If you\u2019re a regular reader of this blog, you know my take on morality.\u00a0 It is the manifestation of a subset of our suite of innate behavioral traits.\u00a0 The traits in question exist because they evolved.\u00a0 Absent those traits, morality as we know it would not exist.\u00a0 It follows that\u00a0attempts to apply moral emotions in order to solve complex problems that arise in an environment that is radically different from the one in which the innate, \u201croot causes\u201d of morality evolved are irrational.\u00a0 That, however, is precisely how the Europeans are attempting to deal with an unprecedented flood of culturally and genetically alien refugees.\u00a0 The result is predictable \u2013 a classic morality inversion.<\/p>\n
The situation is unfolding\u00a0just as Jonathan Haidt<\/a> described it in his paper, The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail<\/a>.\u00a0 As he put it,<\/p>\n …moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, the “emotional dog” makes the judgment.\u00a0 Only after the judgment has been made does the “rational tail” begin “wagging the dog,”\u00a0concocting good sounding “reasons” for the judgment.\u00a0 One can get a better idea of what’s really going on by tracking down the source of the moral emotions involved.<\/p>\n Let’s consider, then,\u00a0what’s going on inside the “pro-refugee” brain.\u00a0 As in every other brain, the moral machinery distinguishes between ingroup and outgroup(s).\u00a0 In this case these categories are perceived primarily in ideological terms.\u00a0 The typical pro-refugee individual is often\u00a0a liberal, as that rather slippery term is generally understood in the context of 21st century western democracies.\u00a0\u00a0Such specimens will occasionally claim that they have expanded their\u00a0ingroup to include\u00a0“all mankind,” so that it is no longer possible for them to be “haters.”\u00a0 Nothing could be further from the truth.\u00a0 The outgroup have ye always with you.\u00a0 It comes with the human behavioral package.<\/p>\n If anything, the modern liberal hates more violently than any other subgroup.\u00a0 He commonly hates the people within\u00a0his own\u00a0culture\u00a0who disagree with\u00a0the shibboleths of his\u00a0ideology.\u00a0 Those particular “others,” almost always constitute\u00a0at least a part of his\u00a0outgroup.\u00a0 Outside of his own culture, ideology matters much less as a criterion of outgroup identification, as demonstrated, for example, by the\u00a0odd affinity between many Western liberals and radical Islamists.<\/p>\n Beyond that, however,\u00a0he is hardly immune from the more traditional forms of tribalism.\u00a0 For example, European liberals typically hate the United States.\u00a0 The intensity of that hatred tends to rise and fall over time, but can sometimes reach almost incredible levels.\u00a0 The most recent eruption occurred around the year 2000.\u00a0 Interestingly enough, one of the most spectacular examples\u00a0occurred in\u00a0Germany, the very country that now takes the cake for moralistic grandstanding in the matter of refugees.\u00a0 Der Spiegel<\/em><\/a>, its number one news magazine, was certainly in the avant-garde of the orgasm of hatred.\u00a0 It was often difficult to find any news about Germany on\u00a0the homepage of its website, so filled was it with furious, spittle-flinging rants about the imagined evils of “die Amerikaner.”\u00a0 However, virtually every other major German “news” outlet, whether it was nominally “liberal” or “conservative,” eventually jointed the howling pack.\u00a0 The most vicious examples of anti-American hate\u00a0were typically found in just those publications that are now quick to denounce German citizens who express concern about the overwhelming waves of refugees now pouring into the country as “haters.”<\/p>\n On the other hand, refugees, or at least those of the type now pouring into Europe,\u00a0seldom turn up in any of these common outgroups of the modern liberal.\u00a0 They land squarely in his ingroup.\u00a0 Humans are generally inclined to help ingroup members who, like the refugees, appear to be in trouble.\u00a0 This is doubly true of the liberal, who piques himself on what he imagines to be his moral superiority.\u00a0 Furthermore, as the refugees can be portrayed as victims of colonialism and imperialism, one might say they are a “most favored subset” of the ingroup.\u00a0 Throw in a few pictures of drowned children, impoverished women begging for help, etc., and all the moral ingredients are there to render the liberal an impassioned defender of the masses of humanity drawing a bead on his country.\u00a0 Nothing gives him more self-righteous joy than imagining himself a “savior.”\u00a0 This explains the fact that liberals are eternally in the process of “saving” one group of unfortunates or another without ever getting around to accomplishing anything actually recognizable as salvation.\u00a0 All the pleasure is in the charade.\u00a0 We find the same phenomenon\u00a0whether its a matter of “saving” the environment, “saving” the planet from global warming, or “saving” the poor.\u00a0 For the liberal, the pose is everything, and the reality nothing.<\/p>\n Which brings us back to the theme of this post.\u00a0 All the\u00a0sublime moral emotions now at play in the “salvation” of the refugees\u00a0have an uncanny resemblance to many other instances of moral behavior as practiced by the modern liberal.\u00a0 They have a\u00a0tendency to favor an outcome which is the opposite of\u00a0what the same moral emotions accomplished at an earlier time, and that led to their preservation by natural selection to begin with.\u00a0 In a word, as noted above, we are witnessing yet another classic\u00a0morality inversion.<\/p>\n Why an inversion?\u00a0 At the most fundamental level, because it will lead to the diminution or elimination of the genes\u00a0whose survival\u00a0a similar response once favored.