The future of William Writes.

So I've accepted an invitation to join the group blog The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. I won't be writing there more than once a week or so until after Easter, but I intend to let William Writes fade for the time being. These individual blogs tend to resurrect themselves unexpectedly, so you might want to keep the subscription if you're RSS'd.

I hope the League will be a good place for me to test ideas on culture and politics. I think it'll be a good place to explore the consequences of the social decline of Protestantism in the USA… but I'll be pursuing another project where I will try to write about being a part of a confused tradition in a modern world, for those of us who are engaged in the struggle. More on that when it comes together.

Anyhow, the other writers at the League are smart guys and always up for a debate, so check them out, leave some comments, and watch for my future contributions.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that Will Collins is also joining. So there's another reason to drop by.

Cheese.

In principle, I would love to be a Michael-Pollan-style eater of real food, but in practice I have trouble. I keep telling myself that someday I will do better.

So please don't be angry or upset when I tell you that I usually buy store-brand American cheese (not “cheese product,” though) for my sandwiches. It's just easier than understanding all the complicated varieties of real cheese, and now it's part of my routine.

I do like to change things up from time to time, so yesterday I bought the white kind of American cheese, like they have at Subway, rather than the yellow kind. I thought to myself, it will be good to have sandwiches that are basically the same, but taste slightly different.

But I hope I didn't have an ulterior motive.

Stotlebots.

This is not Lenten, but since it's already mostly written I thought I'd go ahead and post it. Excerpt from a paper I just turned in:

Consider the case of extremely advanced androids whose behavior is entirely determined by circuitry, yet whose behavior appears outwardly to be very much like our own. These androids have built-in subroutines that direct them to perform necessary and complicated maintenance, such as collecting energy and disposing of waste. These subroutines are analogous to our own bodily desires. They also have advanced defense routines, so that when they are in danger they alter their behavior in order to survive the situation. The defense routines can even be activated when nearby androids are in danger. These routines correspond to our own spiritedness and our biological fight-or-flight responses. Finally, the androids have a complicated unit that handles their long-term task management. The android has a database of long-term goals. Progress toward these goals proceeds according to a complicated rubric; no single goal takes precedence at all times. When the android has sufficient energy to do so and is not in danger, the long-term deciding-unit selects the top goal at the moment. Then it uses a randomizer based on something very subtle, like variations in atmospheric static, to generate a list of possible actions to achieve that goal. It runs an evolutionary algorithm through several generations, optimizing at each stage and generating several new options that are similar to the best option of the previous stage. What is important here is that the android can override some of its basic maintenance and defense routines, and even goals which are subsidiary at the moment, if its long-term planner decides that such an option would be the best way to achieve the long-term goal that is currently prioritized.

The behavior of such an android is completely determined by its physical capabilities, its programming, and the output of the randomizer that its long-term planner depends on. But, if the randomizer is good enough and the long-term planner can generate diverse options, the behavior of the android will be impossible to predict. We know that its behavior is determined by physical states—but knowing the input to the randomizer doesn’t tell us anything about the action that the robot ends up performing. That is to say, we know that the android’s behavior is ultimately caused by its physical state, but in describing its unexpected behavior it only makes sense to trace the cause back to the long-term planning unit. If we say the robot is responsible for an action, we can mean in a technical sense that the action came from the long-term planning unit.

This gave me an idea for a cartoon series called 'Stotlebots. The first series will be about the battle between the Aretebots, led by Sokraton Prime and his lieutenant Plator, and the Sophisticons, led by Gorgiastron. They battle it out in scratchy 80s anime, and later in sharper 90s animation. Then, after a while, we'll switch to CGI for the next series, in which the Essentiabots (including Aquinox and Dunobot Scotus) and and the Nominacons (Megoccamtron's team) crash-land on an abandoned planet (which turns out to be Earth, far in the past) and duke it out for a few seasons. Then the CGI gets smoother, and the Essentiabots finally go back to their homeworld, where everything changes.

In short: my new fake life mission is to reproduce the work of Alasdair MacIntyre via the genre of giant-fighting-robot Saturday-morning cartoons. The massive revenue I will get from merchandising, especially with awesome action figures, is just a side bonus.

