Rants Within the Undead God

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Rants Within the Undead God

Benjamin Cain

RantsWithinTheUndeadGod.blogspot.ca

Copyright 2011 Benjamin Cain

Dedicated to the omegas

Chapters
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Prologue
The Rant Within the Undead God

i i 1 1 15

Introduction
Happiness is Unbecoming

Part One: Religion Theism

The Theism vs Atheism Farce The Psychedelic Basis of Theism Theism: Does its Irrationality Matter? Life of Pis Argument for Theism The Helpful Strangeness of Fundamentalism Does God Write Books? Christian Chutzpah: Why Christianity is the Worst Religion Christian Crudities: Aesthetic Condemnation of Christian Myths

16 19 31 46 57 69 78 94

Atheism
The Curse of Reason Should Atheists Mourn the Death of God? Hyper-Rationality and the Two Cultures 111 123 130

Scientism: Modern Pagan Religion Untangling Scientific and Philosophical Atheism Sam Harriss Scientific Morality Jerry Coyne on Scientism and Freewill Can Evil Derive from Atheism?

136 152 169 182 195

Existential Cosmicism
Nietzsche and Secular Liberalism From Theism to Cosmicism Lovecraftian Horror and Pragmatism Inkling of an Unembarrassing Postmodern Religion The Worlds Creation as Gods Self-Destruction Varieties of Mysticism Darwinism and Natures Undeadness Science and the Matrix Metaphor Science and God: The Ironic Theophany New Atheist and Spiritual Atheist in Dialogue Buddhism and Existential Angst 206 215 228 234 248 256 266 278 286 298 316 327

Part Two: Politics Liberalism and Conservatism

Liberalism: From Scientism to Nihilism Should Liberals Try to Win More Elections by being Less Rational? Existential Grimness and Cornel Wests Catastrophic Love Atheism Plus and the Liberal Conceit of Hyper-Rationality Conservatism: Myth-Making for Oligarchy

328 338 353 367 372

Oligarchy
Oligarchy: Natures Inhumanity to Humans How Godlike Oligarchs Train Consumers by Eliminating Babies and Old People from Pop Culture Untangling Liberalism and Libertarianism 404 417 387

Political Correctness: Spellbinding the Masses

427

American Politics
Obama or Romney? The Subtext of the First Romney-Obama Debate The Closely-Divided US: A Case Study of the Matrix 441 452 456 460 461 473 485 491 498 508 517

Part Three: Sexuality

Is Love the Meaning of Life? Embarrassment by Sexual Ecstasy The Perversity of the Sexual Norm Sex is Violent: Why the F-Word is Taboo Individualism and the Sexual Attraction of Opposites Should We Procreate to Honour our Ancestors?

Part Four: Pop Culture Ethics and Culture

Modernism and Postmodernism The Philosophy of Existential Cosmicism Morality and the Aesthetic Conception of Life Case Studies of Aesthetic Morality: Abortion and Gay Marriage Comedy and Existential Cosmicism Philosophy and Social Engineering Existential Cosmicism and Technology

518 524 538 548 561 566 579

Entertainment
Games, Sports, and Mixed Martial Arts The Emptiness of Postmodern Art (and of its Consumers) Male-bashing in Advertising: A Sordid Business Sheldon Cooper: The Nerds Paradox The Abuse of Light in the Films of Spielberg and Michael Bay Woody Allens Curious Intellectualism Sacrificial Offering to Our Lord, The Dentist 584 594 604 607 614 620 628

Mental Health
Mental Disorder as Monstrosity The Question of Antinatalism Revenge of the Omega Men Defending Existential Cosmicism 633 642 656 665 676 Were the Squishy Monsters! Dirge in the Undead God 676 681

Afterward

Prologue:
The Rant within the Undead God ____________________________________________________

Some centuries before the Common Era, in a sweltering outskirt of the ancient Roman Empire, a nameless wanderer, unkempt and covered in rags, climbed atop a boulder in the midst of a bustling market, cleared his throat and began shouting for no apparent reason: Mark my harangue, monstrous abode of the damned and you denizens of this godforsaken place! I have only my stern words to give you, though most of you dont recognize the existential struggle youre in; so Ill cry foul, slink off into the approaching night, and well see if my rant festers in your mind, clearing the way for alien flowers to bloom. How many poor outcasts, deranged victims of heredity, and forlorn drifters have shouted doom from the rooftops? In how many lands and ages have fools kept the faith from the sidelines of decadent courts, the aristocrats mocking us as we point our finger at a thousand vices and leave no stone unturned? And centuries from now, many more artists, outsiders, and mystics will make their chorus heard in barely imaginable ways, sending their subversive message, I foresee, from one land to the next in an instant, through a vast ethereal web called the internet. Those philosophers will look like me, unwashed and ill-fed, but theyll rant from the privacy of their lairs or from public terminals linked by the invisible information highway. Instead of glaring at the accused

ii in person, theyll mock in secret, parasitically turning the technological power of a global empire against itself. But how else shall we resist in this world in which were thrown? No one was there to hurl us here where as a species were born, where we pass our days and lay down to die--not we, who might have been asked and might have refused the offer of incarnation, and not a personal God who might be blamed. Nevertheless, were thrown here, because the world isnt idle; natural forces stir, they complexify and evolve; this mindless cosmos is neither living nor dead, but undead, a monstrous abomination that mocks the comforting myths we take for granted, about our supernatural inner essence. No spirit is needed to make a trillion worlds and creatures; the undead forces of the cosmos do so daily, creating and destroying with no rational plan, but still manifesting a natural pattern. What is this pattern, sewn into the fabric of reality? What is the simulated agenda of this headless horseman that drags us behind the mud-soaked hooves of its prancing beast? Just this: to create everything and then to destroy everything! Let that sink in, gentle folk. The universe opens up the book of all possibilities, has a glance at every page with its undead, glazed-over eyes, and assembles miniscule machines--atoms and molecules--to make each possibility an actuality somewhere in space and time, in this universe or the next, until each configuration is exhausted and then all will fly apart until not one iota of reality remains to carry out such blasphemous work. How many ways can a nonexistent God be shown up, I ask you? Everything a loving God might have made, the undead leviathan creates instead, demonstrating spirits superfluity, and then that monster, the magically animated carcass we inhabit will finally reveal its headlessness, the void at the center of all things, and nothing shall be left after the Big Rip. I ask again, how else to resist the abominable inhumanity of our world, but to make a show of detaching from some natural processes of cosmic putrefaction, to register our denunciation in all existential authenticity, and yet to cling to the bowels of this beast like the parasites we nonetheless are? And how else to rebel against our false humanity, against our comforting delusions, other than by replacing old, worn-out myths with new

iii ones? For ours is a war on two fronts: were faced with a horrifying natural reality, which causes us to flee like children into a world of make-believe, whereupon we outgrow some bedtime stories and need others to help us sleep. We conquered masses in what will one day be called the ancient world have become disenchanted with Roman myths, as the cynicism of the elites who expect us to honour the self-serving Roman spin on local fables infects the whole Roman world. Now that Alexander the Great has opened the West to the East, we long for revitalization from the fountain of exotic Eastern mysticism, just as millennia from now I foresee that the wisdom of our time will inspire those who will call themselves modern, liberal, and progressive. And just as our experiments with Eastern ideas will afford our descendants a hiding place in Christian fantasies, which will distract Europeans from their Dark Age after the fall of Rome, so too the modern Renaissance will bear tainted fruit, as technoscientific optimism will give way to the postmodern malaise. Our wizards and craftsmen are dunces compared to the scientists and engineers to come. Romans believe theyve mastered the forces of nature, and indeed their monuments and military power are staggering. But skeptics and rationalists will eventually peer into the heart of matter and into the furthest reaches of the universe, and so shall confirm once and for all the horrifying fact that nature is the undead, selfshaping god. The modernists will pretend to be unfazed by that revelation as they exploit natural processes to build wonders that will encourage the masses: diseases will be cured and food will be plentiful; all races, creeds, and sexes will be made legally equal; and--lowly mammals that they are--the future folk will personally venture into outer space! Alas, though, I discern another motif in realitys weave, besides the undead behemoths implicit mockery of God: civilizations rise and fall according to the logic of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Take any group of animals that need to live together to survive, and they will spontaneously form a power hierarchy, as the group is stabilized by a concentration of power that enables the weaker members to be most efficiently managed. Power corrupts, of course, and so leaders become decadent and their social hierarchy eventually implodes. The Roman elite that now rules most of the known world

iv will overreach in their arrogance and will face the wrath of the hitherto conquered hordes. As above, so below: the universe actualizes each possibility only to extinguish it in favour of the next cosmic fad. And so likewise in the American civilization to come, plutocrats will reign from their golden toilets, but their vanity will undo their economic hegemony as theyll take more and more of the nations wealth while the masses of consumers stagnate like neglected cattle, again laying the groundwork for social implosion. For a time, that future world I foresee will trust in the ideal of each persons liberty, without appreciating the irony that when we remove the social constraints on freedom of expression, we clear the way for the more indifferent natural constraint of the Iron Law to take effect, and so we establish a more grotesque rule of the few over the many. Thus, American government will be structured to prevent an artificial tyranny, by establishing a conflict between its branches and by limiting the leaders terms of office, but this hamstringing of government will create a power vacuum that will be filled by the selfish interests of the mightiest private citizens. In whichever time or place theyre found, those glorious, sociopathic few are avatars of undead nature, ruling without conscience or plan for the future; they build economic or military empires only to bring them crashing down as their animal instincts prove incapable of withstanding temptation. Conservatives excel at devising propaganda to rationalize oligarchy; modern liberals will experiment with progressive socialism only to inadvertently confirm the Iron Law, and so liberalism will give way to postmodern technocracy, to the dreary pragmatism of maintaining the oligarchic status quo while the hollow liberals pretend to offer a genuine political alternative to conservatism. What myths we live by to avoid facing the horror of our existential predicament! We personify the sun and the moon the way a child makes toys even out of rocks and twigs. The scientists of the far future, though, will investigate not just the outer mechanisms, but will master the workings of human thought. Theyll learn that our folk tales about the majesty of human nature are at best legends: we are not as conscious, rational, or free as we typically assume. Our ridiculous lust for sex proves this all by itself. We have

v contempt for older virgins who fail to attract a mate, even though almost everyone would be mortified to be caught in the sex act; at least no one remains to pity the throngs of copulating human animals, save the marginalized drifters who detach from the monstrous world. Psychologists will discover that while we can deliberate and attend to formal logic, we also make snap, holistic judgments, which is to say associative, emotional and intuitive leaps. Most of our mind is unconscious and reason is largely a means of manipulating others for social advantage. But even as modern rationalists will learn as much, rushing to exploit human weaknesses for profit, they will praise ultraconsciousness, ultrarationality and ultrafreedom. These secular humanists will worship their machines and a character named Spock, and theyll assume that if only society were properly managed, progress would ensue. Thus, Reason shall render all premodern delusions obsolete, but that last, modern delusion of rationalism will be overcome only through postmodern weariness from all ideologies. The curse of reason is that thinking enough to discover the appalling truth of natural life prevents the thinker from being happy. That curse might be mitigated, though, if we recognize that the irrational part of our mind has its own standards. We crave stories to live by, models to admire, and artworks to inspire us. Our philosophical task as accursed animals is to assemble all that we learn into a coherent worldview, reconciling the worlds impersonality with our crude and short-sighted preferences. Happiness is for the ignorant or the deluded sleep-walkers; those who are kept awake by the ghost story of unpopular knowledge are too melancholy and disgusted by what they see to take much joy. When you face the facts that there is no God, no afterlife, no immortal soul, no transcendent human right, no perfect justice, no absolute morality, no nonhuman meaning of life, and no ultimate hope for the universe, youll understand that a happy life is the most farcical one. We sentient, intelligent mammals are cursed to be alienated from the impersonal world and from the myths we trust to personalize our thought processes. We are instinctive story-tellers: our inner voice narrates our deeds as we come to remember them, and we naturally gossip and anthropomorphize, evolved as we are to negotiate a social hierarchy. But how do we cope with the fact that the truest known narrative belongs to the horror genre? How shall we sleep at night, relative

vi children that we all are, preoccupied with the urges of our illusory ego, when were destined to look askance at optimistic myths, inheriting the postmodern horror show? Shall I proceed to the final shocker of this woeful tale that enervates those with the treacherous luxury of freedom of thought? Given that nature is the undead self-creator of its forms, what is the last word, the climax of this rant within the undead god? While theres no good reason to believe there is or ever was a transcendent, personal deity, we instinctively understand things by relating them to whats most familiar, which is us; thus, we personify the unknown, fearing unseen monsters in the dark, and so even atheists are compelled to blame their misfortune on some deity, crying out to no one when they accidentally injure themselves. But if theres no room in nature for this personal God whose possible existence were biologically compelled to contemplate, and theres nothing for this God to do in the universe that shapes itself, the supreme theology is the most dire one, namely the speculation that Philipp Mainlander will one day formulate before promptly going insane and killing himself: God is literally dead. God committed elaborate suicide by transforming himself into something that could be perfectly destroyed, which is the material universe. God became corrupted by his omnipotence and insane by his alienation, and so the creativity of his ultimate act is an illusion: the worlds evolution is the process of Gods self-destruction, and we are vermin feeding off of Gods undying corpse. Sure, this is just a fiction, but its the most plausible way of fitting God--and so also our instinctive, irrational theistic inclination--into the rest of the ghastly postmodern worldview to come. Is there a third pattern manifesting throughout the cosmos, one of resistance and redemption? Do intelligent life forms evolve everywhere only to discover the tragedy of their existential situation, to succumb to madness or else to respond somehow with honour and grace? Perhaps well learn to re-engineer ourselves by merging with our machines so that we no longer seek a higher purpose and well reconcile ourselves to our role as agents of the universes decay and ultimate demise. Maybe an artistic genius will emerge who will enchant us with a stirring vision of how we might make the best of our predicament. From the skeptical, pessimistic viewpoint, which will be so

vii easily justified in that sorrowful postmodern time, even our noblest effort to overcome our absurd plight will seem just another twist in the sickening melodrama, yet another stage of cosmic collapse; a cynic can afford to scoff at anything when his well of disgust is bottomless. But theres a wide variety of human characters, as befits our position in a universe that tries out and discards all possibilities. I rant to the void until my throat aches and my eyes water. The undead god has no ears to hear, no eyes to behold its hideous reflection, and no voice with which to apologize or to instruct--unless you count the faculties of the stowaway creatures that are left alone to make sense of where they stand. So may some of you grow magnificent flowers from the soil of my words! The sun had set and most of the townsfolk had long since returned to their homes, having ignored or taken the opportunity to spit upon the doomsayer. A few remained until the end of his diatribe, their mouths hanging open in dismay and when they glanced at each other, asking what should be done, they lost sight of the preacher as he had indeed scurried away as promised, homeless, into the dark.

Introduction:
Happiness is Unbecoming ____________________________________________________

Many people profess to be confused about the question of lifes meaning, of whether theres a best way of life: the question is a philosophical one, and since philosophy has so little cultural prestige, people suspect that the question is idle. These people are doubly mistaken, since their behaviours if not their words indicate that they typically accept not just the question, but the hedonists answer to it. The best way of life is assumed to be the one filled with the most happiness, which is to say the most contentment and pleasure. But should happiness be the ultimate goal of a persons life? Theres a clue in the fact that people are widely thought to be perfectly happy only in heaven, when God shows his face and directly rules over creation. The myth of heaven, in which disembodied people feel ultimate joy on a spiritual plane, implies, of course, that there are presently obstacles to feeling happy. In theistic terms, the main obstacle is Gods remoteness from the world, which permits the inhumane forces of nature to dictate the course of our lives. Some people win the lottery, others get hit by lightning, while nothing of lasting significance happens to the majority.

2 In nontheistic terms, theres no God and theres just the frigid, impersonal universe, evolving along its alien trajectory. Far from being at home in nature, we live in one of the few, relatively miniscule spots that arent perfectly lethal to us; were we to try to explore the outer reaches, wed be snuffed out. We can take pockets of the Earth with us in spaceships, but wed die within them before passing much beyond merely the neighbourhood of our own solar system. Most of the universe is thus effectively hostile towards us, has no mind that can be changed on the subject, and seems far beyond our power to modify to our benefit. Even on Earth, our oasis, the universe rears its alien head in the frugality of natural selection, which equips species with barely enough adaptations to survive, if even with those, so that shortages of resources are commonplace and many people suffer rather than flourish. A meteor could destroy us all as one wiped out the dinosaurs, making nonsense of any pretension to our cosmic importance. Ill call the set of such obstacles to our happiness, whether they be characterized theistically or nontheistically, Our Existential Situation (OES). OES, then, necessitates the myth of heaven in an afterlife, on the assumption that happiness is the ultimate good in life. We cant be perfectly happy here and now, and some of us are prevented from being even remotely happy, but there will be a time and a place in which everything will change for the better. Id add, though, that when our response to OES is weighed by an ethical standard, were left with the normative implication that happiness should not be our ultimate goal in the first place.

Kinds of Happiness Despite OES

To see this, consider the spectrum of possible relations between happiness and OES. At one extreme, in heaven, theres an ontological split between the two. The situation becomes ideal for happiness, because the natural barriers are obliterated by God at a metaphysical, supernatural level. Next, the philosopher, Robert Nozick, conceived of a thought experiment in which theres only a physical split between the two: imagine theres a virtual reality machine that makes the user happy in a simulated world, as the machine prevents the real world from impinging on the user. In this case, the persons

3 happiness would be more fragile than the supernaturally-guaranteed sort in heaven, because the machine, being just another part of nature, could break down, interfering with the virtual paradise. Then theres the case in which theres only a psychological split between them: a happy person may be ignorant of the facts of OES or else may pretend that theres no such thing, subscribing to myths or fairy tales so that the individual effectively lives in a make-believe world without the need of an external happiness machine. Finally, theres the case in which theres no split between them, in which OES thus prevents someone from being happy. This prevention can be physical, as in the case of a natural disaster or a genetic deformity, or psychological, as in the case of the melancholic pessimist or ascetic who becomes morbidly fixated on the facts of OES and feels that contentment is unseemly under those circumstances. Lets consider the positions in this spectrum from an ethical standpoint. Details are sketchy about heaven, and not just because no ones been there and back; as Christopher Hitchens likes to say, heaven represents a celestial dictatorship in which were swept up in Gods arms and forced to have our minds blown by the infinite majesty of his presence. The fact that theists are more scared of hell than of heaven shows that they still operate with a childishly anthropomorphic view of God. Being hugged by a human parent may be comforting, but the prospect of being hugged by the necessarily alien source of all creation, and thus of OES, should terrify us, which is why fear of God is a proper synonym for faith in God. Ethically speaking, then, a finite creatures endurance of heaven should be heroic. But of course, this esoteric, mystical understanding of what theism amounts to undermines the exoteric promise that people are happy in heaven. Anyone who would be so happy must have access to a psychological means of keeping the terror at bay, which reduces this position in the spectrum to the case of the psychological split between OES and happiness. Ill reserve judgment, then, until I come to that position. What of the ethics of entering the happiness machine? According to Nozick, were we given the option, most would choose to remain in the real world despite the loss of perfect feelings of happiness, which suggests that happiness isnt a matter of mere

4 feelings. Regardless, the ethical failing of opting for the machine would seem to be cowardice, since the machine would provide an escape hatch from earthly troubles. The nobler, heroic choice would be to face those troubles regardless of the cost to ones feelings. As for the psychological split, the ethical judgment seems similar. The mental walls have the same effect as the machines physical walls that prevent harsh reality from intruding on a dream world. Its hard to believe anyone could be ignorant of any aspect of OES, but even were this possible, such a person would be either mentally incompetent and thus incapable of human levels of happiness, or else guilty of the vice of incuriosity if not that of cowardice. Lastly, theres the tragic hero who carries on with no illusions, whose confrontation with the facts of OES takes its toll on his or her capacity for pleasure. Such a person could be expected to lose in lifes races, because the pessimist tends to be shunned and social connections are needed for success as well as for happiness. Now, the person who is physically prevented from being happy may be just a victim with no special virtue, unless she stands up to the alien face of nature despite the personal cost, as in the case of someone who chooses to go on living with a severe physical deformity. In any case, ethically speaking, the tragic hero shines. Assuming, then, that we should be ethical and that OES is a fact, we shouldnt seek to be happy. Thats my unsettling conclusion. Note that the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, could take the primary ethical goal, on the contrary, to be happiness, because he anthropomorphized nature instead of knowing about the stomach-churning reality of OES. Aristotle viewed all of nature as imbued with purpose, so that rocks literally succeed when they move downward to their natural home, while air succeeds when it rises, and all of nature works towards The Good. We could feel at home amidst so much teleology, so many human values possessed animistically by everything in the universe. But scientists have shown that thats not our existential situation. And so happiness, contentment, or joy makes sense in some situations but not in others: in our actual situation, happiness is not just often mixed with anxiety, sorrow, or pain, but is always awkward and guilt-producing as soon as we step back and appreciate OES.

Knowledge versus Happiness

Take, for example, a child who begs his mother for a lollipop, is awarded the treat and is overjoyed, slurping the sugar out of it. This is an uncontroversial, perhaps even archetypal case of joyous contentment. We praise the boy for enjoying his treat, for taking life easy while he can (assuming the boy doesnt have excessive access to candy, causing obesity). We smile and perhaps feel a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia, longing to relive our own such carefree moments. But widen your perspective to encompass the childs existential predicament, his inhumane physical environment that makes possible his pain just as much as his pleasure. We then see that his pleasure is due partly to his ignorance of the scope of OES, to his disinterest in planning obsessively for the future in which the indifferent world will threaten to crush his dreams. The child doesnt know the evolutionary reason why he loves the taste of sugar despite its ruinous effect on the body when consumed in abundance. Moreover, the child lacks self-control and his parents have to restrain his self-destructive impulses. Mother Nature thus created this grotesque relationship between the infant or child, on the one hand, and the parent on the other, betting that the parents pity for the formers helplessness will cause the adult to care for the little one. And does Mother Nature do this for the childs benefit? No, nature selects the genes, and the parents pity is a mechanism for propagating them. What good are the genes by themselves? Whats their value without the travails of their host organisms? If none, then those travails are absurd. When viewed in this broader context, it becomes harder to smile innocently at the childs beaming face as he stuffs his gullet with candy, harder to excuse his moment of joy as a respite from OES: there is no escape from the fact that sensitive, sentient beings dont belong in brutal nature. This problem with happiness is a very old one. In one of the founding myths of western cultures, the story of the Garden of Eden, Life is divided from Knowledge, our human representatives eat from the Tree of Knowledge, but before they can eat from the other tree, theyre cast out of the garden and condemned to years of toil and misery. The Tree

6 of Knowledge symbolizes, in part, an appreciation of OES, a gods eye view of whats outside the garden, such as the fact that God sent a serpent to test his human creations, and the Tree of Life symbolizes not just immortality but the capacity to live well, as a god in heaven. From the beginning of recorded history, then, weve suspected that consciousness of our surroundings may be a curse, or at least that its comparable to a two-sided sword. Theres a conflict between understanding whats actually going on in the natural world, and being able to feel good about being in that world. The monotheist tends to whitewash this conflict by blaming us for it: we simply suffer from original sin which prevents us from seeing that this is the best of all possible worlds, that theres good in everything and that God who is the ultimate good sustains the universe for a higher reason which makes sense of the suffering and of the universes apparent indifference to life. Thus the monotheist blames the messenger. We dont make the world as it is, nor are we responsible for our manifestly dark existential situation; we just discover that the enchanted perspective enjoyed by people who lived prior to modern science is like the ignorance of Adam and Eve before they ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Even as they frolicked in the garden, blissfully unaware of the serpent (i.e. Gods higher plan for humans) or of their capacity for tragic knowledge, the serpent and the tree existed in the garden, according to the myth. Likewise, the natural properties of the universe, which are quantified by exotic mathematical languages and explained by mind-blowing scientific theories, and which alienate animals with anthropocentric instincts like us, have always been objectively there, the causes of all of our potential pains. My point, then, isnt that pleasure of any kind is always wrong; rather, my point is that ethical pleasure must somehow overcome knowledge of OES. What counts as happiness is typically pleasure that derives from luck, ignorance, or vices such as cowardice or self-absorption, and is thus condemnable. Whats the ethical alternative to this pleasure thats artificially walled off from knowledge of OES? Pleasure tainted by a tragic sensibility, joy periodically cut short by an internal reminder of the terrifying

7 broader context of all human affairs, and a heroic commitment never to feel perfectly comfortable in nature, a place which can no longer be our home. Science shows that were effectively stranded in hostile territory, and that our activities are irrelevant to cosmic processes that are beyond our control and that impinge on us in many ways. Ethical pleasure must therefore be felt by a tragic, Nietzschean hero, someone who understands OES and has the will to creatively overcome it.

Instrumentalism and Consumerism

Theres a liberal gambit for avoiding the thrust of this conclusion, which is to identify happiness with success in attaining any goal at all. Thus, the serial killer who succeeds at murdering is happy and the tragic hero who successfully overcomes OES is simply happy. What makes this response a liberal one is its telltale avoidance of evaluating goals, its scientistic, systems managerial focus on the abstract efficiency of means. The liberal thus misses the difference between the positions in the spectrum, considered above. The persons in heaven, in a happiness machine, in psychological denial of OES, and tragically at one with OES may all be abstractly successful in achieving some goal or other, but the difference between their goals makes for different kinds of life, and those differences have ethical consequences. The liberals notion of happiness is individualistic and subjective, and thus facilitates consumption-driven societies in which mental states are sold along with material goods, by associative advertising. As I say in my rant on liberalism, the liberals anachronistic faith is that everyone is equal, as rational beings who have sovereign authority over themselves. If people come to different conclusions about what makes them happy, so be it: the world is ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. This Kantian individualism collapses into postmodern nihilism, into a power vacuum occupied in capitalistic democracies by demagogues who tell so-called autonomous moral ends unto themselves (i.e. rational persons) what to think, feel, and consume.

8 Then theres the positive psychologist who explains the mechanisms associated with happiness as opposed to those that cause mental illness. For example, one aspect of happiness is thought to be a feeling of flow, rather than of anxiety, while at work. As with the liberal, the positive psychologist cant address the normative question of whether happiness should be a persons ultimate goal, and still claim to be practicing science. Just as a psychologist can only presuppose the badness of quantitatively abnormal mental states, or risk committing the naturalistic fallacy of attempting to derive normative statement from scientific factual ones, the psychologist can only presuppose the rightness of the most desired goal, for the same reason. Liberalism and positive psychology, then, are accomplices to the double failure of the pursuit of materialistic happiness. The first ethical failure is the foolhardy plan to be happy in spite of our existential predicament. In the long run, OES wont let us be happy unless happiness is understood as something tragic. The second such failure is our settling for the lowest kinds of pleasure and for fleeting moments of contentment, which are all that a capitalistic, materialistic culture can afford us. After all, the reason pleasure is our highest goal in the west is that capitalism is driven by our weaknesses, such as our egoism and greed. As I explain in Conservatism, the idea is that human society should be just as wild as the jungle, since competition compels the environment to pick out novel forms of complexity, and according to libertarian conservatism, this natural selection is the most divine creative force. So instead of trying to out-think nature, we should unleash our primitive impulses, thinking only of short-term, personal profit and giving in to fallacious associative advertisements; thus, we let nature take its course and separate successes from failures. When reduced to pleasure-seeking animals, we feel that happiness, rather than some more ascetic duty, is our lifes purpose. But this social Darwinism backfires. Even were happiness our ultimate good, capitalism tends to make the majority miserable. Businesses churn out an endless stream of services and toys to play with, but in a free market in which the government is naturally corrupted, the predators at the top devise Ponzi schemes to siphon money from the bottom and--thinking only of their own short-term, personal profit--restrict the wages of

9 the middle class so that eventually they cant afford most products. In this way, the holy pecking order is safeguarded. And instead of living like hedonic kings enjoying a feast in our mansions, we often eat fast food and live in houses we cant afford, but were manipulated into believing that were living the good life. Ronald McDonald is always smiling, so a flash of base pleasure from consuming fatty food must be the very stuff of happiness; like that clown, we wear painted-on smiles. On top of the pressure on us from wall-to-wall advertising, cognitive psychologists have experimentally confirmed that were prone to a host of fallacies and biases, called heuristics, most of which have the evolutionary function of inuring us to unpleasant facts by papering over them. Our thought processes are evidently adapted to distort the truth to make us feel comfortable in what would otherwise seem a terrifying alien environment, to distract us from OES so that we can conduct our sexual transactions and preserve the genes. Again, liberal and psychological instrumentalism complement this charade, since these cheerleaders for happiness cant challenge the societys underlying normative assumptions and can speak only to how we might more efficiently succeed at being happy, within the status quo parameters. If we want, above all, to be happy, despite the facts of OES that make our world horribly absurd, and we delude ourselves into feeling happy when were really victimized and bewildered, thats because our cultural standards have been so lowered to make way for oligarchic capitalism, for the reduction of high renaissance culture--the product of religious rationalizations of monarchy, the rise of scientific reason, and godlike artistry--to a beastly struggle for survival so that a new class of more nihilistic predatorial oligarchs can lord it over the rest of us from their perches in the natural pecking order. Given this calamity, the liberal and the positive psychologist accept its underlying causes and, respectively, merely fine-tune the system like a wannabe engineer or investigate the more nitty gritty, proximal causes of the most desired mental state.

10

Conclusion
Most people want to be happy; if they cant be rich or famous, at least they can still be content with what little they have. But an appreciation of OES turns everything on its head. The rich and the famous are ethically worse off than the poor, not because the poor inherit the kingdom of God, but because the poor cant build such elaborate fantasy worlds to protect them from that which makes their life absurd: their alienation from the natural world. Human life does have a meaning, in the sense of a value, and that value is, as Kurtz says in Apocalypse Now, the horror, the horror. Our life also has an ethical purpose, which is to deal heroically with that horror, not to try to escape from it by fleeing to transitory, base pleasures that arent earned by confronting our predicament which is the fact that were fragile, sentient beings in an alien cosmos that destroys as freely as it creates. Precisely because we are so fragile, because we evolved not to ethically challenge the cosmos but to be preoccupied with a social game that mixes the gene pool so that Mother Nature can keep her options open to fill some future niche with a fresh species, we succumb to vainglorious myths and to the temptation to follow our instincts and submit to religious or to capitalistic dominance hierarchies. One of these myths is that we ought to be pleased when we succeed in our work so that we can rest contented, with no regrets. This myth fails to take into account the fact that the more knowledge we acquire, the more we must regret having been born at all in the nightmare of our dependence on the practices of an inhumane cosmos for our very survival, let alone our happiness. No amount of hard work can obviate that regret, unless its the work of suicide which is itself cowardly. That regret is just the anxiety of a hapless animal thats cursed to have discovered its existential plight. Pure happiness, joy or contentment is a nonstarter for such a tragic creature. Ethically speaking, anyones happiness on Earth is as obscene as any immaterial spirits bliss in heaven while knowing about the everlasting holocaust in hell. So if we must smile when the natural cycle spins to our benefit, lets smile half-heartedly, sparing some revulsion for

11 the fact that for sentient beings alone, that cycle, spinning mindlessly, uplifting and crushing each of us in turn, might as well be a torture device.

Appendix: The Rich, Full Life

Among the throngs of shiny, happy people, theres an upper tier in which are seated those renowned for their more monumental contentment: not only are these blessed few pleased with their lot and so unmoved by empathy for the suffering masses and undisturbed by knowledge of our existential predicament, but theyve managed to accrue for themselves what we dub a Rich, Full Life (RFL). These champions of egotism are personally fulfilled, to be sure, but that understates the completeness of their triumph, since theyre happy many times over, as it were. The happiness of a hundred ordinary folks doesnt equal that of a single hero whos blessed with an RFL, who has traveled the whole world, garnered a bewildering variety of experiences, succeeded in numerous fields, loved and been loved by countless life partners. Enduring their torments far beyond that upper tier and the herd of cheerful consumers and pragmatists, the inured losers moan in agony, crying in despair, trembling in horror. The worst of these are said to be cursed with the opposite of the RFL, namely with an Empty, Wasted one (EWL). Sometimes intentionally withdrawing from the race to flourish, these self-tortured existentialists, mystical ascetics, and assorted omega men and women are unhappy, to be sure; but time also passes them by, as do opportunities for advancement, and so their mind comes to resemble a barren echo chamber filled by their harping inner voice, bereft of memories of mountains climbed, friends and lovers enjoyed, conventional challenges met, or luxuries consumed. All the struggles of their ancestors have led, pitifully and tragically, to their withdrawal, to their dropping of the torch. Such is my dramatic way of drawing the politically correct distinction between the happiest and unhappiest people. But lets look closer at this pair of categories. Much of the meaning of an RFL and of an EWL is relative: the person with a wide variety of

12 enjoyments and successes is deemed all the happier by comparison with the person with few if any of them. An RFL is praised and an EWL is pitied because theyre so far apart from each other: the happiest people have won the race only by leaving far behind the losers, and the unhappiest are those who can regret that they havent seen or done as much as the winners. Another way to frame the distinction is to rank each life next to the plethora of potential experiences that humans can have, in which case the happiest are those who have at least a representative sample of those total experiences, while the unhappiest are subhuman in that their accomplishments fall below that threshold. However, if we broaden our perspective, we can compare the total number of types of experience for humans to the number of potential experiences of more powerful creatures who might roam solar systems or whole galaxies. Simplifying, we can stipulate that there are, say, a million types of experiences for humans, confined as we are to Earth and its near orbits, and that a person with an RFL accumulates a representative sample of that total, say, ten thousand types of experience (including pleasures and successes but also sorrows and character-building failures, of course). In that case, there must be, say, a trillion potential experiences for organisms throughout the natural universe. With that bigger picture in mind, we can compare even the human RFL to the cosmic RFL and argue by way of analogy that just as the human RFL is supposed to render someone with less depth contemptible, by comparison, the human RFL must be likewise contemptibly vacuous and provincial compared to the cosmic RFL. Compared to British magnate Richard Branson, for example, the life of an omega man living in his mothers basement or a poor farmer scraping by in Haiti is a void perhaps not even worth enduring. Likewise, though, compared to the manifold perceptions and challenges of a member of a technoscientifically advanced spacefaring species, Branson might as well be a hermit, since neither the human RFL nor the human EWL includes a representative sample of the total number of potential macrocosmic experiences.

13 Thus, were faced with a dilemma: either we follow the broader comparison which belittles the accomplishment of the human RFL, in which case praise of the latter is optional, at best, or else we spare the human RFLs dignity and decline to engage in that cosmic comparison or in the analogous one, with the human EWL, in which case we should no longer despise the latter by its failure to measure up to the human RFL. An objection should immediately come to mind: the analogy afforded by the so-called broader perspective is weak, because the human RFL is possible for all humans whereas the cosmic RFL is impossible for any of us. But the analogy appears strong after all, because the human RFL is actually impossible or at least highly unlikely for most unhappy people, whether because of their less fortunate outer circumstances or because of their inner character which lacks the arrogance, egoism, sadism, narrowmindedness, or whatever conglomeration of vices is required to out-compete the hordes of human beasts. Of course, no human can presently journey to other planets, let alone galaxies or dimensions. But likewise, most people cant afford a life as rich as Bransons: they lack the drive, the resources, and the opportunities. True, many unhappy people likely have the chance to lead richer, fuller lives, thus approaching at least a few steps toward the human RFL; but likewise, there must be some potential even for present oligarchs to make great strides in space exploration. (See, for example, Bransons Virgin Airlines which takes customers into suborbital space, and Planetary Resources Inc, the new business backed in part by James Cameron and Google founder Larry Page, which will attempt to mine nearby asteroids for precious metals and water.) Suppose, though, my response to that objection doesnt work and the analogy is weak in that sense, because the cosmic RFL is much less possible for any of us than is the human RFL. Still, the comparison thats relevant to the normative difference between the happiest and the unhappiest humans may be between only the conceptual possibilities, not the practical ones. Intergalactic travel may be wildly impractical for any of us, but we can all still imagine the grandeur of such a macrocosmic life (the longer life span, the power of controlling whole worlds, the fellowship with other intelligent species,

14 and so on). Likewise, unhappy people tend to be practically incapable of experiencing much more of the worlds copious offerings, but they can still be tortured by the knowledge of what they might have been and indeed--now that the internet has made the planet much smaller, in a sense--of how happier people actually live. We dont yet know of actual extraterrestrials, but thanks to science fiction we can all imagine the cosmic RFL and thus compare such a life to the human RFL. That conceptual comparison still plucks the happiest humans, with their relative RFL, out of their heavenly tier and hurls them into the ranks of human sufferers, since next to even the imaginary cosmic RFL, a human RFL seems parochial and pathetic. Of course, a human with an RFL cant be morally blamed for failing to achieve whats actually impossible, a cosmic RFL. But the conceptual possibility of the cosmic RFL should provoke us to think twice before pitying the unhappy person with an EWL. When we broaden our perspective, we all tend to become more pitiful, tragic, and absurd.

15

Part One: Religion

____________________________________________________ Theism Atheism Existential Cosmicism

16

The Theism vs New Atheism Farce ____________________________________________________

The current incarnation of the dispute about whether theres a god is a perfect storm of confusion.

The Players
On one side, there are the New Atheists, those who see themselves as zealous defenders of reason and of liberal values against fundamentalist religion and terrorism. Atheists proclaim that religion is thoroughly irrational and dangerous. On the opposing side, there are the literalistic monotheists, sometimes called fundamentalists, who see themselves as conserving revealed transcendent truth against the demonic distractions of science and of liberal society. They maintain that faith or intuition accesses deeper truth than does reason, and that the liberals so-called defense of liberty is actually an excuse to sin. The literalists are joined by religious moderates who see no conflict between reason and faith, science and revelation, or liberalism and theism. Then theres the publics misunderstanding of this controversy, as caused by the old media that profit by entertaining consumers with stories of sensational, ideally-endless

17 conflicts. Journalists tend to report the social and political battles between atheists and theists, and also the latest scientific finding that has only ambiguous or tangential consequences for religion. Rarely do journalists investigate whats really at stake in the controversy. Finally, there are the cloistered professional philosophers who have lost credibility with the anti-philosophic public. Despite frightening signs of civilizations collapse and despite their being equipped to shed light on issues that concern everyone, these philosophers prefer to practice a pseudoscience thats equivalent to the counting of angels on a pinhead. They thus cede the floor to ideological partisans, to New Age hangers-on, and to profit-driven, bar-lowering journalists.

The Muddle
The result is a colossal muddle. The New Atheists pretend to be more rational than anyone can be. Only the narrowest, quantified questions can be answered purely with logic or with empirical evidence. The broader questions that people care most about and fight over divide us because of differences in our values, character, life experience, and power. Religious people who affirm some myth or other in answer to the grand question of whether the whole universe has a purpose, are bound to express their personal biases, commit numerous logical fallacies, and cherry-pick the data. The New Atheist is surely correct to that extent, but is wrong to think he or she is in a different boat, sailed by Star Treks Vulcans with no values, character, or other nonrational factors that determine their fundamental beliefs. Theists personalize the cause of the universe, but New Atheists likewise treat their loved ones as though their mere organic bodies were made precious by some attachment of theirs to an immaterial spirit. Theists dont exercise cold, calculating reason when they bow their knees and pray to an invisible cosmic parent, but neither do

18 atheists when they make love. We are all of us animals, after all. There's not much of a defense in saying that romantic love is private, since like religious faith, an emotional bond has public consequences.

The Cause
The real problem isnt just that theres a clash of cultures; rather, its that the cultures at stake, secular liberalism and religious conservatism, are both so decrepit that their adherents forget that a cultural commitment ought to be personal. Only when a culture lives and breathes do its people appreciate the importance of being enchanted by a myth. Our problem is the postmodern one that theres no suitable myth to guide us: the Enlightenment myths of progress through reason and democratic capitalism led to the world wars and to a host of current oligarchic injustices, while the anachronistic myths of monotheism can only mislead us to squabble over stale metaphors. When our interaction is driven by those moribund narratives, we defend them like zombies, unaware of what we are, what were doing, or why our culture war seems both endless and meaningless. Were a suitable myth for our time found, an atheist would quit reducing religious and philosophical questions to logical or to empirical ones, while the monotheist would leave behind the old myths that were forced on her as a child and that an adult can support only with techniques of gross mental compartmentalization.

19

The Psychedelic Basis of Theism ____________________________________________________

Why is there now, just as there has always been, anything as outlandish as a theistic religion? Why have most people always believed there are immaterial spirits and a perfect mind at the root of reality? Why the angels and demons and the all-importance of morality as the condition of an afterlife in heaven or in hell? How did our species become sidetracked with such apparently crazy beliefs? The lazy answer is that most people are not so smart and are prone to fallacies and superstitions and are themselves lazy, which is to say gullible; thus, the bigger the lie, such as the one told by corrupt rulers throughout the ages, the more likely the masses will believe it. But theres a more interesting answer, one that addresses the fact of religious experience which indirectly challenges the alternative, nontheistic worldview.

From the Brain to the Immortal Spirit

Lets begin with some elementary facts of the human brain and its thought processes. The higher-level thinking that distinguishes us as a species takes place in the cerebral cortex which is our brains thin outer layer and most recent evolutionary addition. This part of our brain is responsible for our special, top-down control over our internal processes, which we take for free-will and which is in some ways illusory but which is nevertheless more pronounced in our species than in others. Instead of always acting

20 automatically on instinct, we can search our memories and evaluate our abilities, concocting elaborate plans to succeed in our environment. Because the brain evolved largely by natural selection, though, there were severe constraints on how the brain developed, so that the central nervous system we inherit is inevitably flawed, from a design viewpoint. For example, our top-down access to our mental states and thus to the brain activity that generates them is limited by our finite memory; thus, we cant access all our brain activities at once. Moreover, since the brain was an adaptation that enabled us to survive in the wild, we evolved skills at making snap judgments, based on intuitions as opposed to exhaustive considerations of evidence. Thus again, instead of having total access to our thought processes, we think in highly simplified ways, relative to the amount of brain activity associated with each thought. These simplifications take the form of biases, heuristics (mental shortcuts based on rules of thumb rather than logic or all available evidence), stereotypes, or models of our environment. Theres a sort of competition between neurons as they transmit information across their synapses in response to some internal or external stimuli, and we become aware only of the winners so that our conscious self can be compared to the top of an iceberg that pokes out of the water of our unconsciousness. Additionally, our thinking is distinguished by our sophisticated form of communication, by language, which is processed in the cerebral cortex (in Wernickes and Brocas areas). We think largely in words which we use as labels for concepts, allowing us to organize and search for our ideas as though we were thumbing through a labeled file system. Just as we have a simplified way of thinking about everything, thanks to our abstract concepts and top-down self-control, we have a commonsense, simplistic feel for how language works. We think of language as consisting of systematic relationships (syntax) between meaningful units (symbols). Words bear intentional relations to what theyre about, and so we map the world in our head. This linguistic nature of our thinking further sets the stage for human misery, as will become clear in a moment. To the extent that we identify ourselves with our stream of consciousness and with the linguistic thoughts that sail that stream, as it were, our selves become vanishingly small

21 compared to what we perceive in our external environment. We become what Sartre calls nothingness and what Thomas Nagel describes as the view from nowhere. As David Hume said, there is no self but only a bundle of transitory mental states. What happens is that we identify with our thoughts and feelings, not with the objects to which those mental states are assumed to be intentionally directed. So if you have a thought about trees, youre on the side of the concept TREE, which is in your head, of course, and a thought is always insubstantial compared to what its about. When a mental state represents something in our outer environment, all of our senses may be feeding our brain information pertaining to what we represent, whether directly in an act of perception or through our memory or imagination. Even the senses themselves only model the outer world for us, abstracting from or filtering out the noise, presenting us with just a slice of reality; still, we have much more input from the outer world than we do from inner ourselves, and this is surely for the evolutionary reason that our brain evolved as a control system to deal with external threats to the genes we carry. Now, when we do think about ourselves, forming a higher-level thought, for example, about our concept of trees, we again identify more with the subject of that mental act, not with its object. That is, wed think of ourselves more as the conscious processes involved in having that higher-order thought than as the part of our mind that becomes an object of our attention. When we contemplate our belief, desires, or dispositions, we divide those parts of ourselves from the active part thats currently doing the contemplating. Thus, we reestablish the dichotomy between subject and objective environment--within our mind. But because we also personally (and vainly) identify with the most conscious and rational part of our mind, which has top-down control over our inner world, thanks to the cerebral cortexs implementation of this part of ourselves, the most active and subjective part of ourselves is also the most abstract and simplified. Thus, the more abstract and higher-order our thinking when were self-conscious, the more we identify with an increasingly insubstantial self: a self which we neither see nor hear nor smell nor taste nor touch; a self which we thus have less diverse information about than we do about anything in the outer, sensible world; and a self

22 which is closer to the top of the pyramid of mental associations/neuronal connections and is thus all the more isolated and detached. These facts of human nature--the cerebral cortex and its top-down, pyramidal and thus highly simplified view of the labyrinthine connections throughout the rest of the brain, wandering the maze whistling linguistically-filtered thoughts to keep our spirits up-naturally give rise to what was only in the last century called the existential problem, but is actually a problem that goes back at least to the ancient Gnostics. Descartes later took up this problem in its modern, rationalistic guise, and the existentialists made a fad of it which faded away some decades ago. The problem is universal because it arises from the brains structure and from the intuitive picture of language, one of our two most crucial instruments, the other being our opposable thumb. The elementary human problem is that our default feeling is one of alienation from the world. This is the price the human brain pays for developing the ego, which is the relatively conscious, free, and rational part of the self: while the ego has those advantages, which we apply in our bodys dealings with the outer world, the ego can also turn them loose on the mind, producing an ever more abstract personal identity which is subjectively all the more removed from the rest of the world. This primordial separation between the selfaware person and the sensible world is the source of all our existential woe, of the fear that we dont belong in nature and thus have to transform the world to suit the alienated self, literally putting technological images and extensions of us all over the globe so that we feel more at home. As a consequence, were faced with the tragically heroic task of finding meaning in our absurd life as ultraconscious animals inhabiting a mindless cosmos. In so far as a person is identified roughly with the mental work of the cerebral cortex, which Freud called the ego, a person is an invisible stream of fleeting abstract mental states, and this ghost haunts the planet, literally seeming to float above it somehow from its perch at the top of the head; as a matter of fact, thats exactly where the inner person exists, in the cerebral cortex. But the point is that when this part of the brain tries to access itself, to acquire a clue as to its inner identity, the brain finds mental states

23 that compensate for their height in the pyramid of neuronal connections by offering up a correspondingly simplified view of the blizzard of synaptic information, which cant be cognized all at once. The result is the narrowly focused conscious self that lumbers from one thought to the next. Thus, the more we know of ourselves through introspection, the more ghostly or vacuous we seem, and thus the less we seem to belong in the material world that the five senses present to us as so much richer. Our plight then becomes the absurd one of feeling homesick while being deprived of any ordinary knowledge that we even have a proper home. Were like a prisoner born in a prison cell, realizing eventually that she doesnt belong there, but able only to hope that theres anything at all outside the prison, let alone some more welcoming place. There are three main solutions to this existential predicament, only one of which is ideal. The ideal one is tragic heroism, based on existential, aesthetic, and ascetic virtues. Ive sketched this ideal elsewhere and Ill explore it further in later writings. The two inferior answers are secular and religious, respectively, and I want to focus on the religious one here. Briefly, though, the dubious secular answer begins with ignorance or denial of our existential situation and so proceeds to foolish, dehumanizing distractions. Fascist and communist political projects are examples, since those secularists trust in progressive myths without first recognizing the philosophical implications of where we stand in nature. All political arrangements degenerate into corrupt, self-destructive oligarchies unless some heroic effort is made to overcome our basic absurdities and tragedies. The dubious religious answer begins with the nave view of the self as an alienated, immaterial spirit in a material world, but then codifies this intuition, adding baroque speculations about the spirit world which is supposed to be our true home, about other invisible entities such as angels, arc angels, and fallen angels, and a mind-first ontology centered around God.

24

Religious Experience is Psychedelic

What generates the shameless range of theistic speculations? Not just gullibility or other such cognitive vices. Theres a telling fact of all religions, which is that they begin with visions due to altered states of consciousness. The earliest religions were shamanic rather than organized, meaning that they were led by solitary figures who acted as magicians and doctors and whose power was thought to derive from their special relationship with the spirit world. The shaman delves into that world by ingesting psychoactive drugs or by fasting, rhythmic chanting, or hyperactive dancing to bring on visionary states of consciousness. Shamanism dates back at least to the Neolithic period and was present all over the world. Theres even a special name for a visionary plant thats used for religious purposes: entheogen. Thus, Egyptian religion was inspired by Psilocybe cubensis (a magic mushroom), Hinduism by soma, native American myths by peyote and ayahuasca, the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries by kykeon; ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, was either the fly agaric mushroom or fermented honey, which was an early entheogen; ancient Jews may have used cannabis in their holy anointing oil, while early Christian art depicts mushroom trees. As Graham Hancock argues in Supernatural, there are patterns throughout the major religions, in prehistoric cave paintings, and even in faerie folklore and modern alien abduction narratives that attest to the same altered states of consciousness. Terence McKenna advocated the use of entheogens and mesmerized audiences with his descriptions of DMT trips. Even my meager experience with cannabis confirms what everyone knows, which is that if you take a psychoactive substance, you will assume youre sensing things that arent apparent to normal consciousness: you may hear a voice that seems omniscient and perfectly trustworthy, and you may see an alternate world made of lights and populated by strange beings. The question of whether the visions are hallucinations or higher realities I leave aside for the moment. My point here is just that theres abundant evidence that religions all over the world have historically been based on the shamanic, prophetic, or mad ravings of stoned individuals. As a religious institution naturally degenerates into a corrupt oligarchy, the religious

25 structures are bureaucratized and the entheogens are outlawed or reserved for the elite, to prevent challenges to the leaders power. This secularization of religions is typically a stage in the conflict between the two ignoble responses to our existential problem, with secular distractions replacing theistic ones. And what religious distractions entheogens bring! Not only the litany of spirits, monsters, faeries, and aliens, but whole theologies and the general religious outlook can be ascribed to the culture that springs up around the use of visionary plants. Monotheism and Eastern monism derive from the inner authoritative voice you may hear when in a state of deep relaxation, when your inhibitions are stripped away, while tripping on a psychoactive substance. One part of your mind asks the more authoritative part a question and you receive an answer which seems revelatory. Moreover and notoriously, there are good and bad trips, depending on whether you come to the drug with a clear conscience. If you hide from unpleasant personal truths, your ego defenses will be annihilated in the visionary experience and your consequent terror seems projected in the visions of demons or of other evil spirits youll see; hence, the religious idea that morality is a precondition of living peacefully among the spirits. The speculation that consciousness is immortal and thus that it lives on after the physical bodys death follows from the common experience of self-consciousness and alienation, explained above. But now the myth arises that your condition in the afterlife depends on how you lived while embodied: as the Egyptian myth has it, your heart (mind) will be weighed against the Feather of Truth, and if youre lighter than the feather, youll be admitted into heaven. Even the physical highness of heaven and of the spirit world is actually felt while on something even as relatively weak as cannabis: you feel your mind shooting upward into a realm of hypercognition; hence, the phrase getting high. The emphasis on authority in religion derives from trust in the shamans or in other ancient hippies who were brave enough to put their sanity at risk when they confronted the very apparent and alien spirit world. Moreover, the call for faith to override reason when dealing with ultimate questions is likewise an artifact of psychedelic experience, since while tripping

26 youre overwhelmed by the visions strangeness and by emotion which breaks down your ego and forces you to question your presuppositions. Afterward, when you come down, the challenge is to assimilate the seemingly profound revealed truths into the worldview of your waking consciousness. Moreover, DMT, the most powerful hallucinogenic, is naturally produced in the brain, and the release of that chemical during sleep seems responsible for our surrealistic dream imagery. Likewise, as consciousness fades in a near-death experience, its reasonable to assume that the dying person experiences a DMT flash and the associated dreamlike imagery; thus the reports of travelling down a tunnel towards a bright light that feels warm and inviting, and the conviction that the spirit world is real and awaits us all after we die. In fact, the process of dying may be like falling asleep and dreaming until we become so unconscious that we dont notice the dreams end; nature may pay us the courtesy of singing us each a bizarre lullaby before she turns out the light. The moral is that if you don't learn in life to surrender your pride and detach from your ego, you'll have a bad trip when you're nearing brain death, just as those who take DMT often wish their ego wasn't along for the terrifying, mind-shattering ride.

Two Forms of Personal Inauthenticity

Whats wrong with this psychedelic basis of religion? Well, while the ancient or genuine theist, as opposed to the modern, secularized one, neednt be wholly blind to our existential condition and may even evince courage in facing it head-on with an entheogen, theistic speculations tempt us to ignore our fundamental plight and to lose ourselves in the fantasy world of the speculations we tell to make sense of weird visions. The social aspect of religion, too, provides the familiar temptation to lose ourselves in tribalism, as we come to identify with one herd of followers rather than another, worshipping idols which are mere images of the unknowable that derive ultimately from someones psychedelic experience. In any case, my goal here isnt to argue for theisms failure as a solution to our existential problem. Im interested, instead, in theisms challenge to philosophical

27 naturalism, which is the main alternative to the theistic worldview held or presupposed by the bulk of humankind. The point is that most people have been and still are theists because of genuine religious experiences. Thats why religions are universal: they arise, first of all, from the brains capacity for self-awareness, which generates the impression of the alienated, ghostly self. This impression is then elaborated by our imagination which duly speculates on the nature of the spirit world to make sense of our absurd homesickness. Religions persist not because most people are stupid, but because religions are grounded in observation, in genuine, albeit highly ambiguous data. Daniel Dennetts explanation of how we overuse our mind-reading capacity, projecting personal qualities onto inanimate objects, is only part of the story. We do personify nature, but those projections are encouraged by what we seem to perceive when stoned--which is indeed an enchanted world. To make my point plain, consider this typical refutation of theism: Theres no evidence of God or of any reality that transcends the material world. Youre just making it all up because youd prefer to think you're going to live forever in paradise. Atheistic naturalism, by contrast, is based on ordinary evidence derived from the senses, and the theories that explain that evidence are tested by scientific experiments. Moreover, naturalism is simpler than theism since theism posits two substances, spirit and matter, whereas naturalism is materialistic. Also, naturalism is more fruitful since its been successfully applied countless times in the technologies we take for granted. Thus, the atheistic worldview is more rational than the theistic one. Notice that when we consider the actual primary cause of religion, which is the visionary experience due to entheogen use or to other forms of altered consciousness, this standard dismissal of theism seems weak. True, the content of naturalism derives from ordinary perception of material objects, but the content of theism seems to derive from extraordinary perception. If were not to beg the question in favour of materialism, its all just input to consciousness, right? The brain receives signals that contain information which the brain must process and interpret. So the assertion that theism is simply made

28 up or based on loose analogies between, say, a human king and the supposed ruler of the universe, is mistaken. The question is how empirical data should be explained and interpreted. The choice of epistemic standards rules out certain hypotheses as crazy or as otherwise not worth investigating. Occams Razor, for example, which says that we shouldnt multiply kinds of theoretical entities beyond necessity, isnt neutrally rational but is pragmatic in a conservative sense, and pragmatism is normative, presupposing some values rather than others. Just ask yourself: beyond necessity for what purpose? Conservatism makes sense as a form of caution which serves the genes, the point being that we evolved to survive in the immediately apparent environment and so we risk our safety when we ponder matters that are far removed from that primal task. This epistemic principle ultimately validates the state of nature thats intolerable as it stands, whereas we might just as well prefer an aesthetic standard of originality and a creative rather than a conservative worldview. Again, fruitfulness makes sense if youre interested in elevating the materialistic standard of living, with technoscience, but what if youre interested in ascetically detaching from that world by way of facing our existential situation and discovering a heroic way out of it? In fact, the mystical traditions are psychologically fruitful in transforming the ego into an ascetic rebel with a taste for subversive wisdom. Naturalism or secular humanism may well be more useful to modern mainstream society that teems with the unenlightened herds, but who says that materialistic developments are more important than psychological ones, without begging the question? Likewise, calling naturalism more rational than theistic supernaturalism begs the question, assuming reason is defined by such biased epistemic values. Now, Im not arguing that entheogens present us, indeed, with a supernatural reality. Im interested in the prior ethical and aesthetic question of which values should guide the pursuit of knowledge. I assume that these values are seldom chosen. Instead, the main camps are split into those who temperamentally prefer secular distractions and those who prefer religious ones. Some want to be rational, to defend the modern enterprise of

29 using science to neutralize natural processes, and the relatively conservative, naturecentric worldview effectively enforces our biological function as vessels for genes. Meanwhile, others prefer to shirk our ethical and aesthetic responsibilities, by losing themselves not in a surreal world they personally create, but in one that was clichd thousands of years ago and is all the more so today, and in myths that few theists test for themselves by personally confronting the supposed spirit world. It goes without saying that if you load the dice by presupposing or prioritizing rationalistic values, youll conclude that psychedelic visions are just hallucinations that tell us nothing about reality. As in The Life of Pi, if you insist on a philosophy thats concerned with just the flat facts, youll naturalize weirdness, exercising the caution that our biomechanical overlords would surely welcome if only they werent just undead molecules. By contrast, if your scheme for evading your obligation as a potentially heroic creature leads you to open the floodgates of speculation, denigrating reason to allow yourself the freedom to imagine an escape hatch into a fantasy world, youll downgrade the metaphysical category of facts and interpret psychedelic visions as illustrative of a deeper, mental reality. In short, metaphysical realists and idealists have rival explanations of religious experience, because they have opposing epistemic values. You might think that metaphysical idealists are rare nowadays and arent worth discussing, but thats because youre likely reading this on the internet and are thus a full participant in the postmodern secular monoculture. Never forget that most members of our species have been theists and thus metaphysical idealists who believed that mind (God) is ontologically deeper than matter; moreover, most people currently alive are likewise theists. Instead of dismissing theism as based on trivial fallacies and smallmindedness, we should be aware of the power of theism that derives from the very real religious experience. If you think the experience is bogus, just take up Terence McKennas challenge and smoke some DMT; as he says, the only long-term danger of doing so is the risk of death by astonishment. The psychiatrist Rick Strassman conducted a clinical study of DMT trips and the participants reported having life-altering

30 experiences. The religious/psychedelic experience is no joke: if you drastically alter your consciousness youll naturally interpret the world very differently. This is, of course, why visionary plants tend to be banned in secular societies, since religious experiences are bad for business. Its worth recognizing, though, that the dubious secular answer to the existential question likewise transforms the self: instead of becoming a flaky theist, the alienated ghostly ego can take on the role of the obsessed consumer, throwing herself so far into the material world, which she longs to possess, that she willingly dehumanizes herself to become just another material object--typically one owned effectively by the corporations that brand her. Whether we merge with organic biotechnologies, such as entheogens (or inherit our compromised religion from the ravings of those who so merged), or with the lifeless technologies that depend on applied rationality, we transform ourselves in the process: we spare our detached consciousness the horror of being estranged from the sensible world and we preoccupy ourselves with one dubious mission or another. While the religious delusion seems to end in fundamentalism and zealotry, the secular one seems headed for so-called posthumanity, for our complete takeover by technoscience and by the sociopathic oligarchs who profit most from the science-centered industries. We should hope that theres a third path.

31

Theism: Does its Irrationality Matter? ____________________________________________________

Theism is the belief that there is at least one supernatural god, a perfect (all-powerful, all-knowing) person who created the natural universe and who intervenes in that universe, particularly in human affairs. Theism is the philosophical content of religions which is almost never discussed in mainstream journalistic coverage of religions, whether on the radio or TV, in newspapers or magazines. In the West, addressing the philosophical merits of theism would inevitably call the monotheistic religions into question and alienate consumers of news, most of whom pretend to follow a traditional religion without actually doing so. In short, monotheistic religions are currently farcical. The farce begins with the theists erroneous notion that theism can and should be rationally supported, as though theism were something like a scientific theory. The scientistic blunder here is monumental and often motivated by comically misplaced arrogance, as in the case of Catholic pomposity or the militant Islamists woefully perverse delusions of grandeur. A monotheists condescension towards a nontheist or an Eastern mystic is like an ants deeming itself to be taller than a giraffe. (Ill speak of nontheism rather than atheism, because atheism has negative social connotations which are irrelevant to the core issue I mean to address.) However, the farce ends when we see that theisms irrationality may not matter and that the theist may have the last laugh. The rational case against theism may itself rest on a category error. Indeed, the

32 rational ideal that our philosophical beliefs be logical and attuned to the evidence conflicts with the more Humean reality confirmed by cognitive scientists, that humans are not as rational as we might prefer to think. Ill provide an overview here of why theism is indeed irrational, but then Ill turn to what Ill call the existentialists nonrational case for theism.

Mysticism and Literalism

First of all, we need to observe the split in all religions between their mystical and exoteric traditions. The mystic seeks transcendent experience of the divine, not a rational justification for intellectual beliefs. She understands that language and logic simplify and thus to some extent falsify reality as they map it, and that in any case those tools evolved to provide us with practical knowledge of how to get by in the natural world, not to contact anything that might lie beyond that world. The mystic prefers a direct, intuitive grasp of supernatural reality, but if shes forced to speak of what she thereby grasps, she often resorts to myths and metaphors which she knows shouldnt be taken seriously. Mysticism is central to Eastern religions but marginalized in Western, monotheistic ones. What replaces mysticism at the heart of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a colossal misunderstanding, called literalism, which is the mistaking of exoteric knowledge for the esoteric, mystical kind. Literalists err in literalizing the mystics metaphors. So while a mystic may compare God, that which transcends nature, to a loving parent, the literalist falls in love not with God but with the image, succumbing to our primitive, tribal inclination to worship an idol. From the mystics viewpoint, the literalists ego gets the better of her; like Narcissus shes captivated by her own reflection, in this case by an image poured out of a mystics mind to provide a sketchy map of what transcends our rational comprehension. So one of the initial mistakes made by Western theists, at least, is the elevation of their anti-mystical tradition. Thus, Christians persecuted their Gnostics and Muslim jurists have a strained relationship with Sufis.

33 Indeed, when theism is reduced to literalistic idolatry, the contents of theistic beliefs become ridiculous. The images contradict each other or are otherwise preposterous, leading the indignant literalist into a web of falsehoods as she has to rationalize the absurdities that inevitably follow when she naturalizes and anthropomorphizes something thats supposed to be supernatural. For example, how could God literally have thoughts and feelings with no physical brain or other substrate? If a substrate is needed for psychological states, who made Gods? Needless to say, if God evolved, hes not the creator of everything. Literalists have traveled far, looking for Eden or Noahs ark, always ready with a spurious explanation when they fail to find any archeological evidence for the biblical tales historicity. And literalistic theology becomes the proverbial tennis match played without a net. So-called systematic theology tomes are written to map every nuance of theistic imagery, arriving at creeds that purportedly specify Gods attributes--including, no doubt, what God had for breakfast the other day.

Divine Revelation
To return to my narrative, though, the mystics metaphors are eventually written down, and literalists come to write their own teachings in response or to misinterpret the mystics texts. Thus we have the spectacle of so-called divine revelation, as though that which begat the universe would write a book or create more or less free creatures and then turn some of them into puppets, inspiring them to read Gods mind and translate his commandments for everyone elses benefit. Why wouldnt God inspire everyone at once and for all time? That would interfere with our freedom and God cherishes humans above everything else in Creation. Why then would God still inspire a handful of prophets? Because God has a soft spot for the odd human sacrifice. Thats just one out of a million contradictions in literalistic theology. At any rate, were then faced with the impossible task of correctly interpreting Holy Scripture. This is the hermeneutic problem that besets all religions, because the symbols in natural languages are ambiguous: the words have multiple meanings and this ambiguity ramifies when the text is translated into other languages. The ambiguity is

34 ramified even further, since there are multiple scriptures, leading to many sects and religions, and the adherents of each monotheistic group claim exclusive divine authorship for their religious texts. So which meaning or text is the divinely intended one? We must all be ignorant of Gods intentions or else God wouldnt have stooped to writing out his manifesto for us in the first place, but God leaves us to squabble over how to interpret our preferred manifesto and over which manifesto is the genuine article. Inevitably, interpretation of religious texts becomes an exercise in cherry-picking: we ignore some passages and highlight others, usually to suit our own preconceptions. As for which religion we adopt, despite the competing religions available, thats decided in almost every case simply by where we happen to be born and by the religion of our parents. For evolutionary reasons, children are highly gullible, having to learn quickly in their formative years, so when parents fill their childs head full of nonsense, as was done to them by their own parents, the child's theistically prejudiced for life and the religion recycles itself through the ages. Of course, the theist who regards her religion as exclusively correct needs to explain why God would create people who are so influenced by their parents and their geographical location and time period, that most would thus be innocently misled to adopt a different, false religion, and why God would then punish those people, in effect, for being born to the wrong parents or in the wrong place or time. Incidentally, another fact that should unsettle a theist is that our brain is adapted to read each others mind, giving us an instinctive grasp of human motivations. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett argues in Breaking the Spell, we often overuse this capacity for mind-reading, viewing just about any pattern in the world as susceptible of a psychological interpretation, and so we anthropomorphize everything from clouds to automobiles to what we suppose must be the ultimate reality. Heres why this sort of evolutionary fact should worry the theist: its much more likely that we overuse our innate capacity for mind-reading and anthropomorphize the ultimate reality, arriving at theism, than that that reality is actually a person.

35 Now, in the case of Christian revelation, haughty Catholic priests come to the rescue, alleging that theyve been given the authority by God to provide Christians with the orthodox interpretation of the Bible and with infallible guidance on moral matters. Indeed, Christianity is the most literalistic, and thus the most absurd, of all the major religions. Official Christianity started in the fourth century CE as a gambit by the Roman Emperor Constantine to unite the far-flung and religiously-divided regions of his collapsing empire. Whereas in earlier years the Roman military achieved that goal by quashing rebellions, the fading empire could no longer employ that blunt instrument, so Constantine turned to a subtler approach. What better way to unite than to temper Roman polytheism with at least the appearance of monotheism? Were there only one God, thered be only one correct way to live (assuming God doesnt have multiple personalities and chooses to issue logically consistent commandments). So the Romans adopted Judaism as the basic ingredient in their recipe. Of course, Judaism would hardly suffice since Jews are famously antisocial, distinguishing themselves from everyone else with their peculiar observances and ceremonies, including circumcision and arbitrary restrictions on diet. So the Romans opted for an offshoot of Judaism, for a literalistic Jewish cult that promised to combine Jewish monotheism with Roman polytheism, yielding the best of both worlds. That cult became Christianity, and so the one immaterial Jewish god, Yahweh, became a Trinity which included--of all things--a man named Jesus who served as the equivalent of a Roman demigod. And whereas Jews were more interested in how humans can live well by following Gods orders, than in speculating on how God might otherwise be acting throughout the world, Christianity doubles down on the literalistic confusion, adding that God, the Holy Spirit, not only speaks through the odd prophet, but passes its power through the greatest prophet, Jesus--just dont say so to a Muslim--to Peter, the first Pope, thus adding the Catholic institution to the list of Christian idols.

36

Secular Christianity
Ironically, a secular critic of Christianity who points to these historical facts should feel a little guilty. Being first and foremost a secular ploy to preserve the Roman Empire, institutional Christianity has greatly served the purposes of secularization, furthering what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature. By bringing God so far within nature, actually identifying a single man as equal to the universes creator, Christianity degrades God, preparing the way for nontheism when scientists explain more and more of nature, leaving nowhere for the literalized God to hide. In this way, Judaisms relation to Christianity is like that between the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Plato posited abstract, immaterial Forms or Ideals which account for natural categories. Aristotle brought these Forms down to earth, identifying them with material processes. Just as Aristotle naturalized Platonism, Christians naturalize monotheism--and do so only sometimes unwittingly. Christianitys covert disservice to theism is seen most strikingly in the way most Americans can pretend to be followers of Jesus even though their behaviour attests to their worship of money and worldly pleasure. Mind you, all these Christian consumers do is substitute one idol (Jesus) for another (Mammon). From a mystical viewpoint, theres surely a slippery slope here: once you initially mistake a symbol for the terrain which the symbol imperfectly maps, youre led further into carnality, egoism, and rationally conceptualized nature, and away from the mystics experience of the worlds transcendent unity. Thus, an American can identify herself to a pollster as a Christian, implying that she wants to be like Jesus who was, roughly speaking, a hippie pacifist and communist who cared nothing for worldly conventions, and then hang up the phone in her mansion and drive her kids to school in her Mercedes--all without feeling guilt for any hypocrisy or fear that perhaps a spiritual life is antithetical to a comfortable secular one. The point is that this materialistic Christian isnt really so hypocritical; she goes where the Roman handlers of Christianity wanted the religion to go. Coincidentally, this utterly compromised Christianity is practiced in a country whose founders explicitly took

37 themselves to be re-instituting a Roman social order. (See, for example, the Roman style architecture of Washingtons government buildings.)

