite of ethical leadership, where it needs to be about the team and our shared interest. I don’t see much of a chance of us really coming together and overcoming our differences before the election. Or, basically, as long as Trump is in office.

Here, Haidt states that Trump is “unethical” as an objective fact, a claim that flies in the face of what he has written about morality in “The Righteous Mind,” and “The Happiness Hypothesis.”

In short, however one cares to judge him, Trump has done a wonderful job of exposing the difference between what the most prominent “subjective moralists” among our public intellectuals say about morality, and how they actually apply it. Just as Westermarck pointed out long ago, moral judgments are based on an illusion, but it is a very powerful illusion. It is powerful enough to inspire the Dawkins, Coynes and Haidts of the world to issue moral judgments in ways that would be completely irrational absent the implicit assumption that good and evil are real, objective things.

Suppose these gentry actually wanted to be consistent with what they’ve said about morality in their judgments of Trump. They would have to say something like, “I realize that my moral emotions exist because they enhanced the odds that my ancestors would survive in the days when they were hunter-gatherers. After due consideration, I’ve decided that I want to act in a way that is consistent with the reason that these emotions exist to begin with. I believe Trump is a threat to my genetic survival for reasons a, b, and c. Therefore, I’ve decided to resist him by pretending that he is a “truly bad” man. Alternatively, they might say, “I know why my moral emotions exist. However, after due consideration, I’ve decided that doesn’t matter to me, and I just want to be happy. Pretending that the illusions spawned by my moral emotions are real makes me happy. I enjoy experiencing the illusion that Trump is an objectively bad man. Therefore, I’ve decided to pretend that it’s actually true.

Obviously, no such statements have ever been heard of from any public intellectual, and I expect none will be made anytime soon. We will continue to live in the same old, familiar world of moral chaos, where new moral fashions are invented on the fly, and then paraded about as if they represented some kind of objective truth. As usual, the winners at this game will be those who are the cleverest at manipulating moral emotions. I need hardly add that the game is a dangerous one, given that the emotions in question are more than likely to accomplish the opposite in the world we live in today to what they accomplished when they evolved. Deal with it, my friends. When it comes to morality, the Darwinians have forgotten all about Darwin.

Good News! Academics Prove Trump is Reducing Prejudice

As I noted in my last post, we have an innate tendency to perceive others in terms of ingroup and outgroup(s), and to apply different versions of morality to each. We associate the ingroup with good, and the outgroup with evil. There was no ambiguity about the identity of the outgroup when this behavior evolved. It was commonly just the closest group to ours. As a result, any subtle but noticeable difference between “us” and “them” was adequate for distinguishing ingroup from outgroup. Today, however, we are aware not only of the next group over, but of a vast number of other human beings with whom we share our planet. Our ingroup/outgroup behavior persists in spite of that. We still see others as either “us” or “them,” often with disastrous results. You might say the trait in question has become dysfunctional. It is unlikely to enhance our chances of survival the way it did in the radically different environment in which it evolved. In modern societies it spawns a myriad forms of prejudice, any one of which can potentially pose an existential threat to large numbers of people. It causes us to stumble from one disaster to another. We respond by trying to apply bandages, in the form of “evil” labels, for the types of prejudice that appear to cause the problem, such as racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, etc. It is a hopeless game. New forms of prejudice will always pop up to replace the old ones. The only practical way to limit the damage is to understand the underlying innate behavior responsible for all of them. We are far from achieving this level of self-understanding.

Consider, for example, Continue reading “Good News! Academics Prove Trump is Reducing Prejudice”

Trump and Sex Talk: The Left Rediscovers its Inner Prude

D. C. McAllister just posted an article entitled “America, You Have No Right to Judge Donald Trump” over at PJ Media. Setting aside the question of “rights” for the moment, I have to admit that she makes some good points. Here’s one of the better ones:

Those who are complaining about Trump today have no basis for their moral outrage. That’s because their secular amoral worldview rejects any basis for that moral judgment. Any argument they make against the “immorality” of Trump is stolen, or at least borrowed for expediency, from a religious worldview they have soundly rejected.