Lent begins tomorrow.

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of the Christian season of Lent. Churches that observe Lent do so as a way of preparing for Easter, the most important holiday in the Christian year, by taking extra time for reflection, devotion, and spiritual practices. Often, we “give something up,” the idea being that our deviation from the routine will remind us to reflect on the last weeks of Christ's life and their significance. Going further, our weakness in the presence of even small deprivations underscores the magnitude of what Jesus suffered. (I only explain this because Lent seems bizarre and ritualistic even to many Protestants I know, not to mention non-Christians.)

My Lenten commitments over the past few years have tended to involve reducing my use of some kind of technology. This year I'm going to cut back on blogging and reading blogs, in hopes of using the extra time to better purpose. If I post, I'll avoid my usual topics in favor of something appropriate to the season, probably theology. (Please don't say I'm “blogging my way through Lent”—nothing so gauche as that!)

Things will be back to normal here in forty days.

Communitarian Movies.

Via John's “linkage,” Russell Arben Fox has got a top-five list communitarian movies. The writer's obviously aware of the dangers of such a list and the flaws of NR's list, so he's specific: he wants movies that explicitly claim “that human beings do, and should, belong to (and thus are invariably somewhat defined and limited by) communities within which, and through which, traditions and associations and virtues are strengthened, examined, and made meaningful.” Check it out.

Listen to the gatekeepers, but make up your own mind.

Will at Dispatches asks about discursive authority:

“Internet triumphalists tend to discount the value of cultural and scientific gatekeepers, and there’s some truth to their criticisms of filtering public discourse. But in a fragmented media environment, I’m genuinely disconcerted by the lack of visible authority figures. To add to the confusion, fringe individuals and institutions have become very adept at copying the aesthetics of mainstream organizations - witness the Discovery Institute’s glossy website, which lends an air of plausibility and scholarship to arguments that fall well outside the mainstream. To take a more extreme example, sophisticated Holocaust denialists are also very good at trotting out convincing facts and figures, styling themselves as legitimate historical revisionists rather than fringe cranks.

“So what do I do? How do I choose sides? I don’t have the scientific background to evaluate the Discovery Institute’s claims. I don’t have the time or resources to investigate the scope of Nazi genocide. In both cases, I defer to expert opinion, but now I’m less certain of my ability to distinguish between trustworthy figures and talented impostors. Instead of absolute deference to authority figures, I now rely on a vague sense of where the boundaries of acceptable discourse lie. So far, I’m not very happy with the results.”

I've believed for a while now that even though we protect freedom of speech, what we really want is moderated discourse. That's the only way that you can get anywhere. Mainstream science comprises an institution, the purpose of which is to systematically extend human knowledge of the natural world by moderating discourse between proponents of different hypotheses. As far as I can tell, the community of scientists is exemplary in its self-moderation of its internal discourse, almost always striking the right balance between giving a hearing to new ideas and deferring to established ones. It may make mistakes—it has in the past—but that is a peril of self-government. The balance doesn't always carry over to the outside world, where complex findings have to be reduced to blunt statements.

One suggestion for getting your bearings in any field: see if you can find a book by someone who is writing for sheer love of the subject rather than out of some desire to make an ideological point. Everybody's got an agenda, sure, but I think that a "disinterested" book can be a good way to get a decent impression of the state of the whole field. I can imagine that you could go wrong here, but it's probably a better place to start than the polemics. I'm thinking specifically of Richard Fortey's "Earth," which is the first and only full book about rocks that I've ever read. Fortey wrote it not out of any desire to prove the age of the earth, but to try to pass on his obvious joy in the history and practice of paleontology and geology. Could someone give a similarly “disinterested” account of creationism? It seems to me that creationism always has an axe to grind.

That a book is aloof from controversy doesn't guarantee that it is correct, but I think it's a start—it shows you where the gatekeepers are standing. As for challengers, I think one should give them an occasional hearing but not an equal platform. A “fair debate” for the Discovery Institute should be a panel of at least a dozen scientists, with laptops and reference materials, to the single DI rhetorician.