Theistic Proofs
How about the philosophical arguments for theism? As Kierkegaard said, none turns a nontheist into a theist. Take the First Cause Argument, which is that everything in the universe has a natural cause, and since there cant be an infinite series of natural causes and the first natural cause cant cause itself, the first cause of everything has to be supernatural. But who says there cant be such an infinite series? Also, things in nature are organically rather than mechanically connected, and so rather than being separate from its effects, the first natural cause, that is, the Big Bang singularity or quantum fluctuation, is more like the whole of nature in seed form that evolves into more and more complex forms. And if God can be an exception to this principle about what can or cant cause itself, why cant that singularity somehow be another exception that causes itself, in which case the supernatural cause would be superfluous? As for the Design Argument, that the universe is like a human artifact, which implies that the universe was intelligently designed, this argument was more compelling prior to Darwins naturalistic explanation of biological design. Also, for everything in the universe to be comparable to human artifacts, everything would have to have a function. Whats the function of the moon, of an asteroid, or of dark matter? Certainly, we can imagine functions, but those would be what biologists call Just So Stories, meaning ad hoc speculations that may be more or less plausible but that are unsupported by independent pieces of evidence. The notion that the universe is Gods designed artifact makes sense only from an anthropocentric standpoint thats long been rendered quaint, from Copernicus onward. Then theres Pascals Wager, according to which no one knows whether theres a God or what God would be like, because by definition God is infinite and transcendent, but its prudent for the agnostic to gamble that a divine Judge exists, because a person making that bet has the most to gain (heaven) and the least to lose (the relatively little

38 effort of going to Church, etc). This argument has many problems, one of which is that the chance that God would appreciate such a gamble and reward the gambler are surely very low. Indeed, who would want to worship such a utilitarian god? Moreover, if God is infinite and transcendent, as the argument assumes, the correct position would be the mystics, in which case the image of God as a casino operator who cares about our utilitarian calculations should be discarded as a gross oversimplification. Next, theres the Moral Argument, according to which morality is impossible on the assumption of nontheistic naturalism, and so the existence of morality requires the supernatural, which includes God. The shortest answer here is that there is a complete evolutionary explanation of morality, after all. As Ive been saying in my other rants, though, any complete, scientific explanation of morality will commit the naturalistic fallacy. Science might explain how morality originated and how it works, but this explanation wont justify any moral prescription, which is a philosophical matter. The better response to the Moral Argument is just to point out that the anthropomorphic notion of God that this argument presupposes is so parochial as to be a nonstarter. When the universe was believed to be a relatively small place, with Earth at its center and all the stars forming meaningful patterns for our benefit, it must have seemed obvious that God is like a human king or judge who attends to our behaviour and readies himself for the day when hell render his final verdict. This image is simply no longer credible to any scientifically-informed person. No such person can sanely suppose that the creator of black holes, dark matter, supernovas, and of all the galaxies, stars, planets, and probably other species thinks just like a human. That anthropomorphic image of God has been suspiciously self-serving for monarchs throughout history, who have used it to glorify themselves and pacify the masses. The image no longer has the same power and so its no longer sensible to thank God for human morality. A recent and popular theistic argument goes by the name of Presuppositionalism, according to which not just morality but logic and even science presuppose theism. For example, scientists posit natural laws and thus they assume nature is intelligible, but

39 only a mind could cause that intelligibility. (You can find this argument in Dinesh DSouzas book, Whats so Great about Christianity?) Again, there are many problems with this argument. First, natural laws are descriptions, not prescriptions, although early Western scientists muddied these waters with their deism. Second, cognitive scientists explain what human reason is, and they show that were not so rational, which is just what wed expect if our cognitive faculties were products of natural selection. Third, who says nature is fundamentally intelligible? Quantum mechanics is paradoxical even to the few whove accomplished the superhuman feats of study to master the mathematics needed even to begin to describe what goes on at that level of reality. Christians in particular like to say their religion is unique for its abundance of historical evidence in favour of their theistic claims. So theres supposed to be adequate evidence, for example, that Jesus miraculously rose from the dead. This is simply not so, given standard inductive rules of evidence. In a court of law, of course, the historical evidence of the New Testament narratives couldnt even be entered into the record as having any value, because the narratives are now hearsay; indeed, theyre hearsay not just because theyre one or two steps removed from the present, but because theyre hundreds of steps so removed. (The anonymous Gospel texts have been copied and recopied for centuries.) Would the earliest Christians have died for their religion if their belief that Jesus rose bodily from the dead wasnt well-justified? Sure they could have, since people can be very deluded or desperate. Look at the radical Muslim terrorists who even today throw away their lives believing theyll enjoy seventy-two virgins in heaven. If Jesus wasnt raised, why was his tomb empty? Lots of possible reasons, each of which is more likely than that a violation of natural law occurred. Jesus might have been put in the wrong tomb or thrown into a lime pit to rot with other bodies, and in the panic caused by Romes unwanted attention to Jesus, his followers could have scattered and confabulated all sorts of stories to rationalize their loss. In fact, from where we stand with the limited evidence we have, its much more likely that there was no historical Jesus in the first place, and that the whole religion is the result of confusion and fraud than that Jesus rose miraculously from the dead.

40 Again, the Christians penchant for idolatry has served the cause of secularism well, since its drawn theism into the realm of inductive reasoning, which works entirely to that religions detriment. Thus, objective Bible scholars and archeologists have duly investigated the biblical claims and found them wanting in most instances. But after nearly eliminating the supernatural, by identifying what would be a transcendent entity, God, with a Jewish Middle Eastern guy and with a human institution or two, thus betraying perennial mystical traditions--for a Christian then to turn around and pretend that theres a rational case for Christian supernaturalism takes some chutzpah. Christians need to sleep in the bed theyve made: theyve gone along with secular Romes subversion of Jewish anti-idolatry, so they have to live with the fact that, as mystics have always understood, secular reason works against belief in the supernatural. Christians cant have it both ways. If God was actually a man and we want to know what were rationally entitled to believe about that man, standard inductive methods apply. As it happens, the scientific historian subscribes to methodological naturalism, which pragmatically assumes there are no miracles. So much for inductive reasons to be a Christian! Finally, Ill say something about the Problem of Evil, which has made theism dubious for millennia. The deductive problem isnt as powerful as the probabilistic one. If you define God as being all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent, and you grant that theres evil (unnecessary suffering) in the world, you have to give up one or more of those divine attributes. For example, God might have preferred that there be no such suffering but lacked the power to create a perfectly good world. This argument is weak, because the theist is free to modify the list of divine attributes. (Remember that theology is like a tennis match with no net.) The real thrust of the problem comes from our having to face the question of which explanation of the apparent world is best, the theists or the nontheistic naturalists. Were life an accident of natural evolution, unnecessary suffering would be easily explained in terms of the impersonality of the forces that sustain life. But the odds seem low that the deity that most theists actually think about would create just the natural

41 world that actually exists. In fact, monotheists concede as much, which is why they blame nature on our Fall from Gods grace and expect that the intended world of heaven or of Gods kingdom will eventually replace this imperfect world. This just pushes the problem back a step, since now the theist must consider the probability that God could be responsible for such a rigmarole. Sure, God could have an unknown reason why he allowed the Fall to happen or why he created Satan to tempt humankind into sin, thus somehow corrupting all of Gods creation. Again: tennis without a net. Likewise, an insane person, locked away in a mental institution, can explain away any piece of evidence that conflicts with her elaborate fantasy. But such a person will not be thinking properly. At some point, a decision has to be made about whether a certain explanation is the best available and is accepted for impersonal reasons or whether, instead, the explanation is an all-too comforting, ad hoc rationalization, protecting a tradition thats cherished for its ability to unify a family or a society. After all, the root meaning of religion is to bind.

The Existential Argument against Nontheism

In summary, theism isnt rational. Especially after the start of modern science, theres just a wealth of reasons not to believe that a perfect person created the universe and works miraculously in our favour. In the first place, literalistic theism is a childish confusion next to mysticism. Literalistic theists hardly agree on the details of their religion, because of their insuperable problem of interpreting scriptures. The anthropocentric assumptions that historically have lent theism whatever rational credibility it may once had had have been thoroughly undermined by scientific discoveries of the universes inhuman scale. Scientific standards of explanation count against theism and are especially damaging to the historicity of the Christian narrative. None of the classic theistic proofs is rationally persuasive in itself, and none of the modern proofs improves significantly on the older ones. Luckily for the theist, none of this should matter. The notion that theism needs to be rational is a piece of scientism, which can be discredited. Humans may be the best thinkers around, but were still animals and few if any of our important decisions are

42 rational. We choose our deepest beliefs not because we calculate the odds or look over a set of arguments, but because of our experiences, feelings, and character. Once that nonrational work is done, we look for reasons to add to the cognitive edifice, but even here we seldom exercise pure logic; instead, we incline to the many biases and fallacies that our genes have built into our brains, upholding, for example, confirmatory evidence and passing over evidence that counts against our assumptions. With this in mind, I want to discuss what I think is the best argument against nontheism, which I call the Existential Argument because it focuses on the nonrational nature of our major decisions. I begin by describing the typical nontheists attitude towards theism. Most nontheists are highly interested not just in the content of modern scientific theories, but in the scientific method of inquiry, which is currently the Western paradigm of objectivity. Religious people fail, therefore, not just because their supernaturalism is incompatible with scientific ontology, but because they elevate faith above reason. The nontheist assumes that metaphysical and empirical questions should both be addressed from an impersonal, objective frame of mind, using rigorous modes of reasoning, avoiding fallacies wherever possible, and paying careful attention to the data. From that frame of mind, nontheism becomes the only viable option. Presumably, theists have roughly the same capacity to reason as the average nontheist, so the nontheist goes on to diagnose the theist as suffering from delusion, brainwashing, superstition, wishful thinking, dogmatism, social pressure, or a mind virus. At any rate, some such nonrational power overcomes the theists capacity to reason, while the nontheist is liberated from such forces, seeing the situation clearly and going where pure reason takes her, to the rejection of theistic beliefs. This may all well be so as far as it goes, but the nontheist has to face the question of whether she deems herself to be so rational with regard to all issues of such personal importance as whether theres a god who will take care of us when we die and whether the universe is fundamentally good. The nontheist often boasts that he or she deals with the theistic issue in a rational fashion, discarding theism for reasons like the ones I give above. Is the nontheist hyper-rational, though? Does the nontheist consistently side with

43 reason rather than with some nonrational factor, like feeling, intuition, or institutional power? Take, for example, the issue of sexual relations, which is just as personally important to almost everyone as the question of whether to be a theist or a nontheist. Should the nontheist find a mate and have an intimate relationship, and if so, with whom? Most nontheists do have intimate relationships. But note that were they to adopt the same attitude towards intimacy as they do towards nontheism, their efforts in dealing with the former would surely end in abject failure. Unless youre living on planet Vulcan, you cant expect to attract a mate and have a successful intimate relationship if you scrutinize every detail of the partner with cold, hard logic and adjust your behaviour based strictly on impersonal observation of the evidence. To take a commonplace example, many people form bonds of intimacy by dancing, which is a ritual that tests a persons ability to let go of reason and to literally go with the flow of the music. In addition, dancing is often a prelude to the sexual act itself, the whole point of which clearly is to bond emotionally with the partner rather than to overanalyze the situation or conduct anything like a scientific experiment. To put the upshot as bluntly as I can, I ask you to compare the nontheists image of the theist in the grip of her delusion or mind virus, loudly protesting that God does exist and making a fool of herself in the process, to the image from, say, a hidden camera, of the nontheist in the throes of passionate sex with his or her life partner. Reason clearly has little to do with ensuring the success of either way of dealing with a personally crucial decision. The nontheist puts reason aside when bonding with a significant other, submitting to a cocktail of sex hormones. And the theist puts reason aside both in that situation and when confronting the big philosophical questions of whether theres anything beyond nature and whether that transcendent reality is personal. Why trust science and logic to deal with one decisive personal issue but not with another? Does the nontheists failure to be hyper-rational, to decide all personal matters using pure reason, undermine nontheism, making the rejection of theism a case of special pleading? If the wisest course is to put our best foot forward when searching for a mate,

44 for example, doing whats practically necessary to be as happy as possible, why not be equally as pragmatic in our choice of what to think about God? Note that the existentialists point here isnt quite the same as Pascals. Pascal advocates a cynical calculation, whereas the existentialist says we should go with our gut: if our temperament and experience happen to direct us towards nontheism, then nontheism will make us happy, and the existentialist concludes that such people have an ethical or aesthetic obligation to be nontheists. Most people, though, clearly find theism more palatable than nontheism. Now, Richard Dawkins likes to emphasize the perfectly logical point that something isnt true just because we want it to be so: even were theism ethically or otherwise practically preferable to nontheism--for most people, at least--that fact wouldnt indicate that God actually exists. But this is just to repeat the category mistake. Granting that theism isnt rational, should everyone reject theism purely for that reason? If you cant bear to live without assuming that youll see your loved ones again in heaven after you physically die, is the wisest option nevertheless to side with reason and science, to condemn yourself to angst? Again, the nontheist surely agrees we should adopt a less-than-fully-rational attitude with respect to our love life, since rigorous analysis and skepticism are counterproductive in that endeavour. So why doesnt the ethical goal of happiness trump the dictates of reason and science in answering transcendent philosophical questions? The point isnt that emotion or character logically or scientifically proves anything; instead, the question is whether ethical standards should override rational ones in dealing with matters of existential importance. For the sake of argument, Ill assume that nontheism is indeed in some trouble here. What conclusion should be drawn? What conclusion should be drawn? Not, of course, that theism is rationally justified. What we need are nonrational criteria, such as ethical or aesthetic ones, for evaluating both how people fall in love, including the partner they choose for themselves and their subsequent behaviour, and their decision to be a theist or a nontheist. Which life decision in either context is superior in terms of character

45 development and the quality of life experience? I leave this question for my fellow nontheists to ponder.

46

The Life of Pis Argument for Theism ____________________________________________________

The story in the novel The Life of Pi (LP) is framed as an argument for Gods existence. The argument is made explicit near the novels end and it can be paraphrased as follows. In our postmodern time, were properly skeptical of appeals to absolute truth; instead of grand theories or systematic treatises, were left with stories. With regard to philosophical as opposed to scientific matters, at least, reason is not the final arbiter. The question of whether God exists is such a philosophical matter, and atheism and theism tell us different stories. Theism is the better story and so we postmodernists should be theists. This argument is a postmodernist mix of William James pragmatic argument about the will to believe, Kierkegaards argument about the need for an irrational leap of faith, and Pascals Wager. Ill outline these prior arguments here. James assumes a pragmatic theory of truth, according to which truth is whats useful to believe, given a conceptual scheme. James then argues that some beliefs are more useful than others; in particular, theistic belief would be useful in that, according to the belief, sufficient evidence in its favour is granted only to those who first accept the belief without that evidence. On pragmatic grounds, then, theism would be epistemically justified. One problem with this argument is that it doesnt discount the possibility of self-reinforcing delusion. Once you entertain certain dangerous beliefs, you change your conceptual scheme until you

47 acquire the ability to interpret all conceivable countervailing evidence in a way that favours your new way of thinking. Thus, instead of finding evidence that really points to Gods existence, after you choose to believe, you might gain instead an invincible hermeneutic facility, a sort of infinite creativity in interpreting evidence, so that you read theism into everything with which youre confronted. Kierkegaard emphasized the need for passion in theistic faith. Contrary to the philosopher Hegel, who thought we could reason our way to theism by means of an elaborate metaphysical system, Kierkegaard took a more mystical position, according to which God, as far as atheists and theists alike are concerned, is the possibility of a transcendent mystery at the heart of reality. The Christian God, at least, is the absurdity and the paradox of God made into a human or of the deity that commanded Abraham to kill his son. The theistic argument thats implicit in Kierkegaards writings is that we ought to be existentially authentic, and that an authentic Christian who has blind theistic faith exhibits virtues of an inner struggle, indicated by bouts of angst and dread. Likewise, Pascal assumed the mystical premise that God is rationally unknowable, or infinite. Thus, reason wont settle the issue since the evidence and the arguments will be ambiguous. Nevertheless, because the question of theism is so philosophically important, we must choose what to believe, and since we can gain more by choosing theism than we can by choosing atheism, and we can lose more by choosing atheism than we can by choosing theism, we should choose theism. The LP argument for theism also assumes that atheistic naturalism and theism both can account for the facts at hand, for life, the universe, and everything, as it were, and that reason alone doesnt dictate which worldview is best. Thus, these worldviews become mere stories and we need to evaluate them in aesthetic terms. Given that theism is the better story, or as LP says, that theism surprises us, makes us see higher, further, and differently, as opposed to being a flat, dry story of mere factuality (336), we should prefer theism to atheism on aesthetic grounds--which are the only remaining grounds. In this respect, LP avoids the crassness of Pascals Wager, since LP equates religion with the enjoyment of literature rather than with a selfish calculation. Of course, the novel

48 illustrates LPs argument by contrasting two narratives of how a boy survives disaster at sea. On the one hand, theres the horrendous story of the mere facts, which are that after his ship sinks, the boy, Pi, winds up in a lifeboat with his mother, a sailor, and an evil chef, and the chef kills his mother, Pi kills the chef and survives alone in the lifeboat, facing starvation and despair of never being rescued, of being eaten alive by sharks, and so forth. But then theres the fantastic and uplifting story, that Pi gets stuck in the lifeboat instead with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a tiger, eventually befriends the tiger, and the pair survive against all odds. There are many technical objections that can be raised against this argument. For one thing, theres the matter of a storys coherence as opposed to its correspondence with the facts. Even if theism and atheistic naturalism were indistinguishable with respect to their ability to explain all of the empirical evidence, one storys explanation might be superior in light of epistemic values: theism might be less fruitful or logically consistent; for example, the definition of God might be self-contradictory and semantically empty. Moreover, far from expanding our minds, theism explains the world by appealing to a miracle. For these sorts of reasons, a theory can be distinguished from a story, postmodern relativism notwithstanding. But these objections miss the point. Granted, scientific theories are not mere stories when applied to everyday practical matters; even Pi relies on his understanding of tigers to tame the one in his lifeboat. But scientific theories are ambiguous when applied to the philosophical question of whether ultimate reality is personal or impersonal. Theism appeals to a miracle, but so does the Big Bang. Even though theism doesnt enlighten us regarding how the universe would have been created by God, science-centered epistemic values beg the question in favour of atheism, by presupposing methodological naturalism.

49

Philosophy and Religion as Fiction

In any case, Im not interested in a technical assessment of that arguments merit. Instead, Id like to address two questions. First, what would it even mean to speak of entertaining a philosophy or a religion as a mere story, letting aesthetic standards govern our preference? Second, is theism aesthetically superior to atheism, as LP contends? So what could be involved in accepting a worldview as a mere story? In some ways, treating philosophy as fiction would be a step up for philosophy, since fiction can matter more than a dry, abstract philosophical argument. Scientistic philosophy, which needs to appear as rigorous as physics to earn respect within the Ivory Tower, has ceded the traditional philosophical problems, of how to find meaning in life and of what sort of person we should be, to such ghouls as self-help gurus, televangelists, New Age whitewashers, and happy-talking psychiatrists who are funded by pharmaceutical companies. Even when we know a story is just fiction, the story can shape our character by giving us a model (the protagonist) and a warning (the antagonist). So were an answer to a philosophical question regarded as a mere fiction, the answer might then be more widely understood and easily applied. But wouldnt the philosophy then be just a game, an entertainment? In the back of your mind, youd know that were theism just a story, you wouldnt believe that God is real; youd just be pretending, suspending disbelief for the sake of enjoying the narrative. However, we can see the more serious role fiction might have if we look at another kind of art, such as music. Many people keep music on in the background, while theyre driving or taking the bus, while theyre at work or eating or having sex. Music consists of sounds that have metaphorical significance and so can trigger our emotions and affect our mood. Music thus has an implicit narrative, in the highs and lows of the rhythm, in the pregnant pauses between the sounds, and so on, and this narrative can be made explicit if the music has lyrics. Chanting of mantras can alter your state of consciousness, producing hallucinations or deep meditation. And so art more generally

50 can be used as an instrument to achieve a certain goal. Note that tools can be very serious business. In war, weapons are hardly taken lightly, the Mars rover shows us the surface of another planet, and oil refineries and nuclear power plants produce the energy thats the lifeblood of modern civilization. Likewise, one goal that fiction used to serve for children was to scare the daylights out of them, to warn them that the world is a dangerous place. Catholic religion still has this effect in its private schools, when nuns teach children about hell and Gods bloody death on the cross. So whats it like to accept a philosophy as a mere story? Well, it could be a matter of keeping a story in mind, to brainwash yourself, as it were, or to affect your mood to achieve a certain goal. This seems to have been William James point. Whether the story is factual or not is irrelevant if the story is used as a tool to get a job done; instead, the issue is whether the story is effective. Music can calm your nerves, inspire your painting, or give you courage before battle. Likewise, theism or atheistic naturalism can serve as a metaphor that teaches us about ourselves or establishes a cultural mindset, standing by in our memory of first encountering the worldview, as a continuing source of inspiration or fear. Stories can offer powerful models that we try to emulate or ideals that we want to achieve. The main reason many atheists and theists alike will scoff at the notion that their philosophy may best be understood as a powerful story, which is to say as a myth, is that postmodern culture is frankly scientistic. We think art is dead, because were too busy enjoying the fruits of science to notice that weve become Philistines. Even when science is put to use in technology, we contrast the colossal institutions of capitalism and of applied science with the humble, private use of art to change your life, and we cant help but dismiss the latter as relatively insignificant. This in turn I take to be our animalistic response to a display of overwhelming power. Were cowed and mesmerized by technoscience, and so we settle for the low-brow, mainstream culture, time and again preferring mass-produced consumer kitsch and hackneyed excretions of corporate cynicism.

51 A corporation is, in fact, a system that squeezes the humanity out of its members and transmogrifies that humanity into forces of cynicism and misanthropy; this is achieved when the members of the corporate body are forced to see themselves as functionaries playing a role or just doing their job, as the meme would have it. Put differently, a corporation provides legal cover for its members to set aside their altruistic impulses and to regress to a precivilized state of animal narrow-mindedness; the corporate system functions, then, as a smokescreen that allows its members to betray their principles and to escape unscathed by pangs of conscience. When you enter the corporate world, you lose sight of the humanity not just of your competitors or of your target consumers, but of yourself. You get lost in something akin to the fog of war and so blindly oppose any elevation of cultural standards. You become antihuman in your subservience to the corporate collective, which collective itself is a fiction, the proverbial curtain behind which sits the overwhelming beneficiary of free enterprise, the oligarch. And that power which corporations (oligarchs) now wield over democratic and dictatorial governments and over the global economy flows from technological applications of science. We increase our power by learning how things work and science discovers those mechanisms. Thus, like deer frozen in the headlights, we witness corporate and other technoscientific displays of superhuman power, and we naturally dismiss anything that would seek to challenge them. The only valid role of art, we presume, is as a means of corporate control of our mindset. Art becomes serious and respectable only when its blessed by corporations and by their zombie functionaries, as indicated by that arts mainstream status, or else when art is used cleverly in postmodernist cons. But the prospect of philosophy or of religion serving as art, as an instrument of selfimprovement or of social evolution, threatens that social order because the Socratic and esoteric mystical traditions present rival forms of psychological and social subversion. That is to say, the use of scientific knowledge in a free, naturally oligarchic society subverts our potential for spiritual/existential advancement; corporate art, the dreck that slithers and slimes its way out of mainstream TV, movie, music, and publishing studios preoccupies us with fantasies. To take an obvious example, the American corporate media present democratic politics as a conflict between democrats and conservatives,

52 whereas the true political conflict, between the American oligarchs and the rest of the population, ended in the 1970s after Ralph Naders consumer advocacy sparked the corporate takeover of the US government by means of lobbying power. (See the terrific TVO documentary, Park Avenue.) Socratic philosophy threatens that corporate abuse of technoscience--polling, marketing, public relations, infotainment, and other forms of media manipulation--by offering the ideal of obsessive self-knowledge; were we to think more like Socrates, taking him as our model protagonist, wed be compelled to watch ourselves as we consume corporate media, to recognize how mainstream messages distract or numb us, exploiting our sex instinct, for example, to sell everything. With its cosmicist implications, mystical religion, too, challenges the delusions that tend to hold societies together, such as the ideal of personal happiness. My point, then, is that were a philosophical argument or religious creed treated as a story, which is to say as an instrument that has practical relevance as opposed to being merely academic, the science-centered institutions would have rivals. To the extent that our culture is scientistic, we dismiss the very possibility of such a rivalry, and so we oversimplify the postmodern reduction of philosophy and of religion to art. We assume that any piece of art is as good as any other, that art must be dead because artists tend to be impoverished and thus can pose no threat to the established order. And we say this even as we consume the very-much-alive art that serves those ruling powers. The fact that dehumanizing, corporate art--advertisements, infotainment, and various mainstream spectacles and diversions--is mass-produced by Serious businesspeople proves that art has the potential to modulate our consciousness and character. We forget, too, that Socrates and the character Jesus were hardly wealthy when they inspired their revolutionaries. As a philosophical viewpoint, atheistic naturalism, then, would be a myth to the extent that the viewpoint engages our emotions, moving us to act, as an artwork that illustrates its message with a narrative of struggling, concrete characters (protagonists and antagonists). The practical aspect of this viewpoint is better known as secular humanism, although its been corrupted now for mass consumption, in New Atheism,

53 becoming the scientism Ive described in this section and elsewhere. The atheistic naturalists implicit protagonists are the scientist, the engineer, and the businessperson (especially the oligarch, as Ayn Rand appreciated), who are agents of progress, while the antagonists are the ignorant, superstitious savage and the dogmatic, armchair philosopher or theologian who arrogantly presumes to tell us what to think without first doing the hard scientific work to discover whats what.

Atheisms Aesthetic Virtue

So much for the preliminary question of what it could mean to speak of theism and atheism as mere stories. Which is the better story, then? LP implies that the deciding factor is theisms optimism compared to atheisms pessimism. Theism is uplifting with its fantastic characters of gods, angels, demons, and even human immortal souls, while atheism is depressing with its sober, fact-confined view of reality as the series of accidents that form patterns within the impersonal dimensions of space and time. Theism affords us the satisfaction of believing that, despite the inevitability of biological death, ultimately people win since deep reality for the theist is personal. But this shouldnt be the deciding factor, since many great stories are tragic. Another basis for deciding would be to compare the richness of the characters in the two stories. Theism has extremely colourful antagonists and protagonists, such as God and the devil; indeed, these characters have influenced most Western art. Meanwhile, atheistic naturalism has, at best, the implicit and mere mortal heroes and villains I referred to above. How can even Newton, Einstein, or Tesla compare to God, and how can a prescientific tribesperson, a religious fundamentalist or an upstart academic philosopher compare to a demon, even assuming youre in the throes of scientism? Moreover, this second worldview can be construed as having no explicit characters to speak of, since science reduces subjects to objects. Assuming a good story requires characters in the first place, not to mention compelling ones, theism would be aesthetically superior to the alternative.

54 But this raises what to me is a crucial meta question about the nature of fiction. Classically, fictions role is to give the reader or viewer the experience of catharsis, which requires that she identify with the hero and live vicariously through that character. In effect, fiction appeals to our social predilection, by introducing a virtual social network which we can negotiate and in which we can enhance our status. The more fiction we consume, the more characters we become acquainted with, the larger our circle of virtual friends and enemies. We feel we come to know those characters, admiring some and condemning others. To this extent, fiction can be compared to comedy: both reinforce our comforting anthropocentrism which shields us from the alien wilderness. The wider our social circle, the less alone we feel and the more we can occupy our minds with thoughts of personal matters, of our real or virtual friends choices, deeds, physical appearance, and so forth. Fiction thus has social utility, in that a good story helps unify society by adding more characters with whom we can mentally interact. Luckily, our hunger for social interaction and for discerning mental patterns is so boundless that we can be just as emotionally affected by tales of unreal characters as by those of nonfictional ones. Again, to this extent, theism may well have an aesthetic advantage over atheism. But perhaps we need a new kind of fiction after the Scientific Revolution, just as we might now require a grimmer, genuinely subversive kind of comedy. Perhaps the most authentic kind of postmodern fiction belongs to the horror genre, since a story should address the cosmicist implications of what we now know scientifically about our natural position. Instead of reinforcing our social instincts, fiction can challenge them and drive us to become transhuman, something that has a chance of thriving in our newly perceived environment. One way this new fiction might work is by following the existentialists advice and forcing us to look into the void, to accept reality as it is instead of hiding in the alternate, artificial reality that we substitute for nature. Only when weve first wrestled with the dire philosophical implications of science can our cultural creations be existentially authentic, since only then can they express our virtues rather than our vices. Mental projections arent always bad, but anthropocentric ones that depend on our preoccupation with personal or social matters at the expense of our

55 understanding what the cosmos is really like seem to me detrimental. As Thomas Homer-Dixon says in his book, The Ingenuity Gap, technology is advancing much more rapidly than society, so that we become less and less able to solve the problems in our increasingly fast-paced, technological environment. Id add that one such hindrance is a vestige of theism, which is the sort of art that preserves a personal mindset and a culture that distract us from our existential obligation to confront the cosmic reality in which such distractions are pitifully absurd. At any rate, to show that atheistic naturalism is aesthetically superior to theism, we may first have to question fictions traditional role. You see, if we should tell stories to reinforce anthropocentrism and to maintain widespread ignorance of sciences cosmicist implications, then of course theism will make for the better story. But if anthropocentrism is obsolete, so is traditional fiction and thus so may be the aesthetic judgment in theisms favour. I should add that this is so only for those born into theistic as opposed to cosmicist societies. What I mean is that when theism rather than cosmicism is socially taken for granted, theism contributes to existential inauthenticity since that default culture prevents a sober assessment of cosmic reality. And yet imagine what life must have been like for prehumans many thousands of years ago, prior to the advent of religion. Those ancestors would have faced cosmic horror at every turn. Granted, they wouldnt have known how impersonal nature is, since they wouldnt have thought about the size of the universe or about the lack of our centrality in it. But neither would those prehumans have had the comfort of living in an animistic world, which is to say a world animated by their imagination. Life would have been nasty, brutish, and short, with some pleasure and wonder mixed in. Now, after those millennia of facing nature as it is, without its being clothed to look like a camouflaged person, the invention of religion may initially have been a virtuous creation of our species, an existentially valid way of overcoming the ugly facts of life, with honour and grace. In the early part of religions history, religious people could still be said to have come to religion without having taken a shortcut to escape from their existential predicament. But now, even after science has rediscovered the basis for cosmic horror, when we Westerners have an extensive track record of religious decadence and dogmatism, religious people no longer have

56 ownership of what was likely some such primordial horror in our prehistoric ancestors confrontation with wild nature. So in our postmodern time, certainly, theism would be aesthetically inferior to atheistic, cosmicist naturalism, given what should be the new function of fiction. This would be because theism now doesnt deal nobly with cosmicism, whereas theistic myths may once, long ago indeed have been ethically respectable acts of existential rebellion.

57

The Helpful Strangeness of Religious Fundamentalism ____________________________________________________

How should the atheist respond to the religious fundamentalist? The atheists inclination is to flood the theist with arguments proving the manifest irrationality of that worldview. Ive attempted to do this many times over the years, entering into long debates and dialogues especially with committed Christians. Moreover, I believe that all forms of exoteric (literalistic, inerrantist) theism are in fact irrational. The problem is that this irrationality is all too obvious; atheists miss the point when we prepare an exhaustive treatment of the theists fallacies, and indeed when we pretend that philosophical naturalism or secular humanism is a matter purely of observation and logic. We forget that a rationalist too has certain epistemic values that mark even the secular worldview as partly a matter of choice, of artistry. Ill show what I mean by considering the rational and the existential responses to a particular Evangelical Christians sermon.

The True Believer Speaks!

Joel C. Rosenberg is an Evangelical Christian and author of several novels about how modern terrorism is prophesied in the Bible. In one of his recent blog posts, he offers his readers insight into why theres so much gun violence in the US:

58 How is it possible, he asks, that violent crime in the United States has surged by more than 460 percent since 1960? The answer is as painful as it is simple: the further we turn away from God in our nation--the further we drive Him out of our society, out of our schools and courts, and out of our media, and out of our homes; or the more we give mere lip service to religion; the more men are holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power (2 Timothy 3:5)--the worse things are getting. The Lord God Almighty is a gentleman. He wont force us to accept His great love and many blessings. If a nation tells Him to leave, He will leave. But what are we reaping as a result of a society that increasingly ignores God and hates or dismisses Jesus Christ? We are witnessing a horrifying explosion of murder. We are witnessing a gruesome crime wave unprecedented in American history. What is the future of America? Is America in a Jonah moment, or a Nahum moment? Will we hear the word of the Lord that we have strayed far from the teachings of the Bible and allowed our land to become polluted with abortions and pornography and violence and wickedness of all kinds? Will we admit how far we are from Gods plan and purpose for our lives? Will we confess that our hearts are far from Jesus Christ and plead with the Lord for His mercy and grace and forgiveness? Will we fast and pray and earnestly seek Gods face, and implore Christ to give us a Third Great Awakening? Or will we ignore the word of the Lord and continue in our sins and watch our nation continue to decline, or even implode? There is a point of no return--a point at which God removes His hand of grace and mercy and turns to the judgment of America. If we dont repent for our sins, we are going to face that judgmentperhaps sooner than we think. Where are you today? Have you received Christ as your Savior and Lord? Are you absolutely certain that if you were to die today that you would spend eternity in heaven

59 with the Lord? Are you leaning on Christs everlasting arms for complete forgiveness for your sins, for hope, for peace, for comfort, for wisdom and direction in this life, and in the life to come? If not, let this be the day of salvation for you.

Fundamentalisms Flagrant Irrationality

I trust that any atheist or even Christian with an insiders grasp of the metaphorical nature of myths, who reads Rosenbergs explanation will be able to think of a thousand reasons why its grossly, obviously, embarrassingly wrong. From a rational point of view, the faults of literalistic theism are endless; whenever a true-believing theist speaks about her religion, she commits a dozen more fallacies, gets numerous facts wrong, and betrays her ignorance of one whopping irony after another. You could fill a library with texts demonstrating just a single religious fundamentalists errors, illogic, and characteristic vices. Ill just rattle off some examples before I turn to a more interesting question. Rosenberg feels--I wont say thinks--that the cause of Americans troubles is secularism and that if only Americans were more authentically Christian, they wouldnt now suffer so much. For example, theyd have less gun violence. Indeed, he says, the rise of gun violence is a sign that God is losing patience with the US and will eventually destroy that nation. How do you live as an authentic Christian? By following (parts of) the Bible and by paying heed to (some of) your inner voices, which are actually Gods. Rosenberg thus oscillates between Jewish and Christian theologies, equivocating to suit the facts that authentic Christianity is untenable and compromised by its history, and that Americans can afford to adopt only whats effectively secularized Judaism even while they blather on about Jesus. The New Testament sets out an antireligion of radical otherworldliness. To be sure, there probably was no historical Jesus or if there was, his exploits are irrelevant to the NTs thorough mythologization of his life. In any case, the character Jesus was obviously opposed to natural life, because he had his eyes set on the spirit world, having likely hallucinated the holy shape of that world

60 during his years in the desert as an ascetic. The forces of nature were thought to be those of what Paul calls powers and principalities, the fallen angels who have taken over the cosmos while--as every mystic and Platonist appreciates--the true, transcendent god cant directly be found anywhere in nature. Thus, Jesus taught an ethical system so extreme as to be practically unworkable in secular terms; that is, any society on Earth that would apply Jesus principles would collapse. This is because Jesus ethics were intended as means by which we could renounce the whole world and so save our immortal souls. For example, in an authentically Christian society, there would be no biological families, since those depend on fallen instincts that distract us from the transcendent God. Also, there would be no capitalism since that form of business is premised on egoism. Oh, and politics, which reduces to the Iron Law of Oligarchy, would likewise fall by the wayside. Thus, such a society would boast the anarchy of the 1960s hippie movement. Everyone would live as if the present life were insignificant; theyd give away all their possessions, ignore their sexual instinct, be willing to sacrifice their personal welfare at every turn, and think about God more than anything else. That is, theyd live exactly as the character Jesus lived: theyd sacrifice their earthly life because theyd trust that another one is in store for them in the afterlife, that once their corporeal body gives way due to all of their anarchic, altruistic, and ascetic practices, theyd be reborn in the spirit world and live with God for eternity. Jesus was a Gnostic hippie, a radical anarchist, pacifist, and socialist who was opposed to natural life. Thats Jesus message and thats the New Testament; thats authentic Christianity. Of course, this mystical asceticism is quite counterproductive if youre interested in establishing a religious institution in the here and now. The Church that pretended to represent Jesus naturally degenerated into a corrupt secular oligarchy. This is true of the Catholic Church and of the Protestant fiefdoms led by an assortment of megalomaniacs (televangelists, street preachers, cult gurus, and so forth). The Church literally merged with the secular Roman Empire and then with many more such empires, including the present American one. The upshot is that when Rosenberg speaks of

61 authentic Christianity, he really means secularized Judaism. The Old Testament has much more balanced and realistic ethics than does the New, because the Jews were preoccupied with furthering the political lot of their particular tribe. God for them was their God, a God who favoured the Jews, who would commit genocide to make room for Jewish prosperity, who would punish the Egyptians for abusing Gods chosen people and promise the Jews earthly happiness if only theyd follow their covenant with the Lord and obey his practical, this-worldly laws. And indeed, Jews have followed that ancient regime, with its dietary and other social rules, and are still with us today. But the point is that Rosenberg is a closet Jew, substituting Americans for Jews and the Old Testament for the New one, while throwing around the name Jesus every once in a while to make his readers think his savage tribalism has something to do with Jesus Gnostic asceticism. Indeed, Rosenberg happens literally to be a Jew for Jesus, but there are many evangelical Christians who likewise blend American nationalism with childish, literalistic theism, thus practicing a religion that has much more in common with Judaism than with Jesus mysticism. Rosenberg feels that God cares especially about Christians and thus about Americans. This requires that Rosenberg substitute an idol for the transcendent deity of monotheism, that he project an image onto the divine to flatter his ego. Rosenberg is the biased one with nationalistic pride, not the Creator of the universe. How can God choose favourites if choice requires a mind which in turn requires a brain? How could an omnipotent being limit itself to a brain that would exist in space and time? Even if Jesus represented God, the Christian gives a nod to the mystic by speaking of God the Father as transcending human categories (even while contradicting herself by calling that deity male). Why would God care more about Americans than about North Koreans? Because Americans worship God? Why would God need to be worshipped? Why would he want us to pray to him? Why would he care to save us from hell? God can have no desires, no character, and no personhood while also being the precondition of such particularities. Rosenberg feels that God can literally lose his patience, that Gods gracious only for so long before he turns to judgment and punishes the wicked. This is simply, obviously idolatry. God cant literally be a person with such a thing as patience

62 or an interest in morality or justice, without rendering theology absurd. If God has desires, he automatically has limitations, meaning that he has some desires but not others; thus, he becomes a contingent, particular thing rather than the source and precondition of all things. God becomes a created being rather than the ground of all beings. This is the point of mystical, esoteric theism which escapes the Evangelical Christian. When we try to understand something, we apply categories to it and so what we comprehend is always limited, meaning that it can so fit into our conceptual boxes. Thus, we cannot understand that which is supposed to be unlimited, infinite, and eternal, which is God. So Rosenberg must be very proud of his insight into Gods nature and purpose. Perhaps he should be canonized. Sure, he attributes this understanding to Gods revelation, but many people have read the Bible and disagree with Rosenbergs interpretation of it, just as many have claimed to speak directly with God through the inner promptings of their conscience, but have come away with an altogether different message than Rosenbergs. Nevertheless, Rosenberg can write with a straight face that he effectively represents God, that his advice on how to fix American culture correctly interprets and applies God's revealed wisdom, as though the creator of the universe would also write books and would need a human interpreter. Rosenberg feels that if we dont want God around, God will leave us since hes a gentleman. God wont force his love on those who dont want it, like a Catholic priest; instead, God loves us from a distance like a dirty old man spying on children. God makes himself present only to those who invite him in, because the presence of God is identical with the fiction you imagine as soon as you begin to seal your mind within a self-reinforcing delusion, with that initial insane act of faith in an absurdity. The creator of black holes and dark matter, of quantum mechanics and a multiverse of universes also wants a loving relationship with some clever mammals who happened to evolve by natural selection? No, that tall tale isnt fit even for children. And Americans dont turn God away with their secularism; instead, they embrace a Jewish-Christian hybrid form of idolatry and equate God with the anthropomorphic fiction they create in their image.

63 Instead of worshipping a supernatural source of every particular thing in the universe, American exoteric theists and all religious fundamentalists worship a mental projection of themselves. They prefer worldly freedom to sin and then they betray their prophets, debase mystical wisdom, and redefine God to suit their sinful lifestyles. Thus, they invent theological justifications of war, sex, family, business, and all manner of vices. Rosenberg merely uses his idol to condemn those sins to which hes personally opposed, while some other fundamentalist will condemn the secular habits that Rosenberg cherishes. Rosenberg implies that hes absolutely certain that when he dies hell spend eternity with God. But perfect certainty is cheap. Plenty of insane people in mental institutions are absolutely certain that theyre Napoleon Bonaparte or an alien from another galaxy. If you bid farewell to the rules of evidence, to the standards of rational thought, you can cheaply build up invincible confidence in any outlandish proclamation. Thats unimpressive; on the contrary, the spectacle of an adult so belittling himself is grotesque. Rosenberg should reflect on the fact that critical thinking has been instrumental to billions of heroic acts, stretching back thousands of years to our prehistory when our ancestors had to decipher environmental clues in their hunt for food, in their farming, and in their evasion of predators. How many billions of times have human children been saved by their parents rational thinking, by their commitment to think responsibly, to base their beliefs on the evidence and not to get caught up in foolish games? Whats the comparable track record of blind faith in some patent absurdity peddled by simpletons and charlatans? Of course, it goes without saying that the more religious society is hardly the more peaceful one. Organized religion is an expression of the tribal instinct to preserve one dominance hierarchy at the expense of another. No more proof of this is needed than the fact that the American religious right has replaced gentle Jesuss message of extreme self-sacrifice with a xenophobic, warmongering cult of infinite consumption. Instead of denying themselves for the sake of helping others, rightwing Americans demonize all foreigners and worship an extension of themselves in the form of their

64 tribal God who blesses social Darwinian capitalism and American military hegemony. They select an already-mutilated religion to rationalize their woeful predilections. And so rightwing Americans, who make up the bulk of evangelical Christians and who live in southern states that are by far the most violent, love guns, because they celebrate wild western individualism. That is, because the American religion is more Jewish than Christian, the most religious Americans are also the most nationalistic, and because guns were so instrumental in forging the American identity, through its War of Independence, its Civil War, and its experience of anarchy as a colonial society lacking a long monarchical history, the most religious Americans are also the most steadfast supporters of guns. Hence the egregious gun violence in the US. The problem is hardly American godlessness; rather, its that the most passionate American theists derive their absolute certainty from the childishness of their theology, and pretend to be concerned with God at the very moment they reveal that theyre blatant narcissists. Theres far too much exoteric theism in the US for that to be a relatively peaceful country.

The Irrelevance of that Irrationality

I could go on and on and on, and Im not just saying so. But notice that a rational takedown of some pitiful theistic assertions makes no difference. It solves nothing. Reason has no pride of place in religious fundamentalism. Moreover, most logical and empirical refutations of theism are hackneyed and so uninspiring. All of the crucial New Atheistic arguments were made by the old atheists a few centuries ago. Thus, I think the above sort of refutation is a distraction (as fun as it can be to formulate). Instead, we should ask ourselves what we can learn from religious fundamentalism. When I read Rosenbergs nauseating sermon or when I see a self-righteous Christian or Muslim on TV or harassing bystanders on the street, Im struck most of all by a feeling of alienation. Here, you see, we have a real sense of strangeness: between the minds of a philosophical naturalist/cosmicist and of, say, an Evangelical Christian, theres an abyss that cant be bridged. Rosenberg might as well literally be an alien from another world, or at least an alien pod thats invaded a human body, and Im sure the feelings mutual,

65 which is to say that New Atheists, for example, must seem just as bizarre to born-again Christians or to militant Muslims. This leads to the postmodern sense of vertigo, of inescapable relativism, as we come to view our way of thinking more objectively and to wonder whether we could likely be in the right when we atheists are also the bizarre, foolish aliens according to some opposing perspective. Every culture is preposterously arbitrary from an outsiders viewpoint. However natural and thus caused our beliefs may be, we are also cursed with limited freedom to create our worldview, to assign meaning and to prefer some mental associations to others; we sculpt our memories, surrender to cognitive biases, and otherwise personalize our mindspace, to feel at home in the cosmic wilderness. The result is that whereas our biological body is mostly forced on us, our mind is more artificial just to the extent that our philosophy is a matter of taste and subject, properly speaking, to aesthetic evaluation. Even the ultrarationality of a Sherlock Holmes, a Spock, or a Sheldon Cooper is a lifestyle, a work of art in which the rationalist lives. Again, then, when I read Rosenberg, I dont feel proud that I think I can eviscerate his toy religion. In the last section, I meant to present such a refutation only to set it aside, to show that someone who can think in that way also appreciates the futility of those criticisms. Instead, what interests me is the opportunity for self-knowledge afforded by the experience of such palpable strangeness. The religious fundamentalist is weirdly foolish to the secular humanist, and the feeling is mutual, and were all weirdly foolish next to the undead flow of natural processes. The universe continues to evolve and to complexify regardless of our awareness of what the universe is doing or of our ability to call processes by some names. Theres enough strangeness to go around, so we should be more impressed by displays of genuine humility. The next time we come across some theistic prattle, maybe we should be less quick to attack and more prone to reflect on the existential significance of such a meeting. Read the deranged diatribe and astound yourself by reflecting on the fact that if a mighty human body can choose to be so wrongheaded, there is no hope for anyones perfect

66 rightheadedness. Our worldviews are largely works of art and we are all silly little artists, with our pretentious berets and oversized palettes, vainly preferring to live among our self-portraits. This is not to say, with the lazy postmodernist, that all worldviews are equally meritorious, but only that we need to appeal to aesthetic and ethical standards when we judge between them. As I argue elsewhere, Christianity is currently the most hideous major religion, so it badly fails a worldviews existential test. Secular humanism is superior but still not to my taste, and Im trying to create a more aesthetically appealing worldview, which is to say an emotionally moving and rationally powerful one, sharing the results in these rants within the undead god.

Appendix: The Definition of Prayer

Prayer: obviously among the top five most embarrassingly asinine acts a person can undertake while clothed. (The top five such acts done while unclothed are all sexual in nature.) To begin briefly to count the ways (and to paraphrase Wittgenstein), prayer is as pointless as a widget attached to nothing: either the outcome you ask God for comes to pass and would have happened anyway or it doesnt because God knows better. Then theres the blatant contradiction of assuming that God is knowledgeable and powerful enough to be listening to all prayers and able to fulfill them, not to mention to have created the universe in the first place, but also dimwitted and pliable enough to need a lowly humans advice on how to run things or to be the least bit pressured by our entreaties. Next, theres another contradiction. Whoever prays is sure to clasp her hands together and close her eyes, thus signifying that she poses no threat, that she comes to God humbly and doesnt demand anything with a threat of laughably inadequate force. Moreover, prayers are generally sprinkled with self-deprecating qualifications, with incantations designed seemingly to assure any god whos listening that heres someone

67 hard done by who could use a favour. However, all of this clearly amounts to the falsest humility, since the very notion of prayer presupposes that the creature can influence or control the Creator. As is apparent from so-called primitive, shamanic religions, the medicine man goes as far as to explicitly cast spells on divine forces, as though gods could be hypnotized by magic formulas. Thus, the contradictions of modern prayer betray the origin of that form of pseudocommunication. Evidently, religions began with visionary states of consciousness caused by psychedelic drugs or trance states, in which an authoritative, seemingly all-knowing voice is heard from within. In Hinduism this gave rise to mystical monism, to the view that theres only one true consciousness and that our minds and all material forms are mere disguises worn by God. To that extent, then, prayer has at least a modicum of logic behind it: even we can influence God because were really identical with God; moreover, we can communicate with God by closing our eyes, turning inwards or perhaps whispering, since as indicated by the psychedelic voice, God resides within as pure consciousness. But western religions are individualistic, holding such monism as blasphemy. Thus, the modern prayerful theist must play an awkward charade, attesting to her profound humility while acting like she has power over God. Shes superficially passive and pleasant when she prays, since theres no point in getting mad at herself; after all, religions are based on the misinterpreted experience of being identical with God. But she nevertheless means to cast her more sophisticated magic spell, to enchant God to do her bidding, since her modernist religion elevates the individual human as the one who Nietzsche will later call the god killer. It goes without saying that every such act of prayer is a grotesque fiasco. At best, prayer distracts and comforts the one who prays, but so do a million less preposterous pastimes, like taking a long walk or reading a good book.

68 The final absurdity of prayer, though, befalls those who ridicule prayer, like the present writer, but who nevertheless find themselves instinctively calling out to no one when scared or angry. Prayer thus avenges itself on those who know better than to try to converse with an invisible person, since prayer apparently has some genetic support which drives even the most self-conscious atheist to debase herself in that fashion.

69

Does God Write Books? ____________________________________________________

The three main monotheistic religions each appeal to the divine authority of their exclusive religious texts. Jews, Christians, and Muslims assume that God used human authors to reveal certain moral and metaphysical teachings, which these authors wrote down to form the scriptures. Jews believe that God dictated the Torah to Moses, Christians that the Holy Spirit inspired either the overarching themes or every word of the New Testament, and Muslims that an angel dictated the Quran to Muhammad. With these farfetched presumptions in place, officials use those scriptures to command the consent of the religions members.

The Necessary Ambiguity of Revelation

There are numerous problems with the notion of a texts divine inspiration. First, theres a slippery slope here, since there would be no point of transmitting the divine message were that text to be buried in competition with mere human works and lost forever to posterity. Gods intervention, then, must extend from inspiring or dictating the text itself to manipulating social and political forces so that the text becomes popular and accepted, and even to ensuring that the divine message is properly interpreted by its millions of readers or listeners. The prospect of that degree of miraculous intervention becomes especially dubious when we appreciate that theres a multiplicity of religions,

70 each with its own holy book that conflicts with the others. Assuming God is behind only one or perhaps some of those works, God must ensure that the true divine wisdom outcompetes the pretenders. Since God is omnipotent, we might expect the most successful religion to possess the most authentic revelation. But two factors count against this assumption, both having to do with Gods interest in preserving our freewill. First, according to the theistic worldview, God doesnt want to force anyone to accept his message, and thus even though he might intervene in the world to give his message a fighting chance of being heard, God wouldnt prevent false, seductive messages from surfacing. Second, because were free we can sin and be led astray by those false teachings and even by demonic counterfeits of divine revelation. Thus, the most popular religion in any time or place neednt be one initiated by God. This raises another problem, however, which is that given this context within which God would be operating, God would had to have foreseen the near futility of his endeavour of sending us his message. The root of the problem is that theres a conflict between Gods supposed interests in preserving our freedom and in successfully informing us about how he wants us to live. On the one hand, God cant force us to listen or to understand his message; on the other, God believes that our listening and our understanding are crucial to our afterlife status. Thus, divine revelation is supposed to be a compromise: instead of speaking directly to everyone, laying out the facts about heaven and hell, angels and demons, and so on, God only imperfectly transmits his wisdom, perhaps manipulating history so that his message doesnt disappear entirely, but allowing geographical, cultural, and biological factors to take their toll on the scriptures fate. For example, God would have to concede to rationally-inclined individuals that the whole business of divine revelation is, at best, highly ambiguous. Gods hand in the revelation is so indirect that anyone should be forgiven for regarding the religion and its sacred text as entirely human-made. The multiplicity of religions, the contradictions or errors in the scriptures, the exploitation of the scriptures by unscrupulous religious

71 officials, the availability of infinite interpretations of such poetic statements as are typically found in the sacred books--all such facts add up to reasonable doubt as to whether a deity is remotely responsible for any scripture. To repeat, the only way God can allow us to choose whether to accept his advice on how to live, to render his moral judgment of our lives relevant, is for God to present his advice to us with great ambiguity, leaving room for our reasonable doubt. This means God couldnt just tell us all directly, in person, what were supposed to do. Thus, God would have to rely on human intermediaries, sacrificing their freedom by forcing them to physically write his message down and then to edit, copy, and advocate for it. But this means that those intermediaries would get to inject their biases into the work, giving the text the appearance of having no divine inspiration at all.

Grotesque Anthropomorphism
Faith is supposed to be required to look past the human context in which a scripture is actually authored, proliferated, and interpreted, and this faith is a choice. You can go with your reason which tells you to err on the side of caution and to favour the naturalistic explanation as the most likely one, this being that God would have obviously nothing to do with any of the messages spread in his name. Alternatively, you can side with your hope that the meaning of life is indeed so nicely packaged in one or another holy book. Assuming the rational path leads to damnation and the wild hope to heavenly bliss, this sort of theistic narrative is appropriately preposterous, which is to say that this tall tale is just the sort youd expect to be favoured by clueless souls trapped in the decaying corpse of the actual god who is altogether undead. To believe that theres a living God who creates the universe and gives us the capacity to reason, but sets up life as an elaborate test to see whether wed submit to absurdity in an act of reckless faith, against the overwhelming force of logic and evidence, is to fade into the ludicrous background of the natural order instead of heroically and creatively resisting that order. What I mean is that all natural, which is to say mindless, patterns are tragic and absurd, and that when you take a leap of faith that the creator of

72 dark matter, black holes, and trillions of stupendously huge nuclear fusion infernos stoops to tell us a story about which foods we should eat, who we should have sex with, and how many times a day we should pray, you participate all too closely in the ebb and flow of natural processes: you adopt natures inhumane hallmarks and make yourself horrible to look upon; you become a true child of the cosmos, a plaything of natural forces which create and destroy with no rhyme or reason, a fittingly ridiculous splatter of paint thrown up by a mad and blind artist; you make your life as preposterous and as inexplicable as the natural creation of anything from nothing. Need anyone be reminded that even were there in fact a personal God who indirectly publishes works of nonfiction for our edification, wed each have separate rational, moral, and aesthetic duties to utterly reject that theistic hypothesis, to live as though there were no such abomination? Rationally speaking, it goes without saying, all scriptures are written entirely by certain clever mammals; there is no extraordinary evidence warranting the extraordinary judgment that the universes creator had a hand in any of them: no miraculous foreknowledge, no superhuman writing skill or method of transmission, and so on. (Again, any such miracle would interfere with our free choice to reject God.) Morally, were each obligated to overcome the rank cowardice and vanity that take hold of all those theists who project an image of themselves onto the patently inhuman cosmos, when they speculate that the First Cause of quantum fluctuations, of supernovas, and of hurricanes also writes books for our benefit. That very notion is so monstrous that every time a pitifully desperate Jew, a comically hypocritical televangelist, a pompous and self-righteous Catholic, or an ignorant Muslim fanatic parades his or her odious drivel, which humanizes and so trivializes the mystery of gods undeadness, dignified people everywhere should shun those beasts, refusing even to look at them for fear of being turned to stone by their hideousness. Aesthetically, then, we should strive to beautify the entropically decaying corpse in which weve evolved; for example, we should rebel against the natural forces that exploit us, which entails abandoning childish hope, taking a more accurate measure of our existential predicament, and creatively expressing that grim awareness.

73

Revelation, Evil, and Freewill

However divine revelation is thought to happen, the theist is left also with a problem of freewill. Whether God or an angel would dictate a book to an author or manipulate the human authors natural faculties to write the text, thus remaining more behind the scenes, supernatural agents would thereby possess the human to some extent, turning him into a puppet. Yet the most common theistic solution to the problem of evil is that God allows us to act evilly as a result of our freewill, since our freedom is a greater good. Why, then, would God make an exception for the sake of revelation? Why would God care more about revealing certain messages to us than about the authors freewill, but more about freewill than preventing all the suffering caused by our evil acts? The clearest answer is that our suffering in this life is insignificant compared to our status in the next, and that Gods revelation is intended to inform us of that lopsidedness. That is, whether were happy or miserable in our present, earthly life makes no difference in the grand scheme, because our souls are immortal, and so God isnt much concerned with the plethora of pains to which were subject in our natural bodies. Thus, God isnt motivated to correct natural injustices, by interfering with evil peoples freewill. Gods much more concerned with our eternal destination in the afterlife, and so hes motivated to interfere with some peoples freewill to reveal the path to the best such destination. This solution, however, should be unacceptable to the theist, since it renders theism nihilistic and incoherent. Even were there a supernatural heaven and a hell which are vastly more important than planet Earth, this wouldnt mean the events in the afterlife must be all-important whereas earthly events are completely insignificant. Surely, if God created the natural universe, that fact alone would dignify nature and indeed Genesis says that God called his Creation not just good but very good. So what happens in nature must interest God to some extent, which means it should interest us. But as long as what allegedly happens to us in the afterlife matters more than what happens here and now, the theist has reason to treat everything in nature as having merely instrumental rather than inherent value. Moreover, our supernatural destinations are

74 ineffable, or at best understood imperfectly with religious metaphors, and these two facts together would seem to deprive the theist of any well-grounded values at all. In other words, the theist believes she has a divine promise of ultimate goodness or suffering in another life, an eternal destination for the spirit which requires faith here and now, because we cant rationally understand anything so disconnected from nature. The theist trusts that that promise is contingent on what we do in the present life, but because the next world is more important than the present one, all earthly events can have only secondary importance. In particular, the theist must regard them as means to achieving her ultimate end of reaching her best endpoint in the next life. Since the theist would thereby credit all natural events with mere instrumental value, and must confess that she cant understand her ultimate values of heaven and hell, the theist would be left without any tangible value to speak of. She should be hopelessly adrift, blindly following religious orders like a robot with little or no conception of their meaning. Moreover, if natural life has only instrumental value compared to the supernatural kind, but the latter depends on a divine judgment of the former, which sends us either to heaven or to hell, the relative unimportance of natural life saps the ultimate value of our supernatural destination. Heres an analogy: an Olympian athlete trains for months to run a race, she wins and is awarded a gold medal. Her training and the race itself have entirely instrumental value to her, meaning that her ultimate goal is to win the medal. Now the medal is made of gold, which gives it an independent, albeit not an inherent value, since the demand for gold is greater than the metals supply. But suppose the medal were made of paper so that the medals only value is its abstract representation of the fact that its wearer comes in first place in the race. And suppose also what happens to be counterfactual, which is that the training has no purpose other than to win the competition, that the athletes lose their added muscles and skills after the race, for example. In that case, I submit, the goal of being such an athlete and of winning the race would be arbitrary, which is to say, pretty much pointless. If the value of the journey is solely to reach a certain destination, and the destination is nothing but the

75 outcome of that journey, both the journey and the destination are vacuous. The meaning of the whole affair becomes stipulated and arbitrary. Now, just as the medal is actually made of gold, which has independent value, heaven and hell are supposed to include great pleasure or pain, which should be independently reckoned with. But because where we end up would depend crucially on Gods judgment of what we do in our natural life (whether we follow Gods laws, accept Jesus as our savior, and so on), and that natural life would be a game to test where we belong in the next life, the gravity of heaven and of hell would be lost, as it were. Those in heaven would suffer from the anticlimax that their great joy rests on something as comparatively trivial as what they did in a world that would have passed away, fulfilling its purpose as a mere cocoon for their benefit. Meanwhile, those in hell could content themselves with knowing that although they suffer horribly, their misdeeds must have been relatively insignificant in the first place, since they would have affected only embodied spirits in a game of natural life, and so the divine judgment of sinners must be farcical. If this is the case, though, theism becomes incoherent, since now the supernatural destination loses its ultimate value and the choice of whether to construe natural events as mere means to achieving a supernatural end becomes the choice of whether to play a certain game. Granted, the game in question would be Gods, but it would be a mere game nonetheless, with arbitrary rules and an end state with ultimately artificial, stipulated significance. God would declare those in heaven to be good and those in hell to be bad, but the value of the earthly actions that land those spirits where they end up would be instrumental, which is to say that the only reason to care about earthly happiness or suffering would be because either is a means to our supposedly much more important placement in the afterlife. Remember that were earthly suffering to have some independent value, God would have reason to value that suffering more than the freewill of evil people, so that he might prevent the former by interfering with the latter. Only were the importance of natural events trumped by that of the afterlife, because the former are the means by which we achieve our status in the latter, would God clearly

76 have reason to value our freewill more than our corporeal happiness or suffering. But the mere instrumentality and thus game-like quality of natural life would deprive life's conclusion of its ultimate significance, rendering heaven and hell absurd.

Comic Relief
The notion of divine revelation through scripture is one of the more prevalent but nonetheless loathsome features of exoteric theism. Luckily, critics of theism can spare themselves the physiological damage of apoplexy from contemplating these religions, by paying attention to the comedic value which lies safe and secure in the fact that though most theists claim to have in their possession some such God-written text, they typically either ignore each and every one of its teachings or else substitute their laughably primitive perceptions for what would be Gods, by cherry-picking the parts of their scripture which they deem relevant or plausible. Needless to say, the magnitude of this theistic hypocrisy is beyond measure. Again, when anyone subscribes to such extravagant balderdash in the first place, she dehumanizes herself and submits to natural processes of complexification; thus, the pattern of her daily activities becomes as monstrous as the universes scale, her hypocrisy as grotesque as the imbalance between the evolution of a galaxy and its being swallowed by a black hole. That is to say, believing that God writes books is bad enough, but because the cosmos is a perverse cornucopia, spouting endless tragedies and absurdities, the theist must go one step beyond even that foolish affirmation; she must cast aside all pretense of being a dignified, sentient rebel against the cosmic horrors, and perpetrate a bonus bit of nonsense: she must pretend to care about her manifestly fictional deity while actively ignoring most of what this deity is supposed to have miraculously penetrated the present world to tell her. Having resigned herself to the undead gods tyranny, with no thought of resistance, the theist utterly abandons herself to the sway of mindless forces, heaping one absurdity upon another until the local process of complexification is complete: natural forces, including the biases and fallacies to which were prone, produce a fantasy world in the theists mind, a mental map that bears as little relation to

77 natural reality as one cosmos would bear to another in the multiverse. The theists worldview, complete with anthropomorphisms, delusions, fallacies, and so forth, stands as an emergent level of reality, like scum floating to the surface which nevertheless boasts patterns of putrefaction that can be divined by an intrepid anthropologist. The fortunate point, though, is that this abyss between the theistic worldview and the reality of nature, between the theists self-indulgent conception of the First Cause and her vice-driven, beastly lifestyle which reveals the vaingloriousness of theistic religion as efficiently as any atheistic counterargument, is enormously funny! Instead of criticizing the theistic notion of divine revelation, which after all requires little more than stating the obvious, enlightened individuals might choose instead to allow this corner of the cosmic drama to unfold like a devastating but still existentially arresting train wreck. The evident contrast between our godlike technoscience and our savage or petty confusions is the stuff of classic tragicomedy. Indeed, the spectacle of American culture, in particular, in which those two opposites flourish, will be as universally laughable centuries from now as are the backwards aspects of premodern cultures to the modern mindset.

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Christian Chutzpah: Why Christianity is the Worst Religion ____________________________________________________

Even though Islam is arguably now a much more dangerous religion, the favourite target of Anglo-American so-called New Atheists, inspired by writers like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne, is Christianity. One obvious reason for this is that Christianity is the predominant western religion, especially in the US which is the most religious western nation. Many Christian commentators complain on places like Fox News, Christian Broadcasting Network, talk radio programs, and (in Canada) on Michael Corens shows, that Christians are thus persecuted, that secularists have a double standard, professing to be tolerant and respectful of personal liberties, but waging a bitter campaign against Christianity, a religion thats conspicuously the greatest force for good in the world. The implication, of course, for the Christians who keep one eye on such media and the other on the Bible, is that New Atheists are literally in league with the devil and therefore beneath contempt. The typical New Atheist response is to produce a hackneyed list of grievances with Christianity, including crass statistics on the numbers of people historically killed in the religions name; the religions failure to measure up to scientistic standards of evidence; and the religions opposition to politically correct liberal views on social issues like abortion, gay rights, and science education. Regardless of the status of those issues, Christianity is indeed supremely worthy of criticism--but for another reason entirely, and

79 so Ill lay aside the standard New Atheistic arguments. (For a summary of general arguments against theism, see Theism.) A sufficient reason why Christianity is the worst religion is aesthetic in flavour, picking up on Nietzsches psychological critique of Christian resentment. Nietzsche wasnt interested in whether Christian beliefs are true, since for him all truth is subjective, reflecting the will to power. So instead of tediously pointing out biblical contradictions, the absurdity of miracle claims, or the fallacies in arguments for Gods existence, he focused on tracing the character of Christian theology back to its psychological origins in the experience of the earliest Christians. Somewhat in that spirit, I want to highlight an aesthetic reason why nontheists ought to be critical especially of Christianity. The most unforgivable fault of mainstream and elite Christians--and its unforgivable because the fault offends good taste, and the taste of something is visceral and thus highly memorable--is their chutzpah, their sheer audacity, their shameless participation in historical reversals that pile irony on top of irony until today the whole grotesque Christian edifice--what Kierkegaard called Christendom--is a glaring sign of the universes absurdity and perhaps the clearest proof of Gods nonexistence. Tertullian is infamous for saying that he believes the Christian message because of the messages shamefulness, silliness, and impossibility, but Christianitys absurdity is much deeper than the content of its creeds. Again, Im not interested here in the epistemic status of Christian theology. I stress instead that when you compare the content of early Christian documents, including the New Testament and extracanonical, Gnostic scriptures, with the thrust of the Churchs historical development, youre bound to be repulsed by the gall of so-called Christians simply for their association with the oldest, most hypocritical institution which is the Christian Church.

Jesus Repudiation of the World

I begin by summarizing Jesus ethics as found in the gospels and as highlighted by liberal Bible scholars such as those who formed the Jesus Seminar. If we look at the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus other teachings, we find that, regardless of whether

80 he existed in history, the character of Jesus was an iconoclast. He railed against the Pharisees for their legalistic aloofness and he sided with the suffering poor, with the outsiders and outcasts. Not only did Jesus heal people like prostitutes and lepers, but he prophesied that the poor will inherit the earth, that the kingdom of God will undo the perversions of secular kingdoms in which a minority of privileged elites rule over the starving, impoverished masses. His parables and aphorisms reverse expectations by comparing heaven to a leavening agent in bread (leaven being symbolic of a corrupting influence), and by declaring that the first will be last and the last first: that a rich man will have as easy a time getting into heaven as would a camel of going through the eye of a needle; that earthly standards of ethics are meaningless in Gods eyes, and that therefore instead of following your gut and seeking revenge against someone whos wronged you, say, by striking your face, you should turn the other cheek; that your earthly family is inconsequential compared to the bonds between everyone as Gods children, and that therefore you should give away all your possessions to the poor and follow God instead of pursuing a comfortable life here and now; that good deeds are of minor importance compared to the intention which must be pure, since God judges even our thoughts and feelings. In short, Jesus was a radical socialist and ascetic who condemned all expressions of human pride, from power imbalances, to war, to the narrowly-defined human family, to hypocritical shows of piety. All such natural excesses are preposterous given the nearness of Gods kingdom, whether this nearness is understood in temporal or in metaphysical terms. That is, regardless of whether Jesus assumed that God would soon terminate the natural course of things for everyone at once and personally reign after an imminent Judgment Day or that Gods reign is near for each individual who, after all, lives for only several decades before dying and waking to Gods judgment, Jesus main point was surely that wed agree that radical changes are needed in all of our lives if only we could appreciate the spiritual context. Like horses with blinders on their eyes, we see only the present world, with all of its temptations and injustices, but Jesus claimed to be intimate with a spiritual source of nature, with divine creativity that renders the whole of creation comparatively insignificant.

81

All of this can be gleaned from the apparent influence of Essenian Judaism on Jesus, perhaps through John the Baptist. According to Josephus, Philo, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes, who lived from the second century BCE to the first century CE and, as Josephus says, were present in large numbers in every town, were also dedicated to voluntary poverty, baptism, and the ascetic renunciation of worldly pleasures. Moreover, as I said, the radical nature of Jesus ethics is evident even in the New Testament which--aside from Pauls portion--contains the mere exoteric Christian documents from the Churchs earliest period (although forgeries and obfuscating English translations render Pauls letters orthodox). But by a wild improbability, an esoteric Christian library survived over the centuries and was discovered in Egypt in 1945. The Gnostic Christians were persecuted as heretics by the orthodox, literalistic Christians, but some of the Gnostic texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, are as early as the canonical ones, especially since they effectively include Pauls authentic letters which are the earliest Christian texts. Moreover, the Gnostic texts make sense of clues in the canonical gospels regarding the basis of Jesus radicalism. When we put together the cosmologies implicit in the Gnostic gospels with Jesus ethical teachings in the canonical gospels, were forced to regard early Christianity as a God-intoxicated, and thus anarchical, antisocial, ascetic, utterly unworkable rebellion against the natural world. As Nietzsche put it, Christianity was otherworldly to the point of being antinatural and nihilistic in the sense that the earliest Christians valued only a ghostly world beyond the present one. The fact that many of the earliest Christians were Gnostics means that Christianity was continuous with the perennial wisdom traditions that gave rise to eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Indeed, as the mystic Manly Hall says in Lectures on Ancient Philosophy, the entirety of the Christian good news is easily interpreted as an allegory of the spiritual enlightenment that each individual ought to experience, of the need to renounce the standards fit for our natural bodies and to identify instead with the divinity within, which is our own conscious self. The good news, for those with esoteric

82 insight, wouldnt be that one particular man named Jesus rescued us all from the cosmos in which were trapped by the evil lord of this world, by being crucified at the start of the first century CE. Instead, according to the insiders version of Christianity, the mystical, psychological truth is that we each have our own power of Christ within us because, as Plato said, we can remember our higher, spiritual home; that is, we have an innate conscience, or sense of the good, which forces everyone eventually to condemn the physical cosmos in favour of our ideals. In Christian terms, we each already have the power of self-transformation, of sacrificing the life of our natural bodies, which are sources of sin and suffering, casting off those shells to free our true spiritual or conscious self. Again, according to this view, the crucifixion of Christ isnt a unique historical event that happened only to one person, but an obligation for each suffering individual, whos trapped in Gods spoiled creation and forced to sin just by being born into this world with a distracting animalistic body, to realize that this world is a sham compared to our true home with God. The point is that many early Christians carried Jesus radical viewpoint from ethics to metaphysics and cosmology, condemning not just imperial Rome but the whole natural order as monstrously unjust, as a prison for spirit (consciousness). As the scholar of Gnosticism, Hans Jonas, points out in The Gnostic Religion, the Gnostic Christian shares the modern existentialists feelings of alienation, and Id add that Lovecrafts science-centered cosmicism is consistent with this antinatural viewpoint. Indeed, contrary to Nietzsche, Jesus hostility to nature is admirable as far as it goes, since it presupposes an appreciation of what I call our grim existential situation, or what Christians call our fallen state. Both Jesus and Nietzsche appreciate the horrors of nature, although they disagree on the virtues needed for the best response. But whether Jesus was himself a Gnostic or even whether he lived at all as an historical figure who preached and was crucified, as stated in the canonical gospels, is irrelevant for the purpose of my aesthetic case against Christianity. The unavoidable conclusion, though, is that earliest Christianity was astonishingly radical. We know this now not just from Jesus ethical teachings in the New Testament (NT), which for many centuries were available only to Christian elites who spoke Latin, but from the Gnostic gospels, which

83 again were unavailable for many centuries, because most Gnostic texts were burned along with the Gnostics themselves by literalistic Christians.

