Series:
Essay #1:
Synopsis:
It and Thou
Acid Wash
The secular impasse-- we kill God and lose our external standard for morality, leaving only utilitarianism, which is miserable
We, the inhabitants of the modern West, live in a moral dead-end, a secular impasse. We killed God and lost our old source of the sacred right and wrong, and now we feel miserable; inauthentic. We want the world to be sacred again.
I recall a Sam Harris podcast from March 2017 where the guest was Yuval Harari. Mr. Harari said, “Human rights, like god in heaven, they’re just a story, invented by humans, they are not a biological reality.” Elsewhere he said that if you open up a human’s chest, you’ll find internal organs but no human rights, no beliefs, no right and wrong.
So there it is: Mr. Harari says that human rights are just another belief and a belief is just another story, and stories aren’t reality because they’re not material, not made of atoms. A belief is true or false solely insofar as it has instrumental value, that is, a belief has value to the extent it’s a useful tool for the survival and transmission of the believer’s DNA. Mr. Harari acid-washes down to mush all belief in the sacred.
Let's get back to the podcast. Sam Harris responded to Yuval Harari:
“There are fictions and then there are fictions. I think we still want to differentiate between stories and concepts that are obviously false and that therefore spread confusion by definition, and those that one need not be confused to adopt, like the U.S. Constitution, or the concept of human rights, or the convention of money, these are not fictions in the same way that the concept of paradise or martyrdom or the Holy Spirit are fictions and I don’t have to be confused about the nature of reality to think about the benefits of thinking in terms of human rights or to use money.”
What are they arguing about? Yuval Harari had relativized Sam Harris’ belief in human rights, and Mr. Harris didn’t approve. This is common: we use relativism to undermine everyone else’s beliefs but we don’t appreciate it when they do it back (no backsies). Mr. Harris replies, yes, technically speaking, human rights are fictions, but these fictions are better than the other fictions, like religion, and therefore they must be off-limits to relativizing; they’re sacred.
Don’t most secular arguments about morality seem to end this way? I relativize your moral beliefs but I keep on preaching mine; I dismiss your values as fiction then I give a lecture on your duty to protect the oppressed. In Mr. Harari’s case, once he finishes with the acid wash of other people’s beliefs, usually religion, he starts a tirade about the immorality of our treatment of animals. It reminds me of the old joke about secular moral arguments: “All men are apes, therefore love your neighbor.”
We’ve arrived at the secular impasse. I assume God doesn’t exist, and thereby I assume away our external, objective standard for the sacred and for right and wrong, leaving only the internal and subjective. It’s all relative, which means I got a problem, or more exact, I got three problems:
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I need God to tell them what to do,
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I need God to tell me what to do,
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I need God to help me become more than me.
As for the first problem, I need external morality to keep them under control, to tell them what to do. There’s an episode of Malcolm in the Middle where Malcolm’s older brother, Reese, retires from his role as the hated school enforcer because he wants to change his negative karma. Chaos ensues at recess; it’s war of all against all. Even Stevie the wheelchair kid gets bullied. Clearly that’s off-limits, so Reese resumes his former duties and brings peace back to middle school.
As for the second problem, I want external morality because I want to know the rules. External morality gives certainty and structure to my life. Now I know what to do. I think of Daryl Cooper (Martyr Made) talking about his youth. As I remember it, Mr. Cooper attended almost 20 schools while growing up because his mother was on the move, one step ahead or behind the creditors. After high school he enlisted in the Navy, and for the first time in his life, someone told him the rules. He loved it. Mr. Cooper said that for him and many other young men, joining the Navy was life-changing because it gave them a set of external rules to live by, and now they knew what to do to succeed.
I care most about the third problem: I need external morality so I can transcend myself and become more. I want meaning. When the sacred is external to me, I love it because it’s objectively real, it exists in the universe, and I want that higher meaning. Contrast my internal and subjective imaginings of meaning and my projecting them onto a brute universe. Here, meaning is just something I made up, and who gets inspired by that? If I really believed that nothing is sacred and there’s no meaning, I’d just lay down and die. It’d be worse than a nightmare, to steal an analogy from William James. In a nightmare, I desperately want to run but my legs won’t move. In Harari’s reductive materialism, I can run but I don’t care enough to try.
External is strong; internal is weak. Sam Harris knows this. He tries to recover external standards for morality in a universe without God. And he does it with the same argument that Yuval Harari uses, that a belief is right or wrong based on its instrumental value. Use-value is the common denominator for all secular attempts at external morality: a belief is right if it’s useful, as measured by cost/benefit. So there it is again: Mr. Harari judges the value of a belief by whether it enhances the believer’s survival and reproduction, and Mr. Harris by whether it enhances human well-being (see next essay).
We kill God, and we’re left with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is the secular world’s response to an impasse of its own making.