Want to challenge the gatekeepers? Let's slip back into MacIntyre-speak. You've either got to join the tradition and subvert it, or you've got to build an alternate tradition of discourse. In other words, you have to challenge the science from within the boundaries of an established discipline or you have to create a new discipline that earns its standing as a science. The latter option takes a significant amount of time. Despite some fitful attempts, creationists and Intelligent Design proponents haven't done this (and my guess is that they can't).

Against inferential projects.

William, from William Writes, posted something yesterday about politics as a series of inferential projects. I get the feeling that he's free-associating his way through it, and he admits as much: “This, like so much of what I write, is so abstract as to be nearly meaningless.” Still, I think he's heading in the wrong direction for several reasons.

He wants to think about politics as a big discussion group or something. I think he gets this from Jeffrey Stout, though he doesn't mention Stout in the post. The way William puts it, politics is a logical/rational endeavor. It takes a career undergraduate to get into an idea like this one. Politics, in real life, is far messier. There's rationality involved, sometimes, but people usually engage with politics because they want something to happen or they don't want it to happen. When you vote, you don't talk about your motivations. You just hit “yes” or “no.”

Politics exists because citizens have clashing desires, and someone needs to adjudicate between them. “Inferential projects” imply some kind of intellectual distance from the proceedings. That's not politics. That's philosophy.

I'd have to suggest that William consider the role of interest in political movements. He'd do best to get beneath class analysis to the smaller groups that really have concrete goals in the political realm. They bargain and compromise, but they don't necessarily philosophize. Nor should they have to. This is politics, after all.

The sublimest word.

I usually walk by Silent Sam a few times a day, but today the Robert E. Lee reference on one of the plaques caught my attention. Here's what it says:

TO THE SONS OF THE UNIVERSITY
WHO ENTERED THE WAR OF 1861-65
IN ANSWER TO THE CALL OF THEIR
COUNTRY AND WHOSE LIVES
TAUGHT THEM THE LESSON OF
THEIR GREAT COMMANDER THAT
DUTY IS THE SUBLIMEST WORD
IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

Does anyone know any sublimer words?

Inferential projects.

The observation I'm about to make isn't groundbreaking in any way, but I'm going to try to put it in terms that are sort of new to me.

Reihan writes about a function of political parties:

“To recognize that our two parties represent two broad worldviews isn’t to suggest that one of both have always been faithful to them. Rather, it is a way that we negotiate a landscape that in fact includes as many worldviews as there are individuals. Andrew and I both have highly idiosyncratic takes on the world, and so we both bristle at the excesses of partisanship. But in my case, I tend to think that being part of an extended conversation among like-minded people has some value. At the same time, I think it’s very valuable to also have conversations with people who don’t share the same premises, which is why I strive to be careful and fair-minded and empathetic. Having known Yuval for a while, I think he operates in much the same way, though perhaps he has a little more faith than I do in the Republican leadership.

“There is also, I stress, a place for clear-eyed loners. We’d all be far worse off with Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan and other writers and thinkers who adhere closely to Orwell’s vision of the public intellectual. But there is also a place for movements, and those who seek to repair them and guide them.”

What is the value in conversations with those who think like we do and in conversations with those who don't?

So let's say we're all usually engaged in making inferences from positions to which we're already committed. Sometimes we will have to examine some of those basic positions, but, short of a complete epistemological crisis, we'll have to do it on the basis of inferences from other basic positions.

People who reject your basic premises will help you by questioning your inferences at or near the root level. They don't usually have an interest in following your project to its outer bounds. On the other hand, people who share your commitment to some basic principle will be interested in those limits, though they will be much less likely to challenge you on a basic level. Engaging with both groups leaves you most likely to emerge from the process with only the strongest inferences left standing. If you stick with only one group, you'll end up with shoddy commitments.

That's how I would initially translate Reihan's paragraph. But then I have to move a little bit further, since I don't think all of our inferential projects should be individual endeavors (and Reihan isn't saying this either). A group with a common project—a tradition of enquiry, let's call it—should expect to see some returns from a division of labor. Furthermore, a tradition doesn't have to die like people do.