Jesus versus the Imperial Church

And so we approach the first absurd, stomach-churning turning point, the first indisputable moment of irony in Christian history, which was the Constantinian shift in the fourth century when Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, introducing state involvement in the religion and beginning the long process of making Christianity the empires official religion. Max Weber called this caesaropapism, the complete subordination of priests to secular power. No words can adequately characterize the chutzpah of those so-called Christians who went along with that imperial use of what was once indisputably an iconoclastic, anti-imperial, indeed antinatural cult of rebellion. Just try to imagine: youre an early Christian who claims to follow the teachings of a Jewish radical who was crucified by the imperial powers of Rome in league with Jewish elites who rejected Jesus preaching. (We can now surmise that what many Jews rejected in Jesus was the Greco-Roman syncretism with Judaism, which formed a Jewish brand of Gnosticism called Christianity). Now Christianity is embraced by Rome, and you decide to curry favour with the empire by representing your local church in the Ecumenical Councils, to produce a version of Christianity that might be graced by Romes stamp of approval. Jesus loathed and was killed by Rome, you claim to follow Jesus, and now you align yourself with Rome in Jesus name? The irony is breathtaking! However, not all Christians went along with Rome. The Gnostics didnt attend the Rome-sponsored councils that hammered out Christian orthodoxy, remaining true to the otherworldly spirit of Jesus message. The Donatist Christians as well went as far as to reject the authority of priests who thrived under Constantine but who had betrayed fellow Christians to save themselves, during the earlier Roman persecution of Christians by the emperor Diocletian. At the Council of Arles in 314 CE, the Donatists were condemned as heretics, while for obvious Christian reasons the Donatists in turn

84 condemned the Roman Empire as evil due, for example, to its wealth which went hand in hand with sin. In 317 Constantine sent troops to kill or banish the Donatists, withdrawing the troops in 321. Donatist opposition to Rome-backed Churches persisted until the seventh century when the Muslim conquests rendered the inter-Christian conflicts moot. Why many Christians went along with pro-Christian emperors is easy to understand. Rome had destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE; moreover, according to Christian beliefs, Rome had slain Jesus himself as well as other Christian martyrs. Although Rome was tolerant of and often indifferent to the religious practices of the cultures it ruled, the empire smashed anti-Roman uprisings with an iron fist, which indicates again how radical Jesus would had to have been to be executed. On top of that understandable fear, theres the passage of centuries between Jesus and Romes conversion to Christianity, which means that the memory of Jesus intentions would have faded even for the Gnostics, Donatists, and others who best understood what Jesus was up to, let alone for the fair-weather followers who might have come and gone with not even an indirect connection to Jesus himself. Just as pedophiles presently exploit Catholic Church policies, many Jews and gentiles would have joined a movement that synthesized Judaism with Hellenism--but in pursuit of their own agenda, especially once Rome stopped persecuting Christians and favoured the religion. Still, the effrontery of those later Christians is repellent. There was sufficient evidence of what the religions founder would have said and done, in those myriad gospel narratives and other Christian scriptures. Although those texts conflicted with each other, which is why the Ecumenical Councils were needed to unify the Christian Roman Empire, something like the summary I give above must nevertheless have shone through. Indeed, the audacity of those Christians who betrayed what they must have regarded as their founders clear message, by accepting state power to establish Christianity as an imperial religion, is matched only by the Romans cynicism. Granted, the gospel narratives that were selected for inclusion in the Christian canon whitewashed any Roman involvement in Jesus death and scapegoated the Jews. But Jesus radical

85 message remains even in those sanitized texts, and that message is at least implicitly opposed to all grand secular endeavours, including political ones. (Presumably, the gospels couldnt have been entirely rewritten for the purpose of Roman propaganda, because theyd already become popular, thanks to their mystical and thus implicitly antiRoman message.) For example, Jesus was evidently opposed to war and family, which were bedrocks for Rome. Nevertheless, Constantine and later emperors chose to help unify their failing empire by converting to a religion founded by a Jewish radical anarchist, socialist and antinaturalist, which made Jesus at least implicitly an antiimperialist. Partly, the emperors must have grown comfortable with Christianity because Roman religion already had its own plethora of rising and dying demigods. Also, their familiarity with the Roman versions of the perennial wisdom traditions, such as in the mystery cults, would have made the emperors privy to the esoteric view, according to which the story of any dying and rising god-man is allegorical, and thus the emperors would have realized that Rome didnt actually kill the Son of God. Yet another reason for Romes eventual use of Christianity, to which Ill return in the next section, is that the subtext of the Christian message actually favours secularization, a point which opens the way for a second level of Christian chutzpah. If Rome could assimilate even Jesus radicalism, the Empire could stamp out any anti-Imperial sentiment. As Elaine Pagels points out in The Gnostic Gospels, literalistic Christianity was embraced by Rome as orthodox because it empowered a hierarchy of Church officials (Jesus had to personally confer power to Peter, the first Pope), whereas the Gnostic Christian was more like the Protestant in his or her pursuit of individual salvation without the need of any connection to a religious institution. Gnostic Christianity was thus useless to the emperors in their attempt to revive their empire by unifying its culture. Rome needed a bureaucracy to exercise top-down control of mass religion. Ultimately, the reason for the split between the hierarchical, literalistic Church and the individualistic, Gnostic one is the exoteric-esoteric divide in any mass movement in which the masses have unequal cognitive capacities. Just as gifted children in private

86 schools are given the freedom to pursue their own interests, whereas less intelligent children are forced to follow a technocratic curriculum, the more sophisticated Christians were attracted to the philosophical character of Gnosticism, to the idea that salvation requires secret knowledge of the grim reality of nature, whereas the poorer, illiterate, or less intellectually-curious Christians had to be led, and that demand for leadership was naturally met by a supply of Christian leaders, who became the Catholic priests, bishops and popes. Catholics will respond that the state involvement in the Church benefited both sides, that the Christian Church obviously flourished thanks to its access to secular power. But this response misses the point: the Churchs flourishing in the evil, fallen world, governed by what Paul called powers and principalities, is a bad thing from Jesus radical, antinatural perspective. Authentic Christians want to escape the prison of nature, not build an empire within that prison. The audacity of early Catholics was their pretense to be followers of both Jesus and the Roman emperor. As Jesus said, you cant serve two masters, God and money. The fallout from the decline of Jesus ideological influence on the Church is well-known. Just compare Jesus anarchic, socialist, pacifistic, otherworldly rhetoric to the language used in the Roman Edict of Thessalonica in 380, given by emperors Theodosius, Gratian, and Valentinian II, which formally established the Catholic Church as the exclusive religion of the Roman Empire: We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians; but as for the others, since in our judgment they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give to their conventicles the name of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the punishment of our authority which in accordance with the will of Heaven we shall decide to inflict.

87 Were looking here at the difference between day and night. That the one should turn into the other requires a revolution, which is to say that the Church that was established in Jesus name betrayed the heart of his message, the spirit of his rebellion. The ironies are many and palpable. And so for centuries, Christians acquired secular power by persecuting other Christians and then non-Christians, leading to the destruction of pagan society; to the imprisonment, torture, or burning of heretics including Gnostics, Jews, pagans, witches, and scientists; to the pogroms and inquisitions against thought crimes; to the crusades against the Muslim Empire; to the European wars between Catholics and Protestants; and to the genocide against Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. Again, my point isnt to judge Church history from a modern, secular perspective, but to condemn the cognitive dissonance and audacity of at least the educated and non-monastic Christians, which enabled them to call themselves followers of Jesus even while their lifestyle seldom had anything to do with his otherworldly renunciation of natural life. Their chutzpah is appalling. Sure, Jesus vehemently condemned people to hellfire, but the type that he condemned would have included the exclusivist and hypocritical friends of secular power who came to run the Church. And granted, the Catholic Church also fed and clothed the poor, through its monasteries and missions, and a minority of Christians lived ascetically as monks, nuns, and mystics. Catholic history is mixed from a Christian perspective. But in the first place, the standard of living might not have been so low that there arose such a demand for Church charity, had the Church not destroyed pagan society and stifled intellectual progress, holding medieval Europe in a dark age while the more rational Muslim society prospered. Secondly, the extent to which the Catholic Church cared for the poor and advocated asceticism, thus staying true to its founder, is outweighed by the magnitude of its betrayal of Jesus, especially since, as in todays Christian charities, the assistance was rendered with secular as well as spiritual intentions: the poor were helped as long as they supported the Christian institution which empowered and enriched the elites in the Church hierarchy. Still, the charge of unbearable chutzpah doesnt apply to those Christians who actually tried to live like Jesus.

88

Secular Christianity: a Second Level of Chutzpah

Catholics will reply that the Church isnt like a constitutional democracy which is tied mainly to its founding documents: the Church ought to evolve wherever the Holy Spirit takes it. This brings me to the deeper level of Christian audacity. The first level is the most obvious one, which Ive been highlighting: Jesus was an iconoclastic and otherworldly anarchist, socialist, pacifist, and ascetic, whereas the institution that arose to spread his message clearly betrayed his ideals by joining with the secular power of the Roman Empire. As indicated by the Gnostic gospels, Pauls letters, and the NT gospels, Jesus was opposed to all of Creation in so far as Creation was governed by natural rather than divine powers. Jesus was a dualist who didnt assume that God works through all natural forces, such as the Roman Empire. On the contrary, as Jesus reportedly said, we should render unto Caesar whats his and unto God the things that are Gods. From the original Christian perspective, those two allotments differ from each other, because Gods will is opposed by demons that enslave Gods children by distracting us with secular goals of money, power, and pleasure that are inconsequential in the divine scheme. (The NT gospels even depict Jesus resisting the devil's temptations in a face-to-face confrontation with the devil.) Thats why Jesus ethics seem to us so radical and impractical: weve fallen far short of divine standards because weve lost sight of the big picture; were so distant from God that we cant save ourselves and so God needed to leave his heavenly abode and be incarnated in the midst of evil, in the natural world of darkness, and die on the cross as our sacrifice. But the Catholic is a monist who shares the Jewish belief that Creation is good, that God isnt alienated from nature but works within it in the form of the Holy Spirit which guides the Church, animating the body of Christ. So the Catholic can say that there was no Christian audacity, because Christians arent bound even by the New Testament, but must attend to the ever-developing Christian message as its revealed especially to the Catholic hierarchy which was empowered to be Gods chief instrument for our salvation, next to Jesus. Thus, in effect, the Catholic can move the goal posts to justify the secularization of Christianity. After all, the subtext of Jesus

89 message, as its presented in the NT, is found in the prevailing interpretation of the Pauline gospel, according to which Jesus ethical standards are impossible for fallen humans to adopt and so all that should be expected of us is that we claim Jesus excellence as our own, by proclaiming him our lord and savior. That is, the orthodox view of Pauls formulation of the gospel came to dominate Christian thought, but that view effectively undermines Jesus antinatural radicalism and excuses bad, secular behaviour on the part of Christians. Note the order in which the NT texts are presented in the Bible: the gospels come first even though Pauls letters, which barely mention the historical Jesus, are older. The resulting impression on the reader is that Paul implicitly criticizes Jesus for being unrealistic. The gospels tell of Jesus harangues against humanity for being so impure, and then of his being executed for his trouble. The subtext is one of realism: in the fallen world thats distant from God and at best indirectly controlled by heavenly forces, humans will either fail miserably to live up to Gods standards and save ourselves from the hell which is our lot or else the forces of evil will avenge themselves on those saints who reveal an escape hatch in the form of an ascetic life. Then comes the real good news in spite of the apparent bad news of Jesus lofty standards and ignominious death: as Paul seems to say, theres a short cut, an easy way out for even the greatest sinner, which is that we simply need to confess our sins and call upon Jesus to save us, in which case the credit Jesus earned for himself will be transferred to us without our having to personally live like Jesus and earn our own way. (As indicated in the previous section, that latter point is one where Gnostics and Catholics differ in their reading of Paul. Gnostics believed we each have our own power of Christ to overcome ignorance and liberate our state of mind, whereas Catholics contend that we acquire that power only from external sources of salvation, namely from the concrete event of Jesus sacrifice and from the Catholic institution.) On this realistic, quasi-Pauline subtext of the NT, then, there are two Christian excuses for sin and thus for a rejection of Jesus ethics. First, contrary to Gnostic Christianity, God works throughout the imperfect natural universe and so Gods representatives in

90 the Catholic and Protestant Churches need offer no apology for allying with such secular forces as the Roman, Russian, Spanish, French, British, and American Empires. But compromises are needed because we do live in a fallen world, just as God limits himself by achieving his goals for Creation by mysterious and convoluted means. Second and contrary to Judaism and Gnosticism, God expects very little from us in our fallen state (were fallen in that were spirits which have lost our unity with God and been imprisoned in matter); we cant save ourselves and so were bound to sin even after we become Christian. With these two assumptions in mind, the full meaning of Church history comes into view. On a nave level, discussed in the last section, the Church repulses me with its wholesale treachery against its own scriptural ideals. But when we interpret those scriptures like a jesuitic Christian, we discover that most Christian leaders havent shared Jesus radical ideals since perhaps the second century. Instead, these leaders embrace the secular world and its natural ideals of wealth, power, and pleasure, viewing them as they think God views them, as instruments that ultimately serve Gods will even if only God knows how. By incarnating on Earth, God conquered and sanctified fallen nature, and so God blesses secular powers as long as we inevitable sinners follow Gods path through the wilderness. By severing the Church from Jesus otherworldly radicalism and worshipping God the Holy Spirit as it historically preserves the Church by adapting it to changing circumstances, Catholics effectively deify the natural forces of time and of social evolution, including all of the biological and psychological factors that determine how Christians respond to events and how Catholic officials make pivotal decisions for the Church. In this sense, Christianity brings God down to Earth just as Aristotle reduced Platos transcendent Forms to natural processes. The upshot is that Christianity reduces to a kind of pantheism. Far from undermining pagan secularism, the Church merely renames some gods and prunes the over-abundant mythical celebrations of mystical experience by focusing on a Jewish version of the pre-existing myth of the dying and rising god. From the elite Christian perspective, Christianity is just as this-worldly or practically secular as Judaism and Roman religion, which means that

91 Christianity is ultimately just another ideology in the service of secular powers, similar even to the most primitive form of tribal idolatry. Again, where Christians distinguish themselves is their monumental audacity, their delusion that their religion differs from a garden-variety rationalization of secular injustices and dominance hierarchies. The deeper level of Christian chutzpah, then, is that Christians typically assume a self-righteous posture, paying lip service to Jesus ascetic ravings but practicing a religion that effectively justifies any secular activity, no matter how counter-productive or even abominable from a spiritual, antinatural viewpoint. To be sure, this audacity would be impossible without their uniquely radical scripture that speaks of Jesus ethics, since that scripture serves as a fig leaf concealing the shame of Christians secular preoccupations. The most familiar case of Christianity as a handmaiden of secular powers is the American conservatives brand of the religion, which very obviously bears not the slightest resemblance to anything that Jesus would have welcomed. From the warmongering to the fetishes for guns, violent sporting events, and Ken and Barbie doll-like nuclear families; and from the greed for money and material goods to the seamless union between religious and Machiavellian schemes in the Republican party, conservative Christianity in the US is a farcical charade, a preposterous amalgamation of opposites that brings shame to all its informed participants. By contrast, Jewish and Islamic scriptures openly sanctify secular forces, including war, as long as the participants compensate by chanting some magic words, eating select foods, and performing other comparatively meaningless rituals. This is why whatever excesses the Israeli military or the mujahedin may be guilty of and however complicated their scriptures may be which allow for moderate and liberal interpretations, their killing for the secular purposes of protecting land, exacting vengeance and so forth are never obviously wrong from a Jewish or Islamic frame of reference, respectively. Sure, Jews have their Ten Commandments, but they also have volume upon volume of rabbinical commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures, making every manner of legalistic distinction which effectively justifies any conceivable action a person might take. Thus are Jews

92 secular survivors above all else, which is why they're not hypocritical when they reject mystical ideals.

The Worst Religion in the World

With regard to the major extant religions, only Christianity begins with the preaching of so uncompromising a form of antinatural dualism, wearing the record of that preaching like an albatross, and double-crosses that radicalism so quickly and fully while Christians so blithely attempt to have it both ways. No other religion can tempt its practitioners to exhibit such disdain for what the religion itself proclaims is the ultimate truth. That sin against its own stated principles, that forced hypocrisy makes Christianity the ugliest religion, the one thats most embarrassing to people of good taste. Christians ought to be the most confused members of a major religion, because their scripture is so utterly opposed to their religions history. That conflict isnt accidental. Jesus radicalism was unworkable from the outset, because Jesus condemned all natural works, all natural forces, all our thoughts and inclinations that arent Godsoaked. Jesus was opposed to this whole world, to this kingdom not yet ruled by God. The very notion that a religious institution, such as the Church, should be erected in his name is grotesque. Evidently, Jesus didnt take matters into his own hands and write an account of what sort of institution he wanted to create. As the Gnostics understood, Jesus wanted to create no institution at all, since he didnt want to add one more natural burden to distract us from what he regarded as the ultimate, harrowing truth, that we need to abandon this present world entirely by way of loving God alone with all our emotions, intellect, and consciousness. Naturally, no sooner had the Church gained a sizeable following so that it became useful to the local secular power, than that leviathan, the Roman Empire, swallowed the Church whole. The fact that the Church promptly dropped all pretense of following Jesus contempt for natural life and united not with God but with one hotbed of natural vice after another, from one secular empire to the next, earns Christianity the title of

93 Worst Religion in the World, aesthetically speaking. Moreover, the Christian religion is thus the most richly deserving of philosophical and scientific criticisms, if only because those intellectual criticisms prettify the more gut-level but nevertheless warranted response, which is just that of vomiting in the presence of any educated, non-ascetic Christian. For centuries, these lapsed Christians have had the habit of wearing precious metal crosses around their neck, ostensibly to remind themselves of Jesus crucifixion. What they should at least subconsciously appreciate, though, is that they themselves symbolically condemn Jesus just by owning those crosses instead of giving them to the poor, not to mention by betraying their so-called Lord in a thousand other ways. Their audacity knows no bounds when they feign to follow Jesus the ascetic, the socialist, the pacifist, and the anarchist, even as they belong to a treacherous Church and live as hedonists, war supporters, and eager members of secular institutions while wearing about their neck a perfect symbol of their own apparent contempt for Jesus.

94

Christian Crudities: An Aesthetic Condemnation of Christian Myths ____________________________________________________

Christian theological assertions are illogical and highly improbable, but those faults have almost no place in a proper denial of them. Religion is the irrational core of every worldview, of every belief system, mindset or way of looking at the world. Its currently fashionable for so-called New Atheists to castigate mainly Christians and Muslims for the palpable irrationality of their religious beliefs, as though the issue that separates socalled secularists and theists were the Manichean conflict of Faith versus Reason. No non-autistic or otherwise sane atheist is a hyper-rationalist, a Data-like figure who turns solely to reason in all her affairs, never speculating, feeling, intuiting, trusting, or caving to higher powers. A viable defense of atheism doesnt reduce to the following argument: (1) A worldview should be fully rational; (2) Theism is irrational; (3) Therefore our worldview shouldnt be theistic. A person does not live by Reason alone. As the sociologist Durkheim explained, youre bound to form a religion around what you hold to be of ultimate importance. Id add that only a machine truly cares about nothing, which implies that all people, all clever animals with primitive emotions and instincts, are religious. Indeed, those atheists who rest their case by showing that theists commit various fallacies and that their key assumptions are preposterous, reveal their irrational

95 commitment to certain unexamined philosophical assumptions of their own, be they pragmatic, positivistic, or scientistic. The issue, then, isnt whether a person should reject all religions as foolish, but rather which religion should be discarded. When you appreciate that logic and science stop short of fully justifying a worldview, that a human brains perspective on the world should be coherent, which means, in effect, that it should satisfy all of our cognitive faculties, including the rational and irrational parts of our mind, you should find yourself adopting subtler criteria in choosing what to believe at the philosophical or religious level. (For more along these lines, see Theism, Scientism, and Scientific and Philosophical Atheism.) Now, Christianity happens to be execrable, but the pseudo-rationalist underestimates the religions inadequacies, by banally demonstrating that Christianity isnt perfectly logical or scientific because, after all, the Bible contradicts itself and Jesus allegedly performed miracles. Proving as much shows only that Christianity fails as a mathematical proof or as a scientific theory, and such a demonstration would thereby in turn amount to a category error. Christianity contends for peoples religious commitment, and thus the religions inconsistencies and improbabilities are relatively insignificant. The more loathsome aspects of the religion, to my mind, are ethical and aesthetic. What I mean is that the religion fails now, in modern and postmodern times, to uplift as a work of imagination; on the contrary, in the present context, Christian belief degrades a persons character. When combined with modern myths and values--as every current, responsibly-held worldview must be--Christianitys shortcomings are outrageous. The point, though, isnt just that Christianity contradicts modern truths that should be taken for granted, which it obviously does, but that a synthesis of Christianity and modernism would make for an atrocious, wildly incoherent work of art that disappoints rather than fortifies. This is, of course, the Nietzschean point. What appalled Nietzsche wasnt some assortment of petty cognitive defects of the religion, but the anachronism of Christian values, the anticlimax of the Christian narrative, the unethical effect of the religion which

96 is to reconcile the gullible masses to secular excesses rather than energizing people with stories (myths) worth trusting. In Christian Chutzpah, I develop this aesthetic case against the religion, focusing on the historical context, the main point being that Christianity dulls the senses and redirects the crucial capacity for shame, because the religion reconciles the believer to the most egregious betrayals which are the Churchs compromises with secular powers. The Christian feels only the inconsequential shame of failing to suffer like Jesus, and is relieved by Pauls assurance that faith is much more important than works, that a Christian neednt be even slightly Jewish, let alone ascetic, because Jesus already carried out on our behalf all the good deeds we could hope to accomplish. Historically, this theology plays out as a rationalization of the Churchs betrayal of Jesus Gnostic rebellion against the natural world, and so associating with the religions present grotesque shell has all the charm of bullying a child with a machine gun. Now I want to expand on the criticism by contrasting the content of Christian theology not with Church history but with modern ideals. Ill emphasize the monstrous Christian deformities that emerge from that contrast and that repulse from an aesthetic viewpoint.

The Essence of Christian Theology

But first Ill summarize the narrative in question, the so-called good news, as I understand it. The problem that this religion is meant to solve is our inability to relate properly to God. Most religions codify means of pleasing God, holding out commandments to obey and rituals to perform, such as animal sacrifices. These religions perpetuate injustice and keep God and his children at a distance, because they fail to deal with the fact that God is holy whereas we are inherently imperfect and thus sinful. Even those religions which catch a glimmer of divine truth end up as human schemes, corrupted by their sinful practitioners and heaping useless burdens on their followers. This was the New Testaments point about the Pharisees (not the actual Pharisees but the characters in the Christian legend): the Jewish officials aligned

97 themselves with Rome and kept the letter of revealed Jewish law while ignoring the spiritual intention behind the law. Instead of building the kingdom of God on Earth, the bureaucratic Pharisees supported oppressive political systems that kept people apart from God. The problem was that humans are inherently corrupt and liable to sin, that because were not gods, we cant possibly live up to Gods standards. Even when God reveals his plan for us, inspiring prophets and lawmakers, people ignore or misinterpret the revelation. In modern terms, a Christian would say, this is because of our animal nature, which causes us to act as desperate, selfish beasts, not as the supernatural, altruistic beings were designed to be. Christianity is supposed to have solved this problem. Instead of relying on human initiative, God came to our planet and paid the price of our sin, sacrificing himself and thus both extricating us from the burden of wrongheaded religious hierarchies and further revealing the thrilling truth of Gods benevolence. The Creator of the universe isnt just perfectly powerful and knowledgeable, but hes a loving parent who cares about his creatures and mercifully fulfills the requirements of justice by undergoing the punishment we deserve for the myriad ways we fall short of Gods glory. Indeed, according to Christian theology, Jesus was the only begotten Son of God, which means that he was both God and a man. Thus, when Jesus was crucified by some of the very beings he was trying to save from eternal agony in hell, his intentions were Gods and so we can praise God for his mercy, and his sacrifice was meaningful because Jesus human body permitted him to genuinely suffer. Just as a human ruler can be surrounded by sycophants in a bubble of affluence and thus lose touch with his peoples miseries, God and humans had become estranged, and just as a king can reacquaint himself with his subjects by disguising himself and traveling among them, God dressed up as a human and lived amongst us. God literally walked a mile in our shoes, breaking bread with ordinary humans, to show us not just how an ideal human lives, but how much God empathizes with our plight. Gods Son, or human incarnation, felt our pain; however, instead of merely telling us so, he showed us by demonstrating both his divinity and his wretched sharing in the worst that the human

98 condition has to offer. Jesus was shown to have been divine, by the wisdom of his parables and by the supernatural power of his miraculous prophecies and healings. But Jesus humanity was apparent in his poverty, his humility, and especially in his mortality, which is to say his capacity to suffer while being tortured and executed by the Romans. The horrible irony of the Christian message is that Gods incarnation as a human revealed not just Gods identity but ours. God arrived to save us from divine retribution for our beastliness, and humans welcomed him largely by rejecting him as a foreign body. Gods creatures tortured and killed their creator, but this was Gods plan: knowing what he was getting into and how his created world would devolve, he used our wickedness to devise a way for us to be reborn: God means to shame us by demonstrating our moral failings. The Jewish and Roman authorities dutifully, if unknowingly, played their part by showing why were so helpless, because they couldnt recognize holiness when it literally stared them in the face; on the contrary, they went to war against whats most sacred, against the fleshly incarnation of the Master of the cosmos. They double-crossed noble, loving, and wise Jesus, turning him over to the cruel Roman Empire; they stripped and beat him, nailing his wrists to a wooden cross like an insect specimen in a museum--and just as biologists thereby exhibit the arrogance of the technocratic mindset that uses our capacity for quantification to exploit other species, the Jews and Romans showed why Jesus had to live in the first place, why they needed a saviour, because left to their own devices theyre forlorn, headed for the agony of everlasting separation from God. The good news is that the human reaction to Gods incarnation wasnt one-sided, since some people recognized Jesus divinity and saw the potential for a divine arrangement of human interrelations. Some Jews and gentiles followed Jesus even at the cost of their lives, giving up their livelihoods, their possessions, and their dignity in the sight of their ignorant neighbours and Roman occupiers. They fled after Jesus was executed, but continued to meet out of remembrance of what Jesus taught and what they came to understand that he represented. They formed small churches, they were persecuted by Rome, but a few centuries later the empire that had crushed Jesus was itself overcome

99 by a wave of Christians; Constantine legalized the religion and so Christianity continued to spread. Christianity became not just the worlds most powerful religion, but the only one that deals head-on with the fundamental conflict that motivates all religions: we profane beings glimpse the sacred in nature, but are unable to live in harmony with it because, after all, the sacred and the profane are so contrary to each other. On its own, the profane cant reach a state of perfection, but a perfect being can degrade itself, just as a fast car can travel also at a slow speed; thus, God took on a profane form so that he could save us from ourselves, from our estrangement from him and from our inability to satisfy his holy ideal.

The Need for an Aesthetic Appraisal of Christian Myths

So much for my most charitable presentation of the Christian message. Now, the typical New Atheist would recite a litany of Christian howlers: Jesus probably didnt live even as an historical figure, let alone as an incarnation of the ultimate creative power; the notion of a god-man is incoherent; the Bible is quite errant, so it doesn't adequately support any of Christianity's extraordinary claims; there are no supernatural events, as the philosopher Hume showed, so Jesus miracles never happened; theres no original sin, so there would have been no need for Gods self-sacrifice; the notion of an anthropomorphic deity is preposterously vain for anyone to take seriously; a deity who prepares the punishment of hellfire so liberally is a demon deserving of scorn rather than worship; Jesus and Paul's ethical teachings are inferior to those of the ancient Greeks, so Christianity fails even to uphold human wisdom. All of these criticisms are reasonable, but none is decisive. When the New Atheist finishes arguing those cases, the edifice of Christian theology will remain as influential as before, and this isnt just because Christianity has grown powerful, thanks to its long history. The underlying reason a religion becomes so powerful, in the first place, is that it satisfies a demand, and this isnt the demand for a logically airtight belief system or for a reliable hypothesis about how a natural process works.

100 To see the futility of pretending to dismiss Christianity solely on rational grounds, you need to appreciate the depth of our irrationality, what Hume called Reasons slavery to the passions (emotions). Observe how even the average scientist, engineer, mathematician, or analytic philosopher, let alone someone whos less likely to uphold the Enlightenment creed of hyper-rationalism, can be brought to tears after her reading of a craftily-written sad novel. Again, notice how virtually anyone can be terrified by a sufficiently scary movie or be compelled to pump his fist in the air when watching his favourite sports team score the winning goal. As cognitive scientists have shown, what happens is that our instinct to read each others minds and navigate our social environments can spill over, causing us to anthropomorphize everything from words on a page, to images on a movie screen, to groups of people like sports teams or political Parties. We cope with the inhumanity of natural patterns by humanizing them. Sure, we have the rational capacity to abstract from our preference for a human-centered world, for a heaven in which everyone gets what she wants. But again, no sane person is both fully and constantly rational, that is, hyper-rational. And so my point is that if we cherish arts and sports, for example, so we can vent our emotions or hone our skills at social interaction, we can also feel strongly about a theological narrative, whether its that of Jesus salvation of humanity by his sacrificial death or of humanitys utopian triumph over natural forces by the power of technoscience. Thus, even if Christian theology fails utterly in rational terms, even if Jesus never lived at all, there is no personal God, and the Christian creed is full of holes, the theological narrative can persuade on the level of metaphor, as an emotionally satisfying story like any other powerful work of fiction. Millions of Christians believe, at the very least, that even if their religious creed were literally false, humans are so tragically misguided that we would slay God in the flesh were there a personal Creator and were he to so manifest himself. And that counterfactual contention is plausible and indeed sobering. Besides the Churchs earlier power over peoples bodies, which was lamentable, here then is the heart of the religions power over peoples hearts and minds: the Christian narrative has undeniably succeeded as a work

101 of fiction that rose to the level of myth, taking hold of peoples imaginations and stirring their emotions. The irrational commitment to Christianity--which is of apiece with our attachment to our favourite novels, movies, sports teams, political Parties, or anything else we anthropomorphize and irrationally celebrate--can withstand every logical refutation, every disconfirming experiment. After all, even the cognitive scientists who understand how and why our capacity for anthropomorphic projections works, engage in the practice, emotionally identifying with their favourite fictional characters. Even a physicist who speaks the mathematical language of nature can use pornographic images for sexual gratification, and even a biologist who understands the chemical properties of love hormones can find herself falling in love. Likewise, a theist who suspects that her theology would fail as a mathematical demonstration or as a scientific argument, can have whats commonly called religious faith. Understanding the truth obscured by an illusion wont immunize a brain thats less than fully rational. This is why we should examine the aesthetic merit of Christianity, treating its theology as a story told in the context of the modern narrative of reason, freedom, and progress. (For more on the modern narrative, see Modernism and Postmodernism.) Can Christian theology now sit well with those who have had modern values thrust on them in the wake of the Age of Reason? Does the creed inspire and uplift, engaging with our emotions in a way that helps us cope with modern challenges? In other words, does Christianity make us better human beings in the modern context? I emphasize the latter because art and other outlets for our irrational side arent used in a vacuum: what engaged the imagination of someone two millennia ago in Palestine might be pass today in Europe or North America; what myths were naturally regarded as sacred in one culture may be alien and ridiculous to another.

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Christian Misanthropy versus Modern Progressivism

Ill illustrate with an aesthetic evaluation of some key elements of Christian theology. Take, for example, the part of the story which Christians seem to care about most, the idea that the Almighty degraded himself by living as a mortal man and suffering out of compassion for us. The subtext of the Christian story of Gods self-sacrifice is that God offers us a backhanded compliment. On the one hand, were supposed to be worth saving, but on the other were supposed to be incapable of saving ourselves. The New Testament tells only half the story when it says that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in the power of his sacrifice should have everlasting life (John 3:16). Anyone who could love a depraved worlds potential to be good must loathe its actual depravity. The unstated corollary, then, is that God must have contempt for our choice to sin so abominably that we become unable to save ourselves from everlasting punishment. Jesus sacrificial death symbolizes not just Gods mercy but his contempt for what his prized creatures have become. After all, God could have paid the penalty for sin in private, without shaming us with a public demonstration of his moral superiority. By transforming himself into a human and living the perfect life, according to the Christian story, God effectively humiliates us, showing that we all along had the power to live well but always choose not to do so. With his supposedly sinless life as Jesus, God is like a business manager who, frustrated by his receptionists poor typing skills, shoves her out of her chair and types his own memos at record speed and with no errors, publicly shaming her while assuring everyone that he acts only to edify. To preserve Gods underlying benevolence, the Christian apologist (in both senses of the word) typically distinguishes between Gods love for the sinner and his hatred for the sin. It takes no more than a moments reflection now, though, to see why this distinction has never made the least bit of sense and is thus a ham-fisted attempt to sell the Christian narrative. A sinner is a person and sin is ungodly action. The sinner chooses to act well or badly and the action is the result of that choice, the mental command that causes the hand to feed the poor or to steal someones wallet. Thus, hating a sin is like

103 hating the rock you trip over. We anthropomorphize and emotionally react to inanimate objects or events because we have primitive programs running on our naturally selected brains. God would have no such excuse. If someone chooses to sin so abundantly that the person deserves everlasting torture, the proper target of hatred for those offenses is the sinner, not the offenses themselves which after all are just mental images, bodily movements, and their effects. So if were so wicked that were unable to please God and wed torture and execute our saviour, God must be much more ambivalent about us than the orthodox summary of the Christian narrative suggests. The only way God could love us in spite of our original sin is if were not responsible for our imperfect nature since, after all, God would have made us that way. Of course, with that assumption in place, the whole Christian story would unravel since then we wouldnt deserve punishment in hell or need Jesus sacrificial death. (As everyone knows whos raised a child or owned a pet, when a creature develops from an early age into a monster, that does speak badly of the creatures parent or owner. Our tendency to sin might thus indicate that God has been the quintessential absentee dad.) Again, priests and preachers like to emphasize our worthlessness by saying that Gods self-sacrifice was done out of grace, meaning that we do nothing to earn a way out of perdition, but that God chose freely to intervene out of compassion. This formulation likewise assumes both that we could be so wicked as to deserve hell and that God punished himself in front of us purely out of unconditional love. But love for whom? For the unrepentant sinners who arrogantly live by our own lights instead of praising our Creator at every opportunity, who are so corrupted that wed each kill or at least shun that Creator if only we were given the chance? No, in terms of narrative logic, that story makes no sense, meaning that it cant grip our imagination or stir our emotions. Gods boundless love must be for himself, for his greatness which he demonstrates by doing our job for us, by showing us how its done and then taking the high road, pretending that he doesnt act out of jealousy for our pride. This interpretation is consistent with the rest of the abysmal story, that for Jesus sacrifice to work, we have to confess Gods greatness and our worthlessness, we have to attribute all good things to God, avoiding pride like the plague, in which case were reborn as proper children of

104 God and Jesus heavenly Father comes to resemble nothing as much as a typical human despot whos naturally been corrupted by his absolute power. The Christian subtext of Gods misanthropy is unappealing in its own right. Mind you, misanthropy within reason is thoroughly justified, since we are appalling creatures, but Christian misanthropy is absolute. According to the Christian story, God sacrificed himself because we suffer from original sin, which means that even though we somehow have the freedom to be as sinless as Jesus, well always choose to sin if left to our own devices. In practice, we never redeem ourselves, and our only hope to avoid Gods wrath was the miracle of divine intervention. This implies not just that were miserable sinners, but that as far as the natural world is concerned were hopeless; at best, we have the metaphysical potential to save ourselves, thanks to our alleged supernatural capacity for self-control (our freewill), but naturally well always disappoint. Whats aesthetically unappealing about this is that it renders the Christian narrative anticlimactic. As Christopher Hitchens would say, if the character of God the Father is that of a duplicitous egomaniac who intends to save worthless, wicked creatures mainly to demonstrate his superiority and to remake us into slaves after were chastened, the promise of Christian salvation becomes exactly as tempting as the offer to be a citizen of totalitarian North Korea. More importantly, this absolute pessimism about human nature conflicts with modern optimism about human progress. With no help from divine revelation, modernists during the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment surely proved that we can create exciting new cultures and can learn how the world actually works and gain more control over threatening natural forces. But the aesthetic point is just that theres no compelling story to be told that combines the modern narrative of humancentered progress with the Christian story of how God decided one day to humiliate us so that we might be transformed into obedient children obsessed with singing Gods praises.

105 The root of the conflict is that Christianity assumes a static view of human nature, whereas modernism assumes an evolutionary one. Again, according to Christianity, we cant improve our situation except in some abstract metaphysical sense (without supernatural freewill, the Christian narrative doesnt even get off the ground); that is, human nature is completely corrupt, but we have an immaterial spirit that technically has power over that nature (over our mind and body), even though we never choose to live in a spiritually laudable fashion. This is why Jesus was supposedly the only human who perfectly followed the spirit of Gods law with no help from God (of course, Jesus was God, but no matter...). Ancient Christians took not just human nature but the whole universe to be static: the outer, heavenly realm was one in which the stars or gods never waver in their orbits, because theyre perfect and thus changeless. The modern view of nature is, of course, very different. Nature evolves: stars are created in nebulae and eventually theyre destroyed, as are whole galaxies; the physical laws of nature may be mere environmental properties in an evolving multiverse, as opposed to timeless dictates; biological species change into each other over time, as Darwin explained; and human history can evidently progress on its own at least in certain respects. So a modernist would say that our capacity for change and indeed for progress rests not on something as remote as a ghostly spirit, but on our connection to the natural world. Because were naturally selected, we acquired the power to understand how many things work, and because the forces of natural selection are blind, they have to live with the consequences of their handiwork, as it were. Those forces endowed us with some freedom from our basic genetic programming, which is how the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution were possible. Were we governed by a jealous god who prefers us to be humble rather than proud of our accomplishments, he could change his mind about having given us Reason and lobotomize us. Alternatively, he could wait until were all dead and surprise us with his displeasure by consigning most of us to hell, like a jerk. Whatever those facts may be, the aesthetic point is that modernists (liberals in the authentic, non-corrupted sense) trust in the natural potential of human progress,

106 whereas theres no room in the Christian narrative for the practicality of that potential. The Christian story is presently told with modernism in the background for all people educated in industrial or postindustrial societies. The prospect of combining modern and Christian myths, to forge a coherent, presently-viable Christian worldview is so daunting that few even try to harmonize them. Modernists tend, then, to be lukewarm, secularized Christians, if not atheists or more philosophical mystics in some Eastern tradition. When Christianity and modernism are combined, the result is a hideous bastard tale, like Joel Osteens prosperity gospel. Osteen concedes the benefit of what human greed can produce, namely material wealth, while he disingenuously attributes that success entirely to God--as though Jesus perfect Christian morality lay in anything other than his renunciation of natural possessions, let alone wealth, so that he could dedicate himself to altruistic endeavours.

Theistic Anthropomorphism as Childish Twaddle

For another example, take the bedrock theistic assumption that theres a personal god who therefore could expect us to live well, sympathize with our inability to do so, and sacrifice himself for our benefit. Even were there such a god, only a Philistine could presently be moved by a theistic tale of his exploits, just as an adult must revert to a very silly frame of mind to enjoy playing with her childrens toys. As I said, we all irrationally anthropomorphize the outer world, personalizing the patterns we detect. Spiders spin webs, birds fly, fish swim, and humans over-socialize. But no bit of anthropomorphism is as conspicuous as the theists, especially when judged in the modern context in which the world has been remade by the application of rational methods. Infants look all the more childish when their behaviour is compared to an adults, and so theistic anthropomorphism is all the more clearly an over-extension of our drive to socialize, when we indulge in such obsolete metaphors even in the Age of Reason. Of course, this means were much more likely now to regard theistic statements as wildly false. But the aesthetic point is that these statements about Gods personality, his

107 moral deeds, his war with demons, and so on, really do become as emotionally compelling as a tale intended for children. Because of the unavoidable modern context, theres an unfortunate parallel juxtaposition established between the childs unlimited anthropomorphic projections and the adults partial rationality, on the one hand, and the theists personalization of natures ultimate creativity and the modernists ideal of hyperrationality, on the other. The New Testament does modern theists no favour by accentuating this conflict, with its prescription of childlike qualities: Jesus says that those who inherit the kingdom of God are like children (Matt.18:3) and Paul repudiates the natural wisdom of the world, comparing it with Gods spiritual wisdom which seems foolish to arrogant pagans (who wed now call secularists) (1 Cor.2:13-14). Likewise, the sort of Christian paternalism I criticize in the previous section exacerbates the current tone deafness of Christian theology. In the present individualistic era, when were fed a steady diet of capitalistic propaganda, promising happiness if only we consume enough products, were not going to be genuinely moved by the deeply misanthropic idea that were all hopelessly headed for hell unless we abase ourselves before the egotist who made the universe and who rubbed our noses in our wickedness a couple millennia back. Sure, consumerism is grotesque and the masses cry out for an alternative, for a postmodern myth that can guide us in spite of our rampant skepticism. Fundamentalist religions and New Age cults can fill the void, but no postmodern religion has emerged which truly ennobles its followers, in my view. Certainly, the orthodox Christian story can teach us nothing about our predicament. Children live in a fantasy world that they havent yet learned to distinguish from reality, regarding everything they encounter as extensions of themselves. This is because their evolutionary task is to passively download information from their parents; instead of being fully-formed individuals, they have a window opened in their minds, as it were, so that they can be trained. But that window allows not just for unimpeded parental input, since the childs personality, too, spills out into her experience of the outer world so that everything seems to her magically imbued with life. We cant say in a positivist spirit that the ancients generally were more childlike than modernists, that history recapitulates

108 the developmental arc from human infancy to adulthood. The ancient Greeks as well as the Hindus, for example, were skeptical of theistic anthropomorphism; Hindus used theistic metaphors purely for the utilitarian purpose of developing certain emotions. Still, our irrational drive to socialize tends to be given free reign when unchecked by the wellmotivated use of a competing mental capacity. The Scientific Revolution gave a boost to Reason, picking up where the ancient Greeks left off, and technoscientific progress now dignifies the sort of objectivity thats anathema to childlike personifications of the environment. What this all means, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, is that theistic narratives feel embarrassingly retrograde and even dehumanizing. Even though its fallacious to automatically attribute value to natural developments, including the childs physical and mental growth into an adult, we all surely believe, for one reason or another, that that growth is necessary and ultimately for the best. Granted, we can suffer nostalgia for childhood innocence, but we tend to share the modern faith in the benefits of godlike human creativity, which requires the power that comes with understanding how the world works. When an adult regresses to an infantile state, acting severely ignorant or even wearing a diaper, whether because of a mental illness or a sexual kink, the adults behaviour is invariably kept secret--partly out of the embarrassment felt for what looks like the ultimate cowardice. So when the theist becomes engrossed in tales of a personal hero who acts throughout nature for the greater good, what looks like the shameful abandonment of adult sensibilities is off-putting. Were all irrational at times, but we also have the capacity to think objectively, and when theists brazenly feed their inner child with the most extreme anthropomorphisms even in the shadows of the most stunning edifices of Reason, the gut reactions should be feelings of shame and disgust. Theistic myths just feel misplaced and artificial, even though they inherit the illusion of still possessing the power to exhilarate, from their glory days of yore. Instead, these myths no longer uplift as much as they stultify and then require elaborate rationalizations to preserve the theists dignity in the modern world.

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Conclusion
The upshot is that Christianity isnt just absurd, from a modern, rational viewpoint; the religions creed also makes for a bad story when told in the context of the modern one of how Reason empowers us. Instead of being encouraged by a coherent worldview, modern Christians are forced to create mental compartments, awkwardly abandoning one story for the next as the situation dictates, moving from Church to the workplace, for example. Never mind that Christianity fails utterly to meet modern epistemic standards; as far as our irrational side is concerned, Christian metaphors are stale and ineffective, as Bishop Spong said. A religion thats long overstayed its welcome, Christianity runs up against the modern and postmodern zeitgeists. But like Muzak spilling out of speakers everywhere, the Christian narrative is still told and retold, enchanting hardly anyone. To be sure, there are still so-called Christian missionaries and other altruists who feed and clothe the poor, but who is to say whether theyre inspired now by the Christian message or by the modern story of human-created progress? Both are in the atmosphere and only the latter is supported by recent history. The Church and its myths remain, but Christian institutions have lost their political power and so they must compete with the modern myths that serve the dominant social classes and that best explain recent historical upheavals. That competition is devastating to the current literary value of Christian stories. Just as many early movies are historically great, in the sense that theyre highly influential for later filmmakers, Christian myths should obviously be appreciated for their historical importance. But the fact that an artwork once had the power to move people for the better, to speak to their sensibilities and reassure them or broaden their perspective, doesnt mean the art retains that power under all circumstances. Indeed, the books or movies that move you when youre young often seem crude and paltry when you later encounter them. For many sociological reasons, there are currently around two billion Christians. But the most popular art is seldom the most tasteful. Kitsch, for example, is highly popular. And the current aesthetic value of Christian

110 fictions is less than nil: in their exoteric formulation, at least, Christian stories are embarrassingly irrelevant, besides being obviously false. Now I dont expect that anyone will abandon Christianity after reading this aesthetic condemnation of the religion. My aim is only to identify the queasiness that I assume virtually every educated person feels when contemplating the Christian narrative. That suspicion that the gospel is vacuous, that the Church is like a colossal used car lot, that Christians are literally kidding themselves? Thats your good taste telling you to appreciate worthy art instead.

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The Curse of Reason ____________________________________________________

Reason is a double-edged sword. Our abilities to model reality in our minds, to detach from our immediate sensations and experiment on mental representations, to apply abstract categories with language, and to think logically or holistically and so discover how our environment works, are largely why humans presently flourish. Weve mastered much of the world because of our cognitive powers; indeed, the wonder of reason is the godlike power it places in a beasts paws. But knowledge can be a blessing or a curse, depending on what there is to be known. As it turns out, weve learned that our nave, anthropocentric preferences are mostly false. The universe doesnt care about us; were not at the center of things; our ideals count for nothing in the cosmic cycles; were not immortal, nor as conscious, free, or even as rational as we assume when we childishly compare ourselves to a divine source of the whole natural universe. Reason makes us godlike but only compared to the unknowing beasts that struggle alongside us; were still beastly, given the potential for evolution of intelligent species over millions of years.

How Reason makes Human Life Absurd

As the philosopher Thomas Nagel pointed out, reason makes life absurd in other ways. When we think objectively, seeing things as they are and not as we might wish them to be, we take up what he called a view from nowhere. We can view a situation more or

112 less impersonally, ignoring our feelings and following the data or the logic wherever they lead. The danger in this is that we can view ourselves objectively as well, and when we do so its hard to avoid a destructive sense of irony. Take any highly specialized form of complexity, like a biological adaptation. The giraffes long neck makes sense from the giraffes limited perspective, but were the giraffe able to view itself dispassionately, from a neutral, non-giraffe viewpoint, it would surely regard its specialized neck as a ridiculous albatross. Granted, the adaptation enables the giraffe to survive by affording it access to highly-placed food, but the narrowness of that way of life simultaneously takes the giraffe out of countless other races. The further a species evolves in a single direction, the less flexible its members become and the more absurd their behaviour when theyre removed from their comfort zone. Language and culture, too, become absurd when viewed by an outsider. The symbols that carry meaning to a language speaker are so many noises or curious squiggles to anyone else. Taboos, rituals, and social conventions can appear as extravagant follies to anyone who isnt invested in the culture. The rules of games or sports are relatively arbitrary and thus the players strenuous exertions to follow them are comical: were the rules changed, the player would have to play the new game instead, rendering his or her earlier efforts meaningless. Relative to the perspective in which a set of rules matters, the game makes sense, and fans can even become obsessed with a games vicissitudes. But someone who views a game objectively, from the position of nowhere in particular, thereby prevents herself from identifying with its dynamics or its symbols. Instead of personal involvement, then, theres ironic detachment and a sense of the futility of complex developments due to their narrowness and thus their transience. Complex forms are often inflexible and thus unstable. In so far as you depersonalize yourself and view something critically or scientifically, you cease to care about it and are bent on understanding the mechanisms that make the thing work. The more you understand, the more power you have over the thing, and that power further deprives the thing of its dignity. Reason transforms the natural into the artificial, making nature our playpen. We turn members of other species into toys,

113 domesticating or consuming artistically-prepared portions of them. We use what we understand to our benefit, and just as a gods might is presumed to give the god the right to treat its creation as a means to the gods end, we convert whatever we understand into instruments that lose any inherent worth. Because were beasts rather than gods, the power we acquire from reason corrupts us, and so reason lands us in a quagmire of nihilism and decadence. Thus, we share with the giraffe the embarrassment of overspecialization. While reason obviously makes us much more flexible than the giraffe, our evolutionary gift becomes just as much of a curse when certain circumstances change. In the giraffes case, tall trees can become scarce, leaving the giraffe ill-equipped to compete for low-hanging fare. In our case, we change our own environment, creating a feedback loop as we use technology to customize natural processes, and as we adapt to the newly-created artificial environment, thanks to our ever-flexible capacity for reason, we become alienated from the way of life that insulated most of our ancestors. To wit, we become postmodern, mythless cynics or arrogant, reactionary zealots. Just as an adult may long to recapture a state of childlike innocence, a technoscientifically advanced society can only yearn for the naivety of a blindly anthropocentric culture that hasnt discovered natures impersonal processes. Having lost touch with a childlike perception of nature and been corrupted by the technological prison with which we surround ourselves, we exacerbate our beastly instincts and head out on a path towards inevitable cultural implosion. Replacing childlike creativity and optimism with cold, calculating reason, with impersonal instrumentalism and materialistic consumerism, we build a high-tech society but strip ourselves of the innocence and the passion that might fruitfully direct our godlike power. Ironically, then, the society that becomes outwardly godlike, using science and other modern institutions to acquire power over nature, also becomes inwardly more beastly so that the godlike shell, consisting of the military-financialindustrial-governmental complex and the postmodern lifestyle of disenfranchisement, suffocates the beast within.

114 (This isnt to contradict Steven Pinkers recent thesis that modern people are less violent than the ancients. Our greater beastliness lies not in a penchant for brute force, but in our greater corruption, nihilism, and decadence; in our servitude to the overwhelming systems we create; in the sociopathic rationalism we adopt to master natural forces and to compete with the machines we build; and in the scientistic idolatry that co-opts the religious impulse. Of course the ancients resorted more to brute force: they lacked the infrastructure to punish their enemies and victims in a safer, more sophisticated fashion, with advanced legal regimes and mass-produced, maximum security prisons; with engineered propaganda for social conditioning; and with economic, cyber, and drone warfare. We channel our aggression with more sophisticated instruments, but the use of those instruments doesnt ennoble us.) As an example of the curse of reason, consider the mundane task of editing a piece of writing. While in the midst of constructing sentences, a writer feels emotionally connected to the words as brainchildren, and editing them is more difficult. Only when the text is cold to the writer, after several days during which the text is forgotten, can the author objectively assess the writings strengths and weaknesses, and modify it as needed. The objective criticism can improve the writing, but the distance needed to view the text from nowhere precludes an emotional connection to it. Now, the value of something is more felt than puzzled out by logic, experiment, or any cognitive algorithm. We value what we care about, and objectivity is the opposite of caring. Thus, we care less about what we most understand. Another example is found in a comparison of sociological criticism of ones own culture with that of a culture that no longer exists. In the former case, passions arise more easily, because more is at stake and the critics may be emotionally invested participants in the society in question. With regard to ancient societies, historians and social scientists more readily dehumanize their subject matter, offering mechanistic, reductive explanations of our ancestors behaviour which mock the way the ancients would have understood themselves. However much historians may care about past societies, they cant be as emotionally tied to them as they are to their own society. Just as the

115 emotional bonds to something must be at least temporarily severed to take up a detached perspective and to master the thing, the lack of such bonds invites objectivity which establishes a master-slave relationship between the objective observer and the passive subject matter. There are, after all, roughly two levels of explanation that can be given of human behaviour, the commonsense and the scientific ones. We naive folk think instinctively or in ways we inherit from our amateur training. Thus, we explain peoples behaviour by positing such familiar entities as beliefs and desires, and we assume the person has consciousness, freedom, and perhaps an immaterial soul that makes her sacred. This level of explanation is drenched in normativity, since the talk of beliefs, desires and of much of the rest presupposes standards of behaviour and the special value of human beings. And so we establish the famous Cartesian divide between humans and the rest of nature, since while we may still animistically import psychological categories to the nonhuman world, we more readily take up a scientific attitude in our dealings with that world. The wilderness of impersonal natural forces falls outside the scope of modern social laws, and since weve evolved to be social we naturally care most about persons and our pets. Scientists ignore these considerations and use impersonal and more precise, mathematical language to understand nature, on the pragmatic assumption that nature ultimately consists of impersonal entities and processes. Of course, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, and other social scientists have turned their attention to human beings and so have undermined the traditional, commonsense level of explanation. While the latter presupposes moral bonds and capacities such as autonomy, which dignify us, a scientific explanation reduces a person to much more abstract categories. When we understand human behaviour in terms of causes, whether these causes are found in physics, the brain, the genes, the environment, or in evolutionary history, we inevitably dehumanize the person and think of her, in effect, as a ridiculous puppet. Even if we retain some form of dualistic worldview, according to which the levels of explanation are all valid because reality can be understood in many

116 ways, depending on our interests, the Scientific Revolution compels us to assume that some levels are deeper than others. In nature, as objectively understood by scientists, minds are not fundamental, meaning that while beliefs, desires, and some degree of consciousness, freedom, and reason may be real, its more accurate to speak in scientific terms that disenchant human nature and posit a more deterministic, generally inhuman world. This leads to postmodern irony and cynicism, since while we naturally fall back on our nave picture of ourselves in polite society, in the back of our minds we simultaneously know about genes, hormones, the brain in general, and the whole atheistic panoply of impersonal causes and effects that operates throughout the universe, including in our own bodies. Reason is thus the messenger that reports our foolishness, our ridiculous existential predicament. Theres a genre of comedy in which a character pursues silly goals using serious, highly logical means. This is human life in a nutshell: our nave, commonsense goals are delusions sustained by our ignorance of more fundamental causes, and when we apply reason to understand those causes, we eventually destroy ourselves if only to avoid laughing at our own expense for all eternity. Whats so amusing isnt just the gap between what we think were doing at the nave level and whats really happening as understood best by scientists; rather, the point is that the familiar social world in which were most comfortable is an illusion compared to the deeper reality of natural processes. Our actions are as absurd as a puppets flailing: the puppet is an unknowing actor, following a script and wholly controlled by a puppeteer who looms off-stage. Were the puppet somehow to come alive and learn of the disparity between its nave selfconception as an agent in its own puppet-centered world, and its deeper reality as a stooge on a stage within a much larger, puppet-indifferent world, the puppet would surely be afflicted with angst. In the film, The Truman Show, the protagonist learns [Warning: spoilers ahead] that his whole life has been staged for a television show in which hes the star, and in the end he chooses to leave the show and enter the real world. But we have no exit, no means of cutting the puppet strings that incarnate us as

117 natural beings. The Truman character leaves one stage only to step onto another, that of nave human society the dignity of which is undermined by rationally-obtained knowledge.

Dawkins on Scientific Wonder

The biologist Richard Dawkins responds to this sort of criticism of reason, in his book Unweaving the Rainbow. More specifically, he responds to the charge that science takes the wonder out of life and provides little material for great poetry. On the contrary, he says, poets waste their gifts on romantic fantasies that spring from their imagination and if only theyd stop ignoring scientific discoveries, theyd find a wealth of inspiration. By explaining how light works, for example, Newton spoiled only the fairytale of rainbows and leprechauns, but allowed us to learn about electromagnetism, special relativity, and the immense size of the universe and the properties of other star systems. Science thus replaces minor wonders with major ones. What is so threatening about reason? Dawkins asks. Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry (41). In the first place, Dawkins talk of mysteries and puzzles personifies nature and thus whitewashes the damage science does to the nave, exoteric worldview. To have a mystery, properly speaking, you need a secret and thus a mind that sets the mystery in motion for others to solve (from the Greek mysterion, meaning secret rite). Scientists are not like Sherlock Holmes in that respect. Much of nature is unexplained prior to scientific investigation, but the metaphor of the intrepid British detective who tracks a murderer by following clues left unwittingly behind, is as anthropocentric as any monotheistic fairytale. The philosophical upshot of scientific theories is the Nietzschean and Lovecraftian one, that no one else cares whether humans explain and master natural processes or succumb to them. There is no Mother Nature who hides from the scientist like a guilt-ridden temptress.

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As to whether disenchanted nature is beautiful, the question is trivial since beauty is subjective. Anything can seem beautiful or ugly depending on the viewers criteria. Since aesthetic criteria are normative, there is no factually correct set of them. Even if natural selection biases us to prefer symmetrical faces and hourglass figures, for example, no judgment of beauty is proven correct or incorrect just by citing that evolutionary fact. Normative judgments arent justified by force; instead, they flow from values. Biologists can explain why certain aesthetic judgments are normal, in the sense of being prevalent, but not why anyone ought to favour a prevalent standard. Scientific theories have no normative implications. Thus, biologists may find insects beautiful, while others may have a different opinion. Scientific wonder is also normative and thus subjective. There is no error made if someone doesnt agree with a scientist that electromagnetism is wonderful. Moreover, if we define wonder as astonishment mixed with admiration, were surely speaking of the initial shock from being surprised by a natural phenomenon that isnt yet understood, and then of the dawning admiration as the phenomenon is explained and eventually tamed by technological applications. This sort of wonder is harmless, because its analogous to a gods bemusement by its controlled creation. A patron of a zoo feels this wonder, this delightful mixture of shock and admiration, when beholding a caged lion. But place this admirer of lions in the African Savannah, alone, unarmed, and staring into the eyes of a hungry pride of the beasts, and wed likely have on our hands a different kind of wonder. Here, you see, wed have that same initial shock and surprise, but instead of admiration from a position of safety, we must assume the admirer of zoobound lions would suffer from raw fear due to the reversal of power. We can call this second kind of wonder awe, and it includes the idea of respect or reverence due to fear from a lack of control. In this sense, a religious person is said to fear God, because God would have power over us and not the other way around. With this distinction in mind, we can see that Dawkins is right to some extent: scientific wonder can be felt towards nature in so far as nature doesnt threaten us, whether

119 because the phenomenon is too far removed from us or because we control it with technology. But in so far as science alerts us to some natural phenomenon that does threaten us, whether because we dont yet or can never control it, awe is more appropriate than admiration-filled wonder. And, of course, scientific theories are filled with information that should terrify us. For example, scientists learned that the dinosaurs were probably wiped out by a meteor, and nothing prevents the same from happening to us except chance. Obviously, leaving aside our own self-destructive use of science, scientists are just the messengers and shouldnt be blamed for discovering, in effect, our grim existential situation (the surprising degrees of our irrationality, unconsciousness, and lack of freedom; and our manipulability, mortality, and aloneness in the universe). But the dire existential implications of scientific theories are surely why people dont rush to science for poetic inspiration. Even were a poet interested in writing a tragedy or a dirge, for which science could indeed provide abundant material, most people prefer the comfort of their nave anthropocentric worldview and so dont even want to know the details of our existential predicament. In his book, Dawkins criticizes astrology and talk of psychic and other paranormal phenomena for encouraging people to indulge themselves in unscientific wonder, but for most people these are at best entertainments. Their deeper quarrel with the rationally-understood world lies not in any such unfulfilled New Age interests, but in their suspicion that reason makes a mockery of our whole commonsense self-image, that the most rational philosophical position begins, in effect, with Nietzsches atheism and Lovecrafts cosmicism. And the problem with that philosophy is that it conflicts not just with frivolous supernaturalism, but with the socially-necessary assumption that humans have dignity as rational, free, elevated beings. Dawkins distinguishes between the mystic and the scientist. Without analyzing these three synonyms, he says that both feel awe, reverence, and wonder, but that The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not meant to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, But were working on it (17).

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These caricatures of mystics and of scientists follow from scientistic mythology, but are embarrassing when read outside of that context. Was Joan of Arc content rather than restless? Does the Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire to protest a dictatorship bask and revel in wonder? What Dawkins misses is that while mystical consciousness alienates the mystic from secular society, the peace felt in meditation is spoiled as soon as the mystic is forced to confront the unenlightened masses. Far from being complacent, the mystic often leaves the cave or monastery and works tirelessly in the pursuit of moral aims. Moreover, the mystic claims not that we cant understand ultimate reality, but that reason and science are the wrong methods. Not only can we understand that reality with disciplined consciousness, but thats our highest purpose, says the mystic, to escape from the world of illusions by recognizing our divine nature and the oneness of what seems a multiplicity. Also, as Ive pointed out, the scientist doesnt feel the very same wonder as the mystic. Scientific wonder is tinged with patronizing admiration, stemming as it does from our scientific power advantage. The mystic regards as absurd the egoism at the root of power games. While the enlightened mystic doesnt fear the absolute oneness of everything, existential angst and the detachment of a merely semi-enlightened mind arent so far apart. Finally, theres Dawkins arrogant assurance that the scientist works to dispel profound mysteries instead of leaving them unexplained and untamed. The idea here is that the scientist doesnt fear even those parts of nature that arent yet subdued, since the scientist assumes that because science has worked in so many cases, it will probably work in all cases, leaving no unknowns to fear and no powers too great to harness. This optimism is like the subtle anthropocentrism in regarding nature as a keeper of mysteries/secrets. Why assume that some mammals with an accidental capacity for reason are equipped to understand everything that exists or that were sufficiently ingenious to overcome all obstacles with technology? The pragmatic position may be that defeatism with regard to those two issues is counterproductive, and so scientists

121 are actually open-minded even while theyre professionally optimistic for the sake of their work. But Dawkins goes further when he speaks of the restless character of scientists. Here Dawkins is speaking of what Ive called scientistic faith, or of whats typically called secular humanism. In this case, the anthropocentrism consists in a glorification of human nature rather than in a projection of human categories onto the nonhuman. This scientistic quasi-religious confidence in technoscience is ironic, since Dawkins means to oppose secular confidence to mysticism. Scientism is insidious, since its effectively a religion whose practitioners dare not recognize it as such, since they pretend to be hyper-rationalists who condemn religious impulses. Dawkins condemns trust in astrology, UFOs, psychic predictions, and the Loch Ness monster, but not in secular humanistic ideology, not in the philosophical conviction that we should bravely face the unknown with science rather than shrink in fear. Part of this science-centered optimism is what the political philosopher Leo Strauss calls the modern conceit that everyone can handle the unvarnished truth. Without this added assumption, the scientists business-oriented hunt for the truth might be counterproductive, after all, since were natural facts unpleasant enough and were the report of them shouted from the rooftops, they might upset society and ruin the scientific enterprise itself. But the secular humanists lack of self-awareness indicates that theres no such widespread appetite or tolerance. Dawkins chastises theists for their irrational religious faith, but trust in humans and in secular institutions like science, democracy, and capitalism is no less irrational. More precisely, reason is insufficient in deciding what to believe about such philosophical issues. There is no calculation proving that humans potentially can understand everything, nor is there an experiment demonstrating that capitalism is ultimately constructive rather than destructive. To be sure, there are relevant data that should be weighed, but these arent purely empirical matters. For example, whether capitalism is destructive depends on whats valued, and this is yet another normative issue.

122 However much evidence there is of sciences success and of technologys power, faith is needed to bridge the gap between what logic implies or the data indicate, on the one hand, and what the secular humanist philosophically declares, on the other. The reason the secular humanist denies that shes beholden to a science-centered religion is that the philosophical tenets of her faith are anthropocentric reactions to the grim reality unveiled by science. Just as the masses flee from the horrors of the Lovecraftian gods, into the arms of New Age phonies, so too the more sophisticated secularists seek religious comfort in a science-centered, partly-irrational ideology. So instead of holding up the scientist as a heroic model next to the mystical defeatist, the secular humanist should look in the mirror and appreciate the extent to which were all animals and thus ill-equipped to defend against a flood of harsh truths. A secular humanist like Dawkins would insist that reason is far from a curse, since reason allows us to pacify natural forces so that we can safely marvel at their beauty. By contrast, a cosmicist points at the abyss between what we naively prefer to think of ourselves and what reason shows us to be, and suspects that without an infinite capacity for mental compartmentalization, which evolved animals aren't likely to possess, we can expect that reason will drive us ultimately to insanity and to social collapse; thus, reason is accursed.

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Should Atheists Mourn the Death of God? ____________________________________________________

Recently, a Catholic priest, Robert Barron, criticized the exuberance of New Atheists, contrasting the New Atheists slogan, Theres probably no God; now stop worrying and enjoy your life, with the dark existentialism of earlier atheists like Nietzsche and Camus. According to Barron, only the existential atheists follow atheism to its logical conclusions, that life is meaningless, that theres no hope, and as Dostoevsky implied, that everything is permitted. The biologist and New Atheistic blogger Jerry Coyne replies as follows: The answer of course, is that we, not a sky-father, give life its meaning, and can find joy and fulfillment in the limited time we have. Is that frivolous? I dont think so. Given our finite span, why spend our time being dolorous, weighed down by the supposed futility of life? There is so much beauty and love to be had, not to mention friendship, books, music, food, drink, and cats; and I for one am happy to be happy about these things. I think most New Atheists would agree with Coyne. And of course, as a practical, political matter, the bus slogan is fine because it militates against the theists conviction that atheism is a highway to hell. In that theological context, exaggerated cheeriness in New Atheism is defensible on political, or what Dawkins calls strategic grounds.

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New Atheisms Naturalization of Values

But as to the substance of the disagreement between existential and New Atheists, the memes (prepackaged platitudes) contained in Coynes response hardly settle the matter. The theist contends that if atheism is true, life has no meaning and therefore the atheist has no right to be merry. The New Atheist replies that while there may be no higher, transcendent meaning, value or purpose of our life, there are still local, subjective meanings relative to our interests. Thus, Coyne finds meaning in books, cats, and so forth, and thats why hes happy. The theist can then say that this merely raises the further question of whether the atheists particular interests ought to be pursued, or whether her values are justifiable. If theres no higher authority, why isnt everything permitted? Coyne values music, food, and cats, while a serial killer enjoys killing children. If theres no God, is this all just a matter of taste? Suppose reason shows that killing children is illogical or impractical (risky). To infer from this that such killing is wrong and ought not to be valued would be fallacious, since illogicality and impracticality are matters of fact which have no normative entailments. Whats needed to save atheism from giving a license to chaos, then, is the axiom that all human life is precious, in which case killing children would be wrong. Ideally, this normative assumption shouldnt itself turn out to be subjective or relative, since otherwise atheism would imply just that most people feel that children are nice to have around, and that were you to happen to lack that feeling, there would be nothing fundamentally wrong with pursuing your murderous inclinations. Like all values, morality would run only as deep as our personal preferences. The atheist seems faced, then, with the worry at least that for anyone who understands that right and wrong are matters merely of personal interest, like taste in art, life becomes a game or a joke. Our normative opinions become arbitrary, not because theyre uncaused or unmotivated, but because, despite our bias in their favour, theyre ultimately inconsequential. Fashions go in and out of style, rendering the fashion

125 industry absurdly comical because of the discrepancy between fashions transience and the intensity of some peoples interest in personal style. During the 1980s, Westerners preferred brass furniture, cheesy digital music, and spiky hairdos. Now, those fashions appear ridiculous, and decades from now our tastes will certainly seem foolish to our descendants. Likewise, some ancient cultures were centered on human sacrifice or gladiatorial combat, while today many Western liberals regard life as so precious that they protect their children even from playing outdoors. According to the New Atheists egocentric notion of value, all of culture is more or less like fashion and other matters of taste. Unlike in science, where facts in the outer world make scientific statements true or false, there are no correct or incorrect value judgments, given the typical New Atheists notion that morality is entirely a matter of personal, subjective opinion, which is to say, roughly, taste. The question is then whether the atheist can hold onto her private interests with a straight face. Due to peer pressure, you may adopt your cultures attitude toward clothing, food, pets, and so on, but can you take pride in those values when you also understand the transitory and arbitrary nature of all values? Can a New Atheist be nationalistic and patriotic, for example, given the atheists objective, cynical perspective on value judgments? Were a liberal secular humanist to confront a serial killer, the emotions associated with her moral opinions would likely compel her to forget her postmodern, positivistic belittling of normative questions, in which case shed vociferously condemn the murderers evil and rush to subdue him. But in the atheists bigger picture, in which human value is naturalized, secularists celebration of their way of life when they form a mob, hold up signs, and cheer at the murderers execution must be similar to the stampede to buy the latest Apple device. In both cases, values derive solely from our interests, and interests change and come in a variety of forms like everything else in nature. Perhaps there are some universal features of human morality, due to our brain structures and common evolutionary origin. But again, no normative statements follow from a recognition of the fact of such

126 universality. Just because humans tend to think the same about stealing, murder, and so on, doesnt mean we ought to do so. The atheist who appreciates that our morality is just a natural process is forced to experience a sort of vertigo, a feeling of alienation, of standing outside yourself and looking in with an objective viewpoint. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel explains in The View from Nowhere, theres a double life in which you have your private attitudes and opinions but also the ability to detach yourself from them when you think rationally about their natural causes. What the existentialist calls angst, alienation, and horror follow from the combination of the atheists naturalistic understanding of her values and her inevitable concern for only a partial set of issues. Can she still care about her fellow humans, let alone her favourite foods, authors, and shoe styles, when nothing but ignoble distractions or mental disorders could prevent her at any moment from rationally detaching from those concerns as she comprehends the atheists naturalization of moral and other values? Likewise, while the atheist may be biologically driven at times to feel sexually excited, can she surrender to her feelings and her experience, given her knowledge of the biochemical basis of romantic love? More relevantly, can she do so when acting with what the existentialist calls authenticity or must she fool herself, suppressing her rationality so that she can enjoy her life?

The New Atheists Religion

Indeed, theres one giant atheistic distraction, which I take to be the primary source of the New Atheists lightheartedness. This distraction is the atheists substitute religion of secular humanism, or what I call, somewhat idiosyncratically, Scientism. Just as theists are spared the horror of rationally dissecting the intimate details of their life, because theyre preoccupied with matters of irrational religious faith, the typical New Atheist has quasi-religious faith in democracy, capitalism, reason, and the beauty and majesty of natural creations. That is, not only does the secular humanist rationally defend these elements of her worldview, but she feels strongly about them--indeed, so strongly that theyre of ultimate value to her, in which case, as the theologian Paul Tillich says, her

127 modern ideology passes beyond an idle, academic pursuit, becoming a matter of personal faith. Any such faith is irrational in that feelings and personal character rather than just logic or science account for why that ideology is upheld. You can see an indication of this paradoxical secular faith in Coynes pragmatic preoccupation with time in his response to the priest. Given our finite span, he says, we shouldnt waste time being weighed down with philosophical worries about lifes futility--as though the efficient use of time were an end in itself. Indeed, this value of efficiency is commonplace now because of the monoculture of capitalism. The idea is to work hard and earn as much money as possible, to ignore the social and environmental consequences of most lines of work, since modern workers should be instrumentalists, being instruments of oligarchs who set the social agenda and determine much of the culture by their control over the mass media. This pragmatism derives also from the consumers ideal of the so-called rich, full life, of having a maximally wide variety of socially acceptable experiences, which motivates the consumption of the ever-shifting array of mass-produced products. So the New Atheist can afford to overlook atheisms existential implications, because this carefree modernist is beholden to her own quasi-religious faith of secular humanism/Scientism. Shes caught up in the wonders of life, swept away by the power of technoscience, and generally mesmerized by the modern Enlightenment ideology even though this ideology has now imploded. The New Atheists cheerful disposition, as she lists her personal matters of taste as being sufficient to assuage anyones fear that shes liable to commit suicide, is thus comparable to the Jehovahs Witnesss glee as he knocks on your door and rattles off the benefits of being a Christian. As the existential atheists point out, unchecked reason, or what Enlightenment thinkers called freethinking, causes angst, horror, and alienation, which do in turn sap the joy from life. However, New Atheists are happy rather than despairing not just because they have some personal preferences which inspire them to pass the time in some pleasing way, but because those preferences are grounded in deeper, faith-based convictions.