Exactly! It’s amazing that the religious apologists the Left despises can see immediately that they “have no basis for their moral outrage,” and yet the “enlightened” people on the Left never seem to get it. You can say what you want about the “religious worldview,” but a God that threatens to burn you in hell for billions and trillions of years unless you do what he says seems to me a pretty convincing “basis” for “acting morally.” The “enlightened” have never come up with anything of the sort. One typically finds them working themselves into high dudgeon of virtuous indignation without realizing that the “basis” for all their furious anathemas is nothing but thin air.

The reason for their latest outburst of pious outrage is threadbare enough. They claim that Trump is “immoral” because he engaged in “locker room talk” about women in what he supposed was a private conversation. Are you kidding me?! These people have just used their usual bullying tactics to impose a novel version of sexual morality on the rest of us that sets the old one recommended by a “religious worldview” on its head. Now, all of a sudden, we are to believe that they’ve all rediscovered their inner prude. Heaven forefend that anyone should dare to think of women as “objects!”

Puh-lease! I’d say the chances that 99 out of 100 of the newly pious MSM journalists who have been flogging this story have never engaged in similar talk or worse are vanishingly small. The other one is probably a eunuch. As for the “objectification of women,” I’m sorry to be a bearer of bad tidings, but that’s what men do. They are sexually attracted to the “object” of a woman’s body because it is their nature to be so attracted. That is how they evolved. It is highly unlikely that any of the current pious critics of “objectification” would be around today to register their complaints if that particular result of natural selection had never happened.

And what of Trump? Well, if nothing else, he’s been a very good educator. He’s shown us what the elites in the Republican Party really stand for. I personally will never look at the McCains, Romneys, and Ryans of the world in quite the same way. At the very least, I’m grateful to him for that.

Is Trump Evil?

No.

The question itself is absurd. It implies the existence of things – objective good and evil – that are purely imaginary. Good and evil seem to be real, but they are actually only words we assign to subjective emotional responses. Darwin was aware of the fact, as demonstrated in his writings. Westermarck stated it as a scientific theory in his Ethical Relativity. Arthur Keith and others before him noted critical aspect of human morality that is commonly ignored to this day; its dual nature. Robert Ardrey referred to it as the “Amity-Enmity Complex,” noting that we categorize others into ingroups, with which we associate “good” qualities, and outgroups, with which we associate “evil.” Denial of the dual nature of morality has been one of the more damaging legacies of the Blank Slate. Among other things, it has obscured the reasons for the existence of such variants of outgroup identification as racism, religious bigotry, and anti-Semitism. In the process, it has obscured from the consciousness of those who are loudest in condemning these “evils” that they, too, have outgroups, which they commonly hate more bitterly and irrationally than those they accuse of such sins.

The current attempts in the UK to establish a travel ban on Donald Trump are a good illustration of the absurdities that are commonly the result of failure to recognize the simple truths stated above. As I write this, 570,000 Brits have signed a petition calling for such a ban. In response, the British parliament has begun debating the issue. All this is justified on moral grounds. Ask one of the petition signers why, exactly, Trump is evil, and typical responses would include the claim that he is a racist, a religious bigot, spreads “hate-speech,” etc. If one were to continue the line of questioning, asking why racism is bad, they might respond that it leads to inequality. Ask them why equality is good, and they might start losing patience with the questioner because, in fact, they don’t know. None of these saintly petition signers has the faintest clue why Trump is “really evil.” It’s no wonder. Legions of philosophers have been trying to catch the gaudy butterflies of “good” and “evil” for the last few millennia. They have failed for a very good reason. The butterflies don’t exist.

Let us attempt to bring the debate back into the real world. Trump wants to expel illegal immigrants from the U.S., and end immigration of Muslims. These are not irrational goals. As history demonstrates, they are both legally and physically possible. In both cases, they would recognize the existence of human nature in general, and our tendency to perceive others in terms of ingroups and outgroups in particular. They will result in the exclusion from the country of people who have historically perceived the lion’s share of the existing population of the United States as an outgroup. In the case of Moslems, their holy book, the Quran, includes many passages forbidding friendship with Christians and condemning those with commonly held Christian beliefs to burn in hell for eternity. In the case of Hispanics, they come from cultures that have historically perceived North Americans as exploiters and imperialist aggressors. Both of these groups, in turn, are typically perceived by Americans as belonging to outgroups. Allowing them to remain in or enter the country has already resulted in civil strife. If history is any guide, there is a non-trivial possibility that the eventual result will be civil war. These are outcomes that most current US citizens would prefer to avoid. They are being told, however, that to avoid being “racist,” or “bigoted,” or, in fine, “immoral,” they must accept these outcomes. In other words, to be “good,” they must practice an absurd form of altruism, in which they must make tangible sacrifices, even though the chances that they will ever receive anything back in return are nil. Otherwise, they will be “evil.” This unusual form of moral behavior is not encountered elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