What am I talking about, anyway? This, like so much of what I write, is so abstract as to be nearly meaningless. I've wandered far from what Reihan was talking about. And I've slipped into MacIntyre-speak again. Alas, my fallen nature.

Anyhow, I guess I like the idea of “inferential projects” because they don't require anything but “secular reason,” whatever that is. You don't have to buy the premises to criticize or investigate someone else's arguments, though you might have to invest a good deal of time figuring out how those argument really work, particularly if the premises to which that person is committed are complex.

We'll see how all of this looks in the morning. If you know of a thinker who's been over all of this long before I have—and I'm sure there's tens of thousands—let me know in the comments.

And now, off to see Jandek.

Creedocide vs. Swedocide (getting rid of rats).

Please read Matthew Milliner's open letter to Demitri Martin, and decide for yourself whether religion or atheism makes a better rat poison.

Also: can someone please make a commercial for Milliner's product?

The problem with ignoring our limits.

The problem with ignoring our limits is not that it hurts us. At least not right away. We can find ingenious ways to pass the consequences of our actions on to other people. We have reached our limits when we become complicit in the unnecessary suffering of others.

…After half a pint of shandy, was particularly ill.

Lengthy “hat tip”: A Thinking Reed posted a link to a series called “Philosophy Bites,” which features brief interviews with philosophers and philosophically informed writers, on subjects related to philosophy. I listened to the interview with Richard Reeves on John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Reeves had some good stuff to say, and Google quickly led me to the New Yorker's review of Reeves's biography of Mill.

It's not fair of me to quote from the review only the two good things Adam Gopnik says about conservatism to the exclusion of his criticisms of it, but since I've provided you with the link and I can't see how my action causes Gopnik any harm, I am going to go ahead and do it.

“[Mill's] love of poetry and music and art also led him toward conservative thought. Aesthetes always bend to the right, in part because the best music and the best buildings were made in the past, and become an argument for its qualities. Someone entering Chartres becomes, for a moment, a medieval Catholic, and a person looking at Bellini or Titian has to admit that an unequal society can make unequalled pictures. To love old art is to honor old arrangements. But even new and progressive art is, as Mill knew, a product of imagination and inspiration, not of fair dealing and transparent processes; the central concerns of liberalism—fairness, equity, individual rights—really don’t enter into it. Mozart, whom Mill loved, would have benefitted as a person had he lived in a world that gave him the right to vote for his congressman, collect an old-age pension, and write letters to the editor on general subjects, and that gave his older sister her chance at composing, too. But not a note of his music would have been any better. Art is a product of eccentric genius, which we can protect, but which no theory of utility can explain.”

And later:

“There is a non-stupid conservative reproach to Mill. It is that his great success at changing minds has made a world in which there is not much of a role for people like him. Mill and Harriet, to a degree that they could hardly recognize, flourished within a whole set of social assumptions and shared beliefs. Respect for the mind, space for argument, the dispersal of that respect throughout the population, even the existence of a rentier class who could spend their time with ideas—all of these things were possible only in a society that was far more hierarchical and élitist than the society they dreamed of and helped to bring about.

“You can also fault Mill for not grasping something that a crazy reactionary like his friend Carlyle recognized: the depths of violence and rage and hatred beneath the thin shell of civilization. Mill is like a man who has spent his life on one of those moving walkways you find in airports. He takes the forward movement so much for granted that he never makes it his subject. ‘Most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits,’ he wrote, a little too assuredly.”

Want the other side of the story? I'd suggest reading the whole review, which is interesting and well-written.

The conservatism that liberalism needs and can't do well without is not a conservatism of tax cuts and militarism. Liberalism projects its hopes on the future; it needs the kind of conservatism that will not overlook the costs and the limits of progress. Whether conservatives with questions about liberalism should be content with playing this role in a liberal society is another question.

Dobrze.

An awesome bureaucratic mistake:

“The identity of one of Europe’s most notorious drivers, who racked up dozens of speeding and parking offences in a crime spree across Ireland while continuing to elude the courts, has been uncovered by police - with the help of a dictionary.