128 Their emotional commitment to the modern, atheistic religion (lifestyle or worldview--call it what you like) prevents them from pursuing naturalistic atheism not to its logical conclusion but to its psychological nadir. The existential atheists who are melancholy rather than content are just those who are so paranoid or otherwise considered mentally ill that they truly lack faith in anything: not in a life partner, nor in themselves, nor in government, technology, art, celebrity, or anything else. To borrow a clich from the Matrix movies, these melancholy atheists know the path but cant walk it; they cant fully identify with their preferences, because they lack mental checks on their capacity to philosophically question their values, to remind themselves that in the bigger picture, supplied by rational detachment, those values are foreign, arbitrary, and ridiculous. These rarer atheists sabotage their happiness by their compulsion to live in a selfalienated, vacillating condition. The problem, then, isnt with atheism so much as with the modern naturalistic humanists ideal of hyper-rationality. A wannabe hyper-rationalist, who despises faith, superstition, and all manner of irrationalism will still have emotional and religious impulses but will disown or rationalize them. This lack of self-awareness produces the scientistic, positivistic aspect of the subculture of New Atheism. Meanwhile, those who fulfill the ideal of being passionless are the autistic, paranoid, introverted, skeptical, or philosophically-inclined atheists, the point being not that the latter are omniscient but that they constantly step outside their parochial viewpoint, second-guessing themselves at every turn so that they cant relax and enjoy themselves, like the over-analytical mouse in Dostoevskys Underground Man or like the character Woody Allen plays in his films.

Conclusion
So should atheists mourn Gods demise? Not exactly, since the transparent folly of theism makes for a more degrading replacement for the nobler reaction to our existential predicament than does the New Atheists convoluted modern faith. But should the atheist be happy, lighthearted, and cheery rather than melancholy, dour, and

129 wistful? In effect, I answer this in Happiness and in Postmodern Religion. Happiness is unbecoming to anyone in our tragic existential situation, but especially to naturalists and secular humanists who pretend to care more about truth than fantasy. The facts of our condition are much worse than what anthropocentric theists proclaim, but theyre worse also than whats accounted for in the modern glorification of the rational, free, conscious individual. Moreover, however much pleasure, wealth, and fame an atheist may enjoy, those facts--of our mortality, our animal nature, our aloneness and alienation from the undead (mindlessly creative) cosmos, of the ultimate futility of our endeavours and the comical narrowness of our everyday vision--remain to haunt her.

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Hyper-Rationality and the Two Cultures ____________________________________________________

The physicist and novelist C. P. Snow is famous in academic circles for distinguishing between the cultures of the arts and sciences. When he wrote on the two cultures in Britain, in 1959, academic scientists lacked the prestige of those in the arts or humanities, whereas now the situation is reversed, with English, philosophy, and other arts programs closing down in North American business-oriented colleges, and economists and other social scientists emulating physicists by attempting to quantify their subject matters. During the Scientific Revolution, Newton, Galileo, and other great scientists had to glorify reason in their war with the faith-governed Church, which was dominant at the time in Europe. Thus, as mathematician Mike Alder points out in his recent article, Newtons Flaming Laser Sword, Newton laid out an austere scientific method according to which no statement should be accepted unless its directly testable or it follows logically from a testable statement. The skeptical philosopher David Hume zealously defended this empiricism, for the sake of his assault on intellectual elitism, going as far as to say that if a book contains statements that arent based either on observation or on logic, the book should be tossed into the flames. The philosopher Karl Popper took the main point of empiricism to be a falsification criterion of meaning: if theres no way of showing how a statement could be proven false, the statement is at best pseudoscientific and cognitively worthless. Thus, all knowledge is derived from this broad scientific method.

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To clarify some terms, empiricism is hyper-rational compared to rationalism, or to the claim that reason arrives at fundamental truths without the use of observation or of logic, because the so-called rationalist contends that reason processes other inputs besides sensations, such as those from intuition or faith. According to the empiricist, intuitions and leaps of faith are unreliable, to say the least, and deductions on their basis, such as those in systematic theology, are pseudoscientific and ultimately irrational.

The Empiricists Disdain for Philosophy

Midway through twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy, this extreme empiricism was rejected as self-refuting. After all, the definition of empiricism itself is philosophical, not scientific or meaningful in the empiricists own terms. In their zest to champion science against the forces of irrationality, empiricists put forward an anti-philosophical philosophy so worshipful of science that it destroys itself, like Douglas Adams god that proves its own nonexistence and "promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. But as Mike Alder points out, mathematicians and scientists still adhere to the spirit of empiricism and for that reason they loathe philosophy in particular. The problem with recent, socalled analytic philosophers, from this viewpoint, is that they pretend their discipline is serious and rational, whereas their philosophizing consists of time-wasting, fruitless word games that go nowhere. So-called postmodern philosophers merely waste time with word games as well, although instead of pretending to analyze concepts, they obfuscate with pompous rhetoric. At least the theologian openly declares her irrationality when she speaks of the need for faith and revelation, but the philosopher pretends to possess a form of rationality that stands apart from scientific methods. According to friends of empiricism, modern scientists showed what the rational search for knowledge is, so there is no rationality apart from gathering data from the senses, testing hypotheses to explain the data, and following the implications with mathematical logic.

132 Thus, as Alder says, When you ask of a scientist if we have free will, or only think we have, he would ask in turn: What measurements or observations would, in your view, settle the matter? If your reply is Thinking deeply about it, he will smile pityingly and pass you by. He would be unwilling to join you in playing what he sees as a rather silly game. Again, as to whether a computer program could really be intelligent or thinking, or only able to simulate it, the scientist asks What procedures would you use for distinguishing these cases? Again, the answer Thinking hard would earn a tired smile and a quick exit. According to Alder, most scientists are essentially Popperian positivists [that is, empiricists]... The idea that one can arrive at reliable truths by pure reason [without input from the five senses] is simply obsolete...Such is the conventional wisdom among scientists, and it would be wrong of me to attempt to conceal that this is, broadly, my position too. Thus, Alder takes care not to be caught doing philosophy, preferring to wrap his philosophy magazine in a brown paper bag in the hope that it will be mistaken for a girly-mag. At the end of his article, though, Alder points out that Newtons empiricism is impractical. Only a Vulcan or an artificial person like Data from Star Trek could so rigorously restrict his beliefs to what logic and the evidence support, without speculating, expressing feelings, going with a hunch, or taking a leap of faith. As he puts it, such a genuine empiricist would be a notably poor conversationalist. But Alder maintains that the use of the testability criterion as a weapon against philosophy is still justified when the philosopher meddles in science which he does not understand. When he asks questions and is willing to learn, I have no quarrel with him. When he is merely trying to lure you into a word game which has no prospect of leading anywhere, you really have to decide if you like playing that sort of game.

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The Absurdity of Antiphilosophical Philosophy

Theres a great deal of confusion here on the part of the wannabe hyper-rationalist. You can spy a clue to the confusion in that hostility to philosophy, by reminding yourself that the supreme scientist and arch empiricist, Isaac Newton, was also a thoroughgoing occultist, Rosicrucian, and Christian theologian, a proponent of alchemy and an interpreter of Biblical prophecies and codes. This pseudoscientific side of his work has been expunged from the record, as far as current students of physics are concerned. Notice, though, how much more impressive empiricism seems when the method is attributed to a nonexistent hyper-rational version of Newton. The weakness of empiricism isnt just thats its absurd as a piece of antiphilosophical philosophy, but that the nonrational side of this philosophy is cognitively necessary. Even Star Treks Vulcans idolize and spiritualize logic! Intuition, insight, vision, and imagination are needed to bridge the gaps between the instinctive, emotional, and logical parts of the brain. Knowledge isnt just a matter of having a set of beliefs that maps onto the facts. In addition, the beliefs must relate well to each other, and for human animals these interrelations arent merely logical. Instead, as epistemologists say, our beliefs should form a coherent worldview. What counts as coherence is a matter of philosophical, theological, or otherwise normative debate. To see an example of a presupposed principle of coherence, on the part of an antiphilosophical philosopher, notice how Alder speaks of the need to arrive at reliable truths. Have scientists proven that reliability ought to be the mark of knowledge? Does that pragmatic principle follow logically from testable statements? Of course not, since this is a philosophical, normative principle that derives from intuition, faith, or some other nonrational factor. Indeed, the notion of reliability here presupposes the secular humanists instrumentalism, the Baconian use of science in a struggle with inhumane natural forces. In my view, this presupposition is part of the modern religion of what Ive called Scientism in a broad sense.

134 Now, if philosophical statements arent as reliable as scientific ones, in that philosophy is less cumulative or technologically fruitful, this is because both western and eastern philosophies are traditionally concerned with self-knowledge and ultimately with mystical, cosmicist self-realization that destabilizes the ego and so obviates power games. Philosophy thus makes for a poor weapon in a struggle for progress, to use the euphemism for our war with nature. Ultimately, the intellectual culture war between the sciences and the humanities is a conflict between pragmatism and mysticism. Instead of confronting that meta-issue, Adler presupposes that knowledge ought to be reliable, or sufficiently stable to produce technologies that empower us. But the point I want to stress here is that this normative presupposition is quite unjustified, from an empiricist perspective, and yet some such principle of cognitive coherence is needed for human animals, with our self-conflicted biological nature. Data from Star Trek has no emotions, so he neednt worry about nonrational ideals to guide his beliefs. Empiricism is a hyper-rational philosophy fit for machines, not for animals like human beings. Another lacuna in Alders defense of empiricist antiphilosophy: he speaks to the scientists condescension towards the childish, game-playing philosopher, when the scientist offers the philosopher a tired, pitying smile and quickly exits instead of publicly philosophizing. The conceit in this case is the presupposition that scientists earn their prestige strictly because of the cognitive progress in science. As obvious as that progress is, its not why empiricist scientists can now get away with condescension to philosophers and indeed to all academics in the humanities. The crucial factor is the scientists enjoyment of power that the philosopher lacks; more precisely, the scientist is credited for empowering technoscientifically advanced societies and the philosopher is blamed for doing nothing of the kind. But power is yet another nonrational interest that directs the search for knowledge. The postmodernist says that knowledge is nothing but the expression of some such nonrational interest, as though there were no scientific methods that can be followed more or less without bias or other interference. However, my point is just that empiricism is flawed in its disregard for the extent to which we are animals, after all,

135 who often survive by struggling for power, expressing our feelings, or acting on instinct. If the philosophers pretensions are unbearable, so too must be the empiricists disdain for philosophys inferior use of reason, given that modern science is hardly just an algorithm fit for computers. Scientists are animals driven by a tribal instinct to espouse whats effectively a religious faith (secular humanism or scientism), and scientists provide pivotal aid in humanitys war with those forces of nature that could potentially extinguish us. Hence the philosophical, relatively nonrational nature of empiricism, presupposed by presumed anti-philosophical scientists and mathematicians; hence also their coherence ideal of knowledges reliability; and hence their power-based condescension towards relatively powerless philosophers and other nonscientific academics.

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Scientism: Modern Pagan Religion ____________________________________________________

Traditional religions were holistic, uniting normative and empirical speculations in a mytho-poetic vision of the world. Eastern religious philosophies are still holistic, whereas dualism dominates in the West, and not just because of Descartes attempt to reconcile the scientific picture of nature with the intuitive picture of ourselves. Monotheism itself has contributed to Western dualism. By centralizing divine power and elevating God above all conceivable forms, the monotheist effectively kicks God out of the rationally explainable domain, which is the domain of nature or the cosmos, the order of which corresponds to our conceptual grid. The supreme form of rational understanding is the modern scientific kind, but precisely because science is supremely impersonal and objective, its methods dont provide direct answers to normative or subjective questions. But ethical and aesthetic values, intuitions, and the subjective appearances of things have been central to the human experience. And so rather than giving them up, despite the lack of forthcoming answers to those questions from science, which reigns supreme only in a limited field of inquiry, religious people externalized those ghostly intangibles along with God. God is supposed to sustain everything, and while scientists have discovered more and more of how the physical world sustains itself, dualistic monotheism saves the subjective, intuitive, value-laden, faith-based appearance of the world, by locating this in the deitys supernatural domain and in the earthly fragments of

137 that domain, in our so-called immaterial spirits. After all, according to monotheists, God originated our moral perspective, by inspiring prophets to gain insights into divine commandments, and were able to think in terms of what ought to be done, instead of slavishly following natural law, because our immaterial spirits are supernaturally free. Skeptics would contend, though, that the true originators of official moral laws were the human rulers who codified our instinctive sentiments, to hold social groups together, maintaining their elevated position in the pecking order by attributing societys laws to gods who are just grandiose versions of those human rulers. Far from being supernaturally free, were just social animals who are subject to natural control systems, such as the system of monotheism. And of course, the more scientists have been able to explain empirical facts without appealing to God or to the supernatural, the more theism has declined in most informed parts of the world. Many early Western scientists inhabited the halfway house of deism, and most educated people currently living in relatively wealthy countries in Europe and Asia are nontheistic in both word and deed. Even in the US, which is an exception to that rule, nontheism has grown more popular due to the so-called New Atheist movement. Such is a common way of contrasting traditional Western monotheism with modern secularism. But I want to consider another interpretation, according to which nontheistic naturalism has itself developed into a religion that can be called scientism. Narrowly speaking, scientism is the belief that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, that if a question cant be answered using scientific methods, the question is meaningless or otherwise illegitimate. In this respect, scientism is just radical empiricism, or positivism, deriving from the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, and David Hume. While positivism has since been mostly rejected in academic philosophy, for being self-refuting and for ignoring studies of how the sciences are actually practiced, most analytic philosophers still subscribe to naturalism. Naturalists assume that even if some legitimate questions cant be identified with scientific ones, everything that exists depends on things that are scientifically explainable.

138 That's how scientism has played out in rarified academic circles and it's the meaning I've had in mind in these rants, such as when I referred to "scientistic liberals," in Liberalism. But there's also a more popular form of scientism, which has to do with the way technoscientific progress has shaped the capitalistic social order. The main social effects of that progress are anti-philosophical pragmatism and the ideology of materialistic consumerism. In this broader sense of the centrality of science, scientism serves as a religion that we dare not name.

The Capitalistic Reduction of People to Machines

As I point out in Theism, traditional religions have insiders and outsiders, mystics and literalists. Mystics are supposed to have direct, rationally incomprehensible experience of transcendent reality, and for the most part the price of that experience is ascetic withdrawal from secular life. Literalists have no such mystical experience, and their adherence to secular conventions and their submergence in what mystics call the world of illusions (maya, samsara, etc) bring them suffering. In the purportedly secular West, there are also insiders and outsiders: the wealthy or well-connected oligarchs and the poor, weak, misinformed masses of consumers. Whereas the nonrational component of theistic religion is the mode of access to allegedly supernatural reality (faith, intuition, mystical experience), whats nonrational about scientism, despite the paradigmatic rationality of science itself, is the behaviour of people who have been systematically reduced to machines. To spell this out, consider that in the British Industrial Revolution, labourers--including children--were dehumanized and treated as mechanical components of a system managed for the owners profit. Frederick Taylor streamlined the process, creating the influential field of scientific management, which again turns employees into functional parts of a system while the managers seek ways to cut costs and maximize profits. The goal was simply for businesses to run as efficiently as possible, and since a machine is better at following orders than a human, human labourers compete in the marketplace by becoming more like machines. These workers need to slavishly follow the

139 corporations rules, ignoring any compunctions they might have about the dehumanizing effects of a capitalistic economy, and they must work longer hours for as little pay as possible, often with no union to represent their interests. In short, business became operationalized, which is to say that sociopathic theories of exploiting a labour force for maximal profit were applied within corporations, forcing the workers literally to play the role of machines. While on the job, a worker in a systematically managed business environment must perform a certain function, just as a component of a machine has its function as dictated by the machines design. Beginning with Edward Bernays work on how the human unconscious can be exploited for government purposes or for profit, by propaganda that links the propagandists esoteric objective with the fulfillment of the consumers craving, the dehumanization within corporations was extended to peoples private lives in their capitalistic role as consumers. Prior to public relations and the near-perfection of mass propaganda through television, people could leave their offices and resume their personal activities that they defined for themselves. But because human greed is a bottomless pit, the corporate techniques of converting a person into a functional component of an artificial construct had to be extended to those personal activities. Now there is, in theory, no time at which a participant in a capitalistic economy is off the job, since as soon as a person stops being an employee, she becomes a potential consumer and the scope of consumable goods is as wide as the scope of what can be attached to our unconscious desires. Thus, instead of selling only those products that people objectively need, businesses learned to manufacture conscious desires along with their products, by associating the use of the product with the fulfillment of an unconscious wish. And while this science of mass market propaganda hasnt yet been perfected--after all, a consumer can still watch an ad on TV and choose not to buy the product--the effect of watching so many ads from such a young age is that a person comes to accept the principles of a consumer culture, which are that our ultimate goal in life is to be happy and that this goal is achieved mainly by consuming material products.

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The Nonrationality of Consumerism

So to return to the comparison with theistic religion, while the nonrationality of theism is due to its attempt to address normative questions head-on, by nonrational means, the nonrationality of exoteric scientism is a consequence of its reduction of people to machines, by way of indirectly addressing normative questions. What I mean is that scientism is minimally an anti-philosophical philosophy. Scientisms exoteric message is that there is no progress outside of science, technology, and the free market, and that philosophy and religion are therefore illegitimate in secular society. But scientisms esoteric agenda is that of erecting, roughly speaking, what Lewis Mumford calls the megamachine and what Ive been calling in these rants an oligarchy, a social order run by a minority that holds ultimate political power over the majority. How is the stealth oligarchy achieved? By presupposing answers to normative questions, which is to say a philosophy of life, and by turning society into a machine and assigning it the function of applying those answers. The unspoken philosophy of life in a stealth oligarchy like the US is that were all mere social animals, not godlike creatures capable of heroically confronting our dire existential predicament of being alienated from nature by our consciousness and reason. Moreover, the ultimate meaning of life for mere social animals depends on our position in the natural dominance hierarchy: the aggressive sociopaths who dominate in the social order earn the right to behave as gods, exercising power over the masses, while those in lower positions ought to be content to live as sheep, preoccupied by consuming as much grass as possible to inflate the minoritys profits. The masses are meant to be happy in a degraded sense, feeling base, ephemeral pleasures that are constantly being undermined due to our existential predicament, while the oligarchs are meant to rule and to enjoy the subtler pleasure of schadenfreude. The meaning of life is thus a nonsexual analogue of the sadomasochistic power dynamic. With everyone instinctively playing this sadomasochistic game, a capitalistic economy forms to exploit those instincts, and in the vicious competition that sacrifices the weak

141 on the altar of wild, cosmic creativity, the most vicious rise to positions of power. Further corrupted by the hunt for that power, the American oligarchs self-destructively consolidate their control by busting unions and taking control of the government, the economic regulators, the medical establishment (through pharmaceutical and insurance companies), the educational system (by turning universities into businesses to pump out drones, forcing skeptical liberal arts departments to shut down for lack of profit), the legal establishment (by supplying an endless stream of prisons for profit), and the military (by selling arms all round the world, including to potential enemies, and by facilitating wars with mercenaries and cleanup services). By deregulating as much of society as possible, the oligarchs thus forestall democratic challenges to their dominance. Meanwhile, those who are ruled in such a society are misled into thinking that the ability to vote in a duopoly gives the voters ultimate political power, and that the freedom to choose between a host of fabricated goods is the long sought-after secret of happiness. The consumer is as confused as the literalistic theist, but for a different reason. Theism combines intuitions and speculations to form a holistic, all-encompassing worldview, but the literalist mistakes this worldview for something like an objective, rationally justified theory. The consumer is proud of her secularism and of her hard work, producing tangible results in a capitalistic economy, not playing idly with philosophical ideas or introspection. Shes a pragmatist, not an ideologue, but unbeknownst to her, pragmatism is, at a minimum, a philosophy or rather an ideology in the Marxist sense, meaning a set of ideas that rationalizes an economic order which serves the interests mainly of a small minority of the population. Pragmatism is an excuse to act like a machine, to work hard and to be contented with the consumption of mass-produced items. And so this kind of secularism is a stunted way of life, leaving the handling of normative questions to the oligarchs who most shape American culture with their billions spent on political, corporate, and Hollywood messages over the decades. Instinctively, the oligarchs understand that the ultimate good in life must be just what a capitalistic

142 economy can deliver: shallow, fleeting moments of security and pleasure for drudges and automatons, where these moments are surrounded by anxieties about blowback from the oligarchys concomitant military occupations abroad, and by suspicions that materialistic happy-talk whitewashes our dark existential situation. Another wondrous coincidence: that which can fulfill the scientistic meaning of life is just what empowers the oligarchs to consolidate their control, namely the free market economy that efficiently rewards the vices that take the oligarchs to the top of the pecking order.

Why Call Modern Worship of Nature Scientism?

You might still be wondering what exactly makes consumerism and pragmatism scientistic, or science-centered. After all, one reason Americans are so pragmatic is, as Weber showed, that Protestantism had the unintended consequence that people worked extra hard to prove they were elected by God to enter heaven when they died. But what enabled Protestants to imagine they could read Gods mind is that their Christian religion had been thoroughly secularized for centuries, being a Frankensteinian patchwork of Jewish and Pagan elements. No, the underlying factor seems to be that the US was established to empower capitalists, or so-called special interests, meaning wealthy and well-connected individuals who fill the power vacuum left behind by the constitutionally divided and conquered government. And capitalism in turn empowers technoscience, which drives innovation and economic growth with scientific discoveries and their applications. The chief connection between modern science and capitalism is mass production, the ability of machines to supply an abundance of products. Science thus indirectly provides the opportunity for immense profit, and whereas in earlier centuries only the aristocracy could take advantage of scientific advances, in the modern world the individual won the right to own the fruits of his or her labour. The abundant supply of sellable products requires an equal amount of demand, which in turn requires capitalistic propaganda, the manufacturing of the consumers desires by advertising. The machines, of course, are made possible by advances in scientific understanding, just as effective advertising is

143 the result of advances in the soft sciences, particularly psychology. Lacking the naivety of aristocrats or dictators who deem themselves untouchable and who rely on tradition and counter-productive military oppression to pacify the masses of have-nots, modern titans of industry seek to protect their wealth under the cover of democracy, and as Ive said, these conflicting interests gave birth to the stealth oligarchy. Like liberals inspired by the furious pace of technoscientific advances, these modern oligarchs use democracy as an instrument, albeit merely for their own progress. Mesmerized by technoscientific progress, liberals used to trust that there are objective solutions to questions even of social progress, and so they re-engineered the American economy, adding regulations to prevent the catastrophic busts that attended the booms. This fostered a pragmatic, can-do culture, reinforced by the academys positivistic and behaviouristic hyping of science and by optimistic science fiction, which celebrated the American militarys clean-up job in WWII and the establishment of something like an American empire. On top of these science-driven causes of consumerism, there was the cultural influence simply of all the technological innovation in the twentieth century, of the frantic pace of technological progress which forced people to keep up or lose their jobs to the machines. They say that if you cant beat them, you should join them, which is just what workers and consumers do in capitalistic stealth oligarchies: we pass ourselves off as machines so our meddlesome human qualities might go unnoticed. One such quality is our potential awareness that not only is materialistic pleasure not genuinely fulfilling, but theres a higher, ethical ideal to confront the fact that our happiness is existentially absurd--even if this means sacrificing the possibility of contentment. So the reason I speak broadly--and somewhat idiosyncratically--of scientism, of a science-centered modern worldview, is that science directly or indirectly causes all the cultural elements that add up to the naturalists religion, including technology, capitalism, stealth oligarchy, advertising, consumerism, and pragmatic hostility towards philosophy.

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Case Study: Televised US Political Debates

An egregious example of that hostility towards philosophy in secular culture, and especially in the US, is that which passes for public political debate. As has been pointed out by many political commentators, television has been mostly detrimental to political discourse. In particular, the first televised debate, between Kennedy and Nixon, showed politicians that on TV image matters more than substance. Nixon sweated and looked less heroic than Kennedy; therefore, Kennedy won the debate. Thats what people remember about that debate, not any engagement with ideas. And in his debate with Clinton and Ross Perot, Bush Sr. looked at his watch, revealing his boredom with a question about how the recession affected him. Such issues of personality and of superficial appearances are magnified by the medium of television, and so successful politicians have to project politically correct images. Most of the time, no questioner on television will try to look beyond the faade, because watching TV isnt like reading a book and TV excels at presenting disjointed representations rather than a logical, coherent model of reality. For those reasons alone, we should expect that the quality of political debates would decline, but the collapse of American journalism is also to blame. Once upon a time, people trusted journalists, such as Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow, believing that they were tough, independent, and looking out for the citizens interests, speaking truth to power. Then it became clear that journalism is a business, not a vocation, as more and more news agencies were bought up by fewer and fewer megacorporations. As is evident from a comparison of any American full-time TV news outlet with BBC, for example, American journalists caved to pressures from their electronic medium and corporate managers. Their overriding goal now is to maximize profit for those managers, and that goal can be achieved on TV only by churning out infotainment rather than investigative reporting. News anchors, analysts and pundits therefore put themselves in direct competition with real entertainers, like Jon Stewart or Bill Maher, a competition in which the journalists must sacrifice their intellectual integrity to perform as clowns. As a result, theyve lost not just their credibility with the viewer, but their

145 leverage on politicians to appear on their programs and submit to the inquisitions they deserve as elected officials. Journalists now need access to politicians more than politicians need to be seen on TV, and so the confrontations between them occur on the politicians terms. Thus, during political campaigns, American politicians engage in numerous televised political debates which are not debates at all. A debate requires an interrogation of each opponent, so that the viewer can judge which side has the better arguments on each point that arises in the interaction, and also a deeper concern about ideas than about image or personal advantage, on the part of each speaker. The debaters must be intellectuals in that they must engage with each others arguments, trusting that the truth emerges from a Platonic form of dialogue. None of this happens in televised American political debates. In the first place, the ego-tripping journalist replaces the moderator, and instead of merely enforcing the debates rules and time limits, the journalist proceeds to ask each debater a question, to which the politician gives his or her canned one minute response. The journalist then either moves on to the next question or reframes the first speakers answer so that if the second speaker chooses to recite a talking point about it, he or she can at least have the cover of engaging only with the know-nothing journalist. Thus, the interaction between politician and journalist replaces that between politicians, and instead of a debate what were shown is just an interview, or a press conference. Thats what politicians prefer; they dont want to rationally engage with each others ideas in a public format, whether because they privately agree on the narrow set of issues that arises for a politician in a stealth oligarchy or because they know that on TV, rational political dialogue actually tarnishes the politicians image. Viewers expect TV to supply them with entertaining images, like those seen in jumbles of advertisements. They dont want to attempt to follow complex lines of reasoning while staring at a TV screen, knowing that music and ads will break in at any moment and that its harder to go back and forth to check the inferences on TV than it is to track the inferences written on a books pages.

146

So the televised political debate in the US has become a complete farce. The problems arent just that politicians spin the issues, dont answer the questions, and anyway are given only seconds to answer since the viewers attention span is short and time must be reserved for commercials. To be sure, these factors contribute to the miserable state of affairs. But the primary absurdity is very simply that what the journalists and politicians routinely call a debate isnt close to being a debate. No political debate has actually been seen on American television in at least several campaign cycles. The closest thing to one recently was the vice presidential debate between Cheney and Joe Lieberman, but of course the civility of their discussion was due to their agreement on most issues. The lack of actual public debate between American politicians is absurd for three reasons. First, what are actually just journalistic interviews of politicians are nevertheless always called debates by all parties responsible for them. Second, the viewer neednt be fooled by that misnomer, despite all the false populism and antiintellectualism in American political culture. This is because most Americans are still familiar with the essence of debate, having viewed dozens of movies featuring the Hollywood stereotype of the courtroom drama, in which a witness is vigorously questioned and cross-examined, yielding the truth in the end. Third, Americans are free to compare their laughable televised "debates" with the much more mature and potentially interactive Canadian ones. The format of televised Canadian political debates isn't as infantile as that of American ones, largely because Canadian journalists who serve as moderators aren't as rich or successful as their American counterparts, and so their egos aren't the size of planets. The Canadian moderators therefore tend to do what obviously should be done and simply get out of the way and let the politicians interact. Unfortunately, the Canadian debaters are uninspiring, because even the conservative Canadian politicians are effectively postmodern liberals, or cynical nihilistic pragmatists, lacking vision, values, or trust that we can improve our civilization so that it resembles something other than a concrete jungle. These debaters, therefore, tend to forgo the opportunity of actually interacting with each other's ideas, to help the voter

147 decide which side can make the better case; instead, the politicians recite talking points, dodge questions, take cheap shots, run out the clock, and so on and so forth. Here, then, the unintended consequences of television on American politics are the polarization of the citizenry and the infantilization of their discourse. Lacking evidence of rational dialogue between their leaders, American citizens vent their frustration by heading towards the opposite extreme when conversing with each other, resorting to hyperpartisan shout-fests. Demagogues rush to harness the chaos much as militant Islamists exploit the disorder in failed states. Like the medieval peasants who learned the purpose of their society by gazing at the Churchs stained-glass windows, most Americans learn from TV rather than books, and what they learn is that rational political dialogue, which is rumoured to take place at the UN, is cowardly and idle. Again, courtroom dramas provide an opposing stereotype, but the prevailing view seems to be the anti-intellectual one. As Obama has continued rather than changed most of Bushs foreign and economic policies, despite the optimistic rationalism of Obama's campaign speeches, his administration has effectively reinforced the American prejudice against reason in politics. Americans tend now to be pragmatists who worship strength. But the American citizenry is weakened by its internal divisions and thus the citizens can take no pride in themselves, despite the fact that, theoretically at least, the majority of them indirectly rule as rational, autonomous and informed citizens. Instead, the majority doesnt actually hold ultimate political power, nor is the majority fit to do so. The citizens democratic control was hampered from the outset by their countrys founders who created three separate, equal, and thus hamstrung branches of government. Just as the medieval Church benefited from the masses inability to speak Latin, which gave the Church absolute control over the Bibles interpretation, American oligarchs benefit from a divided, confused, and frustrated populace. These weaknesses restrict the masses to the lower levels of the natural dominance hierarchy, ensuring and even justifying the dominators power over them.

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Scientisms Re-enchantment of Nature

The upshot is that American secular society is split into esoteric and exoteric groups, both of which are as opposed to reason as are the insiders (mystics) and outsiders (literalists) of theistic religion. Granted, that similarity isnt sufficient to make scientism a religion. What we find, though, is that a technoscientific stealth oligarchy like the US caters to religious impulses not with mere lip service to its own theology--although it surely does that too--but by consummating Christianitys naturalization of monotheism. Christianity reduced God to a mortal man, the esoteric (Gnostic) meaning of which is the Eastern idea that human nature is fully divine and that divinity begins and ends with sentient, intelligent life. Moreover, the theistic Gods presumed interventions in nature have been thoroughly demystified by science, although scientists have also shown that nature is much weirder and scarier than any anthropomorphic projection of ourselves. But we understand now why it rains, why the earth periodically shakes, and how diseases generally work. Whats seldom said, though, is that this disenchantment is coupled with a secular reenchantment of nature, as human beings actually replace God in the myths that explain the new wonders for which we alone are responsible. Human monarchs have always been the models for the tyrannical god in heaven, just as their feats of social and architectural engineering have always been the sources for the myth that the universe was intelligently created. The difference is that in the Western imagination, todays oligarchs and scientific wonderworkers have replaced their supernatural counterparts, because the re-enchantment has been preceded by such a thorough disenchantment by Christianity, the Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment philosophy. Thus, when corporations build shopping complexes with wall-to-wall products, the experience of consuming them is the only feeling of being in heaven that consumers know, deep down, they can ever enjoy, and when money separates the haves from the have-nots, that is the only divine judgment left that divides the wheat from the chaff, the blessed from the damned. When oligarchs now live in obscene splendour, sitting on

149 golden toilets and moving from one monstrous mansion to another, those living, breathing humans are the demigods, the angels or demons who stand above human law, whereas hitherto people could have clung to the delusion that the myths spoke only of supernatural beings quite removed from our earthly home. When natural selection churns out biological designs and rewards and punishes economies, that is the divine creative force, perhaps the very same one, at a microcosmic scale, that shapes our whole universe as it mindlessly evolves within the multiverse. And when physicists speak in an arcane mathematical tongue, they are literally wizards whose elite knowledge makes possible the actual wonders of modern engineering, wonders that are subjectively as magical to the layperson as any miracle of nature must have seemed to the ancient theist. These are the great ironies of secularism. First, by demolishing the rational basis for theism, technoscience, capitalism, and stealth oligarchy add new dress to the primitive social divisions that served theists as exemplars in the first place, re-creating an ignorant mass of people (workers and consumers) over which a minority of superior beings (oligarchs) has sovereign control. The masses are even designed, after a fashion, by the oligarchs who dictate the acceptable social functions, effectively training people to behave like machines. Second, those three allegedly secular forces now stand in for what traditionally were conceived of as supernatural ones. After all, theism has always been a coded way of speaking exclusively about nature and human beings, and now that, in the modern world, theistic religion has been intellectually discredited, secularists are free to openly worship the natural powers that in ancient times were mistaken for transcendent ones. Scientism in the wider sense is this religion that re-enchants nature--including an elite minority of human beings--by undermining dualistic theism, which diverted attention to what were mistaken to be denizens of an otherworldly realm. Dualism was a relatively clumsy but necessary scheme for monarchs to preserve their power: the ancients were much more ignorant of the workings of nonliving things than they were of themselves, and so they anthropomorphized the causes of natural events. But since those all-

150 powerful persons (gods, angels, demons, fairies) were evidently hidden from view, ancient theists assumed they inhabited a secret, far-removed world. And to secure his right to dominate, the human ruler had to assure the masses that he had the allegiance of those hidden beings. In the modern world, however, when we perhaps know even more about nonliving things than we do about ourselves, theres no need for the inference that natural events have supernatural causes. Weve looked under the bed and found no monster. But when we nevertheless behave as monstrously as any imaginary boogeyman, we come to fear ourselves as much as any child was ever terrified to look under the bed. And when power and knowledge are still so unevenly distributed, the internet notwithstanding, theistic myths apply to so-called secular societies--except that the myths openly refer to earthly beings and events.

Clarifications
My point isnt just that this re-enchantment is a hidden message of secular society. No, the point is that the behaviour of most so-called secularists is best explained by saying that theyre members of a peculiar religion that goes by other names. Naturalistic humanists worship usefulness and efficiency (machines), money and power (oligarchs and cosmic creativity, which in microcosmic terms is the evolutionary force of a minimally-regulated market), cognitive mastery and miracles (modern science and engineering). We secularists wont speak of ourselves in religious terms, since were under the impression that all religions are classically theistic and we foreswear any theistic belief in the supernatural. But so-called secular culture isnt a hyper-rational alternative to faith-based religion. As social animals, members of a pseudodemocratic, capitalistic society tend to be mostly nonrational, which in our case means deluded, confused, and frustrated. We literally buy into hedonistic and dehumanizing myths that crop up around a stealth oligarchy to keep the money flowing mostly to the top through self-destructive consumption. Were often aware of our societys grotesqueness, but we trust in the superiority of our way of life, just as members of one monotheistic religion may be aware of other such religions and can only rationalize their leap of faith.

151 Nor am I saying just that scientism, including pragmatism and consumerism, is an ideology in a Marxist sense--unless ideology is effectively given the same meaning as religion. Scientism is at least an ideology in the Marxist sense, but so too is traditional theology. Some belief systems tend to serve economic interests, but thats not what makes them religious. Am I, then, overstretching religion so that the word loses its meaning? Not if by religion we mean a set of delusions that binds a social group together, by sidestepping our existential predicament and rationalizing the absurdity of the rituals that are caused by those delusions. Admittedly, thats a pejorative, only slightly facetious definition, but it covers the traditional religions as well as scientism. For this definition to be meaningful, however, there must be a set of ideas that falls outside its scope. If even naturalistic pragmatists and hedonic consumers are religious, who isnt? My answer: at a minimum, the mystics whose enlightenment is the esoteric purpose of the traditional religions that outsiders grasp to reconcile their inferior lifestyle with that mystical ideal, and the ascetic, artistic loners who are alienated from materialistic culture. Religions are methods of mass hallucination, so naturally those who--for one reason or another--are antisocial dont practice religion.

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Untangling Scientific and Philosophical Atheism ____________________________________________________

New Atheism is riven by a seldom-discussed split between scientific and philosophical atheists, which reveals some surprising relationships between scientistic atheism, Socratic philosophical skepticism, and theism. In particular, each should be understood as a response to the mystical perception that the reality behind the apparent natural world is far from ideal for us. Western philosophers and Eastern mystics wrestle with this harsh truth and its implications, sacrificing their capacity for happiness in the process. Scientistic atheists pretend to reject all religions even as they belittle philosophical atheism to purify the membership of their science-centered cult. Scientism and literalistic, exoteric theism each represents a flight from the tragic implications of mysticism, and this is the chief weakness of each of these ideologies, according to the philosophical atheist who, unmoved by pragmatic social conventions, shares with the Eastern mystic the burden of suffering from a confrontation with the horrible truth of our existential predicament. In what follows, I explore these ideas with a view to clarifying the differences between scientific and philosophical atheism.

Some Recent Historical Context

The New Atheist movement began as a counterattack against Muslim fundamentalists who took the longstanding war between white American and European oligarchs, on the

153 one hand, and the Muslim world, on the other, into the open with their 911 terrorism. (Moderate Muslims object that theres nothing Islamic about the members of al Qaeda, but since theology isnt a science, theres no non-question-begging criterion for distinguishing between genuine and phony Muslims. The terrorist cherry-picks some passages from Muslim scriptures, taking them out of context, while the moderate, secularized or reformist Muslim does the same with other scriptures.) The war between secular civilizations and the Muslim hordes has been waged for decades via the secular oligarchs proxies, that is, by the West-friendly dictators who have--until the recent Arab Spring uprisings--kept a lid on the nationalist aspirations of the Muslim majorities in the Middle East. Secularists hardly need to enter an intellectual war of ideas with the stillmedieval Islamic religion since, as Hitchens was fond of saying, the secularists already humiliate Middle Eastern Muslims daily by ruling them via the US military and its proxies. Still, New Atheists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens took up the call for overkill, launching verbal assaults on theism with their books and inperson debates. Again, these verbal assaults satisfied an emotional need to deal with the trauma inflicted by the highly successful 911 terrorist attacks. The Western secularists presupposition is that Muslims are subhumans who deserve to be ruled by brutal puppet regimes. The terrorists miraculous PSYOP of 911 undermined this narrative, and many New Atheists mean to reestablish the prejudice against true-believing Muslims with a media campaign, featuring something as dastardly as an uncompromising tone on the part of atheist intellectuals who had for the most part hitherto declined to speak out on any social issue, being postmodern, nihilistic liberals. Moderate religious folk, or what atheists like Jerry Coyne and P.Z. Myers like to call accommodationists, object to the strident tone of the New Atheistic case, as though intellectual New Atheism werent a superfluous rubbing of the Middle Eastern Muslims nose into the excrement of his or her premodern state of affairs. Strident words are as kisses by a spring breeze compared to the secularists direct or indirect military rule of the Muslim world. (This reminds me of CNNs Wolf Blitzer, who reflexively reacts to any effective use of rhetoric on the part of his interviewee by calling the results strong words. Someone should

154 inform Blitzer that all words are comparatively very weak.) Criticizing New Atheists harsh tone is absurd for numerous other reasons, such as the fact that the Muslim world is hypersensitive, owing to its living under military oppression by Western secular powers, and so those Muslims are wont to riot at the drop of a hat or the sketching of a satirical cartoon, demonstrating both a double standard for harsh rhetoric (their vitriol against Jews is legendary) and a very low threshold for what they deem inappropriate rhetoric against them. Moreover, focusing on the tone of New Atheism is boring and thus aesthetically off-putting, since as has been clear since at least Nietzsche, the implications of atheism are rather earth-shattering.

Scientific Atheism
To paraphrase Nietzsche and to come to the point at issue, the scientific atheist believes that science is the primary if not the only weapon that kills God, that theistic belief is rendered irrational as a result of a wealth of modern scientific discoveries. Science presents us with a natural world in which theres no room for God, and so traditional theistic religions are now backward and anachronistic. Moreover, scientific methods of rationality amount to rationality as such, and thus religious faith is a piece of irrationality. Much of this is accurate, in my view, but scientific atheism is to philosophical atheism as is literalistic religion to the esoteric, mystical kind. Scientific atheism is philosophically primitive, and this is hardly an accident since the science-centered atheist typically pretends to reject philosophy along with theology. And while some religious beliefs are indeed fairly addressed by institutional science, the deepest ones are left untouched because theyre philosophical in nature. The scientific atheist suffers from a massive blind spot, which is the extent to which the case for atheism must be philosophical and not just scientific. Take, for example, the truth that scientists explain the universes natural processes. Does the existence of the natural cosmos entail that theres no god? Of course not, since God is esoterically if not exoterically defined as the supernatural

155 Creator of that cosmos, as a transcendent, immaterial mind or spirit that transcends our ken. How could a scientific experiment show that theres no such being? Scientists actually presuppose methodological naturalism, according to which anything studied should be assumed to be natural and thus scientifically explainable, for the studys sake. This pragmatic optimism about the scope of scientific methods is justifiable as far as it goes in science, but the methodological naturalist only thereby ignores the question of theism. Moreover, whereas the practice of science may indeed be quintessentially rational, the scientist and the scientific atheist tend, as human animals, to invest their ultimate emotional stock somewhere, and as the sociologist Emile Durkheim and the theologian Paul Tillich said, that ultimate object of faith will serve as their god, the sacred center of their universe. But whereas philosophical atheists like Nietzsche are free to address this threat against the atheist's humanism, the scientific atheist tends to be blind to this problem. Although theres plenty of empirical evidence that humans are inherently tribal and idolatrous, the scientific atheist prefers to ignore the normative questions of which idol should replace the traditional God or of whether a repudiation of any sort of myth or religious faith would be wise even were this possible. By construing the question of Gods existence as decisively scientific, scientific atheists play to the greatest strength of secular society, which is the power of technoscience. But in so doing, this sort of atheist demonstrates the same warped single-mindedness as that of the warmonger who thinks theres a military solution to every sociopolitical problem or of the proverbial hammer-lover who sees everything else as a nail. There are indeed facets of religion that are susceptible to scientific testing and thus falsification; for example, the Darwinian revolution in biology directly challenges literalistic interpretations of monotheistic scriptures. These literalists typically do themselves the disservice of following Thomas Aquinas in assuming that the best way to combat heathenism is to wield the heathens weapon of Reason. Thus, literalists treat their scriptures as though they were concerned primarily with empirical rather than with normative truth, despite the fact that outside of ancient Greece and perhaps India, the

156 ancients had no conception of an absolute division between fact and value. Whereas today its commonplace to speak of whats factually the case regardless of whether we approve or even know about the matter, the ancient worldviews that gave rise to the current monotheistic religions were anthropocentric or animistic. The natural world was assumed to depend on divine people just as the local artificial world depends on mortal humans. Natural facts, then, were assumed to be artificial, which is to say that everything from the movement of the sun to the oceans waves were thought to be directly intended by some deity, in which case any question of empirical fact was inextricable from some psychological question of the deitys purpose or from the social question of whether some group of humans properly worships the deity to steer the course of nature. In short, the scientific atheists error is as gross as the literalistic theists. Science conflicts with religion only when a religious creed is reduced to a scientific theory or when values are reduced to facts, and prescriptions to descriptions. Granted, even if religions deal primarily with practical questions of how we should live in the face of death, religious statements are easily interpreted as having empirical implications. Certainly, the theist is committed to the notions that God designed the universe to sustain life and that God interacts with the natural order, responds to prayer, and performs miracles--especially those miracles which are crucial to monotheistic narratives. But refuting these notions on purely empirical grounds, amassing scientific data to demonstrate that theres no such interaction is a fools errand, since the theist is always free to reinterpret her scripture or to rework her understanding of Gods relationship with us. This is largely why theology isnt a science in the first place, because the theist assumes that matter is everywhere dependent on some mind and not the other way around, and that since Gods mind is much greater than ours, we have only a flawed understanding of Gods plan. Even folk psychological interpretation of our own intentions is endless and inexact, because our beliefs and desires all bear on each other in a vast network of ever-changing mental states that corresponds somehow to

157 the brains architecture, so that theres always the possibility of explaining someones behaviour by emphasizing some other relation between her beliefs and desires. But the theologian obviously has even less reason to be fixated on a single interpretation of Gods state of mind, since Gods mind would transcend our comprehension and so we could never be certain we understand what Gods doing. On top of this, as I said, a mind is concerned with normative questions of how we ought to live, which are never answered solely by pointing to some empirical fact and which scientific methods therefore dont address. In this way, theism is subjective rather than objective, because theism is distinguished by the positing of a great mind. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper said, theology and (Freudian) psychiatry are both nonscientific in that their statements are unfalsifiable.

Scientisms Ironic Vindication of Philosophy

Now, the scientific atheist typically regards the unfalsifiability of theological statements as a disastrous defect that renders religion worthless and pitiful. But this is because the scientific atheist is plainly and quite ironically beholden to the religion Ive called Scientism, which is equivalent roughly to a combination of positivism and Enlightenment humanism. Specifically, this atheist tends to reach the conclusion that scientific methods are the sole providers of knowledge, and that any belief that would fail on scientific grounds is worthless. This positivism is epistemologically primitive and otherwise embarrassingly clueless. First of all, humans are animals, not robots, and so were seldom interested just in knowledge for its own sake. Obviously, we have many other interests, including political, personal, and aesthetic ones. When the positivistic New Atheist pretends to be hyper-rational, like a Vulcan from Star Trek, sneering at the theist for her ancient superstitions, wishful thinking, and other emotional weaknesses, just ask the atheist about her sex life: request a cold-hearted computation of the range of her sexual positions, a dissection of her perverted fantasies, and visual records of her sexual practices. See whether that superficially hyper-rational atheist lives up to her religions calling as a posthuman, abiding on a higher plane than that of our primitive

158 ancestors, or whether instead she succumbs to responding like the animal she actually is and retreats to an emotional defense of her embarrassingly primitive private life. Second, because were animals and not robots in the classic SF sense, our knowledge is value-laden, which is to say that our beliefs are intertwined with our interests so that knowledge isnt just a set of propositions that corresponds to some facts, with a theory in tow that predicts and explains the evidence of why that correspondence should obtain; in addition to that strictly rational business, theres the need for our beliefs to cohere with each other and with our desires and emotions. While as a matter of fact the Earth may be approximately 12,700 km in diameter, knowing about that fact involves assimilating the belief into a larger worldview which is informed not just by scientific methods of evidence-gathering and testing, but by our practical concerns. A machine can merely record a representation of the Earths physical characteristics, but a person knows those characteristics by understanding their relevance, given a wider, partly normative perspective. That perspective is always informed by disciplines other than institutional scientific ones, even for a wannabe hyper-rational atheist. Scientism in the wider sense accounts for the ongoing phenomenon of positivism in science-centered culture, and thus for scientism in the narrow sense. (For clarity, Ill now capitalize my references to the former sort of scientism.) In the narrow sense, scientism is just the view that all knowledge is obtained by scientific methods and that nonscientific academic disciplines are therefore of much less importance, if not wholly useless. In the wider sense, I define Scientism as science-centered religion that covertly substitutes for a more traditional one and that depends on a severe lack of selfawareness on its practitioners part. In particular, a Scientistic atheist notoriously pretends that philosophy is effectively as worthless and as counterproductive as theology, even though this atheists case against theism is always fundamentally philosophical. For example, in his blog Why Evolution is True the scientific New Atheist Jerry Coyne cites Stephen Hawkings appeal to the pragmatic principle that science is superior to

159 philosophy because science works (see the entry, How can we justify science?: Sokal and Lynch debate epistemology.) Theology and philosophy fail to progress, on this view, because theologians and philosophers fail to achieve consensus on answers to their intellectual questions, and in any case their disciplines are fruitless in that they dont help us control natural forces to enhance our standard of living. Again, this positivistic, antiphilosophical philosophy is as embarrassingly juvenile as a libertarians worship of Ayn Rand. For no more than a moment of thought is needed to appreciate that pragmatic hostility to philosophy is perfectly self-destructive. Just run through the key terms in my above summary of pragmatism in the present paragraph and ask whether their use is scientifically or philosophically justified. Science works in that science enables us to control natural processes by means of determining their causes. In that respect, technoscience is indeed highly useful, but is it accurate to say that neither philosophy nor theology works in its own way? Of course, to say that philosophy needs to work exactly like science is just to beg the question in favour of scientism. No, philosophy and theology work as cognitive disciplines that attend to the normative and wider coherence dimensions of knowledge. Philosophy works by engendering skepticism with regard to social conventions, while exoteric theology works by unifying tribes around emotionally-satisfying totems or other idols. And just as philosophy and theology nevertheless have their great weaknesses (philosophy causes angst and alienation, while mainstream theology thrives on gullibility, ignorance, and authoritarian impulses), technoscience clearly has its drawbacks as well. To quote Erik Davis, in Techgnosis, Any serious observer must find herself questioning the sustainability of our extractive, industrial, and agricultural practices, our levels of consumption, and our myopic insults to the biosphere. All the cool commodities in the world cannot compensate for a future that promises a massive extinction of plants and creatures, the devastating loss of topsoil and rain forest, a cornucopia of pesticide-laden monocrops and lab-engineered Frankenfoods, and the climatic instabilities of global warming. And while globalization may thrust some social

160 groups and regions into relative affluence, such prosperity could prove to be an ecological time bomb if the exuberant consumption patterns of the West are simply replicated on a global scale. (314) Science isnt solely to blame for these dangers, but science nevertheless is the chief enabler of globalization, and to the extent that globalization has a dark side, science doesnt simply work. But to appreciate the normative aspect of the pragmatic lauding of science is already to enter into at least a philosophical (ethical or aesthetic) comparison of science with other disciplines. Likewise, to say that philosophy doesnt progress is to issue a normative judgment that no series of scientific tests in the world can suffice to justify. This is because what counts as social progress depends on our interests, and institutional science cant prove what we should want. Is consensus or unanimity necessarily the mark of progress or of a working rather than a dysfunctional discipline? What strictly scientific method could demonstrate this as an empirical fact? Perhaps disagreement on largely subjective matters has the social advantage of fostering variety and thus greater human adaptability. Perhaps theres more disagreement in philosophy and in religion, because normative, highly general, and emotionally crucial questions are harder to answer than empirically testable ones. More likely, though, perhaps answering them decisively isnt the point, because grappling with a philosophical question is a way of shaping a personal outlook or a culture, without the benefit of presuppositions, whereas scientists are free to presuppose methodological naturalism, pragmatism, platonism, or some other philosophical stance without neglecting their duties as scientists. Scientific, allegedly hyper-rational atheism, though, is actually a philosophical position, and despite this atheists superficial hostility to philosophy as the baby in the bathwater of theology, the oblivious worshipper of science inevitably vindicates philosophy and at least the need for theology, albeit not any outmoded religion. The mental compartmentalization needed by a modern monotheist to maintain a coherent worldview despite the conflicts between any such religion and a modern mindset, is comparable to

161 that needed by the Scientistic atheist who perceives the world through science-tinted lenses, leaving the blind spot of the philosophical and theological frame that holds those lenses in front of her eyes. Indeed, Coyne is wont to equate science with rationality in general, to conceal the absurdity of his antiphilosophical philosophy and his underlying religious faith in science. (See, for example, his blog entry, A new definition of scientism, in which he says, As for me, I maintain that if you define science broadly as I have above, then yes, plumbing is a form of science, for it uses empirical investigation and reason to do things like locate and fix leaks.) That is, instead of maintaining that all knowledge issues from institutional science, Coyne and likeminded scientific atheists draw the line between atheism and theism at the point of general rationality. But because they equate rationality with science, by way of mere stipulation, they feel entitled to award science and not, say, philosophy, with the credit for atheism, thus satisfying by way of equivocation their religious and highly reductive preference for science in the narrower sense. By all means, let the scientific atheist tout the glories of technoscience, which are many and awesome! But when the hubristic atheist ventures into the religious fundamentalists territory, having been mesmerized by those glories so that the atheist sees nothing of cognitive value outside of science, the scientific atheist creates a selfdestroying worldview, abandoning her philosophical allies for the sake of religious purity.

Philosophical Atheism and Mystical Pessimism

By contrast, the philosophical atheist regards the question of theism as philosophical. But how does this atheist preserve philosophy while rejecting theology? After all, as the scientific atheist likes to point out, philosophy has more in common with theology than does science. Well, on the surface, the philosophical atheist proceeds by building an a priori case against the so-called god of the philosophers, an abstraction thats rationally

162 reconstructed from religious myths. For example, a philosopher is free to deconstruct a definition of God, reducing the definition to absurdity by deriving contradictions from the reconstruction of the theists assumptions. This is mostly a futile endeavour, since theres always a gap between the rational reconstruction and the God that religious people actually worship, what with philosophy not being theology. Thus, the theist is free to say that the god of the philosophers is a red herring, that the rational definition of God would need to be altered to represent the deity figuring in a particular religion, and that theres no end to the needed alteration since ultimately mysticism trumps literalism. As Ill show in a moment, this theistic retreat to mysticism isnt just an escape hatch to evade criticism, but points to the crucial difference between philosophy and theology. There are other philosophical arguments an atheist can deploy, though, in building a nonscientific but rational case against theism, some of which I summarize in Theism. Of course, a philosopher can criticize the theists a priori proofs of Gods existence and in general can show that theism is fallacious. In other words, the philosopher can construe her atheism as a moderate version of the science-centered variety, much as American Democrats can sell themselves as moderate Republicans. But this doesnt reveal whats actually at stake in the conflict between philosophical atheists and theists. As suggested above, rational or so-called natural theology is something of a political strategy adopted by the likes of Catholics and Muslims to convert certain unbelievers. The idea is to show that all sacred paths lead to God, that science and reason generally pose no challenge to religion. But this raises the question of whether reason and science are sacred rather than profane, or God-favoured rather than demonic. Clearly, from a Jewish, Christian, or Islamic perspective, secular powers dont fit well within those religious narratives, assuming the narratives havent been secularized. After all, reason is a skill weve evolved in our fallen state to survive in what the monotheist regards as our mere temporary home, while technoscience is an elaboration on reason that enables us to re-engineer the world God would still have created for us, forging our own path by our own intelligence and power. Clearly, the monotheist requires no leap of imagination to label rationalism a mark of sinful arrogance--literally a following in Satans path, Satan or Prometheus being the

163 archetypal rebel who creates his own world rather than serving as a slave to Gods plan. Paul of Tarsus said that natural as opposed to spiritual wisdom is folly to God, while the New Testament has Jesus say that you can gain the whole natural world but lose yourself on Judgment Day. Some monotheists try to co-opt secular instruments, but in so doing they inevitably corrupt their religion. As I say in Christian Chutzpah, the most appalling current case of this is the revolting spectacle of American so-called conservative Christianity in which the religion functions purely as a political weapon wielded by Republican demagogues, having absolutely nothing to do with the original Christian principles. True, in Genesis God commands that we subdue the whole world, but as Jack Miles shows in God: A Biography, the character of God in the biblical narrative evolves as he discovers his preferences by interacting with his favourite creatures, having apparently no prior history to determine his character. Thus, God commands us to be fruitful and to multiply only to discover later that he doesnt really approve of that commandment, since it has the unintended consequence that we become too powerful, and so God has to destroy us and start again. That initial commandment to the creatures made in his image represents only Gods most nave conception of his purpose for us, reflecting in turn his most superficial understanding of himself, and thus would hardly still be ineffect. What the Bible shows God discovering along with his creatures is that the pride needed for us to rule the world leads to wars between us and thus to the breaking of Gods later proscription of killing, and to a demonic rebellion against God. Not content with ruling the world, humans build the Tower of Babel to reach the heavens, and so God has to weaken his creatures by impeding our ability to communicate. In fact, the literalistic reading of the Bible as inerrant betrays an underlying hostility to the Bible, a resentment that the Bible is so difficult to understand, and a confession that the literalist lacks the patience to read the text with the eyes of a literary critic. Memorizing and mindlessly repeating cherished quotations as relevant equally throughout all time and space, in their most superficial guise with no need for interpretation or understanding of historical and literary contexts, is just lazy and disrespectful to the authors and editors.

164 To return to the point, though, the canonical arguments in Western philosophy of religion are mostly unimportant, which is one reason that that philosophical field is so marginalized even in the US despite the abundance of American interest in religion. The rationalism implicit in the theistic proofs and secular counterarguments betrays a mere exoteric understanding of God, and thus leaves aside the distinction between literalism and mysticism. What theology represents is actually a call for our ultimate humility, given faith or nonrational knowledge (direct perception) that theres something much greater than ourselves to which we owe our lives. Theistic religion is primarily a check on our pride; at least, thats an implication of the mystical heart of that sort of religion. But the problem is that most religious people get caught up in the oversimplified conception of God as a person--as a creator, designer, warlord, father, son, or provider of gifts. The god of exoteric, literalistic theism may be easier to understand and to affirm, but the drawback is that this god becomes one of us instead of a transcendent being that renders our pride foolish. Indeed, the literalists analogy between God and a human secularizes her religion, by implicitly deifying human nature. Literalistic theism justifies humanism, whereas mystical theism condemns our nature as illusory or as nothing compared to the transcendent oneness of ultimate reality. Even an argument like the so-called cosmological one, that God is the First Cause, reduces God to a natural being for the sake of our rational understanding, and thus misses the point of mysticism that is essential to theism. So as I said above, a theists appeal to mysticism is no retreat from the need for rigorous philosophizing; rather, academic Western philosophy of religion is a study mainly of red herrings. That philosophy is naturalistic and thus science-centered and humanistic, whereas for thousands of years theistic religions have challenged those who are tempted to assume that they can find their own happiness. Nonsecularized religious belief always rests on faith, intuition, or an interpretation of experience rather than on science or logic, which renders the belief nonrational (subjective and emotional). The theist feels convinced by her experience that however great our knowledge and power, there are much greater forms that humble ours; she suspects, therefore, that our pride in ourselves is a vice, a result of short-sightedness. The mystical theist grapples with the challenge this intuition

165 poses to the now-treasured secular faith in the autonomy of the human individual, in her rights and dignity as a godlike being in her own right who subdues nature with technoscience. Meanwhile, the literalistic theist loses sight of the intuition and becomes an unknowing pawn of secular powers, as she embraces religious metaphors that covertly deify human nature. What, then, divides Western mystical theism from philosophical atheism? Thats the deeper question. My answer is that the former is comedic whereas the latter is tragic. Western mysticism is so marginalized compared to the Wests interest in exoteric monotheism, that the Western mystics lesson is tainted by the exoteric metaphors. That is, even the sophisticated Westerners God becomes all-too-human, and so Western theism loses its potential to challenge secular humanism. Even the sophisticated liberal Christian who professes to reject the literal meaning of most biblical passages nevertheless identifies God with something as insipid as love or perhaps with a quasinatural force like the platonic Good that steers everything towards its happy destiny. Western theism is comedic in that its highly optimistic about human beings. Jews, Christians, and Muslims currently dont fear God, because theyve humanized him, failing to grasp the meaning of mystical insight. Theistic humanism, in turn, is a force for secularization. (Granted, Islam gives the appearance of being an exception, but this is because the current dire circumstances of most Muslims compel them to latch onto the warlord metaphor which happens to be scarier than, say, the Christians metaphor of God the Father or Son.) Now, Eastern mysticism has much more vitality and immunity from exoteric contamination. But for just this reason, Eastern theism is revealingly regarded by Westerners as more philosophical than religious, despite the fact that Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Taoists are much more concerned with practice than with creeds. And this brings me to the important difference between philosophical atheism and theism: theists flee from the destructive implications of mysticism, whereas philosophers courageously (or foolishly?) grapple with those implications. Western theists flee to the comfort of simplistic metaphors, whereas Easterners tend to

166 depart from theism itself, honouring the philosophical confrontation with mysticism and thus effectively embracing atheism. Granted, many Hindus worship various gods and many Buddhists worship various gurus, but mysticism is much more central to those religions than it is to current Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Again, by mysticism I mean the denunciation of natural appearances as the causes of ignorance and thus of suffering, and the renunciation of pleasures and rational powers that distract from that anti-natural realization. This mysticism began with Hinduism and filtered to the West after Alexander the Great opened channels of communication between the ends of the Old World. Eastern religions are tragic in that they regard the spirits liberation as an escape from the prison of nature and thus from human personality: we win in the end only by grasping that were nothing, that the notion of bliss in a personal heaven on some ethereal plane is just a fantasy. By contrast, Western religions are comedic: showing no mystical turning from the apparent world, and revealing the extent of their exoteric individualism, Jews, Christians, and Muslims envision heaven as life in a resurrected body, with Muslims even emphasizing heavens physical perfection. In Western religions, our wildest dreams are ultimately fulfilled, including the dream of perfect justice for the wicked in hell, whereas in Eastern religions those dreams are rejected precisely as such and replaced with detachment from the world that looks a lot like the existentialists alienation and angst. And this brings me to philosophical mysticism, that is, to the Socratic philosophers hostility to social conventions, which is central to the Western philosophical tradition even if many Western philosophers arent Socratic. Whereas the Western mystical theist slides into exoteric happy-talk, rendering her monotheism comedic and thus contrary to mystical hostility to natural (samsaric) inclinations, the Socratic philosopher shares the Eastern mystical view that the beloved wisdom destroys the ego and society at large by undermining optimistic or pragmatic opinions, what Plato called noble lies. This is why Socrates was executed. He recognized that his sole piece of wisdom was that he knew nothing, which ironically made him the wisest person in Greece; he knew nothing in that he stubbornly lacked faith in tradition or authority. Socratic philosophy

167 is self-destructive, since this sort of philosopher is compelled to reject what society values, which naturally alienates her. The parallels between the Socratic philosopher and the Eastern mystic should be clear. Now, the updated version of Socrates trenchant skepticism is informed, of course, by modern science which undermines the theists faith that history will end in our favour. On the contrary, implies the scientist, no one survives bodily death and since were evolving animals, well become extinct like any other species. No deus ex machina for us (unless the transhumanists hopes for technological apotheosis are realized). But again, the rational case against theism misses the mystical point, which is that our reason, our power, our love, and everything else we do or possess are of no consequence in the greater scheme. The mystic perceives miraculous potential in this scheme--mainly the interconnectedness of everything that appears independent. What the Socratic philosopher finds distasteful in theism, then, is the cowardly backsliding into optimistic, humanistic, and thus secularized literalism. By contrast, the philosophical version of mysticism looks like a synthesis of existentialism and cosmicism. Instead of trusting that were each saved by a divine Son, that divine Love conquers all, that our personal spirit is eternal, or that God is good and in control of the universe, the philosophical mystic, or hyper-skeptic, is preoccupied with horror: horror for the absurdity of our self-centered delusions, horror for the universes palpable inhumanity which we still find ways to deny, horror that every society depends on fraud and vice, horror that nature evolved self-aware beings who are forced to live as degraded beasts or to torture themselves with grim knowledge. To see this in dramatic terms, recall that the exoteric theist demonizes the character of Satan for daring to defy God by rejecting his place in the divine plan and acting as god in a world of his own creation, called hell. Again, on this account of the myth, secular humanism (Scientism) becomes Satanic. But the mystical, Gnostic Christian reinterprets the myth, casting Satan as the wise hero who escapes from the tyranny of a false God. The literalists god is indeed false, a projection of her self-centeredness, motivated by her fear of facing the horrible truths of our existential predicament that modern science

168 now makes clear for all educated people. Like the Eastern mystic and the Gnostics Satan, the Socratic philosopher falls from grace, meaning that shes socially ostracized for her boundless skepticism; indeed, this is the underlying reason for academic philosophys wider unpopularity. As Satan was flung from a false heaven, from participation in the Matrix of illusions which is the natural plane, the Eastern mystic hopes to be liberated from the cycle of rebirth, to be extinguished so that her suffering and her embarrassing incarnation as a clever ape can end. And as Satan suffers in hell, so too the philosopher and the mystic are angst-ridden, jarringly dislocated as they perceive irony and folly everywhere, drawn to the transcendent mystery in all things while condemning every rational or optimistic solution. In short, Socratic philosophy and Eastern mysticism both interpret the world as a monstrous tragedy and as absurdly ironic. The philosopher should reject exoteric theism not because this theists arguments are fallacious, which of course they are, but because theistic literalism betrays the mysticism to which theists and atheists alike are entitled. When the theist dresses up God to look human with anthropocentric metaphors, she tastelessly showcases her narcissism and opts for the pragmatic, secular humanistic lifestyle of pleasing herself with delusions. For the Socratic philosopher, most cases of theism are insufficiently mystical (Lovecraftian or existential), and the problem with scientific atheism is likewise that this atheists Scientism amounts to another comedic, humanistic faith. The exoteric theist and the scientific atheist both fail to appreciate the mystical, utterly tragic upshot of modern science, of Socratic hyper-skepticism, or of Eastern traditions of enlightenment. So while the scientific atheist properly rejects literalistic theism as fit for children, this atheist nevertheless swears allegiance to the wrong faith, to Scientism or positivistic humanism, which itself is preposterously anti-philosophical. In my view, the religious faith needed in a postmodern, highly technoscientific culture looks rather like some combination of existentialism, cosmicism, Eastern mysticism, and science fiction.

169

Sam Harriss Scientific Morality: A Case Study of Scientific Atheism ____________________________________________________

Sam Harriss The End of Faith was perhaps the first major book in the wave of New Atheist books published after 911. Harris argued for the importance of challenging our so-called private beliefs, since beliefs (mental representations) cause our behaviour and thus have public consequences. He argued also that so-called moderate religion shouldnt be off-limits to nontheists, since moderates enable more dangerous, fundamentalist religion by contending that since religion has a harmless form, religion itself is never a primary cause of violence. That book defended a commonsense realist philosophy, according to which beliefs are made true or false by the facts, and the facts support atheistic naturalism. Whatever you might think of his earlier case for a certain philosophical perspective, you should be struck by the shift taken by his more recent book, The Moral Landscape, in which he attempts to show that social conflicts between groups who disagree on moral issues arent inevitable, because science has the potential to show us the truth about moral values just as science has done with regard to the rest of nature. Harris uses his case for a science of morality as a weapon against religion, since theists claim that religion (along with philosophy) are valuable in part for providing the only conceivable framework that justifies morality; that is, the theist means to bash science-centered

170 nontheism for the latters inability to justify morality. In the process of countering this moral argument for theism, however, Harris throws the baby out with the bathwater. If morality is actually in the purview of science, then neither the philosopher nor the theologian can have anything crucial to say about moral issues, just as a chef or a politician has no authority to speak about biology or physics. Unfortunately, Harris case for scientific morality conforms to the positivists pattern of ironically celebrating science with a philosophy that must be kept in the shadows. In Harris case, he should have two reasons not to call attention to the philosophical nature of his arguments for scientific morality. First, those arguments would demonstrate that there is a crucial philosophical debate about morality after all, namely the debate about whether morality can be scientifically justified; the nature of this meta-debate, in turn, prevents a fulsome, Scientistic worship of science at the expense of philosophy. Second, his arguments happen to be badly flawed, often resting on evasive verbal tricks or contradicting each other, due presumably to his contempt for philosophy and thus for its ideals of clarity and rigorous logic even in discussions of nonscientific issues. Harris case for scientific morality, therefore, illustrates the perils of scientific, as opposed to philosophical, atheism.

Facts and Values

Harris says that he sees no reason to pay much attention to philosophical ethics or meta-ethics, because that philosophical work increases the amount of boredom in the universe (Chapt. 1 n.1). In a talk he gave in New York about his book, he says we dont have to pay attention to such intellectual backwaters (see the YouTube video, CFINYC | Sam Harris: The Moral Landscape, approx. 12 minutes in). His goal, he says in his book, is to write for a wider audience, not just for academia. This complaint with academic philosophy is all-too-convenient, though, since Harris book naturally contains many references to scientific research which are surely just as boring to many people. There are popularizers of either science or academic philosophy, who simplify the cutting-edge research and arguments without crudely misrepresenting them or slanting

171 the discussion with amateurish errors. Harris many, more technical footnotes at the back of his book, not to mention his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Stanford, show that hes equipped to engage responsibly with the philosophy of morality. The reason he doesnt, therefore, may be just that even a half-way rigorous philosophical analysis of his arguments for scientific morality reveals their egregious flaws and thus his true technique for persuasion, which is his implicit reference to the power of technoscience. Once Harris philosophical arguments are disposed of, all that remains is the tribal expectation that science will dictate our moral beliefs just as science has come to dictate so many of our others. Standing in the way of this inductive inference is the philosophical distinction between facts and values. Science is usually thought to discover what the natural facts are and how they work, not to show how we ought to behave or to settle any other normative matter. According to Harris, theres no such distinction. After all, he says, science itself rests on certain built-in epistemic values, such as the value of critical thinking (11). But this postmodern observation is irrelevant to the point of the fact-value distinction, which has to do with logical spaces of justification, or with the giving of reasons to accept a belief, not with causal connections. Sure, a persons values can cause her to act and thus to bring about certain facts in the world, perhaps even to make a scientific discovery. This doesnt mean that the persons values by themselves logically entail a reference to any of those facts, or that a reason to believe some fact obtains follows just from a belief about what ought to be the case. As the postmodern skeptic is often reminded to her chagrin, to reason otherwise is to commit a form of the genetic fallacy, of reducing an empirical beliefs justification to its subjective origin, such as to the believers feeling, character, or some other normative factor. To take the hackneyed example, just because Hitler was evil doesnt mean all of his empirical beliefs were false; again, rationally assessing whether an empirical belief is justified doesnt end with considering the believers values. Harris commits the same error in his neurological argument against the fact-value distinction. He points to some evidence that beliefs about facts and values respectively

172 arise from similar brain processes. Again, even were this evidence strong, it would be irrelevant to the distinction at issue since it would show only a certain causal connection--in this case, between mere beliefs about facts or values and their neural origins. Just because those beliefs might be processed in similar ways by the brain, doesnt mean theres no logical difference between reasons in support of either kind of belief. This is just another form of the genetic fallacy. What about the other direction of inference, from facts to values? This is the direction made famous by Humes argument that you cant infer a normative statement merely from factual premises. Harris gives short shrift to this, the more relevant aspect of the fact-value distinction. His most direct response, buried in a footnote, is a citation of Dennetts hand-waving protest that an ought just has to be derivable from something like an appreciation of human nature or a sense of what a human being is or might be or what the person wants. According to Harriss quotation of Dennett, theres no fallacy in that sort of derivation (Intro. n.13). But there obviously is. Just ask yourself whether wanting something makes it right. If Hitler wants to kill Jews, does that mean he ought to do so? Sure, facts about our capacities as humans informs us of our moral limits, but this doesnt mean that the rightness or wrongness of what we do reduces to facts of those limits. A sociopath may be incapable of acting morally, but that limit by itself doesnt tell us that his actions are immoral. Perhaps his lack of a conscience is like a gift and his manipulation of weaker people conforms to a posthuman moral standard. And were the facts of our nature that we have no real freedom at all, values would be illusory and thus so too would a derivation of normative from factual statements. In his New York talk, Harris raises Humes point about is and ought statements, and in the very next sentence pretends to answer it with his postmodern point about the value-ladenness of science (see just before the 25 minute mark of the talk cited above). It doesnt seem to bother Harris that these points are headed in opposite directions, inferentially speaking.

173 Dennett and thus Harris (who quotes him) want to know from where moral statements are derivable if not from factual ones. Scientistic atheists are stumped, you see, because theyre wannabe hyper-rationalists. They assume that moral beliefs have to be logically inferred or based on evidence. But morality, like theism, might be irrational and thus either might be particularly fitting for us--as smart as we are compared to all other known species--considering that were animals nonetheless.