Moral emotions certainly do not exist to promote “good” and defeat “evil.” They exist solely because, at points in time that were utterly unlike the present, they happened to increase the odds that the genes responsible for spawning them would survive and reproduce. Importing civil strife and, potentially, civil war, are not good strategies for promoting genetic survival. The subjective desire to direct moral emotions in order to accomplish goals that are in harmony with the reasons those emotions exist to begin with is neither “good” nor “evil.” However, as long as one recognizes the necessarily subjective nature of those goals, there is no basis for the claim that pursuing them is irrational. In short, expelling illegal immigrants and banning Muslim immigration are not “evil,” because there is no such thing as “evil,” beyond its subjective and dependent existence in the consciousness of individuals. They are, however, rational, in the sense that they are legal and achievable, and are also in harmony with the goal of genetic, not to mention cultural survival. Most US citizens seem to recognize this fact at some conscious or subconscious level. This explains their support for Trump, and what one might call their immune response to a deluge of culturally alien immigrants, whether legal or illegal. As so often happens, many of those who don’t “get it” are intellectuals, who have a disconcerting tendency to bamboozle themselves with ideological concoctions from which they imagine they can distill the “good,” often at the expense of others not afflicted with a similar talent for self-delusion.

The petition signers, on the other hand, would be somewhat embarrassed if asked to justify their condemnation of Trump on grounds other than such imaginary categories as “good” and “evil.” Perhaps they might argue that he is acting against the “brotherhood of man,” and that the “brotherhood of man” is a rational goal because it would reduce or eliminate inter-species warfare and other forms of violence, goals which are also in harmony with genetic survival. To this, one need merely respond, “Look in the mirror.” There, if they look closely, they will see the reflection of their own hatreds, and of their own outgroups. They are no more immune to human nature than the racists and bigots they so piously condemn. After their own fashion, like virtually every other human being on the planet, they are “racists and bigots” themselves. The only difference between them and those they condemn is in the choice of outgroup. Their own hatreds expose the “brotherhood of man” as a fantasy.

In short, all these Brits who imagine themselves dwelling on pinnacles of righteousness don’t oppose Trump’s policies on rational grounds. They oppose him because they hate him, and they hate him because he is included in their outgroup, and must, therefore, be “immoral.” In that they are similar to American Trump-haters. Typical Brits, on the other hand, have many other hatreds in common. Many of them have a long and abiding hatred of Americans. Going back to the years just after we gained our independence, one may consult the pages of the British Quarterly Review, probably their most influential journal during the first half of the 19th century. There you will find nothing but scorn for Americans and their “silly paper Constitution.” As anyone who has read a little history is aware, little changed between then and the most recent orgasm of anti-American hatred in Europe, in which the Brits were eager participants. It’s ironic that these hatemongers are now sufficiently droll to accuse others of “hate-speech.” Ideologues may be defined as those who identify their in- and outgroups according to ideological criteria. In common with ideologues everywhere, British ideologues hatred of the “other,” so defined, is as virulent as the hatreds of any racist ever heard of. In other words, to judge by their “racism,” they are at least as “evil” as the outgroups they condemn. The only difference is that their hatred is aroused by “races” that differ from them in political alignment rather than skin color. It is this variant of “racism” that they are now directing at Trump.

If Trump does become President, it would not be surprising to see him retaliate against the British hatemongers, if not in response to moral emotions, perhaps as a mere matter of self-defense. To begin, for example, he might expel the British scientists who are now so ubiquitous at our national weapons laboratories, with free access to both our classified nuclear weapons information and to expensive experimental facilities, to the construction and maintenance of which they have contributed little if anything. Beyond that, we might deliver some broad hints as to the violation of the Monroe Doctrine posed by their occupation of the Malvinas Islands, accompanied by some judicious arming of Argentina.

None of what I have written above implies nihilism, or moral relativism, nor does it exclude the possibility of an absolute morality. I merely recognize the fact that good and evil are not objective things, and draw the obvious conclusions. Facts are not good or evil. They are simply facts.