“Prawo Jazdy, presumed to be one of the hundreds of thousands of Poles lured to Ireland during its economic boom, was the Scarlet Pimpernel of motoring, leaving a trail of multiple identities and vehicles across the data base of the Republic’s Garda Siochana.

“With not a single conviction by 2007 and more than fifty offences recorded, the police decided to take a closer look at Mr Jazdy, according to the Irish Times and Irish Independent.

“The result was unexpected and embarrassing: in a letter that is now doing the rounds of Garda e-mail inboxes, a traffic division official wrote that it had come to his attention that officers inspecting Polish driving licences were recording Prawo Jazdy as the licence holder’s name. ‘Prawo Jazdy is actually Polish for 'driving licence' and not the first and surname on the licence,’ he wrote.

Who wants to bet that “Prawo Jazdy” starts showing up on fake IDs sometime soon?

Blue corpse.

So, I'm going to see Jandek on Sunday.

It should be… interesting.

Are Mormons Christians?

E.D. Kain asks: are Mormons Christians? It's a question worth discussing, but it takes a long time, since it hinges on what it "really means" to be a Christian, and it's hard to come to any agreement on exactly where to draw that line. Some Catholics still believe that Protestant churches are full of idolators, and you can still find Protestants who believe the reverse. You can't determine whether Mormons are "really Christians" until you know what it means really to be a Christian. There's a lot of self-interest in that question, since many people want to draw the real-Christian line so that a particular someone falls inside of it.

What's easier to determine, as a matter of history and institutional continuity, is the degree to which someone is an orthodox Christian. As I've argued before, orthodoxy has to do with the history of the church you're a part of, not the objective, eternal correctness of your beliefs:

"To put it simply, your denomination's relationship to the Nicene Creed will tell you a great deal about the sense in which you can call yourself an orthodox Christian. If your denomination rejects it entirely, then you probably can't claim orthodoxy. This is not necessarily a matter of eternal salvation, just a matter of the sensible application of a label. Take Abraham Lincoln, for example. He attended church, but he never joined one as an adult. So I think it's safe to say that there's not much of a positive case for calling him an orthodox Christian. Am I 'casting him out'? Not at all. I really have no way of knowing whether or not Lincoln was 'actually a Christian,' and it's probably fruitless to try and pin it down.

"Unfortunately, and as usual, there is grey area. One can be a member of an orthodox denomination and yet be publically heterodox in one's beliefs, or one can adhere to a different theological tradition than that of one's church."

Does anyone object to the claim that we can look at church history and figure out some loose boundaries for orthodox Christianity, and that Mormonism falls outside those boundaries?

For a fuller discussion of Mormon theology and its differences with orthodox Christian theology, see the articles by Bruce Porter and Gerald McDermott in the October 2008 First Things.

Stout on authority and authoritarianism.

Required reading for any discussion of religion and democracy:

“No ethical community could sustain a discursive practice without imposing on each of its members the necessity of keeping track of the normative attitudes and entitlements of their interlocutors, because without this there would be no communication—and therefore no exchange of reasons—among them. But, as we have seen, ethical communities have different ways of going about their discursive business. […] Where the default position in a given community is that the ethical judgments of those in ecclesial or political office are correct, we have a pattern of deference to one kind of authority. The authoritarian extreme is reached whenever such a position is treated as indefeasible and the authority is treated as self-interpreting. As one approaches this extreme, ethical truth is reduced in practice to what the highest authority says. When the reduction is total, it no longer makes sense to claim that the highest authority says P, but P might not be true.

“One should not assume, however, that all religious communities are huddled near the authoritarian extreme of the spectrum. Many religious traditions and movements have developed relatively flexible structures of authority, and even those best known for their official rigidity are rarely able in practice to stamp out critical questioning of allegedly indefeasible authorities. […] Many Protestants, Jews, and Muslims who begin by attributing indefeasible and unique authority to a revealed law end up interpreting that law in a highly flexible way. All of these traditions have been more pluralistic and less authoritarian in practice than some of their officials and intellectuals have wanted them to be.”