Is happiness the only moral value?

So Harris hardly overcomes the philosophical distinction between facts and values. But put that aside. According to Harris, whatever can be known about maximizing the wellbeing of conscious creatures--which is, I will argue, the only thing we can reasonably value--must at some point translate into facts about brains and their interaction with the world at large (11). Harris main argument is that the only intelligible object of value is the welfare or happiness of conscious beings and that morality therefore reduces to facts about what makes those being happy, facts which scientists can discover. (Harris emphasizes another point, about the origin of values. For example, he says, consciousness is the only intelligible domain of value, consciousness is the basis of human values and morality, and any other source would be the least interesting thing in the universe (32). He speaks as if these statements were equivalent, which theyre not, since whether something is interesting has to do with whether its the object of value, not with whether its the source or sustaining cause of values. In any case, this point about the source of values is once again irrelevant. You might as well say that morality reduces to facts about our solar system, since that system produced and sustains the conscious creatures who evaluate things. The origin or vehicle of morality may be scientifically interesting, but its irrelevant to the philosophical, meta-ethical question of whether science can tell us everything we could want to know about morality.)

174 Harris relevant premise, then, is that our welfare is the only possible thing we can value. His meta-ethical defense of this statement proceeds by way of thought experiments, not by any scientific evidence. Harris merely appeals to his readers intuition, asking whether it would make any sense to call the most miserable state of affairs morally good. He contrasts The Good Life, in which a person is successful, emotionally fulfilled by social connections and a worthwhile job, and fortunately blessed with a long life free from much pain, with The Bad Life in which an illiterate, impoverished, starving, terrified woman in war-torn Africa watches as her child is raped and killed, and is forced to flee from a gang of soldiers who rape and kill her (15-16). Harris wants to know what someone could possibly value were the difference between those two lives not to matter to her. If someone wanted to steer another persons life in one or the other direction, as it were, could we conceivably have the same moral opinion of that controlling person, regardless of the direction? Harris wants to say that this difference between happiness and unhappiness is all there is to moral value, that a moral value not captured by the distinction between The Good Life and The Bad Life is inconceivable and impossible (17). And since that distinction has to do with facts that relate--in a scientifically explainable way--to the brains of conscious creatures, if you share Harris intuition about the distinction, youve got to agree that there can be a science of morality. Clearly, theres a difference between happiness and unhappiness and clearly most people would rather be happy than otherwise. Most people prefer pleasure to pain, for well-known natural reasons. The question is only whether this preference is all there is to morality, or indeed whether its even relevant to the question of moral value. All thats logically required to refute Harris conceivability argument is to provide an example of a moral value not captured by his point about the majoritys preference for happiness. One such example is found in my existential argument for the aesthetic value of suffering due to knowledge of our absurd and tragic plight as naturally accursed creatures, a value that trumps the more conventional, materialistic preference for personal fulfillment. Ask yourself not just whether we can or actually do prefer a life of personal pleasure to one of misery, but whether we morally ought to, given our tragic

175 knowledge of our animal nature, of the obviousness of atheism, and thus of the absurdity of our theistic delusions. Instead of appealing fallaciously to an intuitions popularity, as does Harris, consider whether we ought to be happy on Earth even though Earth isnt Heaven. Take even the fortunate soul in Harris example of The Good Life. In that thought experiment, the heros job is actually to help other people, including children in the developing world by means of a billion-dollar grant. So a happy person neednt be selfish. But notice how Harris own thought experiment self-destructs as soon as you start to examine it. Anyone interested in dedicating her life to helping people much less fortunate than her is bound to be motivated by suffering due to her knowledge of their misery. That suffering will compete with her pleasure, tearing her away from her cocktail parties, rendering her enjoyment of her comparative luxuries petty and awkward. How could she enjoy her success and her friends, knowing that millions of children suffer each moment shes offered some pleasure or other, and knowing too the ultimate cause and consequence of that grotesque inequality? The cause, of course, is the fact that were byproducts of mindless, inhumane natural processes, and the consequence is that were thoroughly natural creatures, namely animals whose fates are tied entirely to our bodies, for whom theres no perfect justice. Harris own example reveals that happiness isnt crucial to moral value, after all, since the morally praiseworthy person living The Good Life is bound to be unhappy! Sure, she may be successful, wealthy, popular, and so on, but shell suffer from anxiety rather than be contented. Her angst is what will motivate her to live a more respectable, altruistic life, thus freeing Harris argument from the counterintuitive implication that selfish pleasure is all thats morally valuable. If that heros happiness (in the sense of a set of higher and lower pleasures tied to her brain states) isnt what makes her life morally valuable, why do we morally praise her? Surely, because she chooses to sacrifice her pleasure to help others, and she chooses this out of a sense of duty to respond well to her suffering from the horror of our existential predicament. Because were the spawn of a mindless, inhumane world and

176 not children of any loving god, some people succeed in the struggle for life while others fail, some are lucky while others are not, and many of us live effectively as subhumans exploited by posthuman demigod overlords (globe-trotting oligarchs). The hero cant bear to live selfishly, because her conscience prevents her from contributing to an aesthetically appalling pattern in which she enjoys luxuries while millions of impoverished children starve. Again, whats morally praiseworthy about this hero isnt just that she happens to succeed in helping others, but that she chooses to try even at the inevitable cost of sacrificing her peace of mind and her enjoyment of her privileged lifestyle. Remove this altruistic aspect from Harris example of The Good Life, and the intuition is no longer triggered that theres anything morally right about the persons pleasures from her fortune, social network, and her long life, that is, about her happiness. As I say elsewhere, not only is happiness not the only morally correct goal, but happiness in the sense of personal contentment is especially unbecoming for creatures in our existential situation. We morally ought to be restless and angst-ridden, given what we now know, thanks indeed largely to Harris cherished modern science. I stress the aesthetic aspect of existential morality, but the philosopher Immanuel Kant provides a third example that refutes Harris contention, that is, an example in addition to my case against the moral value of happiness and to the self-destruction of Harris example of The Good Life. Kant famously argues for what ethicists call deontology, which is the philosophy that morality is a matter of duty, not of happiness. Naturally, Harris gives short shrift to Kant as well, stating in a footnote that Kant's categorical imperative (that we have a rational duty to act as if our private reason for acting were a universal law, so that wed expect to reap what we sow), amounts to a covert form of consequentialism (Chapt.1, n.10). This is supposedly because, as Mill allegedly showed, Kants rational basis for morality works only on the assumption that rationality is generally beneficial and thus maximizes happiness. Even were this so, which Kantians will hardly concede, happiness might be a morally irrelevant byproduct of rationality. In any case, as Ive argued elsewhere, rationality rather produces angst and alienation than contentment. Were everyone good Kantians, always worried about

177 treating each other as ends rather than as means, wed suffer from our awareness of how often nature treats us all as means rather than as ends. In another footnote, Harris criticizes Kants notion of treating people as ends, arguing that were split between our present and future selves, so that when we act prudently to benefit ourselves in the future, we abuse our present selves as means to that end (Chapt. 2, n.45). But once again, Harris own philosophical assumptions undermine his scientistic notion of morality. Harris says that morality is a concern only for conscious creatures. According to the philosopher John Lockes view of personal identity, a person is essentially the interconnections between a set of mental states, especially memories. A stream of consciousness can be interrupted without losing personal identity as long as memories are retained of the earlier mental states. So a Kantian could reply that present and future states of a self are united by memories. Moreover, according to Kant, were ends rather than means because we have freewill in the sense of autonomy, and without that attribute morality is nonsensical in the first place. Note also that Harris example of The Bad Life is morally irrelevant. The victims misery is surely not to be preferred, but this doesnt make it morally wrong, precisely because shes a colossal victim who isnt to blame for anything, and even those who immediately persecute her arent to blame (the soldiers are drug-addled and indoctrinated as children). The true culprits who are morally blameworthy are the oligarchs who control the political and economic relations between countries. But the point is that immorality isnt just a lack of happiness; rather, its the cowardice or folly that causes us to ignore our existential predicament, retreating to theistic or to other delusions, as well as the tastelessness (unoriginality) of reinforcing that predicament by contributing to inhumane dominance hierarchies. Finally, a word about Harris dismissal of objections to his conceivability argument for the equivalence of moral value with the welfare of conscious creatures. In talks and his book, he often belittles his critic's objections by saying that they run up against the self-

178 evidence of Harris arguments and therefore dont need to be taken seriously. For example, he says, if we dont want everyone to experience the worst possible misery, we shouldnt do X. Can we readily conceive someone who might hold altogether different values and want all conscious beings, himself included, reduced to the state of the worst possible misery? I dont think so. And I dont think we can intelligibly ask questions like What if the worst possible misery for everyone is actually good? Such questions seem analytically confused...if someone persists in speaking this way, I see no reason to take his views seriously. (Chapt.1, n.22) Here, Harris dismisses a strawman argument, reducing the conclusion of his own conceivability argument to a mere analytic statement that depends on the stipulated meaning of words. The reason it makes no sense to ask whether the worst possible misery for everyone is good is that worst includes the meaning bad. But the description of The Ultimate Bad Life, in which misery is maximized, neednt use that particular loaded label, worst. Indeed, we shouldnt beg the moral question at issue by initially describing this scenario as very bad, but should rather neutrally say that that misery is complete, extreme, permanent, and so on. Then the question becomes whether, say, complete misery for everyone is actually moral. Given existential and Eastern philosophical traditions, this question can hardly be dismissed as easily as an irrelevant one about the loaded use of words. The renunciation of our pleasures may indeed be the moral choice, given our predicament that those who know too much are condemned to live with angst, and that we can either flee to delusion or nobly persevere as tragic heroes. Of course, the philosophical and indeed the scientific standard is to go out of your way to ensure that youve made no error, to work with the critic to formulate the best possible objection to see whether your argument holds up. The alternative is to dogmatically presume that youve got a godlike handle on the truth and to belittle objections, like a self-righteous theist. Harris evident pride goes before the fall of his

179 argument, and the source of his pride is his commitment to the religion of Scientism, which assures him that somehow science has all the answers--even if youve got to employ shoddy philosophical arguments to prove as much.

Just what is Harris' science of morality?

Were Harris conclusion just that science can show us how to be happy, assuming happiness is sustained by certain brain states, there would be little to criticize. The problem is that he thinks we can replace the philosophy of ethics with that sort of science, because the equivalence of happiness with moral value is allegedly selfevident. As Ive shown, his argument for that equivalence is deeply flawed. But put that aside for the moment and consider what exactly Harris wants to show. He says that his general thesis isnt merely that science can help us get what we want out of life, but that, in principle, science can help us understand what we should do and should want-and therefore what other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible (28). But this is a slippery rather than a clarifying statement of his thesis. The weakness in saying that science can merely help in this regard trivializes his notion of scientific morality, since even his critics will agree that an ought can follow from a combination of is and ought statements. The main criticism is just that a prescription doesnt reduce exclusively to descriptions, in the sense of being implied by factual premises without any normative ones. Harris proves himself to be an even slipperier fish when he compares morality to health, pointing out that medical science proceeds regardless of philosophical worries about the definition of health, but also conceding that Science cannot tell us why, scientifically, we should value health. But once we admit that health is the proper concern of medicine, we can then study and promote it through science (37). As far as I can tell, this admission is devastating to Harris overall argument, since it reduces his thesis to what he explicitly rules out as such, namely to the statement just that science can help us get what we want (i.e. happiness). If science cant tell us why we should value health, and health is comparable to morality for Harris purposes, then science cant tell

180 us why we should value happiness (the welfare of conscious creatures). In that case, the science of morality doesn't replace the philosophy of ethics, and that science becomes the instrumental business of helping many people achieve their philosophical or theological goal of being happy. As Ive said, Harris conceivability argument in support of his main premise is itself patently philosophical rather than scientific, so his own case for scientific morality bears out his admission that science doesnt settle the key philosophical issue of what we should morally value. But the slippery fish squirms yet again, adopting the same ploy as the scientific atheist Jerry Coynes, of defining science broadly as our best effort to understand what is going on in this universe, the boundary between this science and the rest of rational thought being sometimes impossible to draw (29). With this Quineian holistic view of the relation between rational endeavours like math, philosophy, and science, Harris can credit science in the broad sense for the work of philosophy and thus satisfy his scientistic preference for science in the narrow sense. Why not instead use philosophy broadly as the name of our best effort to understand the universe, and thus credit philosophy for the work of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein? Again, if you hollow out science as a weasel word, you can have a cheap scientific morality, but philosophy will still be needed to settle the normative questions about morality, which are the crucial ones about what goal we ought to pursue, while science in the proper sense will consist of discoveries and explanations that enable us more efficiently to pursue that goal. Harris is clearly all over the map with regard to what exactly a science of morality amounts to: because of his disdain for philosophical rigor, and because of the conflict between his scientism and his philosophical method, Harris is unsure of how hes entitled to state his conclusion. Thus he equivocates, backslides, and contradicts himself. Theres more in The Moral Landscape than what Ive discussed here, but I think the above demolishes Harris main argument and exposes the amusing ironies of scientific atheism. The scientific atheist thinks that science rather than philosophy is the best, if not the only useful, weapon against religion. But the scientific atheist typically

181 subscribes to what is effectively the religion of Scientism, and inevitably resorts to philosophy in arguing against theism. Thus, scientific atheism self-destructs twice over.

182

Jerry Coyne on Scientism and Freewill ____________________________________________________

Jerry Coyne is a popular new atheist and biologist. In his blog, Why Evolution is True, he often defends two positions among others, both of which I think are dubious. The first is scientism in what I call the narrow, academic sense, that science is the only source of empirical knowledge. (Note that this sense of scientism is different from my broader use of the word as a synonym for the substitute religion of secular humanism. That broad sense of "Scientism" isnt relevant to the present discussion. Whenever I refer to scientism in this particular article, then, I have in mind the narrow sense.) The second is that freewill is an illusion, since science shows that determinism is true. Ill address each in turn.

Scientism and Knowledge

Coyne says that hes always maintained that there are no other reliable ways of knowing beyond science if one construes science broadly--as meaning a combination of reason and empirical observation. Again, The real question is whether theres any way beyond empirical observation and reason to establish what is true about the world. I dont think so In another article, he speaks of his challenge to Keith Ward, which was to give me just one reasonably well established fact about the world that comes from general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and

183 judgment without any verifiable empirical input. Coyne summarizes this by saying that he questioned Wards contention that faith or other non-empirical disciplines could establish facts about the world or universe. And in an article on whether the humanities are scientific, he says There is only one way of finding out what is true, and that doesnt involve revelation or making up stories. Again, his point is that science broadly construed is that only way. Finally, in an article on whether fiction is a way of knowing, he says, its clear that disciplines like history, archaeology, and even sociology have the capacity to tell us true things about the world, but I have my doubts about the arts. Either they can present some facts (like the facts peppering historical fiction like War and Peace) that we can independently verify, or they can give us an idea of what someone felt like in a particular situation (as with Gabriel at the end of Joyces The Dead). The latter, though, is not a truth in the normal sense, but a rendition of emotions: a way of seeing but not knowing. According to Coyne, then, the question of scientism is whether there are ways of knowing besides reason and empirical observation, where knowing means the discovery of facts or truths. Where Coyne goes wrong here was shown long ago by Plato: knowledge isnt just the possession of true (veridical) belief, since someone can come by such a belief by chance or by being misled and we wouldnt say this person knows what shes talking about. Thus, Plato famously added that knowledge requires that the true belief be justified, or supported by reasons. This is to say that the belief must also be acquired in the right way for it to count as knowledge. If knowledge were just the possession of a true belief, where truth is correspondence between the belief and a fact, and a belief is a symbolic representation of that fact, not just lucky people but inanimate objects like books or billboards could be said to know what they represent, which would be absurd. Knowledge is something possessed by a mind, because knowledge must be acquired in a way that only a mind can manage.

184 Once this is understood, we can see that what motivates the talk of scientism and of nonscientific ways of knowing is an emphasis on the justification side of knowledge as opposed to the truth side. The assumption is that the humanities and the arts count as legitimate nonscientific ways of justifying true statements. Now, the scientific method of proving a hypothesis is well-known: the hypothesis is confirmed or disconfirmed by clever public tests that isolate the relevant variables, eliminating chance and subjective factors, and letting the facts speak for themselves. Is that basic scientific method the only way of justifying true statements? Note that were there others, these other methods would count as forms of knowledge because they would amount to nonscientific but still legitimate means of acquiring veridical mental representations. To answer the question, we have to look at whats meant by epistemic justification. A belief is relevantly justified when the belief is acquired not just by chance but by some sort of respectable mental labour. This labour is what philosophers call the search for rational equilibrium, which means the search for the coherence of our beliefs with each other. The goal is to avoid cognitive dissonance, the fragmentation and incommensurability of our beliefs and thus a split between the sides of ourselves that those beliefs express, and to achieve intellectual integrity which requires deep selfawareness, the classic philosophical virtue. Whats meant by coherence here is harder to explain, but one relevant factor is ethical: in attempting to render our beliefs epistemically coherent, we should demonstrate certain virtues such as respect for truth and for those who may be impacted by our beliefs; courage to face harsh truth; skill at handling the complex issues that can arise in learning whats true; and artistic creativity in expressing or otherwise applying a true belief. The point of epistemic justification is to ensure that the true belief is reliable rather than accidental, and the cognitive virtues are the sources of that reliability. With this in mind, contrast New Age ideology with modern, naturalistic philosophy. Even were some New Age beliefs to turn out true, wed have reason to doubt that New Agers know what theyre talking about when they hold those beliefs, because their beliefs wouldnt be well-justified in the above sense. New Age speculations arent currently the

185 fruit of a virtuous search for reflective equilibrium, since those speculations tend to be anthropocentric, whereas modern science decentralizes us. Either New Age myths or modern science must go, as they stand, and by accepting the former, the New Ager shows little willingness to reconcile her worldview with the latter. Moreover, New Age speculations, such as the ones found in the Oprah-approved book, The Secret, cynically spiritualize capitalistic, social Darwinian ideology, holding the consumption of material goods as the ultimate value. According to this sort of spiritual worldview, were magnets that attract what we most think about, and this notion breeds contempt for sufferers since supposedly they get what they deserve. This worldview is insanely optimistic in concluding that all natural events on this planet are perfectly just, and so the New Ager here doesnt evince much courage in confronting the abundance of disheartening truths discovered by modern scientists, about the moral indifference of natural forces to our welfare and about our animal rather than angelic nature. By contrast, naturalistic philosophers arrive at general naturalistic truths through a more ethically respectable process of reaching reflective equilibrium. Modern philosophers think logically, but they also speculate and explore and defend intuitions. But arguably, these latter, nonscientific mental labours are epistemically justificatory, because they attempt to satisfy ethical standards of conduct. For example, when rationalist, empiricist, existentialist, or mysterian philosophers speculate or intuit metaphysical or other philosophical propositions that might turn out true, they do so in a conscious effort to unify modern science with intuitive self-knowledge. They courageously confront the fact that modern science seems to undermine most of our intuitions about our place in the world, and they creatively reflect on how some of those intuitions might be preserved in a rationally respectable manner.

Self-Refuting Positivism
Some naturalistic philosophers, such as the positivists, argued that intuitions or presumptions are cognitively worthless and that only scientific methods yield knowledge. Their recommendation was to dispense with any belief that isnt supported

186 by scientific methods. This scientism led to a dead end, however, since scientific methods dont support the positivists contention that all worthwhile, meaningful cognitive endeavours are exclusively scientific. Positivism presupposes a nonscientific evaluation of science, a pragmatic attitude, or a Philistine prejudice, and these are philosophical rather than scientific issues. In short, a superficially antiphilosophical bit of philosophy is naturally self-refuting. The important point here, however, is that positivist philosophers themselves came to this conclusion, because even they were committed to the Western philosophical tradition which values intellectual integrity. For example, Rudolph Carnap distinguished between external and internal questions, where external ones are about the choice of a language and internal ones are framed in a way that presupposes the languages rules. The external questions are answered in what Carnap called a pragmatic, sociological, and nonphilosophical fashion. Thomas Kuhn argued that in the history of science, Carnaps distinction amounts to that between paradigm shifts and normal, puzzle-solving work. What emerged from these distinctions is greater attention to the values that are presupposed by paradigmatic work and that come to the fore in clashes between theories during a paradigm shift. Suppose a theorys reign comes to an end, because sufficient amounts of data are rendered anomalous by that theory, and suppose that a new theory gains favour not because of its intellectual qualities, but because its champion holds a gun to everyones head and so scares his colleagues into submission. Even were that new theory to turn out true, none of the terrorized scientists could be said to know the facts as told by the theory, for the above reasons having to do with epistemic justification. Again, the more respectable search for reflective equilibrium--even in a power vacuum when theres great uncertainty about how to explain certain anomalies--is guided by ethical and aesthetic values, including simplicity, beauty, fruitfulness, and so on. You can stipulate with the positivist that this value-laden mental labour isnt relevant to the search for knowledge, but then youll have to show how science alone warrants that stipulation. Instead, what most analytic philosophers learned from that period of the philosophy of science is that knowledge isnt as simplistic as theorized by empiricists.

187 Cognitive science, too, supports a broader conception of cognitive processes, by reminding us that reason plays an evolutionary role and by showing, in any case, that were not so rational after all, that our most natural modes of thinking are technically fallacious and biased. Modern science checks these cognitive defects, but the point is that assuming that nonscientists possess some knowledge, knowledge had better not be the result just of rigorous logic or hypothesis-testing. And indeed, as long as a nonscientist, or indeed anyone in her daily life, strives to be virtuous and artistically creative in her thought processes, and the result is that those thoughts put her in touch with the corresponding facts, weve got the makings of knowledge on our hands.

Other Ways of Knowing

What about pure art, such as painting or fiction? Is any of these a way of knowing, on this picture? Suppose you conclude that life is tragic after you gaze at a sad painting or read King Lear. But suppose you conclude as much only because youre forced first to consult Coles Notes, since alas the meaning of the artwork otherwise escapes you. Assuming that life does have its tragic side, youd nevertheless not possess nonscientific knowledge of this fact, since theres little ethically or aesthetically impressive about repeating the slogans found in a popular commentary on some artwork. But suppose instead that you have a profound emotional experience in an organic response to the art, that your way of perceiving the world is thereby drastically altered. As long as you exhibit some relevant virtues in your struggle to harmonize this new experience with what you thought you knew beforehand, your belief about lifes tragic side is nonscientifically justified, and so youve employed a nonscientific way of knowing the facts. Instead of justifying your belief with an argument or an experiment, you've virtuously modified your worldview through an experience of an emotionallypowerful artwork. Finally, I want to point out that Coyne misconstrues whats at issue when he challenges folks to present knowledge that has no empirical input or any other overlap with scientific methods. This challenge is quite unhelpful since it can be turned on its head.

188 Why not challenge the scientist, instead, to present scientific knowledge that isnt arrived at in part by petty squabbles, turf defenses, or other power dynamics? Were all scientific knowledge produced in part by such natural processes, we could then say that theres no such thing as a distinctly scientific way of knowing, that all knowing is fundamentally an appeal to power. Instead, the interesting question is whether knowledge is justified only by a scientific brake on our subjectivity or also by the most respectable ways of being subjective in our thinking. The former proposition is self-refuting scientism, and so were forced to accept the latter, in which case the alternative ways of knowing remain so despite their overlap with broad notions of rationality. This is because these other cognitive modes are alternatives to the scientistic contention that science (rationality) alone is the only such mode. On the contrary, the humanities and arts provide alternatives if only by subordinating rational standards to ethical and aesthetic ones in an effort to create a coherent worldview, that is, a set of beliefs that includes scientific knowledge as a subset. For example, modern philosophers try to deal virtuously and creatively with the conflict between folk intuitions, which call for some awe as outputs of millions of years of evolution, and with modern science which threatens to bring liberal civilization crashing down around us, mocking the traditional self-images that keep us sane and happy. One such intuition is that were free in the sense of being self-controlling and thus responsible for our actions. Do we know that were free even if science implies determinism, that is, the view that every event has a cause? We feel that were free, because we feel we have overriding power over our actions. As Coyne says about fiction, though, feeling that somethings true is a way of seeing but not of knowing since, I take it, feeling something doesnt make it true. This is irrelevant, since neither is the world round because scientists confirmed this by looking through a satellites telescope. The facts are what they are regardless of what cognitive methods we bring to the table (except perhaps in quantum mechanics). The question is whether some subjective labour, such as the everyday experience of being metaphysically free, epistemically justifies a statement that might turn out to be true, such as the statement that were free

189 in that respect. Again, this would depend on how much effort is put into harmonizing the one belief with our other beliefs, including those that derive from science which posits natural laws and myriad mindless processes in which we seem to be caught up.

Freewill and Levels of Explanation

Now, Coyne says were not in fact free, since physics says theres nothing thats both self-causing and responsible for itself. Particles may pop into existence from a quantum vacuum, but were we self-creating by way of our actions in that respect, we wouldnt be responsible for them and freewill would be useless for moral purposes. As the philosopher of science, Massimo Pigliucci, points out on his blog Rationally Speaking, this mechanistic construal of current physics, according to which causes and effects are metaphysically real, may be outdated. Instead, whats real may be mathematical structure, or patterns that can be explained at different levels. In this case, the determinists principle that everything has a cause, including our choice to act in a way we consider free, would be neither here nor there. But whatever the case with regard to the metaphysical interpretation of physics, Coynes determinism is undone by the fact that there are nonreducible levels of explanation. Even were every physical event to have a prior cause, forming a causal chain, this wouldnt mean that every psychological event is a link in such a chain extending past the person, since a person as such isnt a physical object. When you think of a person, as such, that is, in either the laypersons way as a conscious entity with beliefs, desires, rights, and so forth, or in the technical, psychologists way as a naturally selected program for processing information, youre not thinking in terms set just by physics. You can, if you like, perform a gestalt switch and leap from psychology to physics in your conception of a person, in which case you assume a person is identical to the stuff from which the body is made and with the processes animating that body, and you assume also that the body is identical with a set of physical particles and their

190 interactions. But those pseudoreductions call upon miracles in just the way that a Christian declares that somehow God raised Jesus from the dead. You can wave your hands and say that psychological, biological, and physical events are all surely natural, but that notion of natural is philosophical rather than scientific. Otherwise, wed have an overarching scientific theory that reduces each level of scientific explanation to a more general one. Theres no such theory. For example, no one knows scientifically how to think about psychological categories in purely quantum mechanical terms. No one can translate the one language into the other. No one can capture the full meaning of psychological statements about human behavior using language that refers only to mass, quantum fluctuations, and so forth. Is this nonreducibility of certain levels of explanation a metaphysical or a mere epistemic matter? That is, are we just currently ignorant of how to understand everything in physical terms or is the notion of such understanding misconceived, considering how the universe is put together? Are there emergent properties, such as consciousness, that cant be predicted or explained in lower-level terms? Are natural processes genuinely creative in that respect, as the biologist Stuart Kauffman says? Im going to pass over these important questions here, except to say that there are compelling mysterian arguments that the subjective aspect of consciousness, of what its like to be aware of the world, cant in principle be understood in its entirety from any objective, scientific perspective. Instead, Im going to outline how freewill is possible on the assumption that there are nonreducible levels of explanation. The point is just that the concept of freewill might be useful in explaining special, rare phenomena like human behavior. As for the question of how that concept would fit into the physicists picture of nature, there would be no contradiction were physics and psychology incommensurable. Assuming there are emergent properties, a theory that addresses them is just irrelevant to a broader theory that explains the relations between other properties.

191 But does talk of freewill violate basic naturalistic assumptions? In other words, must morally useful freewill be supernatural? I dont see why this should be so. Like natural consciousness, natural freewill would surely emerge from the brain, and the trillions of interconnections between neurons and synapses make the brain not just the most complex, but the most self-contained, known thing in the universe. Something thats highly complex, with highly interdependent parts can be relatively self-contained and thus self-controlling, and the capacity for moral responsibility follows. The brain isnt perfectly self-contained, since it has senses which connect it with the outside world, but theres no need for morally useful freewill to be absolute. Were animals not gods, so our self-control and our moral capacities are limited. We can be freer than other animals, and much freer than rocks and tables, but still be free only some of the time and perhaps often deluded about exactly when were free. We can sometimes feel as though were free whereas instead our behavior is effectively programmed by advertisements which frame issues for us and exploit our neural networks' inclination towards associative thinking. All of this makes freewill limited and thus natural and quite real. As long as sometimes or to some significant degree our brain controls itself without being significantly influenced by anything else, we can understand how our mind might be naturally free in the sense of being self-controlling and thus how we can be responsible for our actions.

The Naturalistic Fallacy: a Case Study

In a blog entry reviewing a Guardian debate between Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss on science, philosophy, and morality, Jerry Coyne hides behind an easilydiscerned rhetorical device to conceal his scientistic prejudice against philosophy. In their Guardian debate, Baggini uses moral questions as prime examples of legitimate, meaningful questions that are irreducibly philosophical. Coyne then says that hes coming around to Sam Harris view that we can already see how science will and should replace the philosophy of ethics. And then Coyne deploys his rhetorical device for the first of three times in his review, saying Peoples view of what is moral

192 ultimately must rest on one or more of three things: an appeal to the consequences, an appeal to some authority (like Scripture), or some innate feeling instilled by our genes in combination with our environment (in other words, morality lies in our neurons) (emphasis added). Coyne is saying here that if there are moral truths, these must be matters of fact which science can naturally discover, in which case philosophical ethics isnt autonomous or irreducible to psychology or biology. But notice the ambiguity of the construction rest on. Y must rest on X could mean either that X causes Y or that X logically implies Y. No one who thinks ethics is irreducibly philosophical thinks science cant discover the causes of moral judgments, including their evolutionary history and the neural processes involved in our thinking philosophically about moral matters. So of course ethics may rest on such scientifically-discoverable facts, but this does nothing to show that there isnt a big, honking naturalistic fallacy in the way of Coynes scientism. The naturalistic fallacy isnt about whether some natural facts can cause us to answer moral questions in one way rather than another, so that our answers rest on those facts in that sense. No, as has been clear since David Hume, the fallacy operates at the epistemic level of whether Y can be inferred from X. The question is whether a moral prescription, for example, follows logically just from factual premises so that, if you like, the prescription rests on those premises in this quite different, noncausal sense. The point, then, is that Coynes use of the ambiguous construction Y rests on X allows him to pretend that hes overcome the point about the naturalistic fallacy, that hes addressed the second, inferential issue whereas science surely deals only with the first, causal one. Scientists can explain what causes what, but this has no bearing on whether a prescription follows logically from a description. Coyne relies on this trusty device a second time, when he asks, But on what grounds, then, do we determine whether homosexuality is right or wrong? It must rest on an appeal to the consequences (which is an empirical and scientific question), on the way most people feel about homosexuality

193 (something that is a combination of our genes and our environment, and coded in our neurons), on sacred books and dogma, or on a combination of these. Ruling out the third, the first two are, in effect, scientific questions. [my emphasis] He concludes that in principle science must be is the ultimate arbiter of moral questions (sic). For the above reasons this is nonsense. Coyne tries to hide this fact with his needlessly ambiguous phrasing, which apparently prevents him from appreciating the difference between causal and epistemological questions about morality. After blundering about in this fashion, Coyne arrives explicitly at the question of the naturalistic fallacy: And for those of you who say that is doesnt produce ought, Id like to ask you this: well, how do we determine oughts? They dont come from thin air, and they dont come from free will. They come from human judgment, which is a result of our genes and our environments. Why is that not, at least in principle, susceptible to scientific investigation? Notice that his confusion persists even in his asking of the Humean question. The question isnt whether facts produce, that is, cause moral obligations, but whether statements about the former imply statements about the latter. Then he switches to a third instance of the same type of rhetorical device. Now he relies on the ambiguous construction X determines Y. As youll know from the freewill-determinism debate, determine can mean cause, which is a scientific matter, but it can also mean ascertain from reasoning, which is an epistemological one. Still, the ambiguity of this phrase allows Coyne to attack his strawman when he reminds his reader that surely moral statements dont come from thin air, but from our judgment, which in turn is a result of our genes and environments. Coyne is once again talking about causes, whereas the naturalistic fallacy is about inferential relations between statements (or thoughts).

194 All Coyne is entitled to say here is that scientists can explain the psychological or biological patterns in our moral behaviour. So if, as Hume thought, we have a separate sense of morality which he calls sentiment, a mental faculty of intuitions about what goals we should pursue, a faculty we might call the conscience, this faculty will rest on the brain, meaning that how we use that source of moral reasoning will be caused by our genes and environments. After all, were naturally selected to be social, and children are trained to think in moral terms. All of that is fair for scientists to explain. But this leaves entirely untouched the philosophical, epistemological distinction between two different logics, between that which licenses inferences to statements of fact and that which licenses inferences to normative statements. Just because moral statements are caused by brain states, which in turn are caused by the genes and so on, doesnt mean those statements follow logically from scientific explanations of the causes of morality. Hence the naturalistic fallacy, which indicates that the philosophy of ethics, in which we think carefully about prescriptions without attempting to replace them with descriptions, isnt reducible to a science of facts.

195

Can Evil Derive from Atheism? ____________________________________________________

Ive argued that for propaganda purposes, many New Atheists whitewash the social consequences of atheism, ignoring more pessimistic forms like Nietzsches existentialism and Lovecrafts cosmicism. Moreover, scientific atheists lack respect for philosophy and thus have low standards of argument in nonscientific debates, including the inevitably philosophical debate between atheists and theists. These two deficits combine to produce the howler that is the New Atheists frequent response to the theists tedious rejoinder to the Problem of Evil, the rejoinder being that in the last century atheists are responsible for their own horrifying measure of evil (Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, etc). This response to the classic theistic problem of evil, that a benevolent God wouldnt allow so much natural and human suffering and therefore doesnt exist as defined, takes the form of the Tu quoque fallacy, amounting to the childish outburst, Yeah? Well so are you! The problem of evil for theists isnt just the pragmatic one, that religion has caused much violence and is thus especially dangerous given advances in weapons of mass destruction. The heart of the problem is that exoteric definitions of God, which rely on weak metaphors, are bound to be absurd. The facts that not all evil derives from religion and that atheists too can be evil have no bearing on that problem. But one New Atheistic response to this counter-charge is highly revealing and annoying. The response seems to originate from Dawkins book, The God Delusion, in which he

196 says that even were Stalin and Hitler both atheists, their atheism would have been as causally relevant to their evil as the fact that they both had moustaches. What matters, he says, is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does (309). And at the end of that section, Dawkins, the brilliant writer that he is, might have birthed the meme so often repeated in these discussions, that Individual atheists may do evil things, but they dont do evil things in the name of atheism (315, my emphasis). Note the difference in Sam Harris handling of the issue in his book, The End of Faith, in which he blames evil on faith in irrational dogmas. Either secular or religious ideologies, he says, can turn people into depraved killing machines, but this just testifies to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about either sort of ideology (231). Indeed, Harris avers, Genocidal projects tend not to reflect the rationality of their perpetrators simply because there are no good reasons to kill peaceful people indiscriminately (79). In its own way, this response is just as wrongheaded as Dawkins.

The Path from Atheism to Evil

Return, though, to Dawkins declaration that theres no evidence that atheism influences people to do bad things. The fallacy here is the assumption that the theists comparison of atheism and religion as full-fledged causes of evil points only to the axioms of either way of thinking. Take the Crusades, the Inquisition, or al Qaeda terrorism. Those evils dont follow just from the most elementary religious beliefs of either faith. Just because Jesus rose from the dead, doesnt mean Muslims should be exterminated, and just because God is Great and Muhammad was his prophet, doesnt mean Jews and Americans should be slaughtered. Youve got to add many implications and natural consequences of basic beliefs about God or his absence to find causes of specific acts of religious or nonreligious violence. With regard to Christianity, you have the Catholic destruction of pagan society and thus of the local rationalist tradition, as well as the literalists victory over the Christian Gnostics and the exploitation of the religion by the

197 Roman Empire, and thus the elevation of the pope as an absolute power. These developments laid the groundwork for a Christian form of totalitarianism, and thus ushered in the corresponding horrors. In cases of recent Muslims terrorism, riots, and oppression of women, you have the rise of secular and Christian nations coupled with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th C., and the subjugation of Muslims by dictators allied with the non-Muslim powers. Recent Islamist violence and retreat to fundamentalist certainties are obviously flailing retaliations against the humiliation of proud Muslims. As for atheism, the connection between violence and atheisms mere basic assumptions is particularly irrelevant, since atheism is defined negatively as the denial of theism. This hardly means that theres no natural path, though, from atheism to ways of thinking that cause atheists to perform evil acts. The fact that atheists have diverse ways of culturally applying their rejection of theism is also of no consequence, since theism, too, manifests in a diversity of religions. What, then, is the path from atheism to evil? Its just the Nietzschean and cosmicist path Ive been discussing at length in my philosophical rants. From atheism follows the rejection of our more nave wishes and delusions about perfect justice, a happy afterlife, an ultimately meaningful life, and a home for humanity in the arms of a personal cause of the physical universe. Once those delusions are done away with, the atheist faces the threats of existential angst and horror in the face of our evident predicament. Were merely clever mammals. Therefore, some of us are lucky to live well, others are not and they suffer horribly; some of us are selfless, others are predatory. Both nature at large and human societies in particular are only partly hospitable to what most of us would call the good life, because life evolved mindlessly from non-life and thus is guaranteed no security, and that very mindless process now involves the mutation of genes which creates a variety of body-types to survive in various environmental conditions. So nature is unfair and far from ideal, from a nave human perspective. Theres no deus ex machina, given atheism, and we can hardly anticipate salvation from our own virtues since those are as natural as the universe that contains black

198 holes which swallow whole galaxies and that hurled a meteor into the Earth and annihilated billions of creatures. If were made of stardust and not of some transcendent spirit that belongs in another realm, our history is bound to exhibit the same mysterious pattern of creativity and destruction that bespeaks the horror of our source. To be sure, most atheists optimistically set about creating a secular society as a refuge of laws for those interested in peace and happiness. Few atheists dwell on thoughts of the Nietzschean implication of atheism, that morality is foolish without God, or of the cosmicist one that if the universe isnt fundamentally friendly to us, were all horribly alienated whether we know it or not. But other implications of atheism are that the universe is likely natural and thus that the brain is crucial to our identity. If we look at a persons brain, we find much activity of which shes not remotely conscious, and this activity can still affect her behaviour. Thus, the path from atheism to evil neednt follow along mere conscious lines of thought, let alone ending with the atheists most fundamental assumptions. An atheist doesnt have to be thinking explicitly of atheism when she acts evilly, for atheism to be the root cause. Take, for example, the role of individualism in modern societies. As the political philosopher John Gray argues, the idea that each individual has inherent worth may derive from the theistic principle that we each have an immaterial essence made in Gods image. (See his book, Black Mass.) At any rate, modernists put a rationalist spin on individualism, inspired by the Scientific Revolution. But the point I want to stress is that individualistic societies can develop in opposite ways, depending on whether the individuals are theists or atheists. In medieval Christian societies, an individuals worth was attributed to the everlasting spirits relationship to God. Any concession to freedom of thought or action in the present life would have paled in significance to the need to ensure the spirits safe passage to heaven after physical death, which latter task in Europe was thought to require the regulation of earthly life by the Catholic Church. Even were there more freethinking traditions in medieval Europe (beyond heresies like Catharism), the rational calculation for theists would have been to suffer in the present

199 life for great reward in the hereafter--and suffer most medieval Christians did, in great abundance. Now turn to modern individualism in its purest expression, which is the New World culture of the United States. Here we find not asceticism but hedonism, libertinism, pragmatism, and what Morris Berman calls the hucksterism of the American identity, the infantile and self-destructive expectation of infinite progress in the form of material wealth, delivered by technoscience. (See Bermans book, Why America Failed.) Americans hold their individual freedoms to be sacred, but they interpret their right to live as they personally choose without any recourse to theistic principles. That is, they calculate that its best to live for happiness in the here and now rather than living in anything like a Christ-like fashion, and this must be because, regardless of their politically correct lies to pollsters, they dont actually have theistic beliefs. There are some exceptions, such as the Mennonites, but theyre vastly outnumbered by thisworldly individualists who merely pretend to be Christian theists.) What this means is that all the business-oriented evils done by Americans, such as the genocide of Native Americans, the slave trade of Africans, the mass imprisonment of African-Americans, the torture and exploitation of nonhuman animals, the export of weapons around the world, the patronage of foreign oppressive regimes, and the overuse of the worlds nonrenewable resources are attributable not just to the faith in personal liberty, but to a nontheistic version of that faith. Or consider Hitlers pseudo-Nietzschean spin on Darwinism. Whether Hitler was privately a Christian or an atheist is relatively unimportant. Nazism as a whole may have inherited its anti-Judaism from Christianity, but the Nazi quest for earthly power, to celebrate the strongs triumph over the weak, is perfectly legitimate as an expression of atheism. Atheism, of course, is just the belief that there are no gods, but the reasons atheists give against theistic religions are scientific and philosophical, the greatest fruit of which is the naturalistic worldview. There are no gods because gods are supernatural, and modern knowledge is based on sense experience and reason, not on revelation, wish fulfillment, or the authority of ancient tradition. According to the positive

200 definition of atheism, as a scientific, rationalistic, naturalistic worldview, all known living things are animals, as explained by biologists and chemists. Darwin added the evolutionary theory of biological design, which emphasized the role of death in the environments selection of viable species. Rather than in an Edenic paradise or a best of all possible worlds, life occurs under harsh conditions in which animals must struggle for survival to pass on their genes. Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer extrapolated from Darwins biological theory to the social sphere, with Spencer in particular praising the virtues of unregulated economic competition as those of the most natural way of organizing society. To be sure, his inference committed whats now called the naturalistic fallacy, but this is neither here nor there since theres no need for the path from atheism to evil to be a logically rigorous one. Remember, according to the atheists naturalism, were just animals; therefore, reason for us isnt necessarily sovereign. An atheist is free to be irrationally inspired by Darwinism to justify a pitiless view of the best society as one that lets nature take its course, just as the whole irrational rigmarole of exoteric theism is needed to get religious violence off the ground. After all, if natural selection has the power to design the panoply of biological wonders, why not let that same power rule in the formation of societies? Why not dispense with Christian, slave morality and submit to nature, like the ancient pagans? Nazi rhetoric, about the glory of war and of the obligation to eliminate the weak, derived its emotional power from atheistic wonder at the magnificent inhumanity of natural evolutions creativity. Once again, then, atheism is the ultimate source of Nazism. I hasten to clarify that my point isnt that atheism and Nazism are equivalent or that all atheists should be Nazis. No, my point is just that, like hedonistic individualism, Nazism is one potent way of avoiding the angst and the horror that haunt any atheist who confronts the fact of our existential predicament which atheism does entail.

201

Evil in the Name of Atheism?

What of Dawkins assurance that secular dictators dont commit their evil acts in the name of atheism? This is just sophistry, benefiting from the evasively negative formulation of atheism. The reason why a Christian crusader thanked Jesus as he plunged his sword into a Muslim childs belly or why a Muslim terrorist chants his mantra that God is great as he flies a plane into a building full of civilians, is that the theistic cause of violence works by encouraging egoism in light of anthropocentric projections. Theistic evildoers are proud because they believe theyre mighty children of God, destined to spend eternity in paradise. By contrast, the atheistic cause of violence works by necessitating schemes to retain the atheists sanity in light of the ever-present threat of confronting atheisms existential implications. While theists childishly bang away at their pots and pans, overjoyed that they should be so lucky to have a divinely written life manual, atheists need to conceal from themselves and from others atheisms destructive potential. Thats one reason Nietzsche is such a controversial figure even in atheist circles: defying the convention that secular humanists can freely borrow Christian values while trashing their theological basis, he proclaimed that atheism has socially revolutionary consequences--and as if to prove his point, he even lost his sanity shortly before he died. So of course atheistic evildoers dont shout that they murder or plunder the environment for selfish profit in the glorious name of Atheism; atheists are at least unconsciously horrified if not consciously terrified by our existential plight, given that there are no supernatural gods, and their evil is accomplished in the name of fleeing from the truth of atheism. Postmodern, secular individualists distract themselves with material goods, to avoid contemplating the unfairness of life and our greater alienation. The Nazis devised a pantheistic religion, worshipping the champions of natural forces, the mightiest beasts who conquer the weak to achieve a sort of Taoist unity with cosmic creativity. (Similarly, current libertarians deify the free market and worship oligarchs as the freest individuals.) By deifying and celebrating the evolutionary forces that make life a heroic struggle, Nazi pagans likewise distracted themselves from the grimmer implication of atheism, that

202 organisms are absurd byproducts of mindless forces and nothing more. In Nietzschean terms, Nazis sought to overcome that harsh fact by inventing an original system of values that affirms the brutal reality of natural life. But like Nietzsche himself, who outlined a substitute religion of the bermensch, the Nazis didnt affirm so much as flee from atheistic naturalism. (Contrast their arrogant and deluded secular religions, for example, with the more tragic one I sketch in Postmodern Religion.)

Does Rationalism Prevent Atheistic Evil?

What of Sam Harris diagnosis of evil as caused by irrationality? In the first place, reason can be bent to the service of evil. For example, social Darwinian economics, which encourages the despoliation of the environment and thus potentially causes the extinction of all life, consists of mathematical models, often concocted literally by rocket engineers. The greedy Wall Street bankers, who in 2008 nearly sank the globallyintegrated economy, are among the smartest, most highly educated Americans. The Nazis, too, boasted plenty of scientific justifications for their eugenic exploits. Just as psychiatrists today are biased by the pharmaceutical companies, and economists by the Wall Street institutions that fund think tanks and academic programs, and many engineers by weapons manufacturers, all selling their coveted intelligence to the highest bidder, scientists in the 1930s were biased by Nazi propaganda, tilting their research for powerful positions in their social hierarchy. This raises a second point, which is that an atheist, and thus most likely a naturalist, has no business preaching pure rationality except as a sort of fairytale for childrens bedtime stories. Harris is surely well aware of the findings in the cognitive sciences, that our powers of reason are flawed by their evolutionary roles. David Hume was closer to the truth when he intuited that reason is the slave of emotions. So even were rational evil impossible, which isnt the case, the ideal of peace through rationality would be irrelevant to the question of whether theres a path from atheism to evil. Given atheism, humans are largely irrational animals. As I said, then, an atheist is free to devalue reason and to celebrate instinct, as did Hume and Nietzsche. That naturalistic

203 psychology can lead logically to the evils of laissez-faire economics, of Nazi social Darwinism, or indeed of any secular dictatorship. Of course, scientific atheists are rationalists, but they exaggerate the extent of human rationality by way of outfitting their scientistic religion with myths and propaganda. The Enlightenment idea is that Reason conquers Superstition and leads to Progress through Science and Technology. But that modern metanarrative is an exoteric article of faith for secular humanists thats especially useful in the secular whitewash of atheism. Nietzschean atheists have the esoteric insight to see through secular substitutes for religion and to appreciate that atheism poses the great danger not just of causing evil but of explaining why evil is inevitable for creatures in our existential predicament. An atheist dispenses with gross fantasies about the human identity and understands that were thoroughly natural creatures. Thus, the atheist appreciates that, as Harris says, people will commit evil acts because were desperate, selfish, irrational, and otherwise often vicious beasts. But an atheist must go further than just understanding the harsh natural facts, and create a fitting set of values. Again, scientific atheists laud Reason as our salvation, but theres no necessary connection between atheism and rationalism. All that atheism guarantees is the more likely awareness of our actual existential plight, and as I said, the atheist must then choose how to respond to that likelihood. Many New Atheists flee to a relatively peaceful, science-centered religion (Scientism), which values democracy and capitalism and thus can be complicit in the sins of materialistic individualism. Many other atheists turn to pagan authoritarianism and revel in the drama of life as a heroic struggle for power, and their irrationalism is complicit in the horrors of corrupt secular dictatorships. As I say above, I personally opt for a different set of atheistic values. But my point is that a scientific atheist merely begs the question when she says that atheism doesnt cause violence because atheists value reason and reason is the antidote to evil. Reason is no such antidote, but even if it were, an atheist neednt be a rationalist. Rationalistic atheists arent necessarily superior to Humean or to Nietzschean ones. Indeed, all atheistic values are rather desperate schemes to avoid

204 the existential angst and horror that flow from the full appreciation that there are no supernatural gods.

The Folly of Theism

Recently, Ive been highly critical of certain forms of atheism. I want to close, though, with an assurance that in my view, however disappointing scientific atheism may be, little appalls me more than exoteric theism. The cowardice, gullibility, selfrighteousness, and narcissism of theists are palpable and repellent. Many centuries ago, when rationalist traditions were scarcer and less spectacularly confirmed, nave theism could be forgiven as much less grotesque and ridiculous. Today, in wealthy, educated countries, theres no such excuse. Indeed, within the last several decades, traditional monotheistic religions have had to retreat from those places, with Christianity especially spreading to the global South, where people are poorer and less informed about scientific naturalism. Without the oppressive dictatorships in the Muslim world, which thrive on the ignorance of their populations, Islam might already have reformed, which is to say secularized, itself. With technologically-driven globalization, the Arab Spring and the great concentrations of youths in contemporary Muslim populations might still indicate an imminent emasculation of that religion. Youd think that the shame of being so transparently retrograde would dissuade Christians and Muslims from clinging to their outdated creeds and worthless religious practices. But the Churches have responded to their growing irrelevance in Europe, East Asian democracies, and North America by spreading their outrageous bastardization of Jesus gospel to Sub-Saharan Africa (Jesus good news being actually the terrible news of Gnosticism). Dishonouring yourself with the personal weaknesses required for the more inane theistic expressions is one thing, but actually taking to the streets to protest anything on such religious grounds, publicly professing your faith by means of archaic jibber jabber, or killing in the name of your fictional god is an abominable crime against good taste, if nothing else.

205 As Ive said elsewhere, Eastern religions are more mystical, philosophical, and naturalistic, and therefore less objectionable. Whats praiseworthy about mysticism? Well, mystics are humbler than the theists who lean on anthropocentric images of the divine. Mystics are what Western philosophers call mysterians, which means theyre dubious of the potential for rationally understanding everything there is to know. Mystics stay true to the religious dread of our perilous and lowly position in the universe, an attitude that fosters the highly praiseworthy virtue of humility. Mystics have a lofty perspective on life, often detaching themselves from worldly concerns and living ascetically, demonstrating their freedom from egoistic delusions. These aspects of mysticism arent wholly laudatory, but at least mystics have a modicum of intellectual integrity, whereas exoteric, literalistic theists carve their minds into a thousand walledoff fragments for fear of the reckoning were they to strive harder to prove the consistency of their implicit naturalistic postmodernism and their premodern monotheism.

206

Nietzsche and Secular Liberalism ____________________________________________________

Secular liberals face a dilemma. Liberal values, such as individual liberty and compassion, derive from monotheistic religious institutions, but these institutions are dysfunctional and their theological rationales are no longer credible. Meanwhile, secularism promotes oligarchy and regressive consumerism, much as Nietzsche predicted. So warns Chris Hedges in his online article, After Religion Fizzles, Were Stuck with Nietzsche. More specifically, the problem is that western secular assumptions--informed by science and the capitalistic drive towards plutocracy--are that were all just clever beasts with no intrinsic worth, who struggle for power with no divine oversight, but who are able to create our own values. As Nietzsche contended, the most appropriate standard by which to rank these values is the aesthetic, not the moral one. Universal western morality is the creation of the early Christians, of conquered Jews who, in their resentment towards the more powerful Romans, articulated a myth to trap their oppressors. According to this myth, whatever helps the weak is right and whatever hurts them is wrong. What helps them chiefly is the Golden Rule that everyone should be treated as if they were the same, that people have rights just by being people, regardless of their personal weakness or social status, since rights flow from something other than natural ability. Instead of having the willpower and the strength of character

207 to confront their world in an ennobling way, Christians delude themselves by trusting that animals arent driven mainly by their will to power. As a product of the creative will, Christian morality is ugly and ignoble, according to Nietzsche. The amoral secularist affirms, instead, the sad truth of our belonging in the gloriously violent physical universe in which stars and whole galaxies are created and destroyed by the exercise of power, not by intelligence or benevolence. Hedges writes that the results of this secular affirmation are the cultures of the bermensch and of the Last Man, which in our case are those of the power-intoxicated, financial and military oligarchs and of the passive, apathetic mob of debt slaves, respectively. The Wall Street titans, castigated by politicians and mocked by comedians for their amorality, are actually the Nietzschean heroes who understand and personally accept that with Gods death falls the whole monotheistic edifice, including morality. From a Nietzschean viewpoint, says Hedges, the ruthless and hedonistic oligarchs stand tall as impressive beasts, not just because of their vast wealth, but because of their creativity and their courage in living as though the world were so horrible that sociopaths such as them could come to dominate in it. From a scientific point of view, the world is indeed so horrible, and theres no escaping that horror except by succumbing to some delusion or other, such as a stale monotheistic myth. But a delusion is just an aesthetically displeasing product of the imagination. By comparison, in its affirmation of natural life, Nietzsches myth of the glory of conquering heroes is an ennobling work of art. Hedges rejects the foundational teachings of the Christian worldview, of the Bibles inerrancy, of Jesus miracles and even of Jesus historical existence, as indeed must everyone who sees scientific methods as more worthy than tradition or institutional authority. And Hedges thinks that secularism has nightmarish consequences. Clearly, a doctrinaire Christian or Muslim would have some basis for condemning a Darwinian culture; after all, assuming that the Bible effectively condemns Nietzschean philosophy, that the Bible is inspired by God, and that God is perfect, no further argument would be needed. But Hedges lament for the secular alternative to the declining religions isnt theological. He seems to accept what he calls the liberal values of monotheistic

208 religions, such as individual liberty and compassion, while also rejecting the theological rationales for those values. Thus, he stands wistfully between the two sides, unable to explain how each individual could have rights and how compassion could be a virtue, because he shares the basic scientific assumptions of the secular worldview even while he rejects the harsh, Nietzschean values that are more authentic expressions of that viewpoint. All of this raises the question of whether theres anything to be said in favour of secular liberalism. Can the best of liberalism and secularism be combined, producing a third option? Is the only ultimate choice of cultures between theistic religion and social Darwinism?

The Bankruptcy of Postmodern Liberalism

North American and European liberalism presents few if any hopeful signs for a way out of the dilemma. In the U.S., Obama promised to change Washington and he was elected on a wave of nave optimism about the chances of victory for progressive ideals in a broken, money-driven political system. But Obama has proven himself to be what the media euphemistically call a pragmatic centrist rather than a progressive. In a socalled bipartisan fashion, he wanted to initiate an alliance between the two, bitterly opposed parties and to reach consensus to solve problems for the majority of the American population. Pragmatism, however, is just flexibility in choosing the most efficient way of achieving some goal. A mere pragmatist, as opposed to a liberal or a conservative one, is a nihilist who has nothing to say about which goal to achieve, but who adopts some preselected plan, as a functionary, for example, of a financial oligarchy. Centrism entails ideological moderation, which is the lack of passion for any political idea, and a focus on negotiating power imbalances. Centrist politicians can be expected, then, to appreciate the weakness of their position compared to that of a financial oligarch on which their funding and thus their political survival depend. So as a functional nihilist (pragmatist or centrist) and servant of American oligarchy, Obama has continued Bushs foreign policies, gifted the private health insurance companies with his signature domestic bill, and bailed out Wall Street at the behest of

209 the duplicitous Wall Street insiders whom he appointed as his advisors. As a result, American progressives are demoralized if not cynical and apathetic about American politics, although Obama has already begun giving progressive, politically correct speeches to win back his base for the coming presidential election. One explanation of why this has come to pass is apparent from Hedges dilemma. American liberals are either theistic or secular. Theistic assumptions cant be taken seriously in a society filled with the technological fruits of science and governed by pragmatic (hedonistic, nihilistic, or sociopathic) businesspeople. And secularists have no satisfying rationale for their own for liberal values. Hence, the liberalism of the secular Democratic Party is mere pretense. When Democrats get into power, they behave as centrists or as weak Republicans, because they have no liberal inspiration. The noose of secularism around their necks has drained the life of liberal values from them, values that are taken from the prescientific, theistic mythos. Moreover, as the historian Oswald Spengler might have suspected, secular liberalism enters into a decadent phase when it loses its mythical underpinnings. Thus, liberalism can devolve into feel-good relativism; compassion for everyone comes to require respect for the presumed equal worth of all cultures. This, too, emasculates Democrats, making them prey for Republicans who retain an energizing, religious worldview. The same pragmatism is found in Canadian liberalism. Canada is more liberal than the U.S., on the whole, but many Canadians long for a leader with a liberal vision that can regain a prestigious place for Canada in world affairs. None seems forthcoming, and Canada becomes more and more internationally irrelevant, even as Canadian banks proved highly responsible in the bursting of the recent real estate bubble. Europeans have the most effective progressives in their midst, activists who force their governments to implement liberal foreign and domestic policies. But these policies have only fattened countries like Iceland, Greece, Italy, and the U.K., as lambs to the slaughter, while parasitic oligarchs use mystifying financial instruments to plunder those countries, having already laid waste to numerous poorer ones.

210 The pattern is that secular liberals offer no viable opposition to the Nietzschean heroes. These heroes are secularists and in some ways theyre more conservative than liberal, but again they assess their activities in realistic, amoral terms: theyre just artists in the struggle for power. The greatest, perhaps most sociopathic of these human predators rule transnationally as oligarchs, even in corrupted democracies where they operate outside of the media spotlight. Liberal values might regulate or even put an end to their destructive games if liberals could bring themselves to believe strongly enough in inalienable human rights to fight for them. But its unclear, at best, that there are these rights, from a secular standpoint. There are feelings of sympathy in compassionate individuals, theres a certain rational strategy for creating a peaceful society, and there are revered documents asserting that there are human rights, but none of these magically turns a talking, tool-using primate into an intrinsically valuable end in-itself. Even if language and human intelligence turn its user from an animal into a more selfcontrolling person, this makes the animal very rare in nature, not normatively special.

A Straussian Solution?
Perhaps liberals can learn to live with their albatross of secularism, by applying the Straussian political theory (as interpreted by the philosopher, Shadia Drury). According to Drury, Straussians, such as many of the neoconservatives in the last Bush administration, would agree that liberals face Hedges dilemma. Monotheism is a flawed vehicle for the classic liberal values that sustain a society in which the greatest activity of all, philosophizing, is possible, and scientists have confirmed the brutal truths of what Ive called our dire existential situation. The grim truths are that we have, at best, an ever-shrinking supernatural dimension, as scientists explain more and more; were not as conscious, free, or as rational as we like to believe and we arent intrinsically significant; morality is ultimately the expression of feelings and our destiny is to war with each other for earthly goods. The ancient Greek solution, however, is for the elite among us, the bermenschen with the willpower to digest the shocking truths, to tell noble lies to the weak-willed mob, to pretend that monotheism isnt flawed, for the greater good of social cohesion. In short, the Straussian solution is for the elite to stand

211 with Nietzsche and Plato, and for everyone else to worship Yahweh, Jesus Christ, or Allah; the elite are those philosophers who are fit to receive esoteric wisdom, while the nonphilosophical majority are fed pablum. The problem with this Straussian solution is that academic philosophers make for unimpressive Nietzschean conquerors. If Drurys interpretation of Straussian philosophy is correct, the neoconservatives may have had the backbone to accept the mournfully dark truths of secularism, but they lacked the wherewithal and the competence to carry out their bold schemes. Even if Iraq becomes a functioning secular democracy, that is, a covert oligarchy as opposed to a naked dictatorship, thanks to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the neoconservatives vision for the post-911 world far exceeded their reach. With Ivory Tower optimism, Wolfowitz, Rice, and the young academics sent in as bureaucrats to run Iraq, tried to remake the Middle East by military force and by the presumed self-evidence of American ideals. Had they succeeded, the Straussian form of secular liberalism might have been vindicated. But the fiasco of Bushs administration covered no neoconservative in Nietzschean glory.

The Need for Great Secular Myths

I can think of no easy remedy for the secular liberal, but maybe the options arent as stark as Hedges suggests. The danger of absolute power is well-known: the prospect of enjoying that power attracts someone who is already corrupt or else the use of that power corrupts an innocent person. So oligarchies have tended not even to be great works of art. Pharaohs, Caesars, emperors, kings, tsars, Kaisers, dictators, and the Fhrer are guilty not just of the worst acts ever committed, from a liberal perspective, such as genocide, but often failed to live up to amoral aesthetic standards. The Nazis dabbled in pseudoscience and scapegoated the Jews, which demonstrated that the Nazis feared certain truths, and so Hitler was no Nietzschean hero. Perhaps there never has been any bermensch, no one who overcomes all internal and external obstacles in an artistically glorious way. Perhaps no higher primate deserves the godlike position of an oligarch. But there is at least this psychological, existential side of the Nietzschean

212 ideal. And this side holds out some hope that even if liberal values are impossible today for the honest secularist, other values will be created to replace them, values that are awe-inspiring even to someone who believes there are no miracles. These other values may even inspire oligarchs to behave as heroes rather than as spoiled children. Inchoate myths that secularists can cherish can be glimpsed in science fiction. In Greg Egans Diaspora, for example, when humans discover that the universe is really a multiverse, and that travel is possible between the infinite universes, they discover also that an alien species has defied those vertigo-inducing facts by creating a multiversespanning sculpture of their biological form, with parts placed in different universes. And in Arthur C. Clarkes Rama series, theres an alien species that uses biological weapons as a last resort to utterly destroy its enemies, but thats so disgusted by the tainted process and so loath to profit from it, that the leaders responsible for the slaughter always voluntarily kill themselves once the sorrowful task is done. This latter ideal of honour in the battlefield is far from the horrible reality of war that Hedges describes as a journalist. Far from committing suicide, those responsible for high tech American wars are wealthy civilians who read reports in their offices instead of confronting what their decisions unleash or who send instructions to remote controllers of robotic weapons systems, while sitting safe in an underground bunker. But honour is more highly prized in certain eastern traditions. The growing popularity of mixed martial arts in North America may look like the result of a regressive mobs lust for violence, but the sports growth could also indicate an emerging secular mythos, one that acknowledges the grim fact that natural life is a power struggle, but that makes the best of this fact by upholding the suitable ideal of honour for the combatants. Honour is respect, fame, glory, integrity. The mixed martial artist who sucker-punches his opponent long after the bell rings has no honour, whereas the one who stops hitting his opponent even before the referee intervenes, because the opponent obviously can no longer offer an intelligent defense, wins respect. Christian charity has no place in mixed martial arts, but this doesnt mean the strong fighters can only prey on the weaker ones.

213 Secular values must be rooted in an acceptance of the tragedy of lifes evolution within an indifferent cosmos. There are no God-given rights and no secularist with any integrity can feel Bible-inspired compassion for all hapless persons. On the contrary, pity for the weak or for the unfortunate brings shame to the latter. But the secularist can feel honour-bound to respect everyone as fellow combatants in the battle to retain our sanity despite the available knowledge of our existential predicament. From a naturalistic viewpoint, oligarchs need offer no apology for exercising their power to their own advantage, even if doing so makes life harder for the weaker majority. But an oligarch should feel embarrassed by any failure of his to make a masterpiece also of the inner world of his mind. Only when his inner success matches his outward one can an oligarch be expected to act heroically rather than as a mere tyrant, parasite, predator, or sociopath. The Pharaohs of ancient Egypt employed thousands of slaves to build the huge pyramids, providing work but also symbols in an elaborate myth that made life and death meaningful to the Egyptians. Many slaves died in the effort to give concrete reality to the Pharaohs vision, and from a monotheistic perspective the whole enterprise of ancient Egypt was absurd. But if, instead, its monotheism and its value system thats absurd, which it is, todays secular oligarchs can learn from the Pharaohs. Some progressive critics of our oligarchs speculate that their master plan is to recreate a feudal society but on a global scale, with a central banking system that controls the debts of nations. Suppose this is so and the plutocrats succeed. What then? Once all human power is centralized, what awe-inspiring mission will the elite pursue with their godlike control? The Dubai playground for the wealthy isnt particularly stirring. A global government should be only a means, not an end, and would be so for an oligarch whose mind is as impressive as his or her mansion. A secular hero needs visionary myths and inspiring symbols, and these are products of artistic genius which is found in a certain noble character, not in a mere hedonist or an insane tyrant. A powerful secular artist may not acknowledge human rights, as such, or feel Christian love for all Gods children. But with the ever-expanding reach of technology, this artist might lift up weaker

214 persons in a way that can now only barely be imagined and that makes for an aesthetically pleasing response to the horror of the inhumane cosmos.

215

From Theism to Cosmicism: Toy Gods and the Horror of the Supernatural ____________________________________________________

Most debate about God is a tempest in a teapot. For example, currently there are riots in the Muslim world because some Christians insulted the prophet Muhammad in a crude video. Likely, the violent protestors dont represent the majority of Muslims, and the majority is cowed into silence by the threat of retaliation from the militant minority which goes unchecked by weak or complicit governments in that region. The ensuing debate in the mainstream media has been about the conflict between freedom of speech and religious fundamentalism, but this media discussion blithely ignores the fact that an outright farce plays out whenever someone acts on the assumption that a perfect person has anything to do with the worlds origin. Indeed, theres a secret history in major religions thats driven by another conflict, between religious outsiders and insiders. The outsiders take religious metaphors or literalistic creeds seriously and so engage in all manner of nakedly childish behavior. The spectacle of even a single Muslim rioting because someone denigrates something the Muslim holds sacred is most ridiculous when viewed from the esoteric religious perspective. A religious insider, you see, such as a mystic, would realize that what the rioter thinks is sacred, namely the prophet, is effectively an idol. Ironically, the ban on depicting Muhammad is meant to prevent ignorant people from worshipping the image.

216 The bans natural side effect, though, is to turn the prophet himself into a sort of forbidden fruit, giving the untouchable Muhammad a mystique that might as well be a mark of holiness. In any case, rampaging through the streets because of a slight against your favourite long-dead person is as ludicrous as an insane persons tantrum thrown over some injury done to his favourite chair in his mental institution. Why, though, is there an exoteric religious discourse in the first place, that is, a discourse which is necessarily the most popular and the least respectable compared to a different, more self-consistent way of talking about god? Why is the truth about monotheistic religions kept so secret by the religious insiders? Answers to these should emerge from what follows.

Why God Cant Exist

The old debate of whether God exists is everlasting because it rests on a confusion that sends its participants on wild goose chases. By definition, you see, god doesnt exist, so to say that god exists is to make a category mistake. The word exist is synonymous with such words as be, real, factual, and actual. You can learn how to use these words by inter-defining them in terms of each other, as the dictionary does, but you wont understand any of their meanings without analogies and examples drawn from your daily experience, and that in turn requires that you effectively naturalize anything you think of as existing. For example, to exist is, in part, to take up space, to pass through time, and to have causal power, and this is to imply that everything that exists is part of the natural universe. But the idea of god is of the source of everything natural, which means that god cant be bound by space or time or have causal power; neither can god have a mind if a mind requires a brain, nor need god follow the laws of logic if logic too applies merely to everything that could exist, where anything we could know of as potentially existing must be limited by our ways of understanding. Adapting some terminology from the philosopher Immanuel Kant, things that exist can be called phenomenal, which means that they necessarily dont transcend the

217 categories and mental faculties we use to understand things. By contrast--and by definition--god is noumenal, which means that the rather paradoxical notion of the monotheistic god is of something that cant be comprehended by us. God couldnt be anything in nature, since hes supposed to be the precondition of nature. Phenomena appear to us only because they register with our cognitive equipment, whereas something that falls outside our net of understanding, as it were, wouldnt be experienced by us in the first place. So if being, existence, reality, actuality, and factuality are understood explicitly or implicitly as aspects of natural things, which is to say things that are understood by a strong connection to our everyday sense experience and modes of conception, god lacks any of those aspects. Thus, if we use those concepts to distinguish something from nothing, god has more in common with nothing than he does with something: both god and nothing dont exist, and again this is merely a definitional, conceptual matter. Once you define god a certain way, you should follow through without self-contradictions. This is why when the theist says that God caused the universe to exist, the natural response is to ask what caused God. We ask that question because we assume that whatever exists must exist in the natural sense, since there is no other meaningful sense of that word, and all natural, relatively familiar things have effects and causes. Likewise, when the theist says that God thinks, speaks, or acts, we naturally understand those words by analogy with our common experience, and so we add absurd attributes to God; for example, we assume God must have a body of some sort, even though hes supposed to be the source of all bodies, or that God must have a gender and either a deep or a high voice, even though to say that is to naturalize the supernatural and thus to speak in self-contradictions. You might be wondering about the metaphysical status of abstract objects: if everything that exists is natural, and numbers and other mathematical structures are natural, do those abstract structures exist? It sounds funny to suppose that they do, but even if numbers and so forth do exist and are abstract rather concrete in the sense that theyre repeatable, an abstract object is still like a spatiotemporally-bound thing in nature in that

218 either is limited by its specificity. The number 2 has its arithmetical properties, which differ from those of other numbers, and those distinguishing properties set limits on that number. Likewise, physical laws and dimensions set limits on everything in nature. But, once again, god is supposed to be the unconditioned setter of all limits and conditions. As soon as you try to specify what god is like, say by distinguishing his character from that of an evil person, you take away with one hand what you give with the other; that is, you misunderstand the point of talking about the monotheistic god, because although you successfully apply your commonsense, comparing god to moral people in this case, you thereby contradict the basic definition of god, since you set a limit on that which is supposed to be unlimited--all-powerful, all-present, infinite, and so forth. As the Jewish theologian Maimonides maintained, we have at best a negative understanding of God: we can say only what god is not, not what god is. Or take the ninth C. theologian John Scot Erigenas statement, We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being." This is to say, with Kant, that we have a mere placeholder idea of god, an idea of that X which reason leads us to believe is the ultimate source of everything we experience without being any such experienced thing. Eastern mystics have long made this point, that to understand just the meaning of god, you have to entertain the possibility, at least, that our cognitive powers are limited, that theres more in heaven and earth than fits inside even our best, most complete theory of everything. Mystics often contend that god can be directly experienced, but they appreciate that as soon as anyone tries to explain that experience or use logic to prove that god exists or has such and such qualities, she inevitably resorts to commonsense metaphors and so begins talking nonsense, holding god out to be both the cause of all causes, the mind that creates all brains (even though every mind needs a brain), and so on. God is ineffable, because language has an evolutionary purpose of enabling us to cope with nature, whereas god is, simply by definition, not natural. Note, though, that although this is a semantic point about the meaning of exist, this doesnt mean the

219 point is about an arbitrary choice of linguistic labels, as the pejorative use of the phrase just semantics would have it. Rather, the point is that our imagination, our categories, our perceptual pathways, our modes of interacting with the world may all be too limited to reconcile us with certain deep truths, such as the truth of what lies behind the natural order.