\u00a0 At the moment, the pro-refugee side is calling the shots.\u00a0 It controls the governments of all the major European states.\u00a0 All of them more or\u00a0less fit the pattern described above, whether they are\u00a0nominally “liberal” or “conservative.”\u00a0\u00a0Indeed, foremost\u00a0among them is Germany’s “conservative’ regime, which has positively invited\u00a0a flood of\u00a0alien refugees across its borders.\u00a0 Based on historical precedent, the outcome of all this altruism isn’t difficult to foresee.\u00a0\u00a0In terms of “culture”\u00a0it will be a future of ethnic and religious strife, possibly leading to civil war.\u00a0 Genetically, it amounts to an attempt at ethnic suicide.\u00a0 I am well aware that these outcomes are disputed by those promoting the refugee inundation.\u00a0 However, I consider it pointless to argue about it.\u00a0 I am content to let history judge.<\/p>\n While we bide our time waiting for\u00a0the train wreck to unfold, it may be of interest to examine some of the techniques being used to maintain this remarkable instance of moralistic play-acting.\u00a0 I take most of my examples from the German media, which includes some of the most avid refugee cheerleaders.\u00a0 Predictably, outgroup vilification is part of the mix.\u00a0 As noted above, anyone who objects to the flood of refugees is almost universally denounced as a “hater”<\/a>\u00a0by just those people who\u00a0wear their own virulent hatreds on their sleeves while pretending they don’t exist.\u00a0 Of course, there are also the usual hackneyed violations of Godwin’s Law<\/a>.\u00a0 For example, Jacob Augstein, leftwing\u00a0stalwart for Der Spiegel<\/em>,\u00a0denounces them as “Browns” (i.e., brownshirts, Nazis) in a recent column<\/a>.\u00a0 On the “positive” side, the “conservative” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung optimistically suggests that the refugees will promote economic growth<\/a>.\u00a0 According to another article in Der Spiegel<\/em>, the eastern Europeans, who are not quite so refugee-friendly as the Germans, are “blowing their chance<\/a>.”\u00a0 The ominous\u00a0byline reads,<\/p>\n Europe is shrinking.\u00a0 The demographic downtrend is particularly dramatic in the eastern part of the continent, where the population is literally dying out.\u00a0 In spite of that, Hungary, Poland and company are resisting immigration.\u00a0 They will regret it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, before turning out the lights and committing suicide, the eastern Europeans should make sure an alien culture is in place to take over their territories when they’re gone.\u00a0 Of course, this flies in the face of the\u00a0impassioned rhetoric\u00a0the liberals have been feeding us about the need to reduce the surface population if we are to have an environmentally sustainable planet.<\/p>\n I note in passing that the European elites that are driving this process now\u00a0seem to have taken a step back from the brink.\u00a0 They are having second thoughts.\u00a0 They realize that they don’t have their populations behind them, and that their defiance of popular opinion might eventually threaten their own power.\u00a0 As a result, the number of news articles about the refugees and their plight is only a shadow of what it was only a few weeks ago.\u00a0 Mild reservations about refugee wowserism are starting to appear even in such gung-ho forums as Der Spiegel<\/em> where, as I write this, the lead article on their homepage is entitled “Now Things Are Getting Uncomfortable<\/a>.”\u00a0 Ya think!?\u00a0 The byline reads,<\/p>\n There is a chance in tone in the refugee crisis.\u00a0 SPD (German Social Democratic Party) chief Gabriel warms about limits to Germany’s ability to absorb refugees.\u00a0 Minister of the Interior de Maziere deplores the misbehavior of many migrants.\u00a0 The pressure on Chancellor Merkel is increasing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Ought” the Europeans to alter their behavior?\u00a0 Is what they consider “good” really “evil?”\u00a0 Are they ignoring the real “goal” of natural selection?\u00a0 Certainly not, at least from an objective point of view.\u00a0 There is no objective criterion for determining what anyone “ought” to do, anymore than there is an objective way to distinguish the difference between things, such as good and evil, that have no objective existence.\u00a0 They are\u00a0hardly failing to move towards the “goal” of natural selection, since that process does not\u00a0have either a purpose or a goal.\u00a0 As you may have gathered, my own subjective whim is to oppose unlimited immigration.\u00a0 I have, however, not the slightest basis for declaring that\u00a0anyone who doesn’t agree with me\u00a0is “evil.”\u00a0 At best, I can\u00a0try to explain my own whims.<\/p>\n I’m what you might call a moral compatibilist.\u00a0 I see myself sitting at the end of a chain of life spawned by genetic material that has evolved over a period of more than three billions years, surviving and reproducing over that incredible gulf of time\u00a0via an almost infinite array of successive forms, culminating in the species to which I now belong.\u00a0 I consider the whole process, and the universe I live in, awesome and wonderful.\u00a0 Subjectively, it seems to me “good” to act in a way that is compatible with the natural processes that have given me life.\u00a0\u00a0It follows that,\u00a0from my own, individual, subjective point of view, I “should”\u00a0seek to preserve that life and pass it on into the indefinite future.<\/p>\n I have not the slightest basis for claiming that “my way” is better than the whimsical behavior of those I see around me exultantly pursuing their morality inversions.\u00a0 At best, I must limit myself to observing that “my way” seems more consistent.<\/p>\n