-Jeffrey Stout. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2004. (280)

I ellipse'd out his brief discussion of the Roman Catholic church. Of course, “papal infallability” is one of the rare explicit cases in Christianity where a religious authority literally maintains that if the highest human authority “says” P, then it cannot be the case that P is false. But I've learned that what it means for the Pope to invoke the doctrine is kind of complicated. Furthermore, infallability is only invoked rarely. And I'm a Presbyterian, so I'm under no obligation to defend it Roman Catholic doctrine. So I think we can skip the RC wrinkles for now.

Now, I believe most Christians would hold that if God says P, then we shouldn't suspect that P is false. But we can always suspect that we didn't understand what God was saying. Interpretation is difficult. (But nothing worth doing is easy.)

I'm trying to imagine how you could plausibly level a charge of authoritarianism towards Presbyterians. We've got a General Assembly, so issues are decided by committees, representatives, and votes. Perhaps a current general assembly could start acting unilaterally—but it would only be a matter of time before their replacements arrived.

The same thing is true for denominations with stronger ecclesiologies. The turnaround just takes longer. The channels for change aren't as speedy (on paper, at least) as those of a democracy, but they exist. This keeps most religious traditions of any size from approaching the authoritarian extreme. A group that closes off these channels will eventually find itself an isolated sect, or even a cult.

To be authoritarian in Stout's sense requires the necessary force to stamp out opposition. And whatever power the Religious Right has in the United States, it doesn't have that. It's far from having it. And I suspect that almost nobody wants them to have it.

Why I like Wirkman Netizen.

Wirkman Netizen has posted his top and bottom five presidents, with Andrew Jackson on both lists. There's more there, but I love that he concluded with this:

“Let me conclude by stating just how radical I will go in talking about American politics. Before the Civil War, I would have been a Garrisonian, advocating the secession of the Northern States. ‘No union with slaveholders!’ The South was filled with evil scum, and a slave rebellion, spurred on by northern instigators and open borders all along the north, would have led the south finally to wise up and phase out slavery before the 20th century dawned. I’m pretty sure of that. If only the North would have loved liberty more than The Union.

“But isn’t that the usual problem, people loving government more than freedom?”

I'll have to accept the “evil scum” remark because it's true.

I need to do some more reading about pre-Civil War intellectual movements to decide what I would have been attracted to. Where would someone with my temperament have landed in the late 1840s and early 1850s? It's hard for me to say. I think I would have subscribed to Brownson's Quarterly Review (assuming that I was not a dirt-poor farmer in western Virginia), although perhaps that would not have been appropriate for a Presbyterian of the time.

Bacevich and the traditionalist syllogism.

A stray thought.

I'm finally getting around to Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power, only half a year after everybody else read it. I think that Bacevich's biggest virtue might be the degree to which he eschews “metaphysical” speculation in his Niebuhr-inspired realism. His case for self-restraint doesn't rest on a natural law argument. You can take his arguments to be entirely consequentialist if you want. Global power projection isn't going to work because we can't afford it. Massive consumer and government debt isn't going to work because it will ruin us in the future.

Take the traditionalist syllogism from the other day:

• Premise 1: Democratic values displace the older virtues of self-restraint and self-government.
• Premise 2: The older virtues of self-restraint and self-government are necessary to human flourishing.
• Conclusion: Therefore a democratic culture is inimical to human flourishing.

You can find this argument in any number of non-liberal conservatives, but it doesn't have much to do with Bacevich's main point. For Bacevich, it doesn't really matter whether it's democracy, liberalism, or modernity that should bear the blame for our cultural self-indulgence. It seems that Bacevich would love it for the United States to have a democratic/liberal/modern culture that can restrain itself from invading other countries or ramping up trillions in debt in a quixotic quest for invulnerability. The intensity of his rhetoric should, I think, be taken as citizen's democratic exhortation.

What's important is that we take a clear view of the consequences of our actions and decide what kind of freedom is worth the price that we won't be able to escape paying when the creditors come calling.

Pop Darwinism follow-up.