Why God is the Most Awful Horror

In line with the mystics insistence on humility with respect to our cognitive powers, a philosophical mysterian would compare god to consciousness, taking each to be necessarily beyond our comprehension. Although we can answer some indirect questions about either, were met with a stumbling block when we try to fit consciousness or god into the naturalistic worldview, since consciousness is quintessentially not objective and thus not quantifiable or measurable, while god is supposed to be natures precondition. Once you see how this mysterian idea applies to the question of theism, the idea being that what there is neednt be and likely isnt limited by our capacity to understand things, you should also be led to appreciate that the thought of god is the most horrible thought we can formulate. After all, once we see that literalistic, exoteric, metaphorical theism leads only to confusion, the proper thought of god is no longer even theistic in the usual, highly objectionable way, since god isnt usefully conceived of as a person who acts within nature. Nothing specific can be said about god, because the fundamental idea behind the word god is that everything we can understand, the natural universe, comes mysteriously from something else. Thus, the myths, fables, and fairy tales of religions become so many distractions from contemplating the possibility, implied by the monotheistic religions, that not only must we lack satisfying answers to our ultimate questions, but those questions are bound to be wrongheaded, because theyre produced by minds that are unprepared to fathom the ultimate source. This further indicates that our best theories and treasured values are at best limited, if not made ridiculous by their insular scope. This is the horror that threatens our happiness, and

220 religionists dutifully pretend that god is on our level, after all--just a better person than any of us or the best thing in the universe. But no such thing could then be meaningfully called the almighty precondition of the cosmos. What, then, is the supernatural? Does the supernatural manifest in the miraculous event or in the scary phenomenon, in a ghost or goblin that stands at the border between our world and something beyond? A mere partial mystery thats half-way caught in our net of understanding, something we glimpse but cant explain? No, anything that appears before us, registering at all with our senses or our conceptual capacities, is natural. At best, some natural phenomena are subjectively magical in Arthur C. Clarks sense, in that we might happen not to understand the mechanisms that make what we observe work. By contrast, the negative concept of god is the concept of a permanent objective mystery, of the possibility that if nature has an ultimate explanation, this explanation will forever be beyond our reach, because nature comes from something else--call it supernatural, preternatural, noumenal, or god (with a lowercase g since god isnt a proper name of a person, from the esoteric perspective). The complement of this idea of the hugeness of god is the idea of our vanishing smallness. If god is so far beyond us, we must be miniscule to god and this applies not literally to our contrasting sizes, since god would have no measurable body, but to our quality of life. The closest analogy is the relation between a human and a bacterium or some other microscopic organism that has little if any conception of where it stands. Of course, biologically speaking, organisms need to know only enough to perform their evolutionary functions; an ant, for example, doesnt need to understand the chemical composition of the earth in which it lives, to know that the stuff can be molded just so to form what we call a colony. An ant has no conception of much outside that colony, including our planet, the galaxy, the multiverse, and so forth. Still, the ant lives on, performing its limited tasks, which is all the ant can do. In short, the ant doesnt know what its missing, and so this insect is spared any embarrassment by the shallowness of its life cycle.

221 Our curse is that we can see beyond our limitations; we can conceive of the possibility that our concepts are limited, that theres more to know than we can possibly understand and that nature likely originates from something entirely alien. Thus removed from the state of Edenic ignorance, we cant live in peace but must constantly suffer from anxiety or flee to the false Edens of our fantasy worlds, of our hallucinatory delusions that confuse us with false hope and cheap comfort. For example, we assume God is our loving parent who prepares heaven for us when we die, or that God writes life manuals for our benefit. Our delusions can be religious, political, or otherwise cultural, but the point is that most people seem to prefer them to the radical, mystical alternative, which is that the ultimate truth is a cosmic horror. Those who even ponder this latter possibility tend to suffer the anxiety of displacement, of being detached from everything that makes for a fulfilling life, because once you suspect that were all incapable of understanding everything, you wonder about the status of the civilizations our species has erected in its saga. Like a witness whose character is impeached when shes caught in just a single lie, and whose whole testimony thus becomes suspect, our cognitive limits, which distinguish us as specific, natural beings, may infect all our accomplishments and joys with existential absurdity and tragedy. Instead of occupying herself with practical tasks, living as a healthy, functional member of a community, like a busy ant helping to build its colony, the mystic, cosmicist, or omega person cant fully engage with a mainstream culture for fear that this culture is, in the end, perfectly ridiculous.

Cosmic Horror and Science

Reason seems the messenger that brings this anxiety and detachment, and by reason I mean objectivity, the ability to stand outside your ego or your culture, to dehumanize yourself with a frame of mind that might just be dispassionate enough to mirror the worlds alien neutrality towards us, thus enabling us to see things as they more nearly are. But is this cosmic mysticism, which identifies god as that which mocks our every pretension, which, when juxtaposed with us, haunts us with fear of the necessarily narrow and thus absurd ambit of our lives--is this point of view really the more rational

222 one? The psychiatrist speaks of anxiety, which seems to plague especially modern and postmodern societies, as a type of disorder. Here, presumably, the psychiatrist seems merely to follow the social preference for happiness over philosophy, for peace of mind at the price of delusion. But perhaps the notion of cosmic horror is the greater delusion, and the wisest course is to adopt cultural conventions as your touchstones. Is there any reason to believe that god in the mystical, cosmicist sense applies to anything? Perhaps theres nothing beyond the natural and nature takes full care of itself. At first glance, the success of science indicates that theres no such god, that the mysterian, cosmicist, and mystic posit a god-of-the-gaps, foolishly betting against the power of science to develop a complete and self-contained theory of everything. According to the Yahoo News article, Will Science Someday Rule Out the Possibility of God?, for example, the cosmologist Sean Carroll points out that as scientists have explained more and more of nature, theres less reason to call upon God to explain anything. This, however, assumes only the confused, exoteric notion of God. Given the rational, scientific model of explanations, a valid explanation that adds to our understanding must explain something natural by reference to something else in nature; indeed, the methods of rational explanation (logical inference, gathering of data, and so on) effectively naturalize the explanans, that X which explains the explanandum Y. Since by definition god isnt natural, you cant rationally explain anything by referring to god; that is, you cant increase your understanding of nature by saying that god causes this or that, since the notion of god is of something thats supposed to transcend our rational comprehension. To the extent that scientists have overturned traditional theistic theories of diseases, witches, and the origin of life, the latter theories must have been associated only with the exoteric anthropomorphisms that obscure the implications of self-consistent theism, to enable religious people to feel a modicum of existential security. The only way the advance of science could count against esoteric cosmicism is if theres reason to think that scientists will one day answer all valid questions, leaving no excuse for even a negative or indirect appeal to anything supernatural. As the above

223 article suggests, a theory of quantum gravity might be both complete and selfcontained, presupposing nothing. But is this how science or indeed any form of rational explanation works? Certainly, the Lawrence Krauss affair suggests otherwise. Krauss, the theoretical physicist, touted his book, A Universe from Nothing, as offering an explanation of how something can come from nothing without God. David Alpert pointed out in his NY Times review that Krauss theory does no such thing, since his theory presupposes certain fundamental physical laws as well as the reality of some elementary stuff, such as relativistic quantum fields. The fact that that stuff is nothing in the sense that such fields dont occupy space doesnt address the underlying, philosophical question of how something specific, individuated, and thus natural and rationally understood could derive, or be understood as deriving, from something else. Lets take a moment to remind ourselves how reason basically works. When you think logically, you infer some statements from others, and inference is a sort of affirmation warranted by certain rules, such as the laws of some logical system or the values of scientific inquiry. Take away the rules and you lose the reason to affirm a statement. Thus, rational explanation would seem to presuppose those rules. Suppose, though, the rules presupposed by a scientific theory of everything were somehow self-evident laws of nature. This would mean only that such laws are fundamental to the human way of thinking, and this would lead to a dilemma: either theres only one theory of everything, which theory miraculously happens to be within the reach of primates evolved on our planet, or else there are multiple such theories, which means each would be somehow incomplete, reflecting in part the interests of a particular culture or species. Now, one reason to think that a complete theory of everything is within our reach is that natural forces and materials are mindless, which implies that the natural elements can put up no intelligent resistance to the scientific enterprise. If nature is neutral towards us and were sufficiently industrious, the universe cant literally hide its secrets from us. In this respect, then, our arrival at a finished theory of everything might be expected rather than miraculous. However, theres also a scientific reason to believe the opposite, which has to do with our decentralization in the scientific picture. From Ptolemy to Copernicus,

224 Galileo and Einstein, our planet is understood as being less and less central until finally the notion of absolute centrality loses its meaning in relativity theory. Of course, the notion of our centrality in the cosmos has historically had a qualitative rather than just a quantitative sense, the idea being that humans are the most important things in the universe, that our existence fulfills the purpose of all Creation. Dispensing with that anthropocentrism naturally humiliates us, in that we become painfully aware of our fallibility and of the limitations that distinguish us even as objects occupying particular times and places. This shift in perspective should bewilder rather than merely humble naturalists, since the result is an all-consuming pragmatic attitude that justifies only our means, not our goals and thus produces a sense of vertigo typically experienced as postmodern cynicism and apathy. Pragmatism replaces modern idealism about our greatness even in the absence of any god to vouch for our pedigree. The upshot of sciences decentering of us is that we can no longer trust in our magnificence in even the secular humanistic manner--at least, not without feeling that were perpetrating a fraud. Of course scientists should pragmatically assume that they can explain everything, since we cant know for sure in advance what we might be unable to understand. But this pragmatism, this methodological naturalism is far from a full-throated defense of the promise that a complete and self-contained theory of everything wouldnt be a miraculous, which is to say a stupendously improbable achievement for us. If its only useful for the business of technoscience to assume that humans can, in principle, understand everything, theres no metaphysical or epistemological guarantee that this business will pay off in the end; after all, most businesses fail. (Indeed, theres now talk within physics that string theory, which has dominated physics for several decades, is a dead end. See Lee Smolins The Trouble with Physics.) In light of the loss of anthropocentrism, which is to say Reasons killing of our nave selfconfidence along with the anthropomorphized God, theres at least as much reason to be pessimistic as there is to be optimistic about the ultimate fruits of science. Again, if were merely an accidental byproduct of natural processes, why on earth expect that our

225 cognitive faculties, which themselves evolved to carry out local and quite humdrum tasks, can encompass absolutely everything? Instead, we might expect that just as advanced civilizations mock the conceits of isolated cultures, such as those of geologically-confined peoples, our best modern efforts might in the end be wildly deficient and indeed laughable. Granted, nature would lack any diabolical genius to prevent us from understanding as much as we can--although super-intelligent alien species might serve that role, as science fiction authors speculate. But natures mindlessness makes its elements alien to our way of thinking, since we evolved to function in a social context, which is why we naturally anthropomorphize whatever we try to understand. Thus, what looks like a reason to be confident in our intellectual capacity may instead be a reason to believe the opposite, that precisely because theres no personal God to account for why the universe is as it is, social creatures like us are particularly ill-equipped to come to terms with the world in which we find ourselves. Granted also, some people are less social than others, and we all have the capacity for objectivity, which strips away our personal and cultural biases. But even the most objective human, who can speak the languages of exotic mathematics, must translate the findings of those alien perspectives into subjective, traditionally-human terms to assimilate physics to the broader worldview that includes intuitions and phenomenological knowledge of how things appear from a lay perspective. If were contemplating scientific progress that involves a replacement of all our subjective viewpoints with the depersonalized, objective one, were effectively conceding that the perfect theory of everything is in range only of transhumans. Abstract cosmological theories, drawing on rarified math, are already disconnected from folk wisdom, and that gap provides us with a rough analogy of the break between the natural and the supernatural, foreshadowing the unattainability of some knowledge by us. Cutting-edge physics lies at the furthest reaches of human cognitive powers, but again, even bizarre mathematical structures are natural in so far as they can be positively specified and categorized by the human mind. Anything that couldnt be would

226 be supernatural and would be nothing to us--not necessarily nothing at all, mind you, but no thing to creatures like us. Whether or not theres somehow a god, the negative concept of a transcendent source of everything around us is the mysterian, cosmicist, mystical concept of such a monstrous, strangely active nothing.

Conclusion
You might think the notion of such a nothing is neither here nor there, since that notion is more deistic than theistic, meaning that such an alien god would have no practical, knowable effect on nature. This leaves out, however, an indirect, psychological effect, which is that creatures cursed with excessive reasoning powers can reason their way to the end of their reason, leading to self-doubt and to postmodern malaise. Moreover, to compensate for these deleterious effects of the mere thought of the-god-thats-nothingto-us, mainstream religions design a panoply of friendly anthropomorphic masks that can be placed across that gods alien face, and the childishness of these religions has plenty of social consequences. This answers the questions I ask in the introduction. Why is there an exoteric religious tradition and why is the esoteric one kept hidden? The reason is that the religious thesis, that the supernatural is somehow prior to the natural, is--far from being more politically correct than, say, atheism--subversive, endangering both society and an individuals peace of mind. Only the most courageous or foolhardy theist is willing to confront the stark implications of the concept of a deity, while the majority prefers the comfort of toy conceptions of the supernatural. Whats needed, then, is a cosmicist religion that makes the best of the potential for anyone to wake up and arrive at the Baneful Thought that everything familiar to us may be nothing to something wholly other. The more you objectively ponder our limitations, the more you find yourself alienated from the politically correct conventions that govern popular cultures, since in that case you come to regard most of our preoccupations (happiness, sex, stealth oligarchy, anthropomorphic theism, cryptoreligious Scientism)

227 as absurd and tragic. Thus, the lost, omega individual could use an uplifting way of digesting and sublimating the Baneful Thought. Buddhism and other mystical traditions may well suffice, but I dont know of any major religion that captures the cosmicist insight that cosmic horror seems a prerequisite for existential authenticity, which is to say, for an ethically and aesthetically justified mindset. Finally: a note about pantheism. How does the mysterian, cosmicist god relate to what Ive called the undead god, which is natures mindless power of astonishing creativity? The undead god is just a poetic name for how nature appears from a position of relative clear-headedness. This undead god is fully explainable by science, although autonomous levels of explanation may be needed to address emergent levels of complexity. By contrast, the supernatural god Ive considered above isnt at all rationally explainable. There may well be nothing supernatural, but general objectivity, science, and religion tend to drive us to this point of ultimate humility and postmodern angst, where we regard the universe as fundamentally absurd, which is to say unintelligible to us and so as silly as a childs babbling. The undead god, which is the monstrous body of the cosmos, represents the extent of whats intelligible to us. If theres no complete, self-contained explanation of nature, however, and reason and curiosity compel us always to ask deeper questions, we may worry that the sum total of what we can know is like an icebergs tip that peaks above the bulk concealed by the sea of our incomprehension. At any rate, the esoteric, mystical traditions of theistic religions are mysterian in this respect, since they posit an utterly transcendent entity as the source of everything thats more familiar.

228

Lovecraftian Horror and Pragmatism ____________________________________________________

Ive referred to Lovecraftian horror a number of times in my rants and this calls for some explanation. To see the relevance of Lovecraft to the philosophical issues Ive been ranting about, you need to be aware that there are roughly two kinds of secularists, the Nietzscheans and the non-Nietzscheans. The Nietzscheans, including American horror author H. P. Lovecraft, British writer John Gray, and existentialist philosophers, warn that what Nietzsche called the death of God, which is to say the ascent of modern science and of secular powers, was a revolution that demands a reassessment of our values. Nietzscheans stress the illegitimacy of those traditions and institutions that presuppose theism. By Contrast, the non-Nietzscheans, including most New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Jerry Coyne, believe that the rise of secularism doesnt have such radical consequences. For example, these secularists often assume that the liberal value of a persons sacredness is sustainable on an atheistic basis, even though that value derives from theistic myths. The non-Nietzschean secularist usually responds to the Nietzschean by saying that theists acquire their values in turn from the use of their own reason as they cherry-pick from scriptures, and from our prehistoric ancestors evolved social instinct.

229

Lovecraft's Cosmicism
Unlike the more optimistic secularists, Lovecraft worried about the philosophical implications of modern scientific findings. He dramatized his worries in weird short stories featuring super-powerful gods or aliens, whose motives are as unfathomable to us as are ours to ants. These extraterrestrials symbolized for Lovecraft the cosmic forces of nature which are just as alien to us, given that theyre not creations of a familiar, humane parent figure like God. The point is that modern science discovered not just the universes inhuman scope, but its impersonality and thus its inhumanity. Lovecraft used the existential abyss between his scientific characters and the inhuman universe to produce in his reader a sense of the truly strange. By existential abyss I mean our alienation from the rest of nature, given sciences disenchantment of it and our own need to enchant what we perceive by projecting anthropocentric categories wherever we go. Science is the eating of the apple and the source of our expulsion from Eden, and once were on the other side of the barrier, lost now in postmodern selfconsciousness and skepticism, were no longer at home anywhere. To paraphrase what Milton says about Satan in Paradise Lost, hell travels always with us, since its a state of mind (see Book IV, line 20). Lovecraft called his philosophical outlook cosmicism, using the inhuman aspects of the natural order to drive home the insignificance of our own ideals and pet projects. Our ambitions are pathetic vanities next to those of intelligent creatures who may well have prospered for billions of years and even now direct the course of galactic development. Even were there no such elder, squid-faced gods, the natural forces themselves have proved to be inhuman and thus alien to us, operating as they do on vast time scales, from subatomic particles to galaxies and perhaps even across multiple universes. The upshot, for Lovecraft, is that the world discovered by modern scientists is awesome, above all, in its capacity to horrify us. Were happiest when we delude ourselves that were at the center of a manageably-large universe and that underlying everything is a supreme person who not only comforts us but is actually related to us as our ultimate parent. The universe becomes a home for our extended family, and so

230 ultimately we have nothing to fear. Nothing is strange in that universe, since God has sovereign control over everything--he knows even how many hairs there are on each of our heads--and were made to be similar to God. When we intellectually mature and can no longer view the universe with such innocence, everything becomes alien and strange, even ourselves as we learn of the effects of the now-impersonal natural forces on everything above and beneath the sun. Were afraid of whats different from ourselves, of the strange and the alien. We assumed that natural forces are controlled by people, because we control many processes in our little corner of the cosmos. But if people are just accidental byproducts rather than the architects of Creation, were adrift on a sea with no safe harbour.

Pragmatism as a Secular Whitewash

There are many consequences of this cosmicism, but one that should be more appreciated is that the New Atheists rosy secular outlook, according to which we should simply get on with our lives, creating our own meanings, following societys laws, raising our families and working hard at our jobs, looks for all the world like a whitewash. Partly, this whitewash is due to the prevalence of scientists in the New Atheist movement, who dont have much sympathy for philosophy, and partly its a tactic in the culture war against the religious fundamentalist in the US, for example, who accuses biologists of presupposing godlessness, to disastrous social effect. Instead of teaching merely the scientific facts of evolution, says the fundamentalist, biologists inevitably instill atheism in their students, since atheism follows from the rigorous use of reason at the expense of faith and atheism leads, in effect, to Lovecrafts cosmicism or to Nietzsches revaluation of all values. In response, the New Atheist insists that neither the modern scientific worldview, nor philosophical naturalism, nor atheism has any such dire implication. As the Atheist Bus message says in Britain and Canada, Theres probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life. This pragmatic message is most telling. Just as Pascal says in his infamous Wager that even if you dont yet believe theres a god, you

231 should go through the motions until you fall into the habit of being a religious person, so too the non-Nietzschean secularist says that even if you dont see meaning or value in anything after Gods death at our hands, you should go through the motions until, no doubt, the secular myths from political, corporate, and Hollywood propaganda enthrall you. The hyper-rational secularist encourages the use of reason to wipe out theistic beliefs, but stops short of recommending skepticism about liberal secular values. No, that extended skepticism must be just postmodern gibberish. Best to trust the liberal technocrats, the cheerful scientists, and the shining images on the silver and little screens. After all, look at how rich and powerful those secularists are. No one could be so successful without possessing great wisdom, and so when they say that even though life is accidental in an immensely cold, grim, and impersonal universe, secularists should just get on with their lives, they might as well be selling coffee, nicotine, or some other capitalistic stimulant. To be sure, non-Nietzschean secularists have their philosophical defenses of liberal values and of morality, democracy, and capitalism, that is, of the secular way of life. In fact, analytic philosophers, political scientists, and economists are for the most part devoted to producing just those defenses. And their arguments may be more or less compelling. But they fail to persuade the less intellectual person in the street whos more liable to follow his or her feelings. So too must those pretty speeches and technical articles flying out the doors of secular institutions, of governments, colleges, and think tanks, fail to persuade the secular academics and professionals when now and again they dont get their way and their animal instincts get the better of them. When their logic and science avail them not and theyre forced to go with their gut, theyll tend to worry like the Nietzscheans. Unlike Pascals calculative wager, the point of cosmicism is that the secular worldview has an overall negative emotional impact. This worldview deflates our self-centered preconceptions, while the rigorous application of scientific objectivity trains us to be hyper-skeptical, to distrust all authority figures and traditions, and thus deprives us of any substitute myths. We have idols aplenty, but none of them is sustainable in the chaotic postmodern climate.

232 In other words, while the philosophical and soft scientific defenses of liberal secular values may be rationally compelling--and Im conceding that for the moment only for the sake of argument--those defenses lack the power of Nietzschean cosmicism because the natural cosmos is above all a scary place. Richard Dawkins sometimes wishes that religious authorities hadnt have dictated the content of European art in previous centuries, since secular poets, for example, armed with scientific data, would have been inspired by natures grandeur to produce their own artworks of epic beauty. But this is nave philistinism. Whatever beauty there is in nature is utterly tragic; in fact, the beauty dies with the inevitable extinction of the beholder. Unless the secularist is a closet Platonist and thus a cryptotheist, the secularist should know that value judgments are subjective and that our talk of a flowers beauty is a byproduct of our parochial mating ritual in which we size up a member of the other sex, searching for telltale signs of health, like facial symmetry and certain body proportions. Fear too is an evolutionary mechanism, which causes us to fight or to flee when faced with an unknown. But at least theres no misapplication when we fear the inhuman cosmos, as there is when we deem fractals and other natural forms beautiful. The Lovecraftian, existential emotion of angst is true to the revolutionary spirit of modern science, lacking the anthropocentrism of the cheap metaphor in which the harmony of cosmic processes--assuming there is such a thing--is compared to the harmony of the human form. The rosy secularist who calls nature "majestic" and "elegant" merely vents his or her prejudice when faced with whats perfectly nonhuman. In this respect, modern secularism is neo-pagan, a high brow version of prehistoric animism, according to which nature is sacred because nature is flush with humanity, or with spirits that are similar to ours, and humans are sacred because, well, we children are narcissistic. The angstridden secularist, however, grapples with the scientific lesson that anthropocentrism is childish folly and so--instead of cheerfully seeing our reflection in the cosmic pool-resorts to the only suitable emotions we have left: fear, horror, awe, a recognition of the Other as such and thus of the limit of our standards and the necessary shortsightedness of our goals.

233 Whatever intellectual merits pragmatic secular optimism may have--and again, I grant them here only for the sake of this particular rant--this optimism cant compete with the fact that fear is the most suitable emotional response to nature. That was Lovecrafts point, which is why his protagonists were mainly men of learning who are driven insane when theyre forced to feel the strangeness of a world without a humane God. For non-Nietzschean secularism to work, wed need a means of neutering or short-circuiting our natural terror in response to our tragic existential situation. Perhaps this is the ultimate purpose of political and Hollywood fear-mongering, to distract us with fictional or propped-up monsters (communism, al Qaeda, middle eastern dictators), to avoid western social collapse from the death of God.

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Inkling of an Unembarassing Postmodern Religion ____________________________________________________

In a few rants here Ive hinted at the Nietzschean view that one of the major problems with secular society, after the death of God, is the lack of an obvious replacement that we can feel in our bones to be sacred. When scientists discovered the universes true inhuman scale and the full animalistic nature of our bodies and of our evolutionary history, the result was a disenchantment of the world that threatens to burst the delusions that sustain our sanity. Postmodern cynics contend that no such nontheistic religion is needed, that we can live with infinite layers of irony, turning our culture into a giant Stephen Colbert skit in which every public statement is at best a white lie and we applaud each others savvy pragmatism, our disdain for philosophical questioning, and our nihilistic poses. These cynics may fool themselves but they dont fool me. Hold a gun to the head of a postmodern poseurs family member and see whether that erstwhile cynic retains her quasi-Buddhist detachment and truly holds nothing on Earth sacred. Naturally, as the animal she is, the postmodernist would sacrifice herself for her loved ones. Her religion is thus biochemically determined. Shes used as a puppet not by a transcendent Creator of all, but by mindlessly replicating genes which cause each of us to care a lot about those who most share our genetic material. The question to ask the postmodernist is whether some feelings can be judged superior to others according to ideals that arent

235 lost with the premodern, theistic worldviews. Nietzsche believed that although traditional morality is rendered dubious by the death of theism, aesthetic standards are still compelling. The problem with the emotional defense of our immediate family members, then, or of our instinctive replacement of traditional deities with naturally selected idols, is that aesthetically speaking, such a primitive religious impulse has surely by now, after millions of generations, become a god-awful clich. Can we postmodern nontheists do better? Given that religions are inevitable in human societies, because were emotionally driven to identify something as sacred, as a radiant good that uplifts us despite our profane lives filled with disappointment, angst, or delusion, can we create a more beautiful religion thats viable even after modern secular humanism has given way to postmodern hyper-skepticism? Had I such a religion fully worked out, perhaps Id be on television hawking T-shirts adorned with the creeds associated slogans. Needless to say, I know of no such religion. However, Id like to speak of some themes that do inspire me and that sketch, at least, the sort of religion Id like to see. Some of these themes are found in the closing speech of Olaf Stapledons 1930 science fictional novel Last and First Men. This novel is found in its entirety online, hosted in Australia, so Id like to quote the whole speech after I summarize the context, and then I propose to analyze the speech. However, if you havent read the novel and dont want its ending spoiled, you should skip the next section and perhaps even put aside this philosophical rant of mine for another day. Fair warning then...

Stapledons Speech
Stapledons novel is about our entire future history, stretching across two billion years until our extinction. After many cognitive and physiological evolutions, plus near extinctions, humankind eventually faces its inevitable and imminent death at the hands of solar radiation. Stapledon perhaps naively imagines that that last generation of humans will have achieved a psychologically mature and peaceful culture in which altruism is the norm and selfishness is anathema and even physically repulsive. Although enervated by the deadly solar winds that rapidly make our descendants final

236 home planet uninhabitable, those last humans struggle to complete their final project: creating interstellar seeds to carry a record of human achievement so that at least the memory of our species might not vanish. The narrator speaks of the Degeneration of the higher neural centers, due to the suns disintegration, which has also brought about in us a far more serious and deep-seated trouble, namely a general spiritual degradation which would formerly have seemed impossible, so confident were we of our integrity...We look back now at our former selves, with wonder, but also with incomprehension and misgiving. We try to recall the glory that seemed to be revealed to each of us in the racial mind, but we remember almost nothing of it. We cannot rise even to that more homely beatitude which was once within the reach of the unaided individual, that serenity which, it seemed, should be the spirit's answer to every tragic event. It is gone from us. It is not only impossible but inconceivable. We now see our private distresses and the public calamity as merely hideous. That after so long a struggle into maturity man should be roasted alive like a trapped mouse, for the entertainment of a lunatic! How can any beauty lie in that? A group called the Brotherhood of the Condemned, to which the narrator belongs, now and again meets in little groups or great companies to hearten ourselves with one another's presence. Sometimes on these occasions we can but sit in silence, groping for consolation and for strength. Sometimes the spoken word flickers hither and thither amongst us, shedding a brief light but little warmth to the soul that lies freezing in a torrid world. But there is among us one, moving from place to place and company to company, whose voice all long to hear. He is young, the last born of the Last Men; for he was the latest to be conceived before we learned man's doom, and put an end to all conceiving. Being the latest, he is also the noblest. Not him alone, but all his generation, we salute, and look to for strength; but he, the youngest, is different from the rest. In him the spirit, which is but the flesh awakened into spirituality, has power to withstand the tempest of solar energy longer than the rest of us. It is as though the sun itself were eclipsed by

237 this spirit's brightness. It is as though in him at last, and for a day only, man's promise were fulfilled. For though, like others, he suffers in the flesh, he is above his suffering. And though more than the rest of us he feels the suffering of others, he is above his pity. In his comforting there is a strange sweet raillery which can persuade the sufferer to smile at his own pain. When this youngest brother of ours contemplates with us our dying world and the frustration of all man's striving, he is not, like us, dismayed, but quiet. In the presence of such quietness despair wakens into peace. By his reasonable speech, almost by the mere sound of his voice, our eyes are opened, and our hearts mysteriously filled with exultation. Yet often his words are grave. And then the narrator ends the novel with the words of this last born of the Last Men: Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling's knowledge. His admiration is a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard. Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.

238 But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness. But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.

Lifes Absurdities and Tragedies

The themes I want to discuss are the recognition of our grim existential situation, mystical pantheism, the aesthetic vision of life, and gallows humour. To begin, then, the speech-giver, who Ill identify with Stapledon for simplicitys sake, clearly appreciates the apparent absurdity of human life, including the gulf between our vain pretensions to greatness and our actual standing in the cosmos as fledglings (young birds), and the objective worthlessness and futility of all our endeavours. A noble religion must begin with this existential premise. The further a religion strays from it and compromises with some variety of happy-talk, the less the religion uplifts and the more it provides a framework merely for baby-sitting the clueless multitudes. In Stapledons novel, the absurdity takes the form of the tragic demise of our species. Even today, though, due to our many advances in scientific knowledge, the gulf between the facts and our fledgling preferences seems so wide as to be almost a case of intentional overkill. Now we know not just that the universe is so large that we can never cross it, expanding our home and thus feeling less alienated, but that our universe may be merely one of an infinite number of universes in a multiverse.

239

In Volume One of Myth of the Machine, Lewis Mumford addresses this question of alienation due to the dwarfing of us and our ideals, given natures unimaginable scale. He points out that on some level there would be no universe without the perceivers consciousness, so that the direction of normative diminishment should point in the other direction. In line with the view of philosopher Immanuel Kant, the way the universe appears to us depends on the cognitive equipment we bring to bear, on our forms of perception. According to quantum theory, this importance of the perceiver is true even at the most fundamental level of nature. Indeed, says Mumford, the mathematical notions of size and scale, the very application of numbers, are human-centered, so any alienation we might feel when we employ our own forms of measurement or even our notion of measurement itself is wrongheaded. Its the universe thats insignificant compared to conscious beings who bring that universe to fruition by perceiving and understanding it. Yet, contrary to this Kantian response to Stapledon, our alienation neednt be due just to the immense difference in size; the size-gap only brings to mind the more fundamental abyss between our familiarity with our home and the Otherness of all that lies beyond our homes borders. When galaxy is piled on top of galaxy and then universe on top of universe, were struck not just by how literally puny we are, but by how much inhumanity there is compared to the human. Even were mathematical concepts of measurement anthropocentric, in which case natures immensity would honour rather than alienate us, since there would be no size as such without our creation of that form of measurement, the fact is that were there no human beings or concept of size, nature would still be doing much thats perfectly nonhuman. A cosmic party would still be in progress to which we were never invited. In Kantian terms, the world of phenomena, or appearances that depend on our modes of understanding, would vanish, but the noumena or things in themselves as they are regardless of whether theyre perceived or explained by anyone, would still be as they inconceivably are, and their Otherness is the ultimate source of our alienation.

240 Thus, even accepting the Kantian view, Stapledons point that a humans admiration is a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature would still apply. As Nietzsche put it in On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense, When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding truth within the realm of reason. This is, he says, a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth. Were alienated by the fact that we can never understand the inhuman heart of nature without dehumanizing ourselves.

Mystical Pantheism
Next, Stapledon alludes to the philosopher Spinozas pantheism when he says repeatedly that were eternal beauties in the eternal form of things. Spinoza shares the mystics intuition that despite the apparent independence of things or substances, everything is interconnected, or to use Spinozas metaphor, everything is supported by a single underlying substance called God or matter, the two being mere ways of looking at the same thing. In Hinduism, the names for this apparent duality of mind and matter are Atman and Brahman. The pantheists point is that God cant extend beyond matter if, as the mystics vision of unity suggests, everything is one, in which case the whole material universe and everything in it is divine. Divinity here is tantamount to impersonal creativity, which is to say that nature may be considered divine in so far as it creates through an evolutionary process. Einstein, Hawking, and other great scientists share Spinozas reverence for nature, so this pantheism isnt foreign to scientific naturalism. But the point I want to emphasize is that mystical pantheism mitigates alienation, by affirming that all things in nature are metaphysically united and thus precluding at that level a gap between self and world. In Spinozas terms, theres a divine viewpoint from which the causal and logical connections between everything in nature are registered and the order in the universes development is made apparent. Every cause and effect and every level of nature from the subatomic to the intergalactic, every speck of dust or hair on our head has its place in that natural order, in that monstrous body of God which

241 is the pantheistic universe, which unifies everything according to natural laws, whether these laws be probabilistic or necessary. This pattern in which everything that exists has its place as part of some natural process which connects it ultimately to everything else, is what Stapledon calls the eternal form of things. From Gods perspective, which is just that of completed natural science, time stops in the sense that the godlike scientist can predict anything in the future by looking at some other part of the pattern; nature is comparable to a spiders web in which everything exists as an interconnected node, and when the web is understood in its entirety, when all the interconnections are recognized, temporal connections become just more nodes in the web. All parts of this pattern, then, have a kind of immortality, because although events come and go from one moment to the next, time too has its limited position in the whole natural course. The universe unfolds according to natural laws which determine the causal processes and the emergence of complex properties, and even though many things lie in the past, from our limited perspective in the present moment, those past stages of natures unfolding arent lost within the godlike vision of the omniscient scientist. On the contrary, their role is guaranteed in the ultimate scientific theory, their position in the pattern subject to reaffirmation. So even were all life to die out and the stars to fade as the universe ends its creative cycle, the oneness of everything that happened in the universe would remain, even if only as a potential for someone to understand. Note that this pantheism is meant to be metaphysical, not epistemic. In practice, of course, actual scientists will never be able to measure everything in the universe, since many events will lie outside their light cone or in impenetrable black holes or singularities. Still, in so far as those events are natural and thus understandable in terms of natural laws, theyre part of the whole natural fabric. When we imagine an omniscient scientist recording every node of the natural web of events in the scientists divine book in which nature is perfectly modeled, were engaging merely in a thought experiment. The experiments purpose is to comfort us with the idea that even were

242 such a perfect scientist never to exist, everything in nature would nonetheless be metaphysically and thus atemporally united by the bonds of causality and logic.

Aesthetic Ideals
Why, though, does Stapledon speak of natural beauty and of the music of the spheres? Well, this is the third theme I want to pull from Stapledons speech. All values we might bring to bear on our judgment of the unified web of nature are more or less parochial, since they all have humble origins in the natural selection of organisms that have the limited purpose of surviving and propagating the species by sexually reproducing. Moral standards are relevant to social beings with relatively high degrees of freedom, and thus the notion of natures goodness is painfully anthropocentric, Platos teleology notwithstanding. Aesthetic standards too evolved as means of estimating the health and genetic fitness of potential sex partners. Still, the aesthetic vision of cosmic development is less anthropocentric than a moral one, for example, because mystical pantheism is consistent with talk of natures beauty. After all, the oneness of nature turns the universe into a single diffuse entity, and the causal and logical links that hold everything together are potentials for scientific understanding. Again, even if no scientist will ever actually understand all of these links or possess data on every instantiation of natural categories, the metaphysical/religious model of mystical pantheism lays out the underlying unity of nature by means of a thought experiment in which the unity provides the potential for a godlike view. This metaphysical potential isnt obviated by the natural impossibility of this omniscience. And so Spinozas mystical pantheism entails both a single cosmic entity and the supposition of a godlike scientist who gazes on the whole, inspecting all of its parts and grasping their interrelations. Clearly, this is comparable to the aesthetic situation in which a person admires an art object. All that must be added to the mystical pantheists thought experiment is the assumption that the scientist has an aesthetic sense.

243 The early modern notion of the music of the spheres had a theistic or at least deistic, teleological connotation. After all, strictly speaking, the analogy between cosmic development and the stages of a musical piece implies a composer. In this way, Stapledons aesthetic theme would contradict his mystical pantheist one, since the composer would have to stand apart from the orchestra and the music, that is, from the cosmos. The two themes can be reconciled, however, by following up on the above construal of pantheism, according to which the oneness of nature could be fully mapped by a hypothetically omniscient scientist. Just as the design of naturally selected organisms isnt intended but can be appreciated by biologists, after the fact, so too aesthetic properties may emerge from the natural order which could be imperfectly appreciated by intelligent beings that occupy limited positions within that order. That is, the natural order might be beautiful or perhaps hideous to behold in its mystical unity.

Gallows Humour
Lastly, Stapledon refers to the great mans strange sweet raillery which can persuade the sufferer to smile at his own pain. This I take to be a kind of gallows humour, which in this case is light, good-natured ridicule that builds camaraderie. What could make raillery a kind of gallows comedy is a tragic context, which in Stapledons novel is the imminent doom of humankind. More broadly, the tragedy is the one given by the first theme, which is the apparent existential absurdity of human life. The gallows humour I have in mind can be instructively compared with the comedy of Jon Stewart or Bill Maher. The subtext of their comedy programs seems to be the liberal audience members desperate cry for official recognition of the sociopolitical absurdities that attend the apparent decline of western powers, in the face of the mainstream medias obliviousness. This was especially so when George W. Bush took his country to war against Iraq, cheered on by the mainstream American media, while most of the rest of the world took to the streets to oppose the war. American liberals especially were desperate for some confirmation that they werent crazy, that Bushs regime was as farcical as it appeared. Jon Stewart provided that confirmation night after night as he

244 fulfilled the fantasy of someone--anyone--with a megaphone loud enough to be heard by millions, condemning political absurdities as such and duly ridiculing the perfectly ridiculous. But although American political comedians joke about whats actually a woeful and perilous state of affairs, their humour isnt exactly of the gallows variety. This is apparent from the audience reaction to their jokes. Stapledon describes the response to gallows humour, which is that the listener smiles at his pain, perhaps also nodding in grave silence, appreciating the jokes wittiness but also the horror and sorrow that motivate the need for that comedy. Stewarts audience members, however, betray their own sense of their political situations absurdity, by idolizing Stewart and liberalism. They vent their rage at their political opponents by bursting into wild applause whenever Stewart blasts those outsiders, even to the point of creating awkwardness when one of the opponents sits right in from of them during the interview with Stewart. The LA audience of Bill Mahers show, Real Time, is even more tribal, robotic, and utterly without humility. Gallows humour is the last resort of a broken person who has no illusions, whos brought low by confronting the thought of his or her imminent or inevitable death, or of the tragedies and absurdities that fill the postmodern world. The occasions for such humour are solemn ones, calling for humility and the courage to dispense with idols of the tribe and with the security blanket of premodern religion. The context of American liberal humour is one of tribal ritual and self-aggrandizement, and thus doesnt quite exemplify the nobler comedy of the gallows that presupposes no delusions.

Sketching the Religion

You might have noticed that the first theme seems to conflict with the next two. How can human life be absurd or tragic if everything in the universe is metaphysically one and if this oneness may be aesthetically appreciated? There are two reasons why theres not necessarily a conflict here. First, the absurdity of life has metaphysical and phenomenological aspects. Metaphysically, life is absurd in the sense that theres no

245 objective purpose of life, that is, no purpose that transcends our interpretations. Briefly put, theism is false. Phenomenologically, theres the feeling of alienation, of tragedy, of the heartlessness of natural forces, of our pitiful stature, and of the ultimate futility of our endeavours. Pantheism is consistent with nontheism, since the natural orders divinity, which is its creative power, is impersonal. Also, existential angst might be appropriate for actual creatures that only barely approximate the omniscient scientist in the thought experiment. Although that scientist might have no cause for angst, that hardly benefits us. However, even that ultimate scientist might feel despair and horror, since there are positive and negative aesthetic properties. Were the natural order beautiful, wonder and reverence could be expected to replace angst, but were the entirety of the divine body of nature horrible to look upon, or were the music of the spheres irritating like a song with a missing note, the scientist might well be disappointed by the anticlimax, to say the least. Still, these themes are materials for a postmodern religion, because the apparent, felt absurdity of life is mitigated by the mystical scientists vision of natures unity, by the possibility of an uplifting normative interpretation of that unity, and by the call for humour to replace despair, given our cosmic situation. What would make this a postmodern religion is that theres no appeal here to anything supernatural, no retreat to delusion or fantasy. On the contrary, those weaknesses of premodern religions are ruled out by the stipulation that life is objectively meaninglessness. At best, we can imagine that a hypothetical scientist who comprehends the whole natural order has an aesthetic reaction to the pattern of interconnected events. This is only a thought experiment; theres no positing of such a scientist, and indeed we should assume that even were nature a monistic system, metaphysically speaking, the comprehension of the whole would be practically impossible. Finally, postmodernists love ironic comedy, and a religion based on the other three considerations should reserve an honoured place for this comedic remedy for angst. After all, regardless of whether natural laws and logical principles of reasoning divulge a unified pattern throughout nature, which immortalizes each node of the web, were stuck

246 without any confirmation of that unity. Even were there music in the orbits of stellar bodies or in a speck of dusts swirling in a breeze, as Stapledon says, this music wouldnt be fit for us in our littleness. Nevertheless, were confronted with two wellestablished facts: the apparent lack of a deep purpose of our being here, alive and on Earth, and scientific advancement in understanding material processes. Add to these the mystics universal claim of having felt natures oneness in a state of altered consciousness. Next, assume that natures unity takes not simply the dry form of having quantifiable interrelations between its parts, but that those interrelations would provoke a visceral aesthetic reaction if only the pattern could be fully comprehended. In this case, outrage is piled upon outrage, since at almost every turn, aside from the present possibility of mystical experience, were merely tantalized by remedies for the brute horror of our existential predicament. The abstract unity of nature provides only cold comfort with the thought that we belong to the universe instead of being alienated from it, given that our position could hypothetically be appreciated by the ultimate scientist. There would still be no personal immortality and no known reason why angst is inappropriate. The possibility of an uplifting, ennobling aesthetic value of the universe and thus of our position in it begins to excite us, but then were left hanging, as in Stapledons speech, with the fact that we cant ourselves hear the music of the spheres. We cant know that there is any justifiable aesthetic interpretation of the whole natural order or, as Id add, whether that order might seem more ugly than beautiful. This, then, is where gallows humour has its pride of place, as a means of our oscillating between angst and hope, alienation and comfort, despair and awe. Humour generally is a way of indirectly calling attention to an irony, to a disparity between a fact and our interpretation of it. In our case, there are even opposite ironies to consider. First, the death of God conflicts with our tendency to anthropomorphize, to vainly project images of ourselves onto the Other. Second, though, our suffering from our apparent existential situation conflicts with the possibility, at least, of a beautiful unity of all things, and thus of a bond between each of us and the world that afflicts us. Thus, the natural facts may be less comforting than our premodern theistic yearnings, but more uplifting than our postmodern hyper-skepticism.

247

A religious way of life requires a myth as its centerpiece, a narrative that makes sense of the totality of human experience. Again, Im not aware of any myth actually taking hold in postmodern society that dramatizes the four themes of Stapledons speech. Even were these themes widely inspiring and well-established, the problem would remain that myths are works of artistic genius, whereas postmodern art is more often than not utterly fraudulent. Trapped between the Scylla of politically correct liberal spinelessness (manifesting in pragmatism and moral relativism) and the Charybdis of an insiders self-righteousness, the postmodern artist needs to deny that theres any ultimate value of anything, but also to pretend to have the cognitive upper hand. The results are highly conceptual art that tends to mean less than nothing, and an art world that throws millions of dollars at artists whose works are obviously worthless. There seem, then, two possibilities. Postmodern artists may go down with the ship of western civilization, without even a tune from the legendary obstinate violinists to assuage them. Alternatively, these artists may shake off their disappointment from the souring of modern culture, draw fresh inspiration from the wealth of scientific knowledge and from their historically well-informed skepticism, and tell us all a good story.

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The Worlds Creation as Gods Self-Destruction ____________________________________________________

What does it mean to declare that God created the world? There are two religious answers, the esoteric and the exoteric. Insiders who best understand theistic ideas take the notion of divine creation to be almost entirely empty. The suspicion is that the world consists of everything we can understand, but that since our powers of understanding are limited, the world likely emerged from something we cant understand, something unnatural. Religious people call that unnatural something and that emergence, respectively, God and the highest creative act. But because the secret roots of these religious ideas are mysterianism, cosmicism, and mysticism, the religious ideas have negative rather than positive content. We can know indirectly that whatever god is, god is alien and thus terrifying to vain and social creatures such as us, who instinctively personalize everything we encounter to feel at home in the wilderness of nature. (Ill speak of God with a capital G only when speaking of the exoteric projection of our personal qualities onto the unknowable.) For reasons given by Leo Strauss, Plato, and others, philosophical truth tends to be socially subversive and thus needs to be hidden from society at large. Plato spoke of the need for noble lies told by the elite to the masses, to maintain social order. Thus, the nontheistic basis of major religions, which is to say the fear of an inexplicable X as the source of everything thats rationally explainable, takes on a theistic, exoteric form for

249 popular consumption. While the mystic says silence is best when thinking of whether to speak of what gods like, the theist indulges in anthropomorphic metaphors. As Dennett argues in Breaking the Spell, theism is to this extent biologically determined. The theist overuses the mental faculty, or neural module, that facilitates cooperation between members of our species, by enabling us to predict our behaviour by way of positing and interpreting peoples mental states. In short, the theist speaks as though god were a member of our species, with capacities for reason, emotion, choice, and so forth. These anthropocentric metaphors are all obviously absurd when applied to the unnatural and taken literally, and when acknowledged as merely metaphorical they become irrelevant, as the mystic appreciates. With this distinction in mind, between the esoteric and the exoteric, lets return to the meaning of the statement that God created the world. Esoterically, the answer is the negative, indirect one that something unnatural and thus beyond our comprehension is somehow both prior to everything in nature, including everything physicists and cosmologists theorize about, and also the cause of nature. Again, as soon as you try to speak positively of the relationship between god and the world, you resort to metaphors that make no sense under analysis. And exoterically, the most prevalent monotheistic answer, for example, is that a white male designer engineered the universe, by brooding over the face of the waters, speaking forms into existence, and so forth, for the main purpose of producing life with which he could interact. The implications of monotheistic creation myths, though, are that God wanted to create a place where his children, who are necessarily more limited beings, could exist, and that he did this not out of grace but out of loneliness. When Catholics or others interpret Creation as a free, unearned and thus miraculous outpouring of divine love they engage in doublespeak, playing the game of going back and forth between the esoteric and exoteric conceptions of God. The notion of unconditional, which is to say, inexplicable love is as self-contradictory as any other theistic metaphor: love is actually well understood, and even when its altruistic the motive is to achieve some higher good, one that requires sacrifice. If you look more

250 closely at the monotheistic conceit, you find the image of God as a mighty individual who stands necessarily alone. Recall that only in polytheism does the creator God have equals; in this case, the anthropomorphism extends to a projection not just of personal attributes onto the unknowable, but of social ones as well. In monotheism, however, theres a single, highest deity who stands at the top of the hierarchy of all beings; that deity is the all-knowing First Cause of everything. Now, when youre forced to supply that solitary, almighty God with a gender, because you cant understand mysterianism or cosmicism or else prefer not to haunt yourself with their implications and so you clothe God in human-made garments which call for literary consistency, youre forced to conclude also that Creation was meant to alleviate Gods loneliness. As feminists have pointed out, the prejudice that the ultimate creative act is a masculine one, with no feminine principle at work, is preposterous. At least a goddess would have some sort of womb from which the universe could be imagined to emerge. Instead, the male creator God must tinker with instruments and build the universe from simpler materials. Human architects and engineers build structures for the social good, for personal profit, and so forth, whereas God would have no such motives. No, the most plausible interpretation, again according to literary standards, is that Gods life prior to Creation was perfectly unbearable for him. First, hes male with no female equals to be his mates. Second, hes benevolent with no one to share in his greatness; to paraphrase the saccharine clich, he has a lot of love to give which goes to waste. Theres no one else to give him advice on what to do. He must find the answer in himself, since if he doesnt know how best to make use of his talents, no one does. And so God decides to have children. Given monotheism, God cant create an equal to himself, and so his children cant live with him. Thus, God must create a place defined by lower dimensions, which is the cosmos of atoms, stars, and planets. God is necessarily removed from Creation and from his children, because he occupies a higher plane of being, but at least hes no longer perfectly isolated. Now, at least, he can spy on men and women, like a voyeur with a transdimensional telescope, slipping

251 messages to us here and there, like a shy admirer.

The Literal Death of God

Does this metaphor of divine creation satisfy you as a piece of fiction? Does the metaphor make for a good story? I hardly think so, at least not in jaded postmodern societies. For one thing, weve learned from history, as Lord Acton put it, that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The monotheistic God is a person cursed with absolute power which must have corrupted him. To assume otherwise is to misuse language and to backtrack from the misbegotten venture of attempting to humanize something that ought to humiliate us instead, because of its dreadful inhumanity, thus making us hesitate before inflicting anything else with human qualities. (What do I mean by that last statement? Well, when you study foreign cultures, which naturally seem ridiculous to you, being an outsider who doesnt care about the rules that govern their practices, which rules thus must seem arbitrary to you, youre very close to putting the shoe on the other foot, as it were, turning this logic around to appreciate that your own social conventions must seem just as silly to the foreigner.) The point, then, is that when you foolishly indulge in an anthropocentric metaphor, you have to run with it, like an improv actor who must react appropriately to any move made by her fellow actors; indeed, a theistic metaphor is as silly and as empty as improvised acting which both depend on the suspension of disbelief. At any rate, once you equate the primary reality with a single almighty person, youre forced to apply your self-understanding to God. If humans tend to be corrupted by power, so too must be God; otherwise, hes no person, the metaphor falls to pieces, and the theist is confronted with the dire prospect of settling into a life of angst at the hands of esoteric, cosmicist philosophy. So God certainly didnt create out of love. Oh, perhaps the character God has benevolent impulses, but theyre bound to be corrupted by the vast power inequality that separates him from any being he could imagine potentially creating.

252 In fact, our two best models for understanding the relationship between the theistic God and nature are the dictator and the infant. Like God, a political dictator who is unchallenged in his prime occupies the pinnacle of a power hierarchy, and like God the dictator need merely speak for his words to be turned into action as his underlings spring to obey their orders. This power inequality isolates and spoils the dictator, so that he either devolves into a monster or the antisocial qualities that bring him to power are given freer reign. Either way, the dictator is infantilized as his every whim is carried out, so that his palace functions as an artificial womb that insulates him from harsh reality, including the misery he usually wreaks on his subjects. This brings me to the second model. Like the God of monotheism, an infant necessarily feels isolated, since the infant cant distinguish itself from anything else. And how does the infant react to that perceived solitariness? Typically, an infant passes most of its waking hours screeching into the void, crying for comfort. Unlike God, an infant has a mother who soothes it by feeding it or rocking it to sleep. God would have no such distractions. With this fuller picture of God in mind, I ask yet again: Why would God, the character of the monotheistic fiction, create a universe populated in part by people? Love wouldnt be Gods primary motivation; instead, we must imagine a pitiful soul wracked alternately by anguish, boredom, fear, and twisted perversions--anguish from the horror of his position of being necessarily alone and beyond anyones comprehension or sympathy; boredom from knowing everything and thus from an eternity with no surprises; fear that God has no escape from his existential predicament; and perversions as his character is warped into that of a decadent predator. If theists would only stop to think about the religious metaphors they pass around as empty memes, theyd appreciate that the hell described by prophets must actually be identical with heaven for God, which is to say that it must be hell to be the monotheistic God. A much superior reading of divine creation was given by the 19th C. German philosopher, Philipp Mainlander, who conceived of whats likely the most depressing thought ever to enter anyones head, who wrote whats been called the most radical system of philosophical pessimism based on that thought, the two-volume Philosophy of

253 Redemption, and who then killed himself. (To morbid English speakers, The Philosophy of Redemption stands as a sort of real-life eldritch Necronomicon, since it hasnt been translated from German.) Mainlanders thought was that God killed himself and that Gods decaying corpse is the natural universe; that is, to carry off his suicide, God had to transform into something that could degrade and eventually be eliminated, namely into an array of quarks, protons, galaxies, and other physical forms. What we think of as a magnificent act of creation was instead Gods escape from the hell of being God, and natural evolution is the pattern of decay occurring in a body so alien we cant see it for what it is; in this respect, were like the blind men who touch different parts of an elephant to identify the beast and reach wildly different conclusions. Mainlanders anthropocentric and profoundly pessimistic speculation has numerous advantages over mainstream theism. First, as I said, his creation myth accords with our self-knowledge, and is thus based on a more coherent metaphor, albeit one which is still just a stained metaphor and so must be counted as a piece of fiction, subject at best to aesthetic standards of evaluation. Second, Mainlanders theism easily accounts both for the natural evil in the world and for Gods absence. Third, and perhaps most importantly, this pessimistic myth rings true for religious insiders, for the mystics and Gnostics who feel alienated from the world and who, like God, seek to be liberated from the torture of being alive (and from being reborn in the cosmic prison). Anxiety is our most authentic source of inspiration, the most fitting reaction to our existential situation that induces noble action. Happiness is for the unenlightened sheep; suffering, for those who fall for the bait of Reason and discover that our ideals are social constructions, our societies oligarchic disaster zones, out fate as a species one of ignominious oblivion. The point, then, is that if we ought to feel like God would had to have felt, detached and isolated by our sentience and objectivity, and if a myth, like any work of fiction, should speak mainly to the phenomenological truth of what its like to be alive, Mainlanders myth of Gods creative suicide is far more moving and relevant than the obsolete and hackneyed yarn about our heavenly Father who just wuvs us so much.

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Living Within God's Undying Body

I want to return now to a question I addressed at the end of "From Theism to Cosmicism," of the relationship between the mystics supernatural god and what I call the undead god, the pantheistically-conceived cosmos which blindly develops more and more complex forms. The esoteric explanation of that relationship is just the cautious, negative one that titillates us with the promise of something which can never be fulfilled: we can know that there are likely things we can never know, such as how everything thats rationally explainable could have come from something else, something unnatural which counts more nearly as nothing to us. But the best exoteric, metaphorical explanation may well take the form of something like Mainlanders bleak myth. God created not out of love or generosity or artistic experimentation, but out of desperation to escape the torments which afflict the best of us too. I said that the fictional character of the monotheistic God would have reason to fear that he lacks any means of escaping his plight of being God, that is, of being like the infantilized and corrupted dictator, grown insane by his solitude and peerlessness. But perhaps the more precise interpretation is that such a character would lack any constructive way out. The most that God could create in addition to himself is a world of inferior beings. Granted, some of these beings, such as angels, might understand God better than others, but given monotheism and mysterianism, there would still be a gulf between everything in the world thats rationally understandable and the likely source of that world. As long as angels are created beings that have bodies and mental faculties, the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena applies: angels could understand only what would fall into the net of their limited ways of thinking. So God would still stand aloof from his Creation; he would still suffer the fires of hell, both as expressions of his inner turmoil and as self-inflicted punishments for his inevitable sins as a corrupted monster. Perhaps God used his genius to devise a weapon of God destruction that would free him from the outrageous embarrassment of being God in the first place. We Westerners

255 laughed from a safe distance at the spectacles of Muammar Gaddafi or Michael Jackson, and we still ridicule anyone else so obviously warped by the curse of being a hyperpower. But how much more clownish must Gods character be--not wise or loving like the half-baked theistic fantasies would have it, but downright grotesque in its absolute freedom of self-expression. Perhaps, then, the colossal monstrosity which is the multiverse affords us with superabundant empirical evidence of the pitiful last act of the worst megalomaniac who ever lived. Perhaps nature is such a fearsome place, so amoral and inhuman in its scope, because the universe is what the mind of a deranged tyrant would look like were that mind by some miracle to metamorphose into a lifeless shell. Ah, but not entirely lifeless! Even in Gods death throes, he must have the last laugh in the faces of his scapegoats: we drops of Gods lifeblood must suffer from similar existential angst; our cries are thus echoes of Gods infantile shrieks into the void. In the undead god, which creatively destroys itself by ever more complex forms of corruption until these fade from entropy, we isolated and accursed creatures must live as godlike, prancing in our bubble worlds of politically correct fantasies or ranting at the horror of reality. What we should be working on, though, isnt how to play with the toy gods of exoteric theism, but where to go creatively from Mainlanders more fitting theistic myth. The mystics challenge is to avoid Gods fate, to sublimate angst so that personal or collective suicide isnt the only viable option. The transhumanists dream of downloading our minds into a computer for eternal life sounds suspiciously like a sugarcoated way of speaking of a bizarre act of self-destruction, much as God might have rationalized his metamorphosis. And the postmodern monoculture seems a stage of social decadence and decline, in the senses given by Oswald Spengler. In Mainlanders myth we have the starting point of a fitting, unembarrassing religion, of a grand narrative that honours the suffering at the core of existential authenticity. But, to reverse the Christian narrative, which seems a garbled version of Mainlanders insight, we need to meditate on how even the lives of such pitiful creatures as us can redeem the death of our God.

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Varieties of Mysticism ____________________________________________________

Mysticism is the doctrine that the hidden wisdom of monistic theology, according to which all souls are united with God, can be proved by direct experience of that unity, through meditation or an altered state of consciousness. If we define God loosely, to cover the pantheism that identifies God with natures impersonal creativity, we see that atheistic mysticism is possible; indeed, Buddhism is another kind of atheistic mysticism. But besides the difference between theistic and atheistic mystics, theres that between what Ill call optimistic and pessimistic ones. The former promises a happy ending for all, while the latter laments the fact that our time on the stage of life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and that our grand finale is ignominious extinction along with the clueless animal species. Ill explore here the ramifications of this latter distinction.

Optimistic Mystics
Mystics claim to have secret knowledge of the worlds unity. Buddhists, for example, say that everything is interdependent and thus united, from an enlightened perspective, whereas without that perspective, everything appears independent and that illusory disunity is the overall cause of suffering. When we recognize that what seems a highly heterogeneous world is actually united by causal and logical relations, for example, we no longer draw absolute distinctions between the self and the rest of the world, or

257 between selves. Those apparent differences are mere illusions, and when the mystic replaces that naive perception with an experience of realitys oneness, she feels bliss instead of disappointment, alienation, or the many other forms of suffering. In practice, though, optimistic mysticism takes two forms, depending on whether the oneness of reality is identified with the individual ego or with the underlying state of the unconscious. In the former case, mystical monism becomes a kind of obnoxious solipsism, such as we find in feel-good, materialistic New Age ideologies. Oprah Winfreys cult, for example, based as it is on the alleged spiritual law of attraction, according to which we get what we most want (because our desires are like magnets that attract what complements them), is individualistic in the Western, American sense. In this comedic mysticism, reality consists of the infantile ego and its toys, all else being illusory nuisances. So the chief virtue is Ayn Randian selfishness and this pseudospirituality becomes propaganda in the service of the beastly economic competition that naturally produces oligarchy. An Eastern (Hindu or Buddhist) mystic would contend that materialistic mysticism is an oxymoron, that individualistic, solipsistic gurus are charlatans who pander to peoples spiritual inclinations, to hawk their books and other paraphernalia, and that true mysticism, based on an actual experience of the worlds unity, leads to the opposite lifestyle of asceticism. According to this more traditional variety, the ego is an illusion, meaning not that our mind or personhood doesnt exist but that its not what it seems; in particular, no person is a self-sufficient, Randian superhero. Thus, to feed the appetite for self-enrichment or self-aggrandizement is to betray a lack of mystical wisdom, and materialistic mysticism is doubly comedic since the last laugh is on the spiritual capitalist for being a fraud. Far from rationalizing infantile selfishness, the mystic should be detached from her instincts and desires for her private welfare, since those (geneticallydetermined and often culturally-conditioned) mental states trap the unwary into an unenlightened state of awareness. Moreover, a true mystic is altruistic, helping others escape the suffering produced by their ignorance. The reason for this selflessness is that the mystic regards all people as metaphysically one, so that just as we wouldnt

258 normally wish to harm ourselves or any part of our body, we shouldnt wish to see other people suffer. I want to emphasize the main mystical argument against existential angst and the tragic perspective on life. Again, the argument assumes radical monism, the oneness of everything through the interdependence of all forms. According to this argument, angst is a form of suffering produced by ignorance of that unity; that is, the sufferer is misled by the apparent difference between the self and the rest of the world, which can cause loneliness, alienation, and fear. Far from ending with our biological death or even with the likely extinction of our species, were all one with the underlying flow of natural forces which evolves more and more illusory stages, levels, and other patterns within itself.

Pessimistic Mystics
What, then, is pessimistic mysticism? Whereas a spiritual optimist says the values that best correspond to metaphysical reality are love, peace, and so forth, the pessimist says that the hidden wisdom calls for melancholy. Instead of cheerfully loving your neighbor as yourself or prophesying the ultimate vindication of human values, We should be careful not to overstate the difference between the two types. Spiritual optimists must concede two points: first, all can be one only metaphysically, which allows for the many rational distinctions between illusory appearances; second, as an empirical fact, enlightenment is rare, so that most people are trapped by ignorance and suffering. The optimist replies that reason isnt as trustworthy as direct experience, and the pessimist agrees, affirming that reason is a curse that brings us sorrowful knowledge of what the mystic calls the merely apparent world. But the pessimist reminds the optimist that, according to the second concession, even mystics are seldom fully enlightened, which means that hardly anyone is liberated from our instincts and culture which drive us into the world of rationally-distinguishable illusions. For example, even the mystic has a sexual instinct which causes him or her to distinguish between

259 men and women. An enlightened person overcomes the force of that instinct, which in turn requires detachment from sex-obsessed cultures. The point, though, is that if full, permanent enlightenment is very rare, so that even spiritual optimists have only fleeting experiences of our metaphysical unity before those optimists are plunged once again into the profane mode in which everything seems to be a tragic multiplicity, even the optimist must concede that a mystic should grieve for the majority whose delusions lead them to fail, to debase themselves, and to suffer. The optimist can reply that what happens at the nave level of consciousness, at which the world seems a multiplicity, is insignificant compared to what happens at the deeper level, which is that those differences dissolve. This fatalism is tantamount to saying, though, that suffering doesnt matter because its unreal in the first place, which raises the question of why anyone should be motivated to seek to escape that suffering through enlightenment. No, mysticism in general assumes that enlightenment is better than the naivety which causes suffering, and that bliss is better than the disappointments caused by foolishly selfish grasping after hallucinations in the matrix. But again, this means that even the optimist must concede that most waking hours lived by intelligent creatures are tragic and absurd, meaning that theyre full of pointless suffering and that they dont lead to enlightenment (since most people die unenlightened, meaning that their consciousness is never fully attuned to metaphysical reality). The optimists final rejoinder, as I see it, is that reincarnation ensures that everyone will eventually be so enlightened, so we have a happy ending after all. This, though, is a retreat from the mystics empiricist criterion, which is that direct experience is more reliable than abstract reasoning; reincarnation is a dubious theological doctrine that must compete with scientific theories. Should we be optimistic at least about those few who are fully enlightened or who enjoy moments of freedom from ignorance and suffering? Not in a way that brings any comfort to the majority with their profane delusions. Enlightenment means complete detachment from the personality, character, and intellect with which we instinctively and emotionally

260 identify. A liberated mystic doesnt identify with anything that the majority cares about, including the individuals fate, cultural distractions, social networks, or political or workrelated obligations. As I say in Buddhism, this is a paradoxical sort of happy ending for the mystic that looks a lot like epic failure. In Hinduism, preparation for moksha is supposed to be the priority for the forest dweller who shuns society only after that dweller has run a household, contributed to society, and thus succeeded in profane terms. This is like the rock star who parties nightly with scores of women, pickling his liver with alcohol until finally in his old age, when he can no longer afford such decadence, he sees the light, becomes a born-again Christian and preaches asceticism as the ultimate ideal. The logic, I take it, is that you wont appreciate asceticism until youve exhausted your wrongheaded cravings for worldly things. But theres still the appearance here of hypocrisy: this all seems too convenient for the mystic, since she gets to enjoy the benefits of foolishness, only to cheaply repent on her death bed. Moreover, her spiritual rebirth cant be perfectly tested, since she cant take back her previous life of relative luxury. Of course, this hypocrisy is irrelevant from the enlightened perspective, since it applies only to the individuals merit which is of no consequence in the greater scheme. In any case, I raise this case of the elderly ascetics double standard to illustrate that while profane success is trivialized from the enlightened perspective, the feeling is surely mutual: a life of poverty and renunciation of worldly pleasures is a paradigmatic failure, from the unenlightened viewpoint. So enlightenment isnt exactly a cause for celebration. Enlightenment is what Schopenhauer calls the denial of the will to life, meaning the devaluation of everything were naturally selected and culturally pressured to prize; this enlightenment isnt the freedom to do what you want or to enjoy an eternity of pleasure in heaven, but is instead the end of the personal self and the replacing of it with nothing at all, that is, with a state of nirvana. Here, freedom means escape from the worlds seductions, as opposed to the libertarians egoistic, infantile freedom to pursue your cravings with no impediments. The upshot is that theres something tragic even about enlightenment itself, the latter being the mystics ultimate good. Not only must the mystics success look like failure to society at large, but the mystics so-called bliss or

261 spiritual pleasure is entirely negative: the liberated mystic feels the peace that comes from having no concerns or responsibilities at all, no ties to the apparent world which cause stress. Spiritual bliss or peace of mind, which depends on an enlightened view of our metaphysical situation, is what it feels like to lose everything that can be categorized.

The Horror of Mysticism

Lets return, finally, to the main objection to pessimistic mysticism, that there can be no such thing since pessimism requires the limited, egoistic perspective and thus ignorance about everythings oneness. I think its true that standard existential angst, horror, and rebelliousness require the distinction between the personal self and the world thats indifferent to that self. Thus, if mysticism has no room for that distinction, existential mysticism makes no sense. As I said, however, the optimists monism does include that distinction and merely reframes it so that instead of having to be preoccupied by the gulf between what wed prefer and how things really are, the optimist can reassure herself that that distinction is only illusory and ultimately overcome by the substantial oneness of all illusions. And as Ive also said, that ultimate overcoming would happen only for someone who is completely enlightened and thus divorced from all naturally selected and most culturally sanctioned forms of life. The rest of us are forced to identify at least partly with our mind and our personality, and are thus doomed to follow reason to the existential dead end, retreat to some ignoble delusion, or transcend angst by some means other than enlightenment, such as by adhering to some cosmicist religion. Now, as Ive discussed in Buddhism and in Postmodern Religion, I doubt that the only path to angst is through that Cartesian distinction between the thinking self and the unthinking world. In particular, I question the basis for the enlightened mystics bliss. Assuming the mystics experience of everythings oneness is possible, why should this experience necessarily comfort rather than horrify the mystic? Our reaction to that experience should depend on the nature of that underlying oneness. While Lovecrafts

262 cosmicism neednt be monistic, his view does illustrate how transcendent wisdom can unsettle the recipient and even render her insane. For one thing, what the mystic should learn is that all the goals we think are justified by our genetic instinct and mainstream cultural indoctrination are woefully narrow-minded and diametrically opposed to what we ought to want. For example, instead of perpetuating natures hold on us, by sexually reproducing and thus replenishing the victims of natural forces, we ought to be denying the will to live in all its manifestations. Far from comforting the mystic, her condemnation of the ignorance that generates the entire world of so-called illusions should terrify her, since shes effectively abandoned most of her humanity, trusting that her altered state of consciousness will elucidate how she ought to act while still in the belly of the beast, that is, while still imprisoned in a body thats configured to present her with the false world of the matrix. In any case, there remains the contradiction between wanting to be enlightened, to escape suffering, and learning when enlightened that the instincts to prefer pleasure to pain and to empathize with those who suffer are parts of the world that ought to be abandoned. Presumably, from the enlightened viewpoint, there is no natural empathy, pity, or utilitarian weighing of pleasures against pains; instead, theres a vision of the world that transcends all of our natural and politically correct expectations. Again, I ask why that vision should reassure rather than horrify. Why, when we discover that our meager personhood counts for nothing, that natural and cultural forces have probably led us astray though weve relied on them from our infancy onward; when the mystics metaphysical reality must be impersonal and inhumane, to have evolved the disastrous world of illusions (samsara) in the first place--I ask, why be tranquilized by such facts? Why turn then to New Age happy-talk instead of ranting from the rooftops, proclaiming your disgust with that vision? If there is music of the spheres, why should that music sound pleasant to human ears, no matter how enlightened the listening mind? Of course, the mystic can always say that youll never know until you directly experience the unity for yourself. But because any mystical experience must be processed by the human body, and because that body evolved to service the genes as opposed to being

263 intelligently designed in the furtherance of a benevolent agenda, Im disinclined to give the spiritual optimist the last word on this point. There is, after all, a skeptical interpretation not just of the charlatans variety of optimistic spirituality, but of the genuine, mainly Eastern kinds. How do we know the mystic is accurately or even honestly reporting her transcendent experience, when she assures us that that experience is entirely encouraging? Perhaps her optimism is one more delusion to which she resorts to deny the deeper wisdom of cosmic horror. And perhaps ascetic detachment is a sign of existential numbness and shell-shock, after a union with otherness that undermines all human modes of judgment, and thus that must obliterate her feeling of self-worth as an embodied, natural creature. Perhaps the ascetic detaches from natural and social cares not just because they cause her suffering, but because she learns that human nature is disgusting from the mystical viewpoint of eternity. And instead of dealing honestly and creatively with that revelation, she endures a more ambiguous form of suffering, avoiding her natural angst only by practically lobotomizing herself, by means of excessive mental detachment. In this case, pantheistic existential cosmicism, such as the sort I explore in my rants, would be the more authentic metaphysical vision of mysticism, calling at least initially for a melancholic appreciation of the tragedy and absurdity of our natural predicament.

Appendix: The Definition of Mistake

Mistake: what business graduates who lack a refined vocabulary call an act of vice. When you pull your underwear on backwards, add a quarter rather than the needed half of a teaspoon of sugar to your sauce, or make a left turn instead of the needed one on the right, you make a mistake. That is, you absentmindedly fail, usually in some minor way for which theres little or no culpability. But when youre a politician, a businessperson, or a lawyer, for example, and you naturally lie, cheat, and steal your way to the top, you dont err at all but knowingly play the social games that require perverse excellence in vice, that is, great demonstrations of selfishness, deceitfulness, cold-heartedness, brazenness, short-sightedness, and so forth.

