{"id":2171,"date":"2010-10-11T13:39:32","date_gmt":"2010-10-11T18:39:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=2171"},"modified":"2010-10-11T16:00:31","modified_gmt":"2010-10-11T21:00:31","slug":"morality-and-the-metamorphosis-of-secular-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2010\/10\/11\/morality\/morality-and-the-metamorphosis-of-secular-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Morality and the Metamorphosis of Secular Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Secular religions have taken the place of spiritual ones among many “progressive” intellectuals.\u00a0 As I noted in an earlier post<\/a>, they are distinguishable by an irrational belief in a disembodied “Good” as opposed to a more traditional “God.”\u00a0 Communism was the quintessential example of such a religion, but there are many other variants, just as there are many Christian sects.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are many similarities between the true believers of both types of faith.\u00a0 For example, pathologically pious secular zealots imagine themselves as saviors of mankind in this world, just as their spiritual brethren imagine themselves as saviors of souls in the next world.\u00a0 Armed with an invincible faith in their intellectual superiority over other mortals, they would guide the rest of us benighted souls who would really prefer that they just leave us alone to a brave new world of “human flourishing,” just as earlier zealots felt duty-bound to herd us all towards the pearly gates.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For many years, Communism was the most viral and toxic variant of either type of religion on the planet.\u00a0 Since its demise, that honor has passed to radical Islam.\u00a0 As Eric Hofer<\/a> noted in “The True Believer,” there are remarkable psychological similarities among the zealots of all faiths, regardless of the particular dogmas that inspire them.\u00a0 His observations have been abundantly confirmed in recent years, as “progressive” true believers, left high and dry by the collapse of Communism, have begun a counter-intuitive flirting with radical Islam like so many moths fascinated by a candle.\u00a0 For them it represents, in a sense, the only game in town.<\/p>\n

Secular religions are as vulnerable to the advance of human knowledge as the spiritual ones.\u00a0 Fanatics of both types have a similar allergic reaction to the truth if it happens to challenge their dogmas.\u00a0 For the secular faithful, one such dogma has long been the perfectibility of human beings, dependent on a belief that human behavioral traits are almost infinitely malleable.\u00a0 Hypotheses to the effect that our behavior, including our moral behavior, is actually profoundly influenced by innate predispositions hard-wired in our brains flew in the face of this aspect of the secular narrative.\u00a0 The faithful reacted furiously to such ideas, resisting them in the teeth of more than abundant confirming evidence until, in recent years, the weight of evidence became overwhelming.\u00a0 Their intuitions were right; they had good reason to do so.<\/p>\n

In fact, acceptance of innate behavior has been every bit as devastating to irrational belief in “The Good” as Darwin’s great theory was to irrational belief in God.\u00a0 With respect to moral behavior, in particular, increasingly frequent and spectacular demonstrations of the physical and chemical basis of the associated emotions, the locations of their origins in the brain down to the level of neurons, and the precise bits of our genome that give rise to them, as well as the observation of analogous moral behavior in animals, have made it abundantly obvious that “The Good” is an artifact of moral emotions similar to those in other species, unremarkable except for the fact that they are experienced and cognitively interpreted in the minds of creatures of exceptionally high intelligence.\u00a0 Our perception of “The Good” is entirely dependent for its existence on evolved traits that were added to our repertoire because, at various times in the distant past with no resemblance to the present, they happened to promote our survival.\u00a0 As such, it cannot exist as a thing in itself, independent of individual human minds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Our moral emotions have and will continue to have an undeniable psychological power over virtually every one of us.\u00a0 However, we have now learned much about the nature of those emotions, the causes that give rise to them in the brain, and the evolutionary nature of their origins.\u00a0 It is no longer plausible or rational to claim that they have any transcendental significance as objective things independent of and existing for reasons unrelated to those origins. \u00a0That does not mean that the dogmas of secular religions will cease to exist.\u00a0 It does mean that belief in those dogmas is no longer compatible with scientific fact or reason.\u00a0 As a result, it will become increasingly necessary for secular true believers to defend them as spiritual true believers have done in the past; with obscurantism.<\/p>\n