Last month I wrote a clumsy post on “pop Darwinism,” where I asked a few questions about the trendy application of evolutionary psychology to modern ethical problems:

“My question: how does knowing the biological origins of our desires help us decide how whether to act on them? I don't see how this knowledge can do anything to help me order my own life, though I suppose it could help you if you were trying to control other people. From my subjective perspective, how can I know whether a particular desire is maladaptive? Trust the scientists? And even if it is maladaptive, what if I decide to do something with my life besides doing my utmost to ensure the continued existence of my own genetic material?

[…]

“The problem I have with pop-Darwinism, then, is that it takes a worthwhile field of human knowledge—the study of our genes and how they came to be—and tells us that understanding the origins of our desires is enough to make good decisions about them. But this understanding isn't enough.”

Confused? I know I am. But Will Wilkinson posted some good stuff from T.H. Huxley on the very same problem:

“The propounders of what are called the ‘ethics of evolution,’ when the ‘evolution of ethics’ would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments, in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution. I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, th’ere is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

[…]

“As I have already urged, the practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence. It demands that each man who enters into the enjoyment of the advantages of a polity shall be mindful of his debt to those who have laboriously constructed it; and shall take heed that no act of his weakens the fabric in which he has been permitted to live. Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process and reminding the individual of his duty to the community, to the protection and influence of which he owes, if not existence itself, at least the life of something better than a brutal savage.”

Here's Wilkinson himself, bringing things up to date:

“One thing I think some ev psych fans have a hard time getting their heads around is that morality–the system of norms that regulates individual behavior and enables social coordination–is variable by ‘design,’ and that our evolved moral capacities are largely norm-acquisition devices which must wait to be calibrated by enculturation. We’re ‘fill-in-the-blanks slates’ not blank slates. There are what you might consider ‘factory default’ settings. (Which involves a lot of out-group slaughter, I’m afraid.) So, yes, certain configurations of moral sentiments, certain systems of norms, are more ‘natural’ than others. But they lead to relatively terrible societies–nasty, brutish, short, etc. The norms that undergird the peaceful liberal order of impersonal, extended, massively positive-sum exchange are the result of generations of often self-conscious resistance to the ‘factory defaults.’ Which is just to say, T.H. Huxley knew what he was talking about.”

It seems so obvious when Huxley and Wilkinson say it.

Daily Disch.

“She addressed the roaches with the same desperate intensity with which she sometimes (though not often in recent years) addressed prayers to the Almighty. Once she had prayed all night long to get rid of her acne, but in the morning it was worse than ever. People in intolerable circumstances will pray to anything. Truly, there are no atheists in foxholes: the men there pray to the bombs that they may land somewhere else.”

-Thomas Disch, “The Roaches,” in Fun With Your New Head. New York: Doubleday, 1968. (7-8)

“ ‘It's just as well that God is dead at last. He was such a prig. Some scholars have professed to find it odd that Milton's sympathies were with his fiend and not with God, but there's nothing remarkable in that. Even the Evangelist more often purloins his fires from hell than heaven. He certainly gives it much closer attention. It's simply so much more interesting, not to say relevant. Hell is closer to the facts that we know.

“ ‘Let's carry our honesty even a little further. Hell is not merely preferable to heaven—it's the only clear notion of an afterlife—of a goal worth striving toward—that human imagination has been able to devise. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans originated our civilization, populated it with their gods, and formed, in their chthonic wisdom, a heaven underfoot. Some heretical Jews inherited that civilization, changed its gods to demons, and called heaven hell. Oh, they tried to pretend there was a new heaven somewhere up in the attic, but it was a most unconvincing deceit. Now that we've found the stairs to the attic, now that we can zoom about anywhere we choose in that unpopulated and infinite void, the game is up, absolutely, for heaven. I doubt the Vatican will survive to the end of the century, though one should never underestimate the power of ignorance. Oh, not the Vatican's ignorance, for heaven's sake! They've always known which way the deck was stacked.’

[…]

“They left the room together, followed by the guards, but Skilliman couldn't resist coming back for yet one more Parthian shot. ‘Don't be downcast, Louis. I was bound to get the better of you. Because, you know, I have the universe on my side.’

“Schipansky was not there to be made distraught, and I allowed myself a riposte. ‘That's just what I find so vulgar.’ ”

-Thomas Disch, Camp Concentration. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988. (152-5)