264

When a Machiavellian power-player gets caught practicing those dark arts, he invariably seeks to avoid responsibility for his choices by labeling them mere mistakes. For example, western CEOs are notorious for pretending to be dunces or ignorant figureheads when theyre caught trying to pull off billion dollar frauds and their companies blow up in their faces. They then act like they never even deserved the hundreds of millions they were raking in thanks to their hand-picked board members who rubberstamp their pay packages, like they had no knowledge that their company was engaging in the very frauds that have become standard operating procedure in socalled post-industrial, financialized societies. Instead, they humbly concede, before senators who are equipped only to grill and never to roast, boil, or skin--so says the mass medias meme--that theyre guilty of a mistake or two, albeit a mistake with disastrous consequences, but nevertheless an innocent moment of absentmindedness. To be sure, a power player never publicly owns up to her year after year of accrued experience at honing the vices thats a prerequisite for advancing any politician or free market businessperson within her hierarchy. Moreover, because few people want to admit that most sectors of their society consist of just such practically amoral hierarchies, a nihilistic or sociopathic Machiavellian is quickly forgiven for his or her mistake. After all, as the saying goes, anyone can make a mistake (i.e. everyone sins in a declining, corrupt society). The first such mistake was committed by Satan, the Prince of Evil, and I happen to have the transcript. Verily, Lord, said Satan to God, Ive jealously watched you waste your divine powers on this petty Creation, on these beasts you call humans. Ive burned with ambition at the thought of what I would do instead were I seated on your throne, and I relished the prospects of waging an angelic war on your hosts and then either of unseating you and becoming master of all or of losing my station in a blaze of glory and then of marshaling all the demonic forces of Hell to sabotage every one of your foolish endeavours. Nevertheless, I say to you now with respect to all of that, on this Judgment Day at the end of all things, with the blood of trillions of your humans dripping from my claws and fangs, that I merely made a mistake.

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God is then reported to have grilled Satan for hours in front of TV cameras, before punishing him with a fine of 0.003% of Satans total net worth.

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Darwinism and Natures Undeadness ____________________________________________________

Following the principle called Occams Razor, scientists seek simple explanations of phenomena, meaning explanations that refer to as few theoretical entities as possible. So instead of thinking of the Earth as somehow special and separate from the rest of the universe, Newton unified the two by positing the universal force of gravity, a force that works the same everywhere. Maxwell unified magnetism, electricity, and light, showing that theyre manifestations of a single force, the electromagnetic field. And Einstein unified space, time, and gravity with his theory of spacetime. In each of these unifications, a complex way of speaking is reduced to a simpler way, and depending on the complex theorys mix of strengths and weaknesses, the reduction may entail the elimination of that theorys frame of reference so that the simpler theory alone is thought to correspond to reality. I think Darwins theory of natural selection is another case of unification, but some of this theory's philosophical implications arent as well appreciated. What Darwin showed is that nature can do the work of an intelligent designer, in creating species of living things. Prior to Darwin, the difference between life and death was usually explained in dualistic terms: natural life derives from God who is separate from all of nature and who implants a spirit or transcendent, immaterial essence, within certain material bodies, while nonliving matter lacks any supernatural spirit. Here we had an absolute distinction

267 between life and death, much like Newtons sharp distinction between space and time. But after Darwin, scientists no longer regard the source of an organisms distinguishing features--its consciousness, agency, pleasures and pains--as supernatural, which is to say that Darwinian biology is monistic with respect to the difference between the living and the nonliving. Darwins theory of how members of a species come to possess their traits is simpler than the theistic, dualistic explanation. Instead of having to refer to two types of things, a Creator God and the created material form, we need refer only to material forms, such as the environment, genes, and simple physical bodies which reproduce themselves from one generation to the next so that their distant ancestors migrate and occupy other niches, becoming more complex and specialized in the process.

Darwinian Life
Those repercussions of Darwinism are familiar to most educated people. But when we ask again, What is the difference between the living and the nonliving, given the naturalistic, nontheistic theory of natural selection? we might be surprised to learn that were no longer scientifically entitled to the commonsense dualism between spirit and matter. When we understand life scientifically, after Darwin, we can no longer rationally justify any talk of immaterial spiritual essences that derive from a supernatural realm inhabited by a perfect person who somehow precedes the natural universe. But if there are no immaterial spirits, what makes life metaphysically different from non-life? Moreover, take what are intuitively thought to be nonliving things, like the environment, DNA, proteins, and chemical reactions, and take also relatively nonliving things like bacteria and viruses, which are the precursors to higher organisms. If these elements-and not some supreme living thing, like God--are responsible for the origin and the evolution of life, again whats the metaphysical difference between the living and the nonliving? To be sure, there are scientific answers to these questions. For example, biologically speaking, life must have genes and the capacity to reproduce, and thus must evolve by

268 natural selection. Also, the physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, offered a deeper definition of life, according to which an organism resists entropy and thermodynamic equilibrium (death), by taking order (such as food) from the environment to maintain the internal order of its metabolic processes. But these scientific answers are consistent with the naturalistic elimination of the theists pre-Darwinian, dualistic notions of spirit and spiritless matter. The naive way of understanding life, by thinking of a transcendent spiritual essence within every organism, clashes with the modern scientific perspective in which life can be explained by referring solely to material things in nature. To summarize the problem, then, we have a commonsense, dualistic and theistic assumption about the difference between a living and a dead body, and after Darwin we have a scientific, monistic theory of that difference. According to the latter theory, what we think of as living things are made entirely from what wed intuitively call nonliving things; moreover, not even the so-called highest organisms, such as primates, are living in the nave sense of having a spirit with a supernatural source. Thus, the nave way of speaking of life has been replaced by a more rational way. Instead of associating life with the supernatural, biologists explain both life and non-life in naturalistic terms. Instead of being created by means of an intelligent designers plan, living things develop from simple, nonliving natural processes. Nature, which was once thought to be nonliving, assumes the role of God in creating the diversity of life in the biosphere; and instead of an all-knowing and all-powerful mind as the ultimate cause of life, theres a series of accidents that occurs over time that happens to set the conditions for the transformation of nonliving matter into breathing, eating, fighting, and dying entities such as you and me. In so far as the everyday concepts of life and death are tainted by the pre-Darwinian, theistic connotations, these concepts are no longer rationally respectable. But my question is about the metaphysical concept that replaces them; specifically, if the theistic intuition is longer tenable, in light of modern science, what viable intuition about the nature of life and nonlife can be made to cohere with that scientific understanding? Again, we have the scientific definitions which assume

269 philosophical monism (naturalism). That is, according to biologists, both animals and rocks, for example, are material objects subject to natural law and also to chance, as opposed to divinely intended, interactions. If life comes from non-life, and both are natural, meaning that neither is invested with anything supernatural like an immortal spirit, whats the metaphysical difference between, say, a person and the nonliving evolutionary processes in her ancestors environment that brought that descendant into being?

All are Undead

The answer, which isnt widely appreciated, seems to be the following. Nothing in nature is living in the old, supernatural sense. But neither is anything natural dead in that sense, since the theistic intuition is that nonliving, dumb and blind matter cant do the work of God, which is why God is needed to create everything--especially life on Earth. Natural forces are neither alive nor dead, in the senses given by the old intuition. Nevertheless, those forces do the work of God but without being God and indeed without being alive even in the modern scientific sense. These forces, then, are undead, as are their products such as you and me, which is to say that the zombie stands as the best symbol for our intuitions to latch onto as we come to grips with the philosophical implications of Darwinism. What is it to be undead? The word undead means technically dead but somehow reanimated so that the corpse doesnt stay dead. Undeadness is like spacetime, in that an undead thing has some attributes of the living and of the nonliving, but isnt the same as either in the old, naive sense. Just as the concept of spacetime undermines the Newtonian theory of the absolute (observer-independent) dimensions of space and time, the concept of undeadness undermines the theistic myth of the gulf between living spirit and dead matter. In recent cinema, a zombie is a monster thats both alive and dead, and thus neither; more precisely, a zombie has some features of the living (a zombie moves, eats, senses) but also some features of the dead (a zombie is brain dead, and it has a decaying body and no metabolic functions). In short, a zombie is like

270 a macroscopic virus, possessing life functions so rudimentary that the zombie occupies a grey area in the biological continuum between the living and the nonliving. Historically, this movie monster descends from the African and Haitian folk practice of using a magic potion to induce a state of death-like suspended animation in a victim. In any case, theres little rational content in the idea of the zombie monster, since this monster is, of course, both fictional and paradoxical. Still, the zombie is the most useful symbol in making philosophical sense of Darwinism, since the relatively harmless horror aroused by the fictional zombie sublimates the horror wed otherwise feel more frequently whenever wed contemplate the fact that Darwin effectively zombified the universe and all of its inhabitants. Part of the horror of zombies is that their state of living death is typically left as an unanswerable mystery: theyre manifestly as dangerous as living predators, since they hunt and feed off of animals, but theyre also obviously dead since theyre reborn, as it were, only after a persons brain death. The root of the horror is that their similarities to both living and dead things confound us. How is it that a dead body could get up and walk on its own? And how humiliated and alienated must we feel when we wonder whether we might be left so far in the dark regarding the nature of reality? What sort of twisted world could allow for such an abomination, for such counterfeit life in a corpse? These are some of the questions we might ask about the movie monster. But Darwinism compels us to ask such questions about our actual selves and about all natural life forms and indeed about the whole cosmos! Just as the fictional state of living death is typically left in the horror movies as a brute, inexplicable fact, so too scientists and philosophical naturalists are content to stipulate that ultimately theres no intuitively satisfying explanation of how a godless, nonliving universe can pop into existence and create life. As the naturalist says, the facts are what they are, regardless of how we feel about them or whether they make intuitive sense to us. (Bertrand Russell took this stand in his famous 1948 debate on Gods existence, with Frederick Copleston, when Russell said that the universe doesnt need a cause because the universe is just there, and that's all.) This kind of metaphysical realism, as its called, amounts to saying that

271 nature and all of its inhabitants are potentially as horrifying as zombie monsters that get up and walk in the first place for no reason at all. Just as the universe begins with a Big Bang, from a singularity whose internal properties are miraculous in so far as theyre not subject to natural law, a zombie begins with a corpses magical reanimation, and both are accepted as brute facts of life in nature and in the movies, respectively. In light of Darwinism, however, all of nature takes on other zombie qualities as well, and so the ultimate inexplicability of the natural universe makes for a more profound horror. Moreover, biologists and philosophers of science frequently speak in shorthand when discussing adaptations or biological functions, using scare quotes when attributing intention to biological processes. The long way of explaining a trait like a bats wings is to tell the story of how certain genes and proteins fitted into an ancestral environment, in that the host bodies produced by those chemicals happened to thrive and reproduce, and so on. The short, intuitive but nave interpretation of the trait is that a bat has wings because the bat is supposed to fly, as though the bat were designed with that end in someones mind. The biologist wants to avoid that theistic intuition, since Darwin showed that such teleology is wrongheaded, but the biologist is forced to give some credit to the nave view--and not just because the long way of speaking becomes cumbersome. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett explains in numerous writings, the evolutionary pattern is subject to the intentional stance, meaning that the bats success in flying with its wings does look, for all the world, as though there were a designers mind responsible for that success. Thus, Dennett personifies natural selection as Mother Nature. The biologist is compelled by the life-like qualities of the evolutionary process to resort to such anthropomorphism, but isnt committed to identifying that process as an intelligent designer. Thus, the biologist compromises by anthropomorphizing the process, but by putting scare quotes around the offending, nave language. For example, a biologist might explain the adaptability of the bats wings by saying that the wings are for the purpose of flying, or that flying is their function, and the biologist will use scare quotes to signal both her displeasure with the compromise and the fact that shes speaking in an ironic fashion.

272 Likewise, a zombie monster isnt really alive even though its life-like qualities are uncanny, so were forced to treat the monster merely as if it were alive. The zombie passes the Turing Test for life, except that unlike in the case of a computer, we happen to know in advance that a zombie is, scientifically speaking, dead. In other words, just like naturally selected traits, a zombie triggers our intentional stance, our social instinct for positing and interpreting mental processes, and so we think of the zombie as in some way alive even though we know better. The zombies a monstrous abomination because of that paradox: the idea of this monster mocks our cherished social instinct, by simultaneously triggering and nullifying that instinct. And once again, Darwinism turns all of the actual cosmos into the same sort of monstrous abomination. Natural forces, which are devoid of life, scientifically and theistically speaking, nevertheless behave as though they were alive by creating the cosmological conditions for life and then by fine-tuning life through natural selection. Moreover, organisms themselves are as dead as the natural forces that produce them, given the nave, theistic conceptions of life and death which flow so readily from our social instinct, but organisms behave as though they were animated by immaterial spirits (even though we now know theyre not). All of nature should be thought to have mere pseudo-life, just like the fictional zombie, and this is some of the metaphysical fallout of the Darwinian picture. Thus, the underappreciated philosophical implication of modern biology is that, like a zombie movie, the evolutionary saga is a horror show. When we behold signs of life, whether by communing with nature, walking through a zoo, studying a biology textbook, or just looking in the mirror, we ought to be fleeing in terror as though from a zombie horde. But of course we dont do so because were not equipped with the superhuman stamina to sustain the degree of terror thats warranted by our existential circumstances. Instead, we confine our dread of the metaphysical facts of life, or rather of the facts of the great living death, to our reaction to the silly Hollywood beasty, in the safety and comfort of a movie theater. Metaphysically speaking, though, the zombie is no silly fiction; given Darwinism, we are all walking dead things. We are neither living nor dead (in the old senses), but undead (to use a newer, more fitting term), and when we

273 die in the scientific sense, our decaying body will add to the natural process by which the larger zombie which is our planet evolves the next round of its zombie progeny.

Ironic Postmodern Pantheism

Indeed, this philosophical implication of Darwinism, that the ordinary notions of life and nonlife no longer make sense and that they need to be replaced by something like the idea of a baffling state of living death, amounts to an ironic, postmodern kind of pantheism. Darwinism not only zombifies but deifies all of nature, since the evolutionary process encompasses the cosmic preconditions of the emergence of life so that the whole universe is required to create life in a mindless, natural fashion. There is no personal God, but the universe as a whole in all of its interconnectedness does yield organisms as byproducts, as though the universe were a creator god. Nature as a whole isnt personal, but social creatures like us will inevitably interpret evolutionary patterns as anthropomorphic. The divinity of nature is no majestic thing, since the cosmos is best understood as an undead monstrosity. Whereas prior to Darwin, educated people could attribute intentional properties to the universe, with no hint of irony since they could assume that a personal god created the universe as a machine, bestowing it with artificial functions, in our postmodern time we can only look on in disgust as the universe abuses our social reflex, compelling us to be overly friendly with what we know scientifically to be inanimate matter. We know that we ourselves are spiritless entities; to be sure, we have a brain that has marvelous effects, but metaphysically were one with the natural cosmos, meaning that were thoroughly material and physical. But physically interacting material things arent inert or dead; theyre peerlessly creative and thus as divine as anything we can know. That divinity, however, is repulsive, blasphemous, and just as abominable as a zombie monsters mockery of life. Our ideal of life derives from the nave intuition implanted in us by our social instinct, by what Dennett calls the intentional stance. We wish we had an inner essence that accounts for our suspicion that were not at home in nature; we feel we dont belong

274 because our human qualities are so unique. Thus, we assume we have an invisible spirit, a precious fragment of a transcendent reality that marks us as akin to a greater realm than the dark and primitive physical one. Evolution forces us to think socially about each other, and so we interpret our behavior by positing minds that freely choose and thus that possess moral value. We assume our spiritual core is immortal, because its supernatural. But Darwinism reveals all of this as delusory. We are not alive in any such respect. Were forced to think we are, because thats how our brain operates, by installing mental programs that model both our external and internal worlds, simplifying them to keep us on the straight and narrow path of fulfilling our evolutionary functions (note the scare quotes). But neither are we dead in the nave sense in which spiritless matter was presumed to lack any divine creativity. No, were something worse, something bewildering, and were children of an equally monstrous parent. Were no more personal than our god; all of us are undead monsters, conglomerations of natural mechanisms that simulate life while lacking any metaphysical distinction that sets us apart from whatever seems to us plainly lifeless. We personify each other and our ultimate creator alike, but those projections are genetically- and culturallyprogrammed vanities. The word pantheism means that God is the universe, that everything is equally divine. Although many theists insist on praying to the corpse, the personal god of mainstream religions is dead, the ancient spells having little if any effect on those inspired by modern scientists to think critically about big philosophical questions. But modern scientists themselves re-enchant nature, divinizing it by being forced by their methodological naturalism to preclude any supernatural creativity. If all creativity must be natural, and the cosmic seed develops into a wondrous tree indeed, complexifying and emerging levels of self-contained patterns like flowers growing from a stem, eventually evolving biological life on at least one planet and probably on many more, the universe isnt just creative but supremely, awesomely so. That makes the universe our god, our creator, albeit a mindless one that only seems personally alive to social creatures like us, but which is actually in a nightmarish state of living death. Like each of us, the cosmos is a spiritless leviathan, but one whose twists and turns create and

275 destroy whole worlds and galaxies instead of just families, communities, or businesses. Thus, the universe has at best a simulated mind, its processes triggering our social reflex so that were forced to anthropomorphize nature even as we now know better. But even were there no biological life to look on the universe in horror, nature would be metaphysically undead since natural forces would still be diabolically creative, like musical instruments playing a tune all on their own, with no one to breathe life into them. Personal divinity is subjective, a mere projection by self-centered primates onto the alien vistas to make us feel more comfortable in a humanized world. But natures undead divinity is an objective fact. Natural forces alone create everything around us and they do so inexplicably and monstrously, with no personal handler, spewing out an infinite diversity of forms on a mind-boggling scale; creating prodigiously, thanklessly, never tiring or second-guessing themselves, creating and destroying to make room for more novel products, for new galaxies and untold wonders. We are such blind, childish know-nothing blunders that we can be surrounded by such infinite creativity and then stoop to attributing the whole universe to a guy like us who lurks somewhere offstage. Only such clumsy braggarts like us could witness nature patently creating itself as it goes along, and then ignore all of that and posit invisible, personal spirits (fairies, angels, gods, etc) as the true culprits. Anyway, Darwinism seems to me to have these dismal implications. There is no life or nonlife in the old dualistic sense. Darwinism unifies life and death, showing that nature simulates God, and simulated life that paradoxically occurs purely in spiritless and thus dead matter is best symbolized by a zombies undeadness. The zombie apocalypse has long come and gone and the zombies won. We cant escape them, because we never were the few remaining, uninfected heroes, remnants of a wholesome time before the coming of the wasteland at the worlds end. There never was a titanic clash between human and monster, between supernatural spirit and passive matter. From the beginning, atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies and the whole panoply of cosmic forces have been infected by the zombie plague, creating and evolving themselves just like the God of yore was supposed to have created and shaped the universe. In our dreadful

276 postmodern condition, we can worship our god only with severe irony, because we have the same social impulses as our prescientific ancestors, but we also have the findings of modern science, including Darwinism. Thus, our prayers should be rants within the undead god.

Appendix: The Definition of God

Gods, undead and personal: gods exist but hide in plain sight, so that ironically atheists surpass theists in their respective knowledge of the divine. If gods are ultimate creative powers, there are two kinds of gods which are obviously real: natural evolution and higher animal consciousness. The former is just the evident power of matter and energy to combine in various forms which interact and develop new forms in time, from molecules to galaxies and perhaps infinite universes. Natures creativity gives rise to complex patterns throughout the cosmos, but this prodigious power is impersonal; to be sure, like nave children we anthropomorphize the sun, the wind, and the rain, but thats just projection, the over-extension of our personhood onto the inhuman, so that we might mitigate our alienation from nature. Nevertheless, natural forces are divinely creative. Nature is thus neither living nor dead. The natural creator gods, named now by those modern wizards, the physicists, astronomers, biologists, and other scientists, are undead: creative but monstrous, inhuman, terrifyingly other than what were most familiar with and best capable of understanding, which is ourselves. Consciousness is the living, personal god which creates what the philosopher Kant called the phenomenal world by interpreting experience, beholding everything within a worldview, applying concepts and values, identifying the natural form and thus acquiring power over it. Theres no good reason to think that consciousness is naturally or metaphysically prior to nature; no mind created the universe out of nothing. However, the subjective aspect of everything in nature depends on conscious creatures. The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics calls this aspect the "collapse of the wave function." The point is that were life never to have evolved anywhere, there would

277 still have been stars, planets, atoms, and all the other products of undead gods, but these products would differ from the ways we experience the world, given how our brains happen to process information we receive from our senses. We help create the world we experience, and to that extent were all divinely creative. However, most conscious beings are doubly oppressed rather than reigning in glory. Were entombed within the decaying body of the undead god, that is, within the natural totality that evolves as a result of the interplay of mindlessly creative forces. Also, most of us are forced to occupy lowly positions in power hierarchies dominated by conscious beings that, unlike so-called Christians, are genuinely twice born and doubly divine. The oligarchs who tend to rule societies conquer nature by understanding their experience within a worldview, but they also conquer their fellow conscious beings, identifying with the undead gods as the oligarchs compete according to social versions of the principles of natural selection. Oligarchs are thus avatars of monstrous nature, their sociopathic depths of vice symbolizing the menacing inhumanity of natural forces which afflict us despite our more modest divinity and limited power over nature.

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Science and the Matrix Metaphor ____________________________________________________

When the Matrix movies were at the height of their popularity some years ago, philosophers were ecstatic because those movies popularized some canonical Western philosophical ideas, reaching back to Descartes handling of the evil genius form of skepticism, and to Platos Cave metaphor. Those films also have Gnostic and other religious themes. Less well-known, I think, is that The Matrix is useful as a way of popularizing what are now becoming scientific conventions, especially in biology and cognitive science. In fact, the core idea of The Matrix, as opposed to the movies plot, is shown to be almost literally true by those sciences. Ive alluded a few times in my philosophical rants to The Matrix, and so Ill explore here the relevance of especially the first of the three movies to Rants Within the Undead God. First, I need to summarize the movies premise. The movie supposes that what most people perceive of the world is actually a mass hallucination, a virtual reality constructed by anti-human, artificially intelligent machines and employed to keep most people docile so that the machines can use their dormant organic bodies for fuel. The hero, Neo, wakes up from the dream world, into the harsher reality and fights the machines, eventually sacrificing himself and rescuing his fellow liberated, enlightened allies.

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Genes and Mental Models

Now, there are two scientific theories that The Matrix seems to popularize, one from biology, the other from psychology. The former is Richard Dawkins genes-eye perspective on natural selection, and the latter is the theory of the self as the brains model of its inner processes. To begin with Dawkins, he went as far as to resort to science fiction tropes in pushing his point that natural selection can benefit the replicators at the expense of their vehicles or hosts. On this view, that which is primarily selected by the environment is a genetic lineage, and the phenotype--with all of its physical and mental adaptations--piggybacks on the fitness of the genes, much as Ayn Rand and plutocrats maintain that relatively poor people survive and enjoy many privileges only because of the greatness of their financial superiors who create civilization in the first place. The second theory, found in books such as The Self Illusion by Bruce Wood, and The Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger, is that just as the brain simplifies the external data it receives from the senses, processing the information and producing a model of the outer world, so too the brain simplifies and simulates its neural activity, producing what we think of the self or the ego. The point isnt that the external world or the self doesnt exist, but that neither is as we naively assume it to be. For example, even though our eyes dart back and forth when we look at something, we assume that all of what were looking at is visually clear, knowing that we could focus on any part of it at will. The focal point of our field of vision is actually tiny compared to everything else we see at a glance. That which falls outside the focal point is comparatively blurry, but the brain remembers what we saw when we focused, say, on the left side of an apple, so that when we focus on the right side, we can think of the whole apple as a crisply-delineated object. In this way, our memories create a simplified impression, or model, of the apple, which edits out the visual information pertaining to the apples blurriness. Likewise, we have an idea of the self as a conscious, free, rational agent, but this self is an illusion generated by the brain and serving an evolutionary function. Anyone who

280 couldnt simplify her inner or outer sense experience in these ways would be stupefied as a result of sensory overload, and thus couldnt actively safeguard the genes or transmit them to the next generation. The kind of model at issue here is common in science. For example, the physical model of DNA or of atoms is a highly simplified representation that ignores many details, but the model might be useful for certain purposes. A so-called ceteris paribus law is another kind of simplification, which generalizes about what would happen in a system were everything outside the system left out of the picture. In reality, systems interact and so a ceteris paribus law can have exceptions. But the point is that our folk psychological myth about our nature as human beings, which theists take to the extreme by positing the immaterial and immortal spirit, is like these scientific models. At best, such a model is useful as a means to a certain end, but at worst the end served by the model is detrimental to us or the model oversimplifies the facts and becomes counterproductive (as is likely the case with respect to the theists dualistic notion of the self).

Our Biomechanical Overlords

Back to The Matrix. The relevance of the genetic interpretation of evolution is that the genes, the proteins, and the whole cellular assembly system that builds our bodies from the moment of conception are literally machines. You might think we can say that that assembly system, in which the genetic code is read by messenger RNA to build amino acids, proteins, and cells, is only metaphorically a sprawling machine, since theres no God who designed those chemicals to perform any intended function, Creationism notwithstanding. But this begs the question, since according to the psychological theory at issue, neither is there any self who builds our cell phones, planes, computers, and other devices. Our nave conception of ourselves is undermined by science, and thus so too is the standard notion that a literal machine depends on a designers intention. The commonsensical notion of an intention, of a belief or a desire, is only a highly simplified way of talking about part of the brain. Granted, complex patterns can emerge, but some patterns are subjective illusions that depend more on the eye of the beholder; in other words, a pattern can be a delusion rather than an illusion. We want to see ourselves as

281 rational commanders, and so we define our technology as a slave carrying out our command. But that may be a story we tell only within the matrix, as will become clearer in a moment. At any rate, as I say in Darwinism and Natures Undeadness, the updated intuition we need to make sense of natural creativity of all kinds, including our designing of technology and our genes role in building us, is the intuition of natures undeadness. Anything which passes the anthropomorphists generous test of life is at best undead, given naturalistic metaphysics. There are no supernatural essences of personality or spiritual fragments of a transcendent plane. But given our preoccupation with social relations, well model as intelligent anything that looks to us as though its following a plan. Thus, we model each other as having rational homunculi that control our bodies, and most people, being theists, interpret all of nature as following Gods plan; even atheists instinctively blame unseen gremlins, for example, when we meet with ill fortune. Again, the nave way of looking at this generous way of interpreting natural order is the dualistic way, which is no longer tenable after the Darwinian revolution. Instead, we should interpret all living and nonliving things as neither alive nor dead in the nave senses, but as blasphemously undead, as mere simulations of ideal, spiritual life; after all, even nonliving things, like DNA, stars, and galaxies perform a great deal of work, evolving, complexifying, and creating everything in nature. So according to the Darwinian intuition, life and death are unified in the concept of the undead, and that undeadness will seem enchanted to zombies like us who instinctively personify everything around us. In this way, everything in the cosmos, both that which is naively thought to be living by way of being infused with a supernatural spirit, and that which is so thought to be spiritless and lifeless, can look alive by merely following its routine, like a zombie stumbling along as though anyone were at home in its brain. In particular, our machines will look like they follow our orders, and DNA and protein synthesis will look like theyre designed mechanisms that perform the function of building organisms. But there are no such orders or designs--at least, not in the way we naively assume. Instead, the source

282 of natural order at both the micro and the meso levels is the monstrous and mysterious simulation of what we think of as planned work. Work is done everywhere, but theres no spirit in charge. True, some work in the universe is done by brains, and here we do find emergent patterns of personal autonomy. But underlying the difference between the brains self-control and DNAs lack of personhood is the monistic, naturalistic metaphysics which has become compulsory as a result of modern science, and according to this metaphysics, theres no substantial difference between a brain and DNA with respect to their apparent vitality. Both work as undead automatons, although brains can tell themselves self-serving (or rather, self-creating) stories to keep their spirits up (or rather to pretend that they have spirits). The upshot of this is that while a human brain looks more alive than the proteins that build our bodies by receiving genetic messages, this is a matter merely of degree, not of metaphysical kind. Metaphysically, everything that participates in the natural order is undead, to some extent. With respect to The Matrix, this means that the genes have the same sort of life as our machines, the difference being that brains build our machines whereas no brain designs the genes. Still, if the genes and our machines are both undead, in that they pass the test of seeming to be fine-tuned and to work according to intentions, the movies narrative applies rather directly to our actual situation. Substitute the genes and the cellular assembly process for AI machines built by humans in the future, and youve still got the movies core idea: were programmed and misled by machines to serve their undead pseudo-interests. Specifically, the Dawkinsian biologist says that our fundamental role is to serve as vessels for our genes. So in the Matrix, the machines use human bodies as batteries, while in biological reality our bodies are used as vehicles to store, defend, and propagate the microscopic machinery that sustains us. Moreover, in the movie the dormant humans are abused by the machines and forced into the dehumanizing, humiliating position of lying in a jelly-filled pod with tubes down their throats. In biological reality, the genes implant in us the instinct to procreate, which is to say, to

283 assume various dehumanizing and humiliating postures involving organic jellies and tubes. The parallel, I trust, is clear. Finally, theres the matrix itself, the virtual reality of delusions that transfixes human slaves. In psychological reality, the brain produces a highly simplified model of its neural interactions, and we inhabit the space of that model; that is, we spontaneously apply naive concepts, anthropomorphizing each other and virtually anything else, projecting that model and reflexively retreating to it even after enlightening ourselves with respect to our true nature, by studying biology or psychology, for example. Were trapped in that misleading view of ourselves, because our bodies are built--by our biomechanical overlords, no less--to adopt that nave viewpoint. We wear blinders that focus us on completing tasks that arent even tasks in the ordinary sense, but are the end results of our genes undead wanderings. Our anthropomorphic models force us to think of each other as gods, as conscious, free, and rational spirits, but the lie of those models is given by the fact that instead of treating each other as such, were preoccupied with primitive urges, sexualizing and otherwise objectifying each other, calculating breast sizes, hip-to-waste ratios, and other signs of fertility or else the wealth and status of a reliable provider of resources for the woman to raise a child. In the matrix of our nave self-conception, we ignore our animal nature and pretend that were godlike, whereas our predominant behaviors, such as our secretive sex practices and our short-sighted, irrational, and violent servitude to tribal conventions, unveil the grim truth for all to see. Despite the obviousness of that truth, we seldom ever appreciate it or dwell on it for long, because we are in fact trapped in a false view of the world, and were put in that trap by machines that are roughly as undead as the machines we design and engineer. Thus, the premise of The Matrix is a highly useful myth, which is to say a powerful story that makes sense of where we are and what we should do.

284

Escape from the Matrix

This brings me to the prospect of a higher selfs escape from the matrix. In the movie, theres a real self who underlies the illusory one in the matrix and who frees himself by recognizing that the matrix isnt real. Here I think science and the movie diverge. There is no real, hidden self that either coexists with or exists prior to the brains mental model, which can then overwrite that model in an act of enlightenment. However, I do think theres an important distinction between the enlightened and the unenlightened, between esoteric and exoteric knowledge, between authentic people who understand their existential situation and who heroically overcome it, and those who thrive on delusions. The enlightened person cant escape from being just a brains model of its inner activity, but some models are aesthetically and ethically better than others. At our best, we create an enlightened self from the rude materials of our more genefriendly pseudo-self, and just as some paintings are more inspiring, original, and beautiful than others, so too some minds come closer to achieving certain ideals. Some ideals transparently serve the routines of our undead, biochemical overlords, whereas others are only byproducts of naturally selected traits, or what Stephen Jay Gould calls spandrels. One such spandrel is surely the existential cosmicists ideal of appreciating the full horror of our existential situation, summarized in the above section, for example, and of taking at least a symbolic stand against that situation. Unlike in the biblical Jobs case, theres no one to hear our protests since our overlords are undead, as are we, their victims. The price of liberation, then, is angst, alienation, dread, and perhaps social detachment or even insanity. The brain didnt evolve to sustain a rebel against its makers. To become such a rebel, we have to overcome genetic and social conditioning, and we need the courage and the creativity to invent new and worthwhile ways of being undead, even while recognizing the tragic futility of this spiritual, transhuman endeavor. To paraphrase Plato, those who are confined to the matrix (or to the Cave of reflections) demonstrate their creativity mainly in the sexual realm, dutifully producing a fresh generation of slaves, whereas the enlightened

285 philosopher creates brainchildren. Ultimately, neither sort of creativity will likely matter. Natural forces create biological patterns, but eventually such forces will replace those patterns with something else; the universes evolution is monstrous--inexorable and inhumane. But enlightenment is the best we can do; confronting the philosophical implications of modern science, and living with dignity in light of that accursed knowledge is, to use Nietzsches word, nobler than the alternative of sleepwalking with a biochemical leash/noose wrapped around our neck. A liberal secular humanist will protest that philosophy is irrelevant, that all that matters is pragmatically applying science and technology to raise our standard of living. You wouldnt know it from the scientistic technocracy implied by this protest, but the humanist has a burden of justifying the values that set the standard of living. How then shall the humanist proceed, by polling a population, asking what its members want to do with their life, and taking their answer as gospel? Will even the humanist be satisfied by that grossly fallacious plan of action? Or how about deferring to the oligarchs that run the system managed by the technocratic liberal? Should the most vicious among us who rise to the pinnacle of a dominance hierarchy be trusted to dictate our ethical and aesthetic standards? Surely not! No, this is where enlightenment is a prerequisite even of the anti-philosophical liberals busywork. Those who feign pragmatism still need to justify their goals, even as they preoccupy themselves with devising more and more efficient means of achieving them. And enlightened people will have ethically and aesthetically superior goals to those of the deluded folks who are mesmerized by the matrix.

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God and Science: The Ironic Theophany ____________________________________________________

What has science done to God? Atheists would like to think that science has made not just theism but all myths obsolete. But neither atheists nor scientists need be such philistines. What scientific discoveries have done is to turn the page on theistic fictions, leaving us with just blank pages. Postmodernists could use a good story, one that gives meaning to the world science has shown us and that leads us in a worthwhile direction. I think this postmodern myth can be found in a certain unsettling vision of the death of God. Before I come to that, however, Id like to go over some highlights of the Western history of sciences relationship to God.

Medieval Animism
Lets begin with the medieval picture of God. The fall of the Roman Empire brought to medieval Europe chaos, ignorance, disease, and thus infantilized the desperate masses. The socialism of feudal society, in the lower classes dependence on the largesse of the decadent aristocrats, was pragmatic as opposed to arising out of adherence to the New Testament. Oligarchies were needed to maintain a fragile social order, and the desperation to avoid the complete removal of the social barriers against the wilderness, that is, against the natural forces that are opposed to life, led also to an ironic self-indulgence. The masses that lived in squalor, eating gruel and owning

287 practically nothing nevertheless compensated for their poverty by settling on a navely anthropocentric worldview. The Church comforted medieval Christians with childrens tales, springing from Aquinass synthesis of Aristotelianism and paganized Judaism (Catholic Christianity). Aquinas replaced Aristotles impersonal Prime Mover with the Christian God, and thus simplified Aristotles teleological metaphors. According to Aristotle, every event has a purpose, a so-called final cause, and thus nature can be explained as though it were intelligently designed even though its not; instead, everything in nature has a destiny given its way of being attracted to the Prime Mover, to a sort of cosmic magnet that starts and ends all natural processes. Aristotles naturalism thus anticipated Darwins zombification of nature. Aquinas literalized and personified Aristotles undead teleology, since the Christian God is not just a person but literally a particular human being named Jesus. Aquinas thus enchanted the undead leviathan, infusing the undying corpse-which displays signs of monstrous pseudolife--with actual life. In the medieval view, instead of the mere appearance of mind throughout natures evolution of patterns, there are good and evil spirits animating all changes so that the cosmos becomes a superorganism, a colossal living body made up of a host of other living things. And thus the fear of the wilderness was neutralized by rampant animism, by literalistic Christianitys bastardization of Aristotelian naturalism. Medieval Europe lacked the economic prosperity that generates the arrogance needed to study nature objectively, because naturalism opens the floodgates to horror and angst, which are the authentic emotional responses to our real position in nature. The peasants were like homeless children who needed reassurance that even though the pax romana was no more, God was still with them--through Jesus and the Church, to be sure, but also throughout the whole world: even when a peasant is forced daily to trudge through mud, a sorry spectacle depicted so vividly in the movie, Monty Python and The Holy Grail, God is present in the purpose of that filth. In medieval Christianity, God is omnipresent, not directing from afar but animating everything from within by means of spiritual extensions of himself. Its hard to see how this animism could have comforted anyone during the

288 Black Death, but the alternative was surely worse: at least if there are demonic forces that cause the evil in the world, those forces can be overcome in familiar ways, by social alliances and negotiations through prayer. Evil creatures can be reasoned with and thus rehabilitated or else punished.

The Modern Machine

Still, the Plague wiped out around a third of the Christian population and discredited the Church, since the clergy couldnt cure the victims or explain the causes. Eventually, the remaining population prospered because of the decline in competition. At the same time, there was an influx of classical and eastern ideas, thanks to the rediscovery and proliferation of ancient texts. The revelation that such advanced art was possible in the ancient past shamed medieval Christians and led to the humanist movement, which is to say to greater pride in our secular capacity to lead rich and fulfilling lives. The merchants wanted to show off their new wealth with both outward and inward signs of their status. Thanks to their patronage, niches were thus opened up for advances in art, philosophy and science. In effect, the easing of competition in the present, due to the Black Death, created a new competition between the present and the past, as those who for centuries had suckled at the Churchs teat like terrified babies, jealously vied with ghosts of the ancient Greeks for cultural supremacy. And so the Italian Renaissance led to the Reformation of the Church and to the Scientific Revolution. Comparing medieval and modern rationalism is instructive. The medieval rationalists were the scholastics, who were pragmatic centrists much like postmodern American liberals. The scholastics wanted to maintain the status quo, arguing implicitly that without the Church, Western civilization would have ended after the collapse of ancient Rome. And so the scholastics bent reason in the service of that goal, to defend the Church at all costs. (Likewise, postmodern liberals can no longer seriously formulate their policies in terms of normative progress, because a postmodernist has no faithbased myths and thus no inspired ideals. Thus, these liberals are technocratic systemsmanagers, like President Obama, and the system they manage tends to be oligarchic,

289 that is, profoundly anti-liberal--for the majority, at least.) Of course, the scholastics pragmatic argument was shown to rest on a false dichotomy, since social and intellectual progress did occur in the modern period. By contrast, modern rationalists were devoted to their methods, to their algorithms, not to any institution. These rationalists were both highly conservative and liberal: they trusted only what their senses directly showed them or what could be logically or mathematically inferred, but they were more willing than their afflicted predecessors, than the scholastics and their peasant charges, to follow their inquiries wherever their senses and their reasoning took them, even if this meant peaking behind the mask we place on natures monstrous visage, thus threatening social stability and sanity. Because of the naturalistic fallacy, no prescriptions are licensed by empiricist rationality, especially if youre assuming the modern, Cartesian dualism between facts and values. The senses reveal only factual things and events, not goodness or badness, and theres no alchemy that transmutes factual premises into moral laws. Thus, modern rationalists drained the life from the medieval super-organism and reduced the Thomistic final cause, the natural events purpose, to the meaningless mechanistic cause. At least, this is what they did in their exoteric work; on the surface, then, nature looked every bit as cold and calculating as the scientists' functional sociopathy in their objective pursuit of the truth. Alas, the vaunted modern rationalists were hindered in their progressive labours by their human brains, which instinctively use metaphors to understand the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. And so the universal metaphor of the super-organism was replaced with that of the clockwork mechanism, and deistic speculations on the intentions of the intelligent designer were confined to whisperings within modern esoteric cults, like Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. After all, if rational methods are so successful in discovering how natural processes work, then nature must indeed work, and a machine is just the sort of thing thats intelligently designed; moreover, the more intelligible nature is, the more we wanton anthropomorphizers are tempted to share the misery of being human with the impersonal cosmos, projecting our idiosyncrasies onto its undead

290 evolutions. Modern scientists thus cogitated to follow the clues left behind in the cosmic machine, hoping to deduce the plan of its maker, like Sherlock Holmes tracking a demented killer. The upshot is that modernists banished God from nature without killing him, and although they exorcised the spirits from the cosmos, they didnt recognize nature as an undead monstrosity, as neither a living thing nor the designed product of one, but as a blasphemous simulation of creativity and rational order that mocks the values of secular humanism. There was a transition from theism to deism; God went underground so that we could have our turn in the limelight.

Postmodern Pantheism
Modernists bathed in that light until the postmodern period, which to my reckoning began in the early twentieth century with Einsteins overturning of the Newtonian theory of space. In classical physics, space and time are absolutely unchanging, which leaves room for Gods omniscience and omnipotence: the dimensions of space and time are like windows through which God could see and sustain absolutely everything in nature. Einstein showed that space and time must instead be relative to the speed of light, meaning that these dimensions change depending on how fast the observer is travelling. So much for taking in the universe at a single, divine glance! And for Newton, an objects motion is deterministic, meaning that its causes and effects are local: theres always an intervening mechanism between cause and effect, as opposed to any spooky action at a distance. This was the point of the clockwork metaphor and the reason why God had to be banished from nature. But in quantum mechanics (Bells Theorem), reality is nonlocal: because of quantum entanglement, a particles properties in one galaxy can affect those of a particle in a distant galaxy with no mechanism whatsoever connecting the particles. Again, in the Newtonian picture, we can calculate motion with certainty, because nature is a machine that doesnt depend on our observation of it, but in quantum mechanics we can calculate only the likelihood of fundamental events, because observation is bound up with those events. There is no

291 preset reality, with objective attributes that obtain even when no ones taking a measurement, or if there is an underlying reality, it seems to be an undivided whole as in Eastern mysticism. Just as theism had to be replaced by deism, because modern scientists substituted faith in the Church for faith in the rational method, and that method depicts the world as a lifeless but self-determining machine, so now the sociopathic deity who builds the machine and then stalks it like a voyeur must be exchanged for the undead god. The upshot of postmodern physics is that the world is so alien to our ordinary conceptions that anthropocentric metaphysics has become plainly self-indulgent. The universe is not a machine, so it has no intelligent designer. Nevertheless, the world is hardly inert: everything a personal God could do to the universe, the universe does to itself; thus, the universe is god enough. But this postmodern pantheism is ironic and bittersweet, because although we become surrounded by the divine just by being in the midst of natural happenings, the god thats actually omnipresent is a terrifyingly undead abomination that mindlessly creates, thus working towards no preplanned end, evolving for no reason at all and mocking the stories we tell about our supernatural essence of personhood. When the universe requires no mind to evolve galaxies, why does a human speck need a spirit to move from here to there? To speak of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is to say that our intuitions are quaint. We evolved to succeed in a social setting that requires that we outwit our competitors, by divining their mental state and predicting their behaviour on that basis. We try to get the most mileage we can out of that mental trick, since our life-preserving traits consist only of mental tricks and our opposable thumbs. Thus, we turn our predictive powers not just on each other but onto the rest of the world, positing mechanisms and hidden dimensions in addition to a menagerie of gods and paranormal creatures. Postmodern physics seems, though, to portend the end of all of that. According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, which I take to be the dominant one among physicists, there is no deep reality of the constituents of matter beyond the one

292 that pops into place when measured. This metaphysically idealistic interpretation of quantum mechanics follows naturally from modern positivism. When you foreswear speculation and focus on what your senses directly show you, youre bound to deny the existence of anything nonmental, since you can no longer justify talk of an independent cause of your sensations. This was the thrust of the early 18th C. philosopher George Berkeleys objection to empiricism. The positivist is interested in exact knowledge, because thats whats needed to increase our technological power (over nothing, once matter loses its independence). Thus, the Copenhagen Interpretation is philosophically anti-philosophical, privileging operational knowledge, which defines the elements of matter in terms of the procedure needed to measure them, and whatever can be done with that knowledge, while deprecating speculation and its potential benefits. Of course, the positivists scientific values cant themselves be scientifically justified. Still, however expected a minimalistic, mind-centered metaphysics might be on the basis of empiricist epistemology, the fact is that even those who might want to speculate on the causes of quantum weirdness are unable to do so in the ordinary way, by using metaphors to compare the unfamiliar with the familiar. Thus, even were there a deep, mind-independent reality, we wouldnt be well-positioned to understand what it might be, because its quantum clues would be so different from our everyday world that our metaphors would be laughable. This is why physicists say you need to understand the mathematics to really grasp the quantum world; our natural languages are too intuitive. (And to be upfront, I do not understand that math.) In any case, the macroscopic world that emerges from quantum leaps is neither a living thing nor the product of one; instead, that world is sufficiently lifelike that even its undead phenomena can provoke the vanity of hapless creatures such as us, so that we in the West have had to pass through millennia of theistic and deistic misunderstandings before weve finally reached the point at which we can prove not just natures undead divinity but our embarrassing ineptness at appreciating where we stand. Quantum mechanics proves, among other things, that were alienated by the

293 limits of what weve evolved to do best: biologically speaking, we malfunction when we pretend that were more than animals, that we can apply our evolved skills to the unnatural task of fathoming quantum reality, and that well necessarily continue to succeed biologically as a consequence. Far from flourishing thanks to modern science, we may in the longer run fulfill the curse of reason and lose our sanity after staring too long at the quantum abyss. We may be too curious for our good.

A Myth for Our Time

One way to endure the postmodern clash between natures alien reality and our vaunted mastery of the Earth, is to face the worst-case scenario, to imagine the most dishonourable situation and then to test our ability to pick up the pieces of our selfrespect and creatively reconcile ourselves with the imagined possibility. This is in fact the Nietzschean attitude towards myths. When Nietzsche said that time might be cyclical and that every moment might be replayed infinitely many times, he wasnt offering a rationally justified theory that was meant to compel belief. Instead, he was trying to test your mettle, to ensure youre not deluding yourself by attending only to self-serving ideas. I think Philipp Mainlanders idea of the worlds creation as Gods literal suicide is a most suitable candidate for such a myth. Mainlanders vision of God is psychologically plausible, merely following through on the theistic metaphor, whereas mainstream monotheistic portrayals of God are stilted, incoherent, or incomplete as works of fiction. Everything we know about the personal concentration of power implies that God would not be benevolent or fatherly, but would become corrupted and insane as a result of his isolation. By itself, this strength of Mainlanders myth warrants that the myth should be taken seriously--again, not as a scientific theory, nor even as a rational proposal for how the world might be, but as a work of stimulating fiction. At their best, fiction and art generally expand our awareness, enrich our mental associations, and fortify us in rough times. Postmodernity doesnt bode well for advanced civilizations. I suggest that some philosophical work is needed to give us a fighting chance to emerge from this period

294 intact. We must put aside childish things since they should comfort us no more, and make friends with the monster that lurks under the bed. We must bid farewell to our toy gods and if we still feel the urge to worship, we should pray to the god that strides naked all around us, that creates and destroys all things, that is no mere mental projection or respecter of our pitiful conceits. Nature is god. That god isnt alive, so our prayers will go unheard, but nature is undead and so we should match that uncanny fact with an outrage of our own: we should worship not by groveling before a magnified image of the most corrupt among us, which is the oligarch, but by ranting songs of mockery at the void, proclaiming that we know where we stand in the grand scheme and are unafraid. But thats just a poetic gloss on Darwinian science. Natures undead divinity is real. You can strip away my figures of speech and the horrifying facts will remain. But as for the needed work of fiction, we should appreciate that Mainlanders idea is physically as well as psychologically plausible. Take, for example, the Big Bang Theory, which explains natures origin from a gravitational singularity. This singularity is a point of infinite density and temperature which cant be described by general relativity or quantum mechanics. The singularity is thus miraculous as opposed to natural. The Big Bang is thus consistent with saying that a transcendent being, subsisting beyond spacetime and which were forced to understand by employing flawed metaphors, somehow caused the singularity to expand and become what we think of as natural. For instance, the singularity could be that transcendent being itself or else it could stand for the miraculous technique used by that being. More relevantly, the singularity could be the point at which God transformed himself into nature, into his undying corpse, thus guaranteeing his eventual extinction through natural devolution. Of course, none of these statements is scientific or even particularly rational; rather, what Im saying here is obviously speculative, the point being to tell a good story, to elevate the discourse to the level of salutary fiction/myth. And my point is about the storys plausibility and consistency, not about providing evidence that the myth is empirically true.

295 Or take dark energy and the possibility of the Big Rip. According to modern cosmology, theres a force called dark energy that counteracts gravity, pushing the universe apart. If that force accelerates over time, becoming whats called phantom energy, it could cause the Big Rip, which is the absolute destruction of everything in the universe, from stars to atoms. Again, this is consistent with the metaphysical speculation that nature is Gods corpse, that God intended to annihilate himself by turning himself into something that could be completely destroyed. It turns out, then, that theres an actual force that may be fulfilling that purpose. Finally, take the quantum mechanical principle of nonlocality. If quantum reality is a unified whole, as in Parmenides monism, this could reflect the unity of its transcendent source in God. According to the monotheistic myth, theres a single, somehow personal being who is excruciatingly supreme in terms of his knowledge and power. That uniqueness of God motivates Creation, not because of Gods generosity or grace, but because divinity is intolerable: the reason God creates something other than himself even though God is already supposed to be perfect, is that perfect knowledge and power are perfectly corrupting and self-destructive. And God wouldnt be creating something else so much as transforming himself into something that could be utterly destroyed, which is to say a material plane made up of patterns that can dissipate and parts that can be separated until theres nothing left. Gods death would proceed by transmuting his infinite being into every possible natural combination of elements, running through and extinguishing each of the configurations until theres nothing left. In the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics, every quantum possibility is actualized in some universe, although presumably not every universe is driven by phantom energy leading to a Big Rip. Perhaps, then, subatomic matter is unified because everything in nature, in the undying corpse that evolves new ways to destroy itself and so completes Gods tragic demise, derives from that single transcendent being whose uniqueness caused the Big Bang. Still, natural complexification and evolution are mindless, serving no purpose, because even though they may work towards the Big Rip, thus in fact fulfilling an insane God's intention, that God would be dead and so the meaning of his corpse would have died with him. For example, living things within the

296 undead god would be free to modify nature to suit our own purposes, perhaps even reversing the process of decay or at any rate interpreting nature according to our ideals. Now, theology can always be shown to be trivially consistent with science, because theological statements are unfalsifiable and can be arbitrarily altered to suit the facts; theyre not meant to be scientific and theyre limited mainly by the imagination. But there are also ethical and aesthetic standards of myth-making. Myths can be more or less emotionally powerful, depending on whether the story they tell resonates with a certain audience. And my point is that Id like to hear a good story, one that makes sense of the postmodern world and that tells us what we ought to do now. From medieval Europe to the postmodern global civilization, science, the cutting edge of accursed reason, has ironically pushed only the false God further and further out of existence while also putting the spotlight on the real divinity. From childish Christian theism, which has been out of fashion for several hundred years, to modern deism which turns God the loving father into God the coy voyeur, science hasnt been a force for pure atheism. No, science has cast out only pretenders to the throne, disposing of our vain and incoherent anthropomorphisms. There is no personal divinity anywhere in the natural universe. No personal God acts within nature, nor is nature an artifact produced by such a being. Instead, what science has steadily revealed is that nature is itself impersonally divine. Nature creates its infinite patterns by complexification and evolution; the undead god decays. Technoscientific progress takes us inexorably to a theophany of the true god: as we think more and more about whats real and as we investigate how nature works, we learn to see the world for what it is. But reason is accursed, because what we learn is that natures mindless creativity is an abomination to our dualistic and anthropocentric mindset. So much for sciences contribution; science has shown us the true, eerie and creepy god, the physical world that simulates life in its scramble to etch more and more novel patterns into itself. How can art complement science in that respect? By telling a good story, I submit, by deriving inspiration from science, to shape culture with a viable,

297 unembarassing postmodern myth. I believe Mainlanders melancholy speculation makes for just such an edifying tale. We deserve no New Age happy-talk, nor need we settle for stale theistic propaganda for oligarchy, nor should we pretend that secular humanistic philistinism is emotionally fulfilling or uplifting. We need a master metaphor that alerts us to whats really going on and that instructs us on how to respond. We should be like the God whos a mainstay of our imagination, by effecting our drawn-out suicide, living more or less ascetically, renouncing the delusions and corruptions that would fell even the greatest being, and by facing our existential predicament with grim humour.

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New Atheist and Spiritual Atheist in Dialogue ____________________________________________________

New Atheist: Whats this I hear about you calling yourself a spiritual atheist? Are you a recent convert from some religion and cant bring yourself all the way to a rational standpoint? Or maybe youre a philosophical fellow who has to muddy all waters to leave work for academics of your ilk. Spiritual Atheist: Neither. I grew up in a secular household and although I do read philosophy, Im no partisan defender of its current academic form. On the contrary, for all the social good professional philosophers presently do, they might as well close up shop. NA: Ah, then you must be a closet mystic, an accommodationist who thinks religion and science can live happily together, because there are some mysteries that science or reason more generally will never solve. In other words, youre addicted to woo.

Spirituality as Woo
SA: Well, thats a lot of loaded rhetoric. What do you mean by woo, for example?

299 NA: Just what I said: you want to preserve mysteries by using obscure notions that are supposed to build bridges between religion and science. SA: More loaded rhetoric and ad hominem. Even if I were addicted to Mystery, shouldnt you feel embarrassed as a so-called rationalist to stoop to such a postmodern fallacy, confusing the psychological origin of an idea with its epistemic merit? NA: Fine, then, ditch the rhetoric! Sheesh! Who says the debate about atheism cant be entertaining? SA: Is that the purpose of New Atheism, to entertain theists so theyll stop demonizing atheists? Is New Atheism just a media-driven shouting match that sells books for a handful of popular atheists, following the same rules of infotainment as postmodern American politics? NA: Hardly, weve got logic and science on our side, as you should know. SA: Then why not try defining woo again and this time without the personal attack? Youll find that Im entertained more by a thorough investigation of ideas than by a trumped-up partisan conflict. NA: Fine, woo is the false mystical notion that human reason and sense experience are limited, but that we have other modes of empirical knowledge, such as intuition, selfconsciousness (as in meditation), or--heaven help me!--divine revelation. SA: Thats more constructive. First off, a quick semantic matter to avoid unnecessary confusion: youre begging the question when you speak of empirical knowledge, since that sorts defined as being scientific, relying on observation or experiment. So I assume the question is whether the woo practitioner has independent access to knowledge of some facts in general, not specifically to scientific knowledge such as knowledge of how things work.

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NA: Fair enough, but woo is supposed to be a matter of ultimate Truth, not just mundane knowledge. SA: Understood. So lets take your definitions first part. Do you really think human reason and observation, that is, logic and science, are unlimited? Are we potentially omniscient thanks to those cognitive powers? NA: I suppose its possible the universe contains things we could never understand. SA: Just possible and not probable? Sure, modern science has progressed tremendously, but science itself tells us how limited we are: our cognitive faculties serve humble evolutionary functions and so it would be miraculous were everything in the universe to be understandable by our mammalian brainpower. NA: OK, so reason and observation are limited ways of understanding things. But that doesnt mean we have some third kind of knowledge, whether limited or unlimited. Woo enters the picture when someone pretends to have genuine knowledge, whereas theyre merely employing fancy rhetoric that exploits peoples gullibility. SA: I suspect that your point here reduces to a semantic one having to do with your definitions of observation and reason. Mystics claim to discover metaphysical truth through intense self-awareness. Does a mystics meditation count as observation? And does philosophical speculation count as a rational exercise? If so, many of those youd call guilty of the egregious sin of woo--apart from some paranormal pseudoscientists and other charlatans--are actually fellow rationalists, given the extended definitions. NA: Neither mystical experience nor philosophical speculation provides us with knowledge thats anywhere near as reliable as scientific methods.

301 SA: Ah, but now youve moved the goalposts to your epistemic standard of reliability. Do you mean to say that all of our beliefs that can be true or false should be reliable, that if were not certain about something, because we lack a strict scientific theory or the ability to measure the phenomenon with great accuracy, we should remain agnostic about it? NA: That would seem the most rational course of action. SA: Maybe, but unfortunately were not so rational--again, as biology and the cognitive sciences themselves have shown. Have you forgotten that youre only a mammal after all? That your brain has evolved to make snap decisions for the practical purpose of keeping you alive in tight spots? That our species has survived largely because of our boundless curiosity, which causes us to indulge in speculation, to comfort ourselves with guesses as to hidden meanings, to creatively posit values, to project our biases onto the nonhuman aspects of nature? NA: Yes, were largely irrational animals, but rationality is my highest ideal. SA: Really? Pray tell me whether youre fully rational when youre making love to your wife. NA: Excuse me? SA: You heard me, and lets not fall back now on politically correct conventions of allowable discourse. Your resort to modesty at this point would already indicate that you fall well short of being perfectly rational. NA: I already conceded Im not perfectly rational! And no, a rational frame of mind would utterly defeat the point of lovemaking. Happy now?

302 SA: So you dont hound the bulk of sexually active humanity for engaging in woo with respect to its romantic endeavors, reserving that criticism for mystics and other spiritual folk. Sounds like cherry-picking, doesnt it? The sort of double standard enjoyed by the Christian literalist who chooses which parts of the Bible to accept, confusing her personal preference with a God-given hermeneutic principle. NA: I dont cherry-pick anything. Sexuality is highly useful. Mystical gibberish isnt. SA: Nonsense! First of all, you rationalize sexuality when you pretend that people have sex because of its utility. Sex is often practiced because its fun, it comforts us, and so on. Second, its undeniable that for millennia the mystical core of religions has had comparable psychological benefits. Thus, I say again that youre working with a double standard, cherry-picking like a fundamentalist; as an atheist, youll want to quit doing that. NA: Even if theres a double standard here, its hardly an arbitrary one. Sex is more conventional than mysticism, at least in modern societies. SA: Again, errant nonsense! First, even in modern societies sex is usually acceptable only in the abstract and on the surface. Youll note that most people, yourself included, are embarrassed to publicly deal with our sexuality. Sex itself is kept private. Deep down, then, we modernists are as ashamed of sex as are puritanical religious fundamentalists. Second, if so-called mystical woo were socially unacceptable, there would hardly be any sin here which the New Atheist feels the need to condemn. No, its surely because the New Age section of bookstores, for example, is often as large as the science section that the New Atheist is so ready to pounce on woo. But this means that what you call mystical gibberish is socially accepted even in sophisticated and wealthy modern societies. For pitys sake, just look at Oprahs popularity! NA: Alright, then, youve made your point. Rationality may not be my ultimate, exclusive ideal.

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SA: And perhaps you shouldnt be so judgmental of how people achieve their peace of mind, as long as they dont harm anyone in the process. Sex is fine despite its irrationality, and perhaps so is woo, that is, the deriving of some kind of psychological benefit from appreciating presumed grand mysteries. Again, as long as mystics dont retard scientific progress, you might refrain from arbitrarily condemning one form of irrationality while indulging in your own form. NA: I suppose that would be reasonable--although New Age mystics have indeed dulled peoples appreciation of science in places like the United States. SA: Yes, Im sure youre right. Luckily, my form of spirituality--what you called woo--is a much more private and science-friendly affair. NA: Well, now that were clear on the possibility of valuable forms of irrationality, what exactly is your brand of woo? SA: Actually, before we discuss it Im afraid Ill have to insist that you refrain from using that word, woo, now that Ive shown you the problem with your underlying double standard. You understand, I insist this for your benefit, not mine: Im just trying to prevent someone from mistaking you for a type of religious zealot. NA: Very gracious and condescending of you. Call it what you like then, but what on Earth is your spiritual atheism?

Secular Humanism vs Existential Cosmicism

SA: My spirituality begins with an appreciation of the likelihood that well remain ignorant of important matters due to our mammalian nature. For me, this mysterianism, as philosophers call it, goes hand in hand with a sobering appraisal of our position in the natural universe. And so, in effect, I combine something like H.P. Lovecrafts cosmicism

304 with melancholy existentialism, which gives me a value system for dealing with philosophical questions, but also for coping psychologically with lifes travails. NA: Why call any of that spiritual? SA: We neednt get hung up on words. Perhaps youre right and my use of that word could be misleading in this context; indeed, spirituality has sloppy sentimental connotations that Id disown. However, the definition I have in mind is actually just a standard one, according to which spirituality has to do with religion or with the sacred, that is, with ultimate values. I suspect that everyone holds something to be sacred rather than profane in that sense. For me, whats sacred is the darkly comedic vision of our lifes absurdity, the horror of our tragedy. In a Nietzschean manner, I seek to transmute that horror into rapture, finding meaning even in our very worst-case scenario. NA: Well, then, if I understand what you mean by your spiritual atheism, your spirituality conflicts with what youd call mine, namely with my secular humanistic philosophy. For me, we find value in life through the liberal institutions of democracy and capitalism which raise the standard of living, thanks to the engine of modern science. Freedom of thought and action and the secular pursuit of happiness dignify human life. And wallowing in existential misery can only be counterproductive, not to mention immature, that is, juvenile and romantic. Frankly, you should grow up, work hard, and find ultimate value in your friends, family, work, and material rewards. Atheists should be humanists in that sense. Indeed, existential or cosmicist atheism would be politically disastrous in our war with the worst of religions. Were atheism such a bummer, our ranks would dwindle. SA: Lots to chew on there. Youre saying, I think, that our highest purpose is to be happy, and that happiness is achieved by participating productively in society, by maintaining social connections, and by enjoying the material benefits of scientific progress.

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NA: Roughly, yes. SA: In that case, while I agree that most atheists likely think that way, and also that for strategic purposes, the dark, existential and cosmicist implications of philosophical naturalism should be kept hidden from some people, I deny that secular humanism is as respectable as the spiritual atheism I espouse. Indeed, Id distinguish between what are typically the exoteric and esoteric forms of value systems that separate the sacred from the profane. Your secular humanism is for exoteric consumption, while existential cosmicism is atheisms higher, esoteric form. NA: What do you mean by higher, esoteric form? SA: I mean that even secular humanists should understand, if only subliminally, that wrestling with the revolutionary consequences of what Nietzsche called the death of God, instead of falling for a substitute, secular religion thats just as delusive as any ancient theistic tradition, is nobler, more heroic. NA: Oh dear, youre going to equate secular humanism with religion? And I suppose youll declare that scientific rationality is just a form of religious faith. Postmodern drivel! SA: No, like I said, I appreciate the strength of scientific methods, since its those very methods that burst so many of our bubbles, and whats sacred for me is the prospect of coping in an aesthetically pleasing way with our humiliation at the hands of scientists. Again, we neednt get hung up on the use of words. But if we use Durkheims broad theory of religion, as a social structure for implementing a distinction between the sacred and the profane, or for upholding the groups ultimate values, then yes, secular humanism surely counts as a (nontheistic) religion.

306 NA: Fine, call it what you like. And so youre saying that secular humanism is a cheap substitute for Christianity or Islam, a delusion thats more compatible with modern science than are those anachronistic ideologies? SA: Theres nothing cheap about it. The modern values that emerged from the Scientific Revolution--the Renaissance values of genius and originality and the Enlightenment celebration of reason and individual liberty--were themselves products of genius: the greatest European minds rose to the challenge of replacing God-centered culture with an explicitly anthropocentric one. They could hardly have done otherwise once the Church lost the political power to control what Europeans believed. As wealth shifted from the Church to merchants, and as the elites came to admire artistic creativity and reason more than tradition and faith, a value system was needed to accommodate the fact that the sacred could no longer be considered supernatural. Modernists developed just such a convenient worldview with myths of our great freedom and rationality. NA: You can call them myths, but the superiority of capitalism and democracy to other social systems is obvious. By harnessing scientific methods in the research and development phases of satisfying our desires with material products, businesses tangibly elevate our standard of living by building on well-established facts of how the world actually works. Just compare the average economic power of the stifling dictatorships in the Middle East or North Korea with that of the more modern G8 countries. Do you really think that for all our social ills, modern secular nations are as deluded as theocracies? SA: Theres no denying the greater wealth and power of modern societies compared to premodern ones, but youre assuming that economic success precludes delusion. Thats dubious. Marx was likely closer to the truth when he said that all societies embrace ideologies that serve the interests of the members who have the most economic power, whether those members be dictators or free-thinking capitalists. Hapless theocrats revere their Leader for his divine wisdom or his inheritance of power from God, while modernists celebrate individual liberty and material wealth because

307 those are the values of the vicious, willful competitors who rise to the top of the modern, social Darwinian free-for-all. NA: But youre missing the point: everyone would embrace the values of personal liberty and material wealth if given the chance, because those values generate more stable, secure and peaceful societies. People immigrate from dictatorships to democracies, not the other way around. SA: You might be right that everyone wants to be happy in the primordial sense of living in peace and security with those in their personal social network. This raises two questions. First, does modernism most effectively achieve that end? Second, should happiness be our highest goal? Lets start with the first question. You say that capitalism and democracy, the organs of modernism, raise the standard of living. However, this assumes a materialistic measure of success. Even if we adopt that measure, theres the possibility of severe blowback, whether from terrorist uprisings from the have-not parts of the world or from the destruction of the ecosystem, which may threaten everyones chance for prosperity. But put that aside. Its possible to enjoy everything that money can buy and still be miserable, suffering ennui and spiritual emptiness, holding nothing sacred because modern society surrounds you with transparently false idols that are rendered such by modern freedom of thought itself. Modernists may be prosperous, but theyre cursed with uniquely modern afflictions, including even mental disorders like anxiety and depression. NA: Alright, for the sake of argument Ill grant that modernism generates a form of suffering thats left out of the economists measurement of success. Is your criticism of secular humanists, then, that theyre less happy than they think? SA: That would be slightly paradoxical. No, my criticism is that the modern ideology of secular humanism makes for an admirable substitute religion that relocates the sacred from heaven to somewhere on Earth or at least in nature, but that this religion is

308 psychologically unsustainable for those who resort to shaky myths instead of grappling with the existential consequences of worshipping nature. NA: I hardly worship nature. SA: Oh no? You refrain from killing even those people you despise, because you hold human nature--our intelligence, freedom, consciousness--to be precious and indeed sacred. You no doubt regard the cosmos thats investigated by scientists as beautiful. Secular humanists may not take up the trappings and ceremonies of religious worship-although some of them do--but they do revere things in nature. Indeed, assuming we all hold something to be sacred, naturalists could hardly do otherwise than satisfy their desire to meet something worthy of intense love, respect, and awe, by turning to the only domain they think exists. NA: Fine, have it your way, but wheres the delusion in secular humanism? Surely the belief that murder is wrong isnt as wildly mistaken as the belief that a person created the universe in six days. SA: Tell me again why murder is wrong. NA: Humans have rights that other animals dont have, because we have special abilities. Not only do we feel pain, but were sentient and self-guiding; were aware of ourselves and can intelligently act to further our interests. So interfering with someones attempt to work out her own life, especially by killing her and thus irrevocably eliminating that capacity for self-direction, is wrong. SA: Unfortunately, cognitive science is showing that were not as self-determining as was preached in the screeds of Enlightenment individualists. Theres no room for the commonsense kind of freewill in a natural, ultimately physical universe. But even if we were able to govern ourselves, albeit to some limited and likely illusory extent, why

309 should that process be allowed to continue? Why respect every individuals ability to direct her life? NA: Why respect it? Well, for one thing, its highly rare and thus special and valuable. SA: But surely no sooner than you finished uttering that statement, you saw its fallacy. Why should somethings rarity make it valuable? The rarity of diamonds makes them economically valuable, but that means only that there arent enough diamonds to satisfy everyones actual demand for them, which discrepancy raises their price. But the deeper questions would be why everyone wants a diamond in the first place and whether that desire is justifiable. Economic value is neutral regarding the merit of our desires. Diamonds are rare, but that rarity alone doesnt justify everyones interest in owning them. Likewise, everyone wants to decide for themselves what they should do with their lives, as opposed to having someone else decide for them, and that autonomy is rare in nature. But that rarity doesnt justify our respect and indeed our reverence for autonomy. As it happens, diamonds have other qualities that make them desirable, such as their physical hardness. Do we have some intrinsic qualities that justify our respect for each others existence? NA: Obviously, yes. For example, heterosexual men and women find each other sexually attractive, so naturally wed prefer to have each other around if only to look at and use once in awhile for our pleasure. SA: Stumbled right into my trap, didnt you? Once you tie the right to life to some objective feature or other, you make that right doubly conditional. First, if people have a variety of features, which we clearly do, then only people with the desirable ones would have the right to live. Thus, following up on your example, wed have a license to shoot ugly men and women in the streets. Second, you make the right to life an instrumental one that depends on our goals. An asexual person, for example, who isnt interested in physical beauty, would have the right to kill beautiful and ugly people alike, just as someone who isnt interested in cutting anything would be justified in doing away with

310 diamonds. Likewise, you might say that respecting each others life is an efficient way to get what we want in society, since people are more successful in such a peaceful arrangement than in the wild. But again, that makes the right to life an instrumental rather than an unconditional one and dependent on the usefulness of society. Do rich people with their own security force, food supply, and so on, have the right to kill the poor, because the rich can take care of themselves and so dont have to respect others as a means of ensuring their welfare? NA: No, I suppose not. Fine, then, we deserve to live not because our freedom is rare or because were useful in certain ways, but because...well, I cant think of the reason offhand. SA: Do you see the problem now? What youre looking for is a secular justification for the monotheistic presumption that human life is unconditionally, inalienably, absolutely good. Theres no such justification, and thats evidence of the startling historical transition that troubled Nietzsche. So wheres the delusion, you ask? The delusion is in presuming that business can continue as usual in secular societies despite the fact that something as fundamental as the human right to life is at the very least no longer obvious once we bury God. The delusion is in paying lip service to politically correct myths and memes about our preciousness despite the fact that scientists have shown were just less-hairy mammals with peculiar linguistic tools. Where is the call for sanctimonious praise of ourselves, given the scientific point of view? Sure, were the smartest, most powerful known animals. But in our recent cultured form, weve been around for only fifty thousand years. Dinosaur and insect species have thrived for millions, and yet wed hunt dinosaurs for food or sport if they were still around, just as we actually hunt or domesticate their reptilian and avian relatives, and we swat insects without thinking twice. Even if we reigned for billions of years--and not just over the Earth but the whole galaxy--would that great power show that human life is good? Would might make right?