As noted in earlier posts, we have already begun to see this in the case of the “blank slate.”\u00a0 The true believers have been forced to abandon it, at least in its most absurd incarnations, but have created a whole new narrative to replace it.\u00a0\u00a0For example, the most brilliant,\u00a0influential and articulate opponents of the “blank slate” in the 60s and 70s\u00a0pointed out\u00a0that there were negative aspects of innate human behavior that we would do well to understand if we were to have any hope of avoiding the endless repetition of warfare, violence, and mayhem in human history.\u00a0 These are aspects of human behavior that are distinctly out of tune with the latest secular narrative.\u00a0 As a result, regardless of the fact that thinkers like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey were right and their opponents were wrong regarding\u00a0one issue of overarching significance they were debating, the hypothesis of innate behavior, they are studiously ignored by modern secular zealots.\u00a0 It is as if they\u00a0never existed or, if they did, their ideas could be dismissed with a wave of the hand as “utterly and totally wrong.”\u00a0 We are assured that “The Good” can still be achieved if we are just a bit more judicious about “adjusting the knobs” of our moral behavior, ushering in a wonderful new era of “human flourishing” in spite of the abundance of historical disasters associated with such noble plans, and their increasingly obvious disconnect with reality.\u00a0 In the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary, “The Good,” lives on, an independent, objective thing dangling out there in never-never land.<\/p>\n

The “proofs” offered up for the existence of “The Good” by the priests of secular religions yield nothing to the miscellaneous “proofs” of the existence of God devised over the years for their unabashed rejection of intellectual clarity and common sense.\u00a0 Here’s an example taken from true believer Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”:<\/p>\n

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

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

Voila!\u00a0 “The Good” ascends triumphant from its humble origin.\u00a0 Like Pinocchio, it sheds its subjective strings and dances about before our noses, a real, honest-to-goodness thing-in-itself.\u00a0 Let this serve as a lesson to you, dear reader.\u00a0 Never let a secular religious zealot draw you into a conversation about the real existence of the number two.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Brave New World beckons!\u00a0 A manifesto has just been released by attendees at the recent Edge Conference on “The New Science of Morality.”\u00a0 Referred to by its signatories as a “Consensus Statement<\/a>,” it includes eight sections, the first seven of which are a brief summary of what passes as the state-of-the-art in our scientific understanding of morality.\u00a0 However, the eighth is a somewhat diffident incarnation of the latest version of the holy scriptures:<\/p>\n

Moral systems support human flourishing, to varying degrees <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

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

It’s not quite as self-assured as something that, say, Calvin or Jonathan Edwards<\/a> might have written, but you get the drift.\u00a0 I’m sorry, dear reader, but it won’t help to suggest to these people that we might all “flourish” better if religious zealots, whether secular or spiritual, would refrain from foisting their dogmas on the rest of us.\u00a0 The pathologically pious have ye always with you.\u00a0 We’ve already had an abundant taste of how earlier versions of their sure-fire nostrums worked with Nazism, Communism, the Holy Inquisition, and a host of others.\u00a0 Let us take heed, lest, sharing the fate of the millions of victims of earlier versions of “The Good” in the 20th century, the next time we “flourish” becomes our last.<\/p>\n

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Secular religions have taken the place of spiritual ones among many “progressive” intellectuals.\u00a0 As I noted in an earlier post, they are distinguishable by an irrational belief in a disembodied “Good” as opposed to a more traditional “God.”\u00a0 Communism was the quintessential example of such a religion, but there are many other variants, just as … Continue reading “Morality and the Metamorphosis of Secular Religion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[48,6,28,67,5,66,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-good-and-evil","category-human-nature","category-ideology","category-morality","category-psychology","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-z1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2171"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2173,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171\/revisions\/2173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}