311 NA: Youre really starting to pontificate now, arent you? Im trying to understand what bothers you so much about secular humanism. Alright, so philosophy gets more complicated once we dispense with theology, and naturally most people are too busy to dwell on these disturbing questions, relying on pat answers to get by. Is your point, then, that carefree rather than melancholy or anxious atheists tend to be secular humanists rather than existential cosmicists and that the former are somehow inferior to the latter? SA: Ethically and aesthetically inferior, yes. Once again, we can define these terms in different ways, but in so far as a secular humanist or a New Atheist opposes spirituality as superstition or as otherwise misplaced in a functional modern society, in which democratic and capitalistic business hums along, theres something very wrongheaded about that kind of atheism, I think. Its not just that certain vices are involved in resting content with delusions and conventional happy-talk, including cowardice, gullibility, and incuriosity, nor is it just the feeling that the hypocrisy of condemning theism while unconsciously assimilating a host of pragmatic modern myths, which perpetuate stealth oligarchies, is aesthetically off-putting. Theres also a non-normative problem with modern, allegedly nonreligious atheism, which is, as I said, that this kind seems unsustainable. As we speak--and for decades now--the modern has seemed to give way to the postmodern. This is complicated, to be sure, but what seems to have happened is that weve become too rational for our own good. Weve become hyper-skeptical, like The Simpsons cartoon or The Daily Show, which satirize everything under the sun. Weve been burned so many times, we think, but we wont get fooled again. Certainly, we wont be so foolish as to fool ourselves, by pretending that someones opinions are true for anyone else. Were suspicious of all metanarratives, holding all truth and value to be highly subjective and relative. We reduce theories to biases of gender, class, or of some clique. Everyones partisan, no one should be trusted to speak for another, and each ego reigns supreme in its own fragmentary world. Even the messianic Obama triumphed over McCain by pretending to empower everyone but himself, encouraging his supporters to shout Yes, we can! like

312 the 2006 Time Magazine cover which featured a mirror, proclaiming that everyone was Person of the Year. How long can this so-called postmodern state of affairs endure? Will the strain of being hyper-skeptical finally fatigue us so that we Westerners will fall prey to demagogues and impose secular dictatorships on ourselves? The radicalization of the right-wing in the United States isnt encouraging on that front. My point, though, is that if allegedly nonreligious atheism is unstable, because those atheists replace comforting theistic myths with flimsy secular ones about the glories of democracy, capitalism, and human nature, we should have something at the ready in case the whole secular edifice crumbles. Again, my spirituality is an attempt to salvage meaning from the very worstcase scenario. Thus, I push scientific and naturalistic conclusions to their philosophical extremes, as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and Thomas Ligotti do, and I search for an honourable way to live under those dire circumstances. This makes for spiritual and not just philosophical atheism, because this search is sacred to me; its what matters most. NA: I dont have time now to ask you about the details of your existentialism and cosmicism. Instead, I wonder whether you should simply get real. The threat of extreme theism far outweighs the danger that modern societies might implode. Mainstream religion is bad for women and fundamentalism is more dangerous than ever before since the invention of weapons of mass destruction. So while your spiritual atheism may not be as harmful as antiscientific New Age obscurantism, your doom and gloom message could only hinder the New Atheists efforts against the worst foe. Strategically, indeed, your so-called spirituality plays into the worst stereotypes about atheism, that atheism implies that life is meaningless, that everythings permitted, that our situations hopeless, and so on. SA: And you prefer to whitewash naturalistic atheism, pretending that now that Gods dead, we can cheerfully get on with enjoying our lives, like the atheistic billboards say. I dont know how many potential converts to atheism would retreat to their churches and

313 mosques were they to suspect that atheism has a dark side. Anyway, both exoteric and esoteric levels of a value system tend to be needed to suit peoples differences. The atheism of anyone who would retreat to theism were they to hear of existential cosmicism surely wouldnt have been worthy in the first place. But this is all idle chatter, because deluded folks lack the interest or the intelligence to discover the unsettling truth. Even were existential cosmicism shouted from the rooftops, most people either wouldnt care enough to be shaken or would lack the philosophical discipline to understand the implications. The separation between the exoteric and esoteric levels of a value system happens organically in that respect. And to return to the question of whether atheists ought to be happy, I suppose the answer depends on whether theyre ready to confront our tragic existential predicament, as entailed by naturalistic atheism (that theres no afterlife, no guarantee of justice or fairness from the cosmos, no absolute morality, no reason not to feel alienated from nature). Those who are ready tend to view happiness, in the sense of being content and well-adjusted to life as an absurdly smart and doomed primate, as ludicrously extravagant. Sure, theists like William Lane Craig portray atheism in the worst light to keep their fellow sheep in line. Those theistic fear-mongers go wrong not in pointing out that naturalistic atheism has troubling implications, but in assuming that we have no constructive options for dealing with them. Centuries before Christianity even began, Buddhists gave the lie to that pessimism, inventing naturalistic psychotherapy and pursuing atheistic enlightenment. As for your earlier charge that existential cosmicism is juvenile, its hard to take that seriously. Even were teenagers to tend to go through a melancholy, angst-ridden phase, to say that all forms of such worry in adults are therefore naive would be a straightforward case of the genetic fallacy. After all, there remains the possibility that teenagers are in a unique position to appreciate some dark truths, as they occupy a

314 twilight period in which they acquire greater cognitive skills while yet lacking adult responsibilities and thus the pressure to accept uplifting conventional wisdom. NA: Well, Im still not sure that secular humanism is a religion except in a uselessly stretched sense, but Im glad to hear that there seems a kind of spirituality thats friendly to science, atheism, and naturalism--besides Buddhism, I mean. By the way, what reason would you give for the wrongness of murder? Or is existential cosmicism compatible with Nazism or with some other hideous slaughter of millions in the name of a utopian ideal? SA: Thats a good question. The New Atheists dismissal of the connection between Nazism and atheism is often pitifully weak, as though Hitlers alleged Christianity would speak to the whole of Nazism. Even had Hitler been the Pope of Rome, the fact is that Nazism was an original, eclectic cult of personality that upheld the modern ideal of the creative genius, not to mention a thoroughly Darwinian and instrumentalistic perspective according to which people arent intrinsically valuable, a perspective shared by most powerful people throughout history, who tend to be educated and thus skeptical of commonplace religion. As weve gone through, it remains difficult for naturalistic atheists to justify the UNs platitudes about the universality of human rights--not that the theist is in any superior position, of course, but an atheist ought to have higher standards. Anyway, as for how I deal with this question, I affirm with the Buddhist that all human life is valuable and ought to be protected, and I ground this value in boundless pity for those who suffer just by living in our accursed condition. This pity, in turn, develops just from confronting the harsh truths that make for existential cosmicism. Once you look in horror at nature, abandoning all comforting myths--including the secular humanistic ones--as mere moves in an inhumane cosmic process, its hard to retain the ego to dominate fellow forlorn creatures. On the contrary, the more natural response to that quasimystical enlightenment is a feeling of alienation--literally of being thrown in an alien prison, surrounded by fellow prisoners most of whom live in a fantasy world like the hallucinating victims in the Matrix or like the shackled captives of Platos Cave.

315 Aesthetically, the notion of exploiting anyone as pitiful and doomed as yourself, of murdering them and so on, is just grotesque. Of course, this raises the question of suicide. Again, were there nothing constructive to be done about our plight, as some theists like to misrepresent the dark side of atheism, perhaps murder or suicide would be appropriate. But that is a misrepresentation which egregiously understates our heroic power to creatively cope with natural affronts to our modest dignity.

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Buddhism and Existential Angst ____________________________________________________

In the Introduction, I ranted against the popular belief that our ultimate goal should be happiness. Our tragedy, I said, is that were equipped with high degrees of consciousness, reason, and freedom, which enable us to appreciate what I called Our Existential Situation (OES). This situation is roughly equivalent to our worst nightmare, implying that life for most of us is effectively hell on earth. Our situation as intelligent animals, thrown into the world, as the existentialist philosopher Heidegger said, is defined by ironies, by the worlds being different from how wed prefer it to be. For example, theistic and New Age fantasies are all wildly off the mark, logically and empirically speaking. Those differences between our nave, anthropocentric picture of the world and the modern scientific picture of it, are results not of any demonic design, but of the inhumanity of the natural forces that put us here in the midst of cosmic evolution. In short, this is the worst possible world, from a humane standpoint. A Satanic dominion over the universe would be preferable to dominion by mindless natural forces, because Satan would at least be a person, albeit an evil one, and were personhood at the root of reality, we could at least take comfort that the universe and thus life and our position have meaning. Our purpose would be to serve as Satans playthings. Were this the case, we might even succumb to Stockholm Syndrome and come to approve of that

317 demonic plan. As it stands in the Lovecraftian, scientific picture, though, theres no such meaning and no such comfort. Were alienated from reality and thus from ourselves, because we view the world through the filter of our ideals, which project onto the world what isnt there, such as the ultimate propriety of our pursuit of those ideals. Our values are either means by which natural forces drive us to perpetuate some stage in a natural process or are free-standing creations of our imagination. Either way, our confidence in their propriety is usually grotesque. Our most popular goal is to be happy, to be successful and contented with the pleasures we earn. This goal is certainly attainable to some extent or other, but were aesthetically, if not also ethically, obligated not to seek happiness as our ultimate good. Instead, we ought to be anxious and pained as a result of our knowledge of OES. The existentialists remedy, of hopeless rebellion in the alien face of inhumane nature, is nobler and more aesthetically compelling than the Aristotelian reduction of our ethical purpose to our narrow biological function. Our narrow function is to stop investigating whats really going on, and to merely survive and sexually perpetuate our genetic code. If we do that, as most people in fact do, raising a family and committing ourselves to various delusions that serve that biological end, we become more or less happy, whether were rich or poor or whether were born beautiful or physically disabled. We then live at peace with ourselves and with the world, despite the fact that that peace is as obscene as the peace of slaves in the Matrix, or in the philosopher Robert Nozicks Happiness Machine (a thought experiment about a virtual reality simulator that caters to our fantasies, enabling a person to live successfully in a dream world that may differ tremendously from the real one).

The Buddhist Critique

So I averred in that rant on happiness. There is, however, an interesting Buddhist critique of this grim existentialism, which runs as follows. My talk of OES, of a gulf between the conscious, free, intelligent person and the rest of the nature assumes that that person is an independent, self-contained essence, detached from the world.

318 Instead, according to the Buddhist principles of Interdependent Arising (IA) and of emptiness, there are no such essences anywhere in the universe: everything is in flux, ever-changing and interdependent. Instead of things, there are phases of processes. A persons mind consists entirely of such flowing transitions, from one mental state to the next, with no unified self tying them together. There is no immaterial spirit or essence that is the bearer of particular thoughts and feelings. Therefore, there can be no gap between a person and the rest of the world; on the contrary, a person is interconnected with the world, since both are bound up in natural processes that unite them. For example, we breathe oxygen from the outer environment and exhale carbon dioxide which plants in turn absorb. According to Buddhism, when nature is understood in terms of cycles and processes that are empty of essences or of thinghood, we can appreciate the source of our anxieties: our delusion of an independent self causes us to crave an unsuitable permanence or stability, an impossible control over those processes for our benefit. We build walls to protect us from the natural flux, including literal walls and conceptual frameworks that amount to fantasies. That defense against free-flowing natural reality and the self-righteous, egoistic justifications of that defense are wrongheaded, for the Buddhist. There is no such thing as an ego, or as a single, autonomous self that can possibly bear the brunt of cosmic indifference or win for itself pleasure rather than suffering. There are only interdependent stages of cycles that unite all that there is in nature. My existential rant, then, according to Buddhism, is based on a self-righteous delusion-as if there could be anything wrong with natures inhumane treatment of sentient beings, given that there are no such beings, because there are no beings at all. Assuming this Buddhist anti-essentialism, the enlightened attitude is bemused detachment as opposed to unrealistic craving. We should carefully observe changes in the processes we encounter, instead of crying like babies when were disappointed that we dont get what we want. If theres no such thing as a self, theres no realistic basis for thinking theres a gap between natures inhumanity and our anthropocentric values. Natural forces arent

319 alien to us; instead, were shot through with those forces, and since theres no self to protect from careless nature, we ought to observe the flux from an objective, aesthetic distance, watching each thought pop into our minds like so many frames in a reel of animated images. Instead of suffering from resentment, like the boy who holds his breath when his mother refuses to buy him his coveted toy, we can relish all changes, including painful ones, as ever more data to scrutinize with a connoisseurs eye for artistic detail. The enlightened Buddhas nirvana is like an art critics peace from being able to freely judge an artwork from a distance, with no reality-based pressure to cling to one judgment or another. Unlike, say, the artist who worries about not receiving the praise she craves, who complains when her art doesnt suit the critics taste and thus when she loses the job offer she desperately wants to be able to afford a larger apartment, and so on and so forth, the art critic--we can assume with some simplification--enjoys the freedom that comes from aesthetic detachment. And its this detachment that the bitter, angst-ridden existentialist seems to lack. Theres no need for any suffering at all, including so-called dutiful or heroic suffering in defiance of whats actually a non-existent abyss between what there really is and what we ultimately want. In short, from a Buddhist perspective, my account of OES is based on egoistic conceptions, and thus my prescription thats supposed to replace the politically correct one of happiness, is itself deluded.

Buddhism and Existentialism

The obvious response to Buddhism is to insist that there are beings, including selves, after all, and that therefore existential angst can be justified. Indeed, there may be a mere semantic dispute here. What non-Buddhists call the self, the Buddhist may call a phase of a process. Moreover, while nothing in nature may be absolutely independent, some things or processes may be more or less independent; hence, the usefulness of concepts that posit similarities between things (or processes) that hold despite their differences. What are commonly called selves have more in common with each other-their cognitive faculties, their genotypes and phenotypes, and so on--than they do, say,

320 with asteroids or with peanut butter. To explain those distinguishing features, we categorize their bearers as instances of a type, and we theorize about them, generalizing for the sake of understanding. For example, we say that humans are persons and thus different from other animal species in certain respects. Were we to stop with the Buddhist principle that everything is interdependent and united, we wouldnt understand any of the patterns in nature; that is, we wouldnt yet be generalizing about the differences and similarities we observe. In short, scientists and ordinary people alike generalize, making use of concepts to explain patterns, and in the case of our patterns, this requires talk of the self. Finally, even if the Buddhist is correct that everything is interrelated at some level of explanation, relative independencies can emerge at higher levels. At the quantum level, particles may be mostly entangled with each other in superpositions, but regularities emerge as subatomic interactions develop complex forms, like the chemical elements, the stars and planets, and all the myriad species on Earth, including people. But I dont want to rest with those head-on answers. Instead, I want to grant the Buddhists anti-essentialist assumptions for the sake of argument, and question whether those assumptions really divide the Buddhist much from the angst-ridden existentialist. I begin by asking why the Buddhist is interested in ending human suffering. After all, as is apparent from the Four Noble Truths, the whole point of Buddhism is to end our suffering, or dukkha, meaning all varieties of disappointment. But on the assumption that everything is interdependent and part of a cosmic process, why the Buddhists compassion for the deluded stages of that process--naively called persons--which suffer from futile cravings? Shouldnt the Buddhist fatalistically infer that that suffering is a necessary part of the cosmic process, which the Buddhist should objectively observe along with all of the other parts? At first glance, it looks as though the Buddhist presupposes that some interdependent processes--naively called persons--have special value due to their capacity for disappointment and their autonomy which allows them to change their course for the better, to become enlightened and end their miseries. In fact, Buddhists also take on

321 board, along with Hindus, the theodicy of samsara and moksha, which is to say the ideas that the cosmos of which were a part is a bad place to inhabit, obligating us to liberate ourselves from the cycle of rebirth. Enlightenment, or nirvana, is freedom from nature by way of emptying ourselves of the flotsam and jetsam that wash up on the shores of our minds, borne by the waves of natural forces. When we detach from our desires, we no longer feel disappointed when we fail to get what we want, because we no longer want anything; our suffering ends and we enjoy the art critics bliss of academic freedom. Now, that theodicy has much in common with what I call Our Existential Situation. In both cases, theres a condemnation of the cosmos. Buddhisms focus on ending dukkha might even presuppose that condemnation: suffering ought to be ended, because suffering inherits the badness of the rest of nature, being a stage of interdependent natural cycles, spun by inhumane forces. But these normative judgments of the prison of samsara and of the obligation to liberate ourselves dont sit well with the Buddhists metaphysical principle of IA. If everything is interlocked as stages of a cosmic process of evolution, theres no metaphysical basis for speaking of liberation from that process. Most people may be deluded, entranced by fantasies that bind them to degrading, punishing natural forces, while a minority manage to free their minds and enjoy the peace of carelessness and the pleasure of objective, aesthetic study of natural reality. However, both groups would surely be different stages in the same cosmic process. Enlightened Buddhists dont transcend nature in the sense of reaching a supernatural vantage point overlooking the whole universe, but merely discover an alternative natural way of life. If we stress the principle of IA, were left with an amoral perspective on what is empirically just a series of interrelated processes. Once again, then, I ask why the Buddhist is preoccupied with ending disappointment and short-circuiting its causes, delusion and craving. An authentically Buddhist answer would seem to appeal to aesthetics rather than to morality, which is why I compared the Buddha to an art critic. Above all, Buddhists are empiricists: they observe that everything is mixed together in a

322 great flux of transitions. Enlightenment gives them the freedom simply of extreme objectivity, of detachment from biases and personal inclinations. A Buddha perceives natural reality as a process rather than as a host of independent things. And in that objective frame of mind, the enlightened Buddhist creates a taste, an aesthetic style of appreciating natural art, as it were, a new bias that befits a Buddhas radical shift in perspective, rather than a passively received bias that flows in and out of the deluded mind. In Nietzschean terms, the Buddha is, to this extent, an bermensch, a hero who overcomes harsh natural obstacles and creates original values. On my existential view, this enlightened creativity is a rebellion that gives our lives meaning and holds off the insanity with which esoteric knowledge of OES threatens us. The Buddhist may interpret the need for compassion differently, but he or she seems forced to admit that compassion is gratuitous, given the metaphysics of IA. The enlightened Buddhist merely chooses to become a Bodhisattva, a liberator of others from their delusions and thus from their sufferings. That is, an enlightened person faces a choice: to enter nirvana and renounce not only her desires but those of everyone else, to live alone somewhere on a mountain top, or to teach others how to achieve the same inner peace. That choice, Im suggesting, is caused by an enlightened taste for one path or the other. Nothing forces the enlightened person to care about other peoples suffering--least of all individualistic morality that holds one process (the self) to be metaphysically (as opposed to aesthetically) more valuable than another (say, dirt or an asteroid), contradicting the monistic assumption of IA. Some enlightened people prefer the natural process of life on this planet that includes less craving and disappointment, owing to the Bodhisattvas work. Likewise, some art critics prefer one style of art to another. Given this aesthetic interpretation of Buddhist compassion, theres another commonality between Buddhism and my existentialism: the choice to confront the horrors of nature by a renunciation of whats naturally expected of us. My problem with happiness is that emotional contentment is aesthetically and ethically unsuited to creatures with dark esoteric knowledge. These creatures should be anxious and melancholic, not at ease

323 with themselves or their position. The cause of happiness, I said, is ignorance of Our Existential Situation or some delusion that stands in for knowledge. Likewise, the Buddhist renounces the so-called pleasures that derive from egoistic delusions, as so many forms of what is ultimately disappointment. The difference is that the Buddhist opposes dukkha whereas I oppose the popular notion of happiness. But this difference may not be as significant as it seems. In the first place, my condemnation of happiness as a degrading abomination isnt the same as a rejection of pleasure following the achievement of any goal whatsoever. The problem isnt pleasure or success of any kind, but just that which depends on ignorance of OES. There may well be a kind of pleasure or contentment in renouncing a conventional way of life, a sort of rebels or Gnostics glee of being an insider rather than a hapless member of the herd. This wouldnt be happiness, but gallows humour, a way of coping with the melancholy that accompanies a commitment to existential philosophy. Just as the Buddhists notion of dukkha is broad enough to interpret vulgar pleasures as forms of suffering, I interpret vulgar happiness as an obscenity and an abomination, owing to its dependence on pitiful fantasy. Moreover, enlightened Buddhists certainly arent happy in a materialistic sense; theyre contented with the peace that follows from their mystical vision of cosmic connectedness. But while they dont suffer, neither do they feel joy or any other satisfaction caused by the achievement of whats personally desired. In fact, their personality disappears with the attachment to their desires. They become empty, which is to say alienated from the world in so far as that world is egoistically conceived. To this extent, a Buddha isnt a Nietzschean bermensch, since while a Buddha may accept the natural flux as it is, without weak-minded illusions, a Buddha still withdraws from the world, disengaging from her own desires. In any case, a Bodhisattva seems even less happy than a Buddha. After all, compassion for other peoples plight is a form of suffering. Empathy is the feeling of someone elses pain as your own. If empathy informs a Bodhisattvas taste for compassion, this sort of enlightened Buddhist is similar to the existentialist who responds to the duty to renounce opportunities for personal

324 contentment, out of awe at the magnitude of our tragedy. Both suffer for their knowledge, the Bodhisattva who understands the absurd needlessness of suffering caused by egoism, and the existentialist who appreciates the grotesqueness of pleasures that require ignorance or intellectual cowardice. Both affirm that the vulgar form of happiness is the flowering of delusion and is thus aesthetically if not also ethically degrading.

Nirvana and Angst

In short, Buddhism has much in common with my Lovecraftian existentialism. But what of the main point of the Buddhists critique, that existential angst is egoistic and therefore foolish? Is angst compatible with an acceptance of Buddhist antiessentialism? Certainly, if everything were really one and all concepts that differentiate were misrepresentations, angst would rest on confusion, since angst presupposes a gap between the self and the world from which the self is alienated. But Buddhist monism isnt so extreme. The principle of IA implies not that everything is one, but that everything is interconnected as transitions in a flux. One transition must still differ from another for their interdependence to be possible. So the more relevant question is whether one part of a process can be alienated from another. And the answer is obviously that there can be such alienation. After all, on the Buddhists own assumptions, the cosmic flux includes a phase consisting of deluded people whose consequent disappointments amount to ways of being alienated from reality. To preserve our fragile egos and our pride and vainglorious ambition, we pretend that each individual is absolutely independent, and even that each is imbued by an immaterial spirit and thus deserving of his or her successes (and failures). If no one is so independent, the egoistic lifestyle becomes absurd. The Buddhist seems led to say, then, that egoism is the unenlightened persons means of avoiding a confrontation with the reality of everythings interconnectedness in the cosmic process. This confrontation produces either angst or, if the person is properly prepared, enlightenment and nirvana.

325

I would go further, though, and suggest that angst and nirvana are fundamentally the same. Nirvana is said to be transcendent peace and freedom from suffering, due to hyper-objectivity and attentiveness to everythings interrelatedness, and to an antipathy to egoism. But the Bodhisattvas compassion makes for a kind of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, this mostly-enlightened Buddhist is free from ego-based suffering; on the other, this person feels compassion for the unenlightened herd, which can mean only that the Bodhisattva feels their egoistic pain. This is quite comparable to the twosidedness of an existentialists life experience. On the one hand, the existentialist is naturally compelled to satisfy her animalistic appetites, to achieve certain goals for the sake of her survival; on the other, this person is barred from happiness by her appreciation of OES and is forced to endure angst. This cognitive dissonance is in each case the curse of dangerous esoteric knowledge, whether of IA or of OES. While the enlightened Buddhist finds that knowledge uplifting, she must admit that were everyone to affirm Buddhist principles, modern civilization would be undone. Buddhist mysticism is destructive to the ego, just as Lovecraftian existentialism destroys optimistic delusions. In addition, nirvana and angst are both forms of alienation. The Buddhist may feel mystically at one with the cosmos, but by refusing to take ownership of anything, including her thoughts and feelings, she casts herself adrift. Shes an outcast, surrounded by egoistic animals that chase after their mirages of power and pleasure. As I said, the Buddhist is alienated from the egoistically-conceived world. Most people think of the world in anthropocentric terms, and so the Buddhist is alienated from all of these people and from the social games that vain persons play. The existentialist is just as alienated, refusing to pragmatically submit to optimistic delusions and horrified by the tragic ironies that dominate our absurd lives. Furthermore, as I suggested, nirvana and angst force the mystic to make aesthetic rather than moral choices. The Buddhist and the existentialist are each like an art critic: theyre alienated observers, objectively scrutinizing all of nature as a sort of

326 meaningless, postmodern artwork. From what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called the view from nowhere, or what Spinoza and other philosophers call the Gods eye view or the perspective from eternity, which is just merciless objectivity, we learn the grim truths that mock all of our dreams and illusions. Nirvana and angst are both uncompromising, mystical perspectives that compel the Buddhist or the Lovecraftian existentialist to renounce the fruits of false hope. The difference between nirvana and angst lies only in the interpretation of whats perceived from the viewpoint of alienating objectivity. The Buddhist is trained to think in terms of liberation from a world of suffering, whereas the existentialist regards certain suffering as ennobling. The Buddhist meditates to escape from the debris blown through her mind on cosmic winds, while the existentialist uses angst as the song inspired by her muse, by the Lovecraftian cosmic god, for example, which is just a symbol for the inhumane cosmos. Again, though, the Buddhist escapes suffering only by severing herself completely from human life. As long as she remains at best a Bodhisattva, she suffers from compassion and must regard her altruism as an absurd, purely aesthetic decision, a matter of taste. Likewise, when confronting the remorselessly-alien cosmos, without the comfort of crutches, the existentialist can judge only by the light of aesthetic and primitive ethical standards. Equally alienated from society, the Buddhist and the existentialist must live on with the sense that life is absurd. Just as the judgment of art becomes farcical when art represents nothing, the evaluation of life becomes arbitrary without the benefit of comforting myths. Compassion is as meaningless as psychopathic misanthropy, given IA, which might explain why Buddhist societies, such as in Japan or in Sri Lanka, sometimes endorse killing. And whatever the alienated existentialist does to rebel, she does with a grave sense of irony and of the ridiculousness of all human effort. In conclusion, then, the Buddhists case against my version of existentialism isnt so clear-cut. The two positions are closer to each other than might at first be apparent.

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Part Two: Politics

____________________________________________________ Liberalism and Conservatism Oligarchy American Politics

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Liberalism: From Scientism to Nihilism ____________________________________________________

To understand liberalism, you have to distinguish between the modern and postmodern varieties of that political philosophy. The story of liberalism is that of disenchantment with modern myths and of their replacement with politically correct bromides.

Enlightenment Liberalism
The main question a liberal should be asked is this: What, deep down, do you believe as a liberal, if anything? The old liberal answer to this question derives from Enlightenment humanism. Inspired by world-shaking progress in science, humanists became confident that similar progress could be made in human affairs, that societies could be greatly improved through our own effort, using institutions such as government. Following science, humanists elevated Reason over faith and religious dogma. Whereas religious faith divides people, exacerbating our tribal instincts, reason unites us. Reason leads to consensus in science and is a basis for universal values and rights: in so far as were all rational, were equally precious as self-guiding beings. Thus, the liberal believes in the equality of human beings and in human rights, including the rights to life and to pursue our own goals as rational, free persons. These rights are thought to follow from the dignity of rational persons. Whereas in a religious society,

329 rights come from Gods commands as revealed in some holy text, in a liberal, humanistic society, rights are discovered by the power of human reason. Just as scientists learn how nature works by objectively testing hypotheses, we learn about ourselves by reflecting on our distinguishing features: were sentient, free, intelligent, social creatures, and those qualities dignify us, elevating us above the other species, but only to a degree; as science shows, were part of nature. But we have skills that make us special, and what the old liberal believes, as a humanist, is that we can use these skills to improve our situation on this planet. We can use government to help the poor, who have just as much dignity as rich people due to their shared humanity. We can think our way out of crises, negotiating and compromising for the common good. Above all, then, the liberal used to be a rationalist. But the liberal can no longer afford to be such, because the history of western rationalism has moved from a modern to a postmodern stage. The modern stage is what I just described: people were inspired by scientific advances and trusted that any species that could win for itself so much control over nature can learn to control itself. Like the technoscientific kind, psychological and social progress lay in the hands of reason, hands we all possess just by being members of our species. In this way, modern rationalists were scientistic, trusting that societies could progress by extending scientific methods or at least sciences general rationalistic approach to problems.

Postmodern Liberalism
In the postmodern period, however, we learn that scientism and secular humanism are substitute religions; that reason is able to figure out how things work but not how things ought to be and is thus no source of rights or values; that, paraphrasing Nietzsche, morality is buried with the death of God and that the humanist is a ghoul sniffing around Gods grave, rummaging through his possessions that are no longer serviceable. Science turns its dispassionate eye backward, as it were, on the human mind, and we learn that far from ideally rational, were usually irrational, prone to a host of fallacies, and are thus easily manipulated. We learn that were not as free or as self-guiding as

330 think we are, nor as conscious as we feel; consciousness is the tip of the iceberg of the unconscious over which we lack conscious control. We learn too that were not as united as wed like to believe: the human brain consists largely of independent modules that have their own, often conflicting evolutionary roles. Thus, social divisions are often symptoms of deeper, internal divisions in the brain. So while the old liberal was a mythmaker, or as the postmodernist Lyotard put it, a purveyor of master metanarratives, about Reason, Liberty, Dignity, and Progress, the more recent liberal finds herself out on a limb thats about to snap. Were not as the Enlightenment liberal said we are. We cant progress just with reason, because progress requires values and goals that give us direction, and reason cant tell us what to value. Reason is a tool with a limited practical purpose, or rather as the cognitive scientist, Keith Stanovich says in The Robots Rebellion, there are different kinds of thinking, each with its own, even narrower purpose: theres serial, slow-moving, highlydeliberative logic and then theres holistic, fast, unconscious and intuitive reasoning. We use the former for long-term planning, the latter for snap judgments. Thinking requires the prior input of assumptions, such as assumptions about right and wrong. The liberal humanist values human beings for their personhood, but in the first place were not as godlike as the Enlightenment myths declared, and secondly even if we were perfectly rational and rare among other species, those qualities wouldnt make us valuable. Just because something is rational or free or rare doesnt make it deserving of anything. Science tells us what the facts are, but the facts alone dont dictate what should be done about them. To say otherwise is to commit the scientistic, naturalistic fallacy. What, then, does the new, late liberal believe, deep-down, if anything? What has liberalism become? What is postmodern liberalism? My answer is that there are kernels of truth in the American conservatives talk of liberal elitism, nihilism, and relativism. Whats happened is that the liberal has come to realize that rationalist utopianism is bankrupt. Marxist societies experimented with preplanned economies and failed. The Enlightenment myths no longer captivate or inspire. If all humans have equal rights, all free societies that let their citizens be what they rationally choose must be equally valid.

331 But because reason alone is no source of culture, the liberal is faced with a variety of societies that meet that condition and has no means of discriminating between them. Liberalism thus reduces to politically correct multiculturalism. The liberals praise of anything is hollow because the liberals test of worth doesnt measure anything of value. A societys goodness or badness lies in its culture, in the goals of its citizens that direct them towards a prescribed end. Just because a culture is freely chosen doesnt mean the goals are noble, uplifting, moral, virtuous, or in any other way qualitatively positive (or negative). Worse than that, there are no free societies; everyone is coerced to some extent, both by other people and by independent parts of themselves. So should Muslim women wear burkas, for example? The liberal feminist says No, unless the women choose to wear them, and because many Muslim women are beaten or stoned for resisting the patriarchal fashion police, the practice of wearing the burka is unjust. But women in materialistic, sex-crazed, libertine cultures are coerced to show skin. That is, these cultures restrict choices by ostracizing women for choosing a way of life that falls outside of mainstream expectations. Granted, these women arent physically beaten or killed, but psychological and social pressures can be as effective as threats of physical force. Moreover, the liberal cant just help herself to holding out physical coercion as being worse than the propaganda and other refined social mechanisms found in secular societies, without having a liberal reason to value human life in the first place. Remember that the old liberal grew enchanted with science for disenchanting the natural world, including ourselves. Scientists have looked within every part of human anatomy and found no spirit or essence that makes us sacred. Our genetic code is very similar to that of some other species, we have an enlarged cerebral cortex that lets us plan far ahead, and weve language and modern science that give us ever-increasing control over natural forces. Undeniably, these traits make us rare and relatively wellinformed and powerful, but those facts about us simply dont make murder wrong. And if it turns out that reason, consciousness, and freewill are all illusions, as many

332 psychologists are currently showing, the humanist will be left with no justification for liberal values. As it stands currently, I think the liberal is caught between modern metanarratives and postmodern nihilism. In practice, the liberal tends to put aside questions of ultimate value, of which goals we should pursue and of which culture is best, focusing on problems that reason can actually solve, namely those of managing systems. Latestage liberalism is instrumentalistic. The liberal defends not the goals implicit in any particular culture, but only the efficiency of a rational bureaucracy in achieving those presupposed goals. The postmodern liberal says not that people have dignity and inalienable rights, as godlike beings, but only that if we believe as much, we should empower the government to secure those rights, following science in implementing rational strategies. Liberal rights, then, have become subjective and hypothetical. The liberal ducks the deep, philosophical questions, preferring to look Serious and Responsible, as a system manager.

Cast Study #1: The Democratic Party

The current American Democratic Party affords a perfect example of this downward spiral. American progressives criticize centrist establishment Democrats for triangulating, giving up on liberal values, and trying to appear like the rational, compromising adults, opposed by obnoxious, uninformed extremists on either side. But the so-called extremists who make up the base of each Party simply have deeplyheld values, whereas the centrist, postmodern liberals have none. To be sure, as Ive said and as Ill argue elsewhere, neither progressives nor conservatives have good arguments in support of their goals, but at least they take stands on qualitative issues. The centrist liberal is supposed to be more serious because she appreciates that modern science has left no room for anything as airy-fairy as values. What the pragmatic, centrist liberal is ultimately convinced of may thus be what critics accused the neoconservatives in the last Bush administration of believing. This underlying belief

333 is in Straussian, Platonic elitism, which can be explicated as follows. Modern science disenchanted the world, destroying forever the traditional myths that held societies together. This is the dark secret known only to the elite members of modern society. Were this truth to get out, society would collapse which would deprive the elite of their decadent lifestyle. Thus, to manage the social system, elites need to tell the outsiders noble lies, about continuing human dignity, reason, liberty, and consciousness even in the face of Gods evident demise. To the extent that the authentic postmodern liberal shares this Straussian elitism, that liberal is a closet nihilist. Her skills at managing systems make her a social engineer, and so she may feel shes entitled to an engineers prestige. Hardcore engineers are prized for creating the machines that help us survive by controlling the forces of nature. To do this, those engineers must master the wizards arcane language of mathematics, and this too is awe-inspiring to the hobbits who earn only liberal arts degrees or high school diplomas. But centrist liberals, making use only of soft or pseudosciences, dont enchant like Merlin or Gandalf; they administer a hyperrational society into the ground like the Star Wars Empire, sucking in recycled air like Darth Vader.

Case Study #2: President Obama

To take another example, theres currently much debate about whether Obama is (1) a progressive who either doesnt know how to negotiate (highly unlikely considering how well he ran his 2008 campaign) or who selects the curious tactic of not speaking up for or implementing a single progressive policy. Alternatively, Obama might be (2) a centrist who pretended to be a progressive during the campaign and who governs as a systems manager, dutifully adopting the goals of the American political system as he finds them, which are the goals of oligarchy. Some progressives hope hes the former, others denounce him as the latter. Notice that in either case, Obama likely functions as a systems manager. In scenario (1), the reason Obama would govern as a pragmatic centrist even though he campaigned as a progressive and still pretends to be such, is that deep down hes

334 embarrassed by the fact that postmodern liberalism reduces to Straussian nihilism. Moreover, he wouldnt want to humiliate himself going up and inevitably losing against the oligarchic system, a system he cant oppose with any conviction. Reading speeches to win an election is one thing, requiring only the basic political skill of lying in one form or another, but going to political war as President, in the pursuit of a non-Machiavellian goal, such as the long-term good of the country as a whole, takes courage of philosophical conviction. As a postmodern liberal and a Harvard man, Obama must know at some level that nature is a Lovecraftian nightmare and that liberal myths are just as delusional and absurd as conservative and religious ones. Thats what you tend to learn in secular institutions; thats the upshot of scientific naturalism and of humanistic rationalism. And this would account for scenario (2). The difference between the scenarios is just the extent to which Obama appreciates the implications of postmodern liberalism: in (1) he only dimly processes them at an unconscious level, while in (2) hes a more self-aware, authentic liberal, that is, a full-fledged Straussian elitist and decadent, nihilistic systems manager in an oligarchy that pursues not rational, long-term goals for the greater good of all rational humans, but the self-destructive, absurdly narrow and short-term ones of likely-sociopathic plutocrats.

Case Study #3: Canada

Canada is more liberal than the US, with higher taxes and more social programs and government regulations of the economy, medical care, and even the selling of alcohol. Conservatives call Canada a nanny state in which government power is abused, curtailing personal liberties. The ideological liberal or socialist response is that the government is needed to pick up the pieces after the fallout from parasitic business practices, which threaten the nations long-term health. Government is needed especially to support those whom, as implied by orthodox (social Darwinian) economic theory, Mother Nature weeds out as failures in the vicious laissez-faire competition. According to liberal ideology, the government should help the poor even when natural forces spit them out in the brutal struggle for survival (on which civilization is supposed to improve but which free market economists re-establish and deify), not out of Christian

335 charity, but out of Enlightenment rationalism. Even the poor have equal dignity as rational, autonomous persons. So much for classic liberal ideology. The postmodern liberal has no such faith in any normative implication of the success of scientific reason. Just because the poor can think doesnt make them valuable, and the same goes for the rich and for any other group. What accounts, then, for socialist, or proactive liberal policies, despite the postmodern decline of liberalism? My answer: instrumentalism run amok. The postmodern liberal presupposes values and ideals that she no longer knows how to justify, such as the ideals of personal dignity and happiness. Ignoring questions about the normative status of those values, she fancies herself a technocrat who can apply cold reason at least to the practical problem of how the corresponding goals can most efficiently be achieved. But theres no end to such problems: theres always more room to re-engineer society, to harmonize what actually happens in it with what ought to happen--especially when societys ideals are misplaced, as they are in the case of a materialistic society that deems the pursuit of pleasure to be lifes ultimate purpose. And so a liberal government can find its tentacles poking into more and more of peoples personal affairs, ever questing for new ways to tax the population to fund more technocratic schemes, constricting social interactions with more and more red tape, turning society into a Rube Goldberg machine that functions smoothly but to no wise end. Canada is such a country, although theres currently a conservative majority in the Canadian government. Still, Canadian culture feels the effect of postmodern liberalism in the dearth of vision in any Canadian politician. Even the Canadian conservatives are pragmatic and technocratic. This is to say that Canadian leaders believe in nothing to speak of and are mere managers of Canadian society, thinking only of how to maintain the status quo as opposed to considering the countrys long-term direction. Canadian politicians are not the only Canadians with no heartfelt principles. Many parts of Canada, particularly Ontario, have no distinguishing character. In part this is because of all the immigration to Canada, but theres just as much immigration to the US and

336 American immigrants tend to adhere to American myths, which unite all Americans in a melting pot of democratic and hedonic delusions. Canada has no national myth that could keep an immigrant or a native Canadian awake for even thirty seconds. As far as I can tell, Canada is in fact the most boring country on Earth. This is hardly to say that Canada is the worst country; on the contrary, its a very safe, naturally beautiful place in which to live. The countrys just spiritually dead, suffering from the postmodern, nihilistic phase of its bedrock liberalism. Id go as far as to hypothesize that Torontos current inability to succeed in any international team sport, be it baseball, hockey, basketball, or soccer, is due to this national somnambulism. Success in sports has an intangible psychological factor, and Canadians on the whole are relatively weak-minded, lacking a national character that means something to them and that they could describe without hollow liberal slogans. Somehow, this cultural miasma seems to seep into athletes who play for Toronto teams and drain their energy. Or perhaps these players cant help but fall asleep at practice, due to excruciating boredom simply from living in Ontario for an extended period. Curiously, though, Canadians are well-represented in the growing sport of mixed martial arts, and I suspect that thats because this sport has a rich Eastern culture built into it which fills in the void left by Canadian postmodern liberalism.

Appendix: The Definition of Liberalism

Liberalism: modern ideology of individual freedom, now anathema to the United States, the so-called land of the free. Originally, liberalism was the salvation of modernists from the Dark Ages, a celebration of Reason, Freedom, and Progress. Liberals were grim secular humanists, scientists, and renaissance men, Gods blood staining their faces as they set about creating a New World, free from superstition, oppression, and squalor, with each liberal serving as her own rationally self-controlling and creative sovereign. Now liberals are reduced to effeminate, vacillating, double-talking managers of the new form of dominance hierarchy

337 they created, the stealth oligarchy in which the strongest and most vicious use democracy and free markets to enslave the mob. Ironically, liberal myths of our potential godhood have backfired, thanks to the liberals science-centered philosophy which corrodes all grand delusions, leaving the postmodern wasteland in which liberals know enough to be miserable and are free to endlessly consume as an oligarchs branded cattle. The very instrument that modern, classic liberals considered sacred, namely technoscience, has been used to control society and not just nature, and so armed with market research and cognitive science, American demagogues have demonized liberals, counting on the publics ignorance of the liberals role in the birth of modern civilization. Liberals armed and unleashed a new breed of human predator and parasite, whose ill-gotten wealth co-opts liberal governments against the majoritys interests or whose perfected demagoguery creates the modern dictatorship. Thus has liberalism demonstrated our gross inequality, making nonsense of the liberals myth of universal human dignity. Liberalism was a paean to the end of the Old World, directing the modern experiment in social engineering which didnt eradicate kings and other pseudogods but merely improved their methods of control. Liberalism is the myth of human progress, but liberals have shown that sometimes change is an illusion.

338

Should Liberals Try to Win Elections by being Less Rational? ____________________________________________________

In his book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, the political psychologist and Democratic strategist Drew Weston argues that in the US, Republicans are much more successful presidential campaigners than Democrats because Republicans understand that voters are typically irrational when they evaluate issues they care about. Democrats, however, labour under the eighteenth century presumption that the mind is dispassionate, that the voter makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions. Unfortunately for Democrats, this theory of the dispassionate mind bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work. When campaign strategists start from this vision of mind, their candidates typically lose (ix). According to Westen, Clinton is the main exception, since he understood the importance of connecting with voters feelings. Westens book was published before Obamas election, but Obamas optimistic and inspiring assurance that Yes, we can change might count as another exception. Democrats like Dukakis, Gore, and John Kerry, though, lost mainly because they presupposed an erroneous, rationalistic theory of the mind.

339 As Westen puts it, Republicans understand what the philosopher David Hume recognized three centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around. With the exception of the Clinton era, Democratic strategists for the last three decades have instead clung tenaciously to the dispassionate view of the mind and to the campaign strategy that logically follows from it, namely one that focuses on facts, figures, policy statements, costs and benefits, and appeals to intellect and expertise. Democrats do so, he says, because of an irrational emotional commitment to rationality--one that renders them, ironically, impervious to both scientific evidence on how the political mind and brain work and to an accurate diagnosis of why their campaigns repeatedly fail (15). According to Westen, Democrats need to come to grips with the fact that We do not pay attention to arguments unless they engender our interest, enthusiasm, fear, anger, or contempt. We are not moved by leaders with whom we do not feel an emotional resonance. We do not find policies worth debating if they dont touch on the emotional implications for ourselves, our families, or things we hold dear. From the standpoint of research in neuroscience, the more purely rational an appeal, the less it is likely to activate the emotion circuits that regulate voting behavior. (16) The paradox of American politics, says Westen, is that when it comes to winning hearts and minds, the party that views itself as the one with the heart (for the middle class, the poor, and the disenfranchised) continues to appeal exclusively to the mind (44). Westen recommends that in political campaigns liberals wear their heart on their sleeve, since right-wing extremists have captured the conservative party and dont represent the majority of Americans.

340

The Irrelevance of Westens Political Strategy

Westens assessment is consistent with my views on liberalism and conservatism, but I dont think he goes far enough. In the first place, his goal is just the partisan one of helping Democrats win elections, not to ensure that the party with the best principles and policies wins. Thus, he recommends that Democrats adopt the Republican strategy of selling their message by appealing to voters feelings, of favouring truthiness over truth, to use the comedian Stephen Colberts distinction. Of course, Democrats want to win elections and they might run more successfully by following Westens advice, but the deeper question is whether such an anachronistic party that needs that advice in the first place ought to win elections in the postmodern world. Whats the point of electing an unprincipled, hyper-rational party when no sooner than its candidate is elected will his or her technocratic governing style automatically bend to serve the oligarchic power structure which most benefits those who can achieve their political objectives by relying just on their lobbyists, campaign contributions, and implicit private sector job offers for cooperative politicians? Even were there no such bribery or economic blackmail, a Democratic president who doesnt understand how irrational voters are about their cherished issues, precisely because that president has no such strong philosophical feelings of his or her own, is bound to cower when faced in office with the great unelected powers. As progressives lament, this is what happened under both Clinton and Obama. Clinton, who is Westens hero, in effect, for the depth of Clintons cynicism about our tendency not to rise above the animalistic parts of our brain, may be responsible for eight years of peace and prosperity, to borrow his supporters meme, but both the peace and the economic prosperity were illusory: the peace was the result of al Qaedas preparation for its main attack on the US, which came just after Clinton left office, and the economic gains were due to a self-destructive ballooning of Americans debt and to tech and real estate bubbles that again burst soon after Clinton left. Clinton is infamous among liberals for his triangulation, which is to say his governing as a centrist Republican. For

341 example, he deferred to Greenspans and to Paul Rubins policies of free trade and deregulation, which led to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which in turn created banks that are too big to fail and that therefore hold the global economy hostage. As for Obama, as soon as he won his election by campaigning as a passionate progressive, he too governed as a pragmatic, triangulating centrist Republican, continuing or exacerbating all of Bushs foreign policies, as Glenn Greenwalds blog demonstrates, and bowing to economic pressures on domestic affairs, such as in the cases of his health care bill which doesnt offer an alternative to the badly-flawed American system thats run by pharmaceutical companies and private health care insurers, and his unconditional bailout of Wall Street. As Greenwald speculates, Obamas betrayal of his progressive base and of the independents that handed him his mandate may explain the clownish status of the current Republican field of presidential candidates, since the Republicans are able to demonize Obama only by moving so far to the right that they lose all touch with reality. Clinton and Obama may have been politically successful, in Westens narrow pragmatic sense, in that they won the presidency by manipulating the voters feelings instead of raising the bar and leveling with voters about the underlying reality in the US, which is, as Chris Hedges says in Death of the Liberal Class, that the US is a stealth oligarchy with merely vestigial liberal institutions that provide dysfunctional checks on its undemocratic centers of power. The recent Democratic presidents may have been politically successful in the narrowest, Machiavellian sense, but their elections didnt further any progressive or socialist endeavor. While in office as the president, neither Clinton nor Obama framed issues in liberal terms in the way that Reagan pushed the American political debate to the right, even though Clinton and Obama were elected largely because of their rhetorical powers. The underlying problem, then, is that even a nihilistic or indeed a sociopathic politician with no feelings at all can succeed in narrow pragmatic terms, by arousing voters feelings in the politicians favour during a circus-like, postmodern political campaign.

342 This capacity to succeed in winning elections, by way of cynical pandering and demagoguery, has no bearing on whether liberalism itself presently has any merit. On the contrary, the reason that Democrats, and indeed liberals in general, are beholden to an anachronistic rationalism or scientism is that they have no deeply-felt values of their own and therefore presume that no one else has or ought to have such values. In short, liberals are postmodernists who flatter themselves by thinking that theyre still modern: theyre actually cynical, nihilistic pragmatists who pretend that they possess a rousing liberal metanarrative that can compete with conservative myths. As I say in Scientism, the liberals root error is the scientistic one of assuming that scientific methods of acquiring knowledge can be extended to dictate how society ought to be run, that society generally can progress just as well as can the institutions of science--and by the same means, namely by the exercise of dispassionate reason in opposition to traditional, intuitive, or faith-based myths. That scientism leads to the postmodern corruption of liberalism, to moral relativism, political apathy, cultural decadence, and to the technoscientific version of the primitive oligarchic status quo.

The Liberals Pitiful Vestige of Theism

Oh, to be sure, the liberal has strong feelings about social issues such as abortion, gay rights, feminism, fair redistribution of wealth, and avoidance of war. Ask for a justification of those feelings and the liberal will offer religious principles of either the theistic or the scientistic variety. Ill look at each in turn (and Ill ignore the religious aspect of scientism, for the sake of simplicity). Liberal theism is a pathetic, retreating echo of authentic theism. Since prehistoric times, real theists have channeled the energy of existential worries into apologies for social dominance hierarchies. Real theism, whether for monotheists, Hindus, or Buddhists, is distinguished by exoteric faith and thus by a narrowness of vision that pits empirical knowledge not simply against faith in a transcendent, supernatural reality, but in a nave replacement of mystical experience with crude, anthropocentric images. The chief flaw of theism isnt literalism, the idolatrous worship of scripture, or even an authoritarian mindset; rather, the theists calamitous weakness is his or her narcissistic projection of parochial human categories

343 onto purportedly ultimate realities. The theist belittles the divine by humanizing it, mocks the awesome miracle of the existence of a cosmos, not just by positing anthropomorphic deities and supernatural events, but by narrow-mindedly clinging to infantile creeds without all due humility. The most appalling shortcomings of theists are ethical and aesthetic in character. Now, liberal, progressive, and moderate theists are much more influenced by the scientific mindset and so they cant bring themselves to worship theological metaphors. This means not just that the liberal theist is more familiar with scientific theories, but that she appreciates the source of the scientists triumph, which is the humility that causes a scientist to abandon traditions, intuitions, and wishes and to let the evidence speak for itself. The liberal theist accepts the modern scientific worldview and is thus far a rationalist, but she nevertheless clings to a traditional theistic religion rather than adopting the more recent science-centered religion, marked by faith in modern metanarratives of technoscientific progress and in the divinity of capitalistic creativity and of the winners in a wild (free) market. Her rationalism sets her at odds with both esoteric and exoteric theism (mysticism and mainstream religious faith, respectively), but due to nostalgia, childhood indoctrination, social pressure, a lack of imagination, or a cynical ruse for private gain, she adheres to a semblance of traditional theism. In the more aesthetically repellent cases, the liberal theist passively absorbs the dominant religion from her social atmosphere and pays mere lip service to its creed, without her religion having any substantial impact on her behaviour. The more impressive liberals are those who creatively seek a fitting religious interpretation of the postmodern world, turning to New Age speculations. The chief flaw of this form of liberal religion, though, is its pseudoscientific syntheses of perennial religious concepts with current scientific knowledge. Either way, the liberals theism is only skin deep, since rationalism undermines the credibility of both traditional religions and of more recent pseudoscientific ones, and also prevents mystical experience (although not the psychedelic, drug-induced version of this experience). To see how this phony theism plays out for the liberal, see, for

344 example, Westens argument that the liberal is astonishingly well-positioned to demolish so-called conservative Christian morality on the ground that this morality is obviously anti-Christian. This is so, says Westen, despite the fact that in the US, conservatives have successfully identified any worldview other than what Westen calls the extremist, fundamentalist Christian one as unpatriotic, immoral, and otherwise intolerable. After all, Westen points out, the conservative Christians social Darwinian trust in market forces, idolizing of plutocrats and soldiers, and lack of compassion for persons--the campaign against the abortion of first trimester embryos notwithstanding--are woefully at odds with the Bible. Says Westen, You wouldnt know from the language of the religious right that Jesus was preoccupied with poverty, not sex, and he goes on to point out similarly glaring conflicts between the New Testament and the Republicans views on school prayer, war, and taxes (381). But the liberals Bible-based denunciation of fundamentalist Christianity is futile. Of course theres nothing Jesus-centered about authoritarian, fundamentalist Christianity, and if Jesus walked the Earth today hed remind those imposters that he never knew them, and then hed blast the earth from under their feet and roast them in hell unto the end of time. Being a friend of scientific rationality, however, the liberal or moderate Christian knows that theres no realistic potential for such justice; that the Bible was written by ignorant, often plagiarizing and patriarchal or victimized males whose metaphors have literary and historical significance, but not much spiritual weight in the postmodern context; that all anthropomorphic images of God are misleading; that no teaching from a religious institution should be dogmatically accepted; that none of Jesus miracles happened as reported; that Christian theology isnt about metaphysical reality so much as psychological transformation and thus that Jesus may not have existed even as an historical person, let alone as a human incarnation of the universes creator. The contradictions between the Bible and Republican orthodoxy mean little in light of the essence of pure theism as a tool for social control. No sooner than the liberal refers to the contradictions, the conservative Christian freely speaks of the Holy Spirits

345 presence in the Churchs development or of Gods hand in inspiring new interpretations of Christian revelation for the present worldly circumstances, or any other ad hoc nonsense to harmonize the theological and political dimensions of the grotesque edifice of conservatism. Theism in its own right is, and has always been, mainly a fantasy for the authoritarian personality that worships power. Thus, by blurring the line between religion and state for the sake of creating a theocracy, the conservative Jew, Christian, or Muslim demonstrates that hes the more authentic theist compared to the liberal or moderate, regardless of the incoherence of the conservatives worldview. Only a rationalist with scientistic leanings like a liberal would assume that the question of the literal truth of fundamentalist theology is crucial to that theologys effectiveness as a means of social control. To be sure, the fundamentalist will climb onto the rooftop to declare the ultimate truth of some handful of religious ravings, but a conservatives religious faith is sustained not so much by trust in the intellectual strength of any doctrine, but by animalistic pride in being friends with the blocks biggest bully, whose power must be obvious to its victims as well as to its possessors. Thus, the Christian conservative takes comfort not in what the Bible actually says, what happened two thousand years ago in Palestine, or in the pseudoscientific hypothesis that God helped along the biological evolution of species; instead, this conservative trusts primarily in American economic and military hegemony, to which Christian symbols are attached for the purpose of taunting outsiders and victims of that power. Fundamentalist Judaism is sustained by Israeli military might, which extends that of the US, which in turn is aligned with Judeo-Christian theism. Finally, Muslim fundamentalists are sustained by the memory of when Muslims dominated during the Middle Ages and by the recent manifestation of their power in the 911 attack on the US, the success of which they incessantly attribute to their god. So much for the liberals criticism of conservative religion. What about the religious basis of liberal values? According to Westen, this basis is essentially just the Golden Rule.

346 Its key virtues are compassion and tolerance, and it reflects the clear and simple moral dictum that we should treat others as we would want to be treated, whether or not they share our religious beliefs, gender, skin color, sexual orientation, or other characteristics, and even if we personally find some of their attitudes distasteful....Although firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and ultimately derived from the teachings of that tradition with its foundation in the Bible, this is a nondenominational view of public morality that can be held equally by Christians, Jews, Muslims, secular humanists, agnostics, and atheists. (408) There are a number of questionable assumptions in this quotation, but the one I want to focus on is that were morally obligated to be compassionate and tolerant. As Westen says, theists and nontheists alike can uphold the Golden Rule, but this universality should give us pause. The reason for the universality is hinted at by Westens reference to the virtues of compassion and tolerance. When we look more closely at the Golden Rule, that we should treat others as wed treat ourselves were we in their position, what we find, of course, is just an appeal to empathy. Once you empathize with others, youll find yourself agreeing with the liberals policies on social issues, such as on redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, and on a preference for negotiation and for trials rather than for a so-called war on terror. Most humans have an innate ability to theorize about other peoples thoughts and feelings, because were social animals, and once we begin dwelling on whats likely happening in someone elses mind, its not much of a leap to start imagining what it would be like to be that other person. You might have preferred to be someone whos better off than you, leading you to feel admiration or jealousy, and you might be repulsed by the thought of being someone worse off, leading you to feel pity or contempt for that other person. The capacities for imagining someone elses mental states and for feeling certain emotions in response to the other persons situation are universal, because theyre biologically ingrained in most people. But this doesnt mean we morally ought to feel certain emotions such as pity rather than contempt. Just because most people are capable of empathizing, doesnt mean that feelings of compassion and tolerance are

347 virtuous nor that were all bound by the Golden Rule. Westen recognizes that the Golden Rule historically had theistic justifications, but once the liberal comes to admire modern science and to digest the naturalistic worldview, she can no longer help herself to that rule in defense of her values. The liberal needs a reason why pity for those who are worse off than us is superior to disgust for their failure or misfortune. Jesus offers a reason: the poor and the miserable will inherit the world when God reigns over it more directly, and those who presently flourish will likely be condemned to hell; moreover, God commands that we help those who suffer. The liberals problem is that she doesnt take the New Testament seriously as a moral handbook, because her science and logic dictate that its authors had no special insight on how we should live. So the liberal can mouth her approval of empathy, but merely calling certain feelings virtuous and invoking the famous Golden Rule dont amount to a prescription of liberalism. Certainly, no compelling justification of liberal values will emerge from the liberals hand-me-down, threadbare theism.

Scientistic Liberalism: Instrumental Reason Masking the Ego

Liberals who appreciate that reason destroys childlike religious faith have attempted to justify their values in more secular terms. The most common justification derives from the social contract theory, as formulated by such political philosophers as Locke or Rawls. According to this theory, liberal values are the results of an objective weighing of the alternatives when pondering the thought experiment of how best to set up a society to escape from the harsh state of nature in which, as Hobbes said, everyone is at war with everyone else. We voluntarily agree to respect each others liberties, because the alternative is anarchy in which most people are disadvantaged. This agreement is the social contract, and the key point is that reason rather than religious faith in divine revelation is the basis for the resulting liberal society. We weigh the odds of how wed fare under different social or antisocial arrangements, and we conclude that the liberal society, in which everyone enjoys certain equal and unalienable rights, provides the best compromise.

348 This rational defense of liberalism shares its main defect with the theistic defense I just criticized. Once again, a description of a prevalent state of affairs is mistaken for a prescription of what we ought to do. Suppose that most people do reason as the social contractarian says and so come to favour a liberal society over the alternatives. No normative statement follows from that premise--no justification of liberal values and no Golden Rule. True, each person who thinks about the alternatives and concludes that a liberal society is best can cite those reason that convince her, but those reasons may be strong or weak. Were there (1) powerful evidence that liberal values of respect for liberty and compassion for everyones inherent dignity are needed to produce the society in which everyone is most advantaged, and were (2) everyone to share an interest in living in such a society, assuming that everyone acts in her own best interest, or to maximize her utility, liberal values would be proven rational and all rational people would in fact be liberals. But this doesnt imply that anyone ought to be a liberal, since the morally or aesthetically best way of life may require irrationality rather than rationality, and those who seek their own advantage may be acting contrary to such an overriding standard. What we have here, in this rational defense, is an appeal to instrumental reason and to conditional prescriptions. The hyper-rational liberal observes that most people do act egoistically, in the direct or indirect pursuit of their own gain, and this liberal recommends that if someone has such self-interest in mind, then that person should prefer a compassionate, tolerant society to an opposite one. This is equivalent to saying that a liberal society is the most effective means of satisfying peoples self-interest. Instead of having any moral force, then, this instrumental liberalism reduces to a scientific generalization about a causal relationship between a certain sort of social order and a certain resulting mental state (satisfaction of personal goals). Only were the liberal to defend the tendency to act out of self-interest (that is, egoism, or the attempt to maximize your own welfare) would we have the makings here of a moral defense of liberalism. Instead, we have only a scientistic one, since the secular liberal seldom admits that her sociopolitical philosophy amounts to merely a description with no normative implications; indeed, shell typically commit the naturalistic fallacy, especially

349 when arguing against a nonliberal, and conclude, in short, that liberal values are superior to nonliberal ones. With this instrumental liberalism in tow, the liberal is entitled to conclude only that if the nonliberal ultimately values her own welfare, then that person should think like a liberal, assuming that doing so produces the society in which egoists are most likely rewarded. Unfortunately, such a person would already be a liberal. (A word about a piece of obfuscation that a secular liberal is wont to hide behind at this point. Liberals arent committed to egoism, shell say; maximization of utility and acting out of self-interest mean only that a person pursues goals that belong to herself, not that her actions aim towards benefiting herself as the object of her goals. Compare a person who kills herself solely to benefit someone else whom the suicidal person hates, with a person who robs a bank to buy a mansion solely for her own enjoyment. In the first case, we can say that the suicidal person acts out of self-interest in the first, non-egoistic sense, since even though she doesnt intend for her action to benefit herself at all, shes the self who possesses the non-egoistic desire to commit suicide for someone elses benefit. In the second case, we can say that the robber acts out of selfinterest in the second, egoistic sense, since not only does she possess the desire which causes her to rob the bank, but her own personal gain is the ultimate objective in her mind. Note that the non-egoistic sense of self-interest is utterly tautological and worthless in a defense of liberalism. Just because someone acts out of self-interest in the non-egoistic sense doesnt mean rationality forces her to prefer a liberal society to the state of nature, since the desire she possesses may be a suicidal, masochistic, sociopathic, or otherwise insane one. (No, the social contractarians argument from instrumental reason assumes the egoistic sense of self-interest, since only the desire for your own preservation could cause you to prefer a society in which youre entitled to certain protections that arent otherwise available. Granted, the secular liberals egoism doesnt require that we each act to benefit solely ourselves, since were free to benefit indirectly from our actions. Thus, a secular liberal can help other people as long as doing so at least psychologically

350 benefits the liberal. Were there no such positing of an underlying constant motive to benefit ourselves, the liberals notion of self-interest would be the useless tautological one.) Once its clear that secular liberalism presupposes a nontrivial kind of egoism, the liberal loses the moral high ground, which is why the liberal shrewdly masks her egoism behind jargon like maximization of utility. This secular defense of liberalism is roughly the same as the Invisible Hand defense of an unplanned economy. In each case, the argument is that, rather paradoxically, everyone is better off if they just stop trying to be so moral and put their own selfish concerns first. In the political context, a liberal, democratic society follows by the power of instrumental reason, which causes the egoist to realize that such a society is most likely to benefit her personally in the long run. In the economic context, a free market, in which buyers and sellers get what they deserve and the standard of living is most likely to rise for everyone, follows by the power of cosmic creativity, which produces more and more complex forms from the atomic to the intergalactic scales. Whats wrong with egoism, given its role in secular liberalism? In the first place, the assumption that rational people are nontrivially self-interested should cloud the calculation of probabilities in the hypothetical assent to the social contract. Whether a liberal society really does satisfy the majority in the long-run is less obvious if we assume that those who reach that conclusion are egoists, since egoism is inherently dangerous. If we replace an omniscient, benevolent God as the master force governing society, with mindless cosmic creativity, we have no guarantee that the expression of our instincts benefits us in the long-term. Even if we assume that our tendency to be disproportionately concerned with our own welfare is an evolutionary adaptation that makes ours a fit species, Mother Nature is frugal and imperfect, and every fit species eventually is extinguished, leaving room for more novel forms of complexity. Our high self-regard may protect our genetic lineage, but in the long-run egoism--combined with our high intelligence--may destroy us. For example, assuming were innately selfinterested, a demagogue can more easily manipulate a mass of people by pandering to

351 that instinct for self-preservation, say by demonizing foreigners, and whats beneficial for an elite group of insiders may harm the majority of outsiders. Also, an unplanned economy in which everyone is encouraged to think mainly of his or her own private welfare, may consume and grow without paying sufficient heed to future generations, leading to environmental catastrophe and potentially the extinction of our species, let alone the collapse of particular nations. In the second place, aside from the damage egoism does to the liberals empirical case, there are ethical and aesthetic objections to egoism. The main alternative to egoism is the mystics lack of self-regard, due to a realization that the personal self is illusory and to an identification with the unity of natural processes. I wont attempt to show here which is the ethically or aesthetically superior way of life, the egoistic, materialistic, liberal protection of liberty and pursuit of happiness or the ascetic, Gnostic, mystical detachment from such concerns due to a vision of their absurdity. Instead, Ill just point to what I say in Happiness is Unbecoming and Curse of Reason, that flight from the knowledge of our grim existential situation, as animals that fall short of the idealistic projections of ourselves in our religious myths, is unseemly. The curse of reason is the knowledge that makes the intellectually curious person unhappy. To honour that knowledge of what we are as beasts lost in the wilderness of natural forces, we need to renounce any carefree lifestyle that depends on delusions. That conscientious renouncing may entail self-loathing rather than self-interest: far from deferring to our natural instincts that cause us to privilege our own welfare, we may find that a willful revolt against those instincts is more tasteful and even awe-inspiring. At any rate, egoistic secular liberalism is at odds with the mystic's condemning of the illusory fragmentation of the cosmos that produces unique levels of alienation and suffering for intelligent animals.

Conclusion
Drew Westens suspicion may be correct, that Democrats hamper their own political chances by clinging to modernist and scientistic fantasies of rationalism in our

352 postmodern context in which the myth of human greatness, due to our rationality, has lost its power to enchant, thanks to the wars of the last century and to the scientific discovery of our natural limitations. Republicans are better at running political campaigns because they have much less shame than Democrats: theyre beholden to much more absurd traditional theistic fantasies that rationalize the colossally unfair, oligarchic social arrangement. As such, Republicans have less compunction about exploiting peoples psychological weaknesses, such as the emotional and instinctive foundations of our brains. Conservatives are the true theists, mesmerized by power inequalities; their enterprise is to approximate the ideal inequality between Creator and Creation, maintaining for us the dominance hierarchies that evolve as the most stable social orders in myriad species, including ours. With all of that on their side, Republicans and conservatives in general ought to be highly effective campaigners, that is, hypocrites, demagogues, predators, or parasites. Liberals are progressive to the extent that they resist those forces of gravity and try to establish a new world order. Their tragic flaw is their scientism, which is their faith in reason as our salvation: reason works in science, not in society at large, since reason has no normative force. So the liberal is left unarmed, now that postmodern disenchantment with reason has set in, but condemned with the Herculean task of unseating the mighty conservative from his natural throne. The only way left to beat the conservatives is to join them, and so a Democrat, for example, must govern like a centrist Republican, fleeing from the opportunity to sell liberal values which are, after all, so fragile now that their support from Enlightenment myths has been lost. In the first place, though, a Democrat must campaign like a Republican, as Westen says, appealing to emotions rather than just to logic or evidence. Were a liberal to succeed with such a campaign strategy, the result would be no defense of liberal values, since such a politician could be expected to triangulate for Machiavellian advantage, having acquired a taste for the cynicism needed to win political power in a competition with inhumane conservatives. And were a Democrat to lose with that strategy, the culprit would surely be the greater difficulty of becoming excited about relatively recent liberal values that are no longer motivated by charming theistic or scientistic myths.

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Existential Grimness and Cornel Wests Catastrophic Compassion ____________________________________________________

This summary of his philosophy draws on the online article, The Supreme Love and Revolutionary Funk of Dr. Cornel West, Philosopher of the Blues, by Jeff Sharlit. See also Wests short YouTube video on catastrophic love. Cornel West is an existential, Kierkegaardian Christian and progressive. As Sharlit says, the Westian turn is that West roots himself in what he calls the night side of American democracy so hell be ready for the dawn. He begins with anger so we can end with love. West speaks as a sort of postmodern prophet. However, To prophesy, he [West] writes, is not to predict an outcome but rather to identify concrete evils. Hes concerned not with divine revelations but with what he sees as jazzlike improvisation, the radical hope he tempers with the tragic sensibility he takes from the blues. Im a bluesman in the life of the mind, he says, a jazzman in the world of the ideas....The blues, West says, is the suffering thats at the heart of the American story, both tragic and comic, darkly grandiose and absurdly mundane. Jazz is democracy...Jazz--improvisation--is his answer to things as they are, the negation of the status quo and thus the affirmation of another possibility.

354 For an appreciation of the tragic aspect of life, West recommends the 19th C. Italian poet Leopardi, who saw that the naturalism of Enlightenment philosophy gives rise to what West calls the paradox of human freedom, that we must resist oppression even as we acknowledge, as Sharlit puts it, that we are ultimately weak in the face of death and despair. We are organisms of desire, West defines the human condition, whose first day of birth makes us old enough to die. Wests perspective is summarized in the title of his early book, Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, in which he synthesizes Marxism, Christianity, and a tragicomic African-American sensibility. Sharlit: West believes in Marxs radical critique of capital and empire, but he also believes in God. To West, Marxism without what he calls the love ethic is inhumane, just as Christianity without a systemic economic and political analysis is incomplete. And what would blackness contribute? Death; or, to put it another way, the blues, a sensibility both tragic and comic that was lacking in the utopianism of the left and the messianism of religion. He advocates what he calls prophetic pragmatism. This is to say that West is interested more in political action than in academic debates, and that he regards theodicy as the chief obstacle to progressive action. As Sharlit says, West locates the problem of theodicy not in the abstract of heaven but in the concrete of the world: How do you really struggle against suffering in a loving way, to leave a legacy in which people would be able to accent their own loving possibility in the midst of so much evil? West is after what he calls catastrophic love, meaning loving-kindness or, as West puts it, steadfast commitment to the wellbeing of others, especially the least of these, a compassion, however, thats rooted in an understanding of the tragedy of human life, of what Ive called our existential predicament. West is directly impacted by one of the primary American catastrophes, which was the enslavement of Africans, and his

355 Christianity requires that he focus on compassion for the poor and the downtrodden. As West says, Justice is what love looks like in public. Sharlit explains: justice is not vengeance but fairness; the respect he [West] believes should be accorded every soul. And democracy, he [West] continues, is what justice looks like in practice. That is, a society where there is justice--a vast, public loving-kindness--for all. Sharlit adds that West is steadfastly anti-utopian. He thinks perfectionist illusions drive both religion and radicalism to murderous ends. He knows that love for all is a hopeless cause, that thus justice is a hopeless cause, too. Democracy? Not a chance. Its a blues dream of a jazz impossibility. But still, he cant help dreaming. This is the practical problem of evil: our religious and political ideals seems impossible to achieve. But West nevertheless prefers compassion to despair or bitterness. Thus he calls everyone his brothers and sisters and is quick to hug strangers and friends alike. As I see it, then, a Westian might read Rants Within the Undead God and say that what Ive left out is a practical concern to help the poor, to correct injustice. Its fine to remind ourselves that nature is a harsh place and that were all doomed to die, but not if this pessimism is unmitigated, not if it prevents progressive action. West overcomes his pessimism with Christian faith in the rightness of compassion, which drives him to fight against political and economic injustices. Like West (and Chris Hedges, another existential Christian), Ive spoken of the injustices of oligarchy. But what resources, if any, do I offer in the field of political action? Have I drunk from the cup of bitterness, to which West refers in his video on catastrophic love? Should we succumb to despair and allow injustices to take their course, retreating from politics, as detached ascetics or outsiders? And is Wests Christian, African-American Marxism what Id call an aesthetically respectable path to worthwhile political ends?

Kierkegaardian Liberalism
My response begins with a summary of what I say in my various rants on liberalism. The gist of my take on liberalism is that modern liberalism has degenerated into a postmodern form, leading to what West, as a postmodern liberal, is forced to think of as

356 the paradox of human freedom. Whereas a modern liberal, flush with Enlightenment ideology and confident in scientistic myths, wouldnt hesitate to declare that the rational route to social progress is self-evident, the postmodern liberal can vouch for her political ideals only with duplicity or with much hemming and hawing. Rationalism has led, as Nietzsche predicted, to hyper-skepticism in modern societies, to a disenchantment of nature and a corresponding incredulity towards all metanarratives, which is as the French philosopher Lyotard said, the mark of the postmodern. The liberal continues to value equality, human rights, and fairness, but has lost any compelling justification for those values. Thats the root of why liberal is a dirty word in the US. Granted, conservatives demagogued and demonized their opponents, but liberals failed to pursue the course of annihilating the obvious evil at the heart of political conservatism (the unabashed preservation of dominance hierarchies), because liberals can no longer trust in their goal of social progress. Liberals cant bring themselves to defend their name, let alone their ideals, and pragmatic Americans have no respect for such lack of self-confidence. In effect, Cornel West confronts this problem for liberalism, but his theological and existential construal of it obscures the fact that the liberal is in an especially precarious position. The problem, West says, is the more universal one of theodicy, that we must all find a way to overcome evil. But unlike rationalistic liberals, conservatives see nothing paradoxical about human freedom, because conservatives live in a fantasy world in which nature is still enchanted. Christian conservatives ignore the upshot of the Age of Reason and wallow in shameful theistic delusions, while libertarian, atheistic conservatives subscribe to an economic religion which deifies the cosmic creativity of the wild (free) marketplace and the avatars of that divine creative power, the oligarchs who triumph in the evolutionary struggle which is the ultimate creative process. Postmodern liberals are energized by no such myths and their lot is the angst which is Reasons curse. Liberals who hold onto a vestige of some mainstream religion typically can only pay lip service to its creed, because theyre more fervently committed to modern rationalism.

357 Now, Wests Christianity is the rare Kierkegaardian sort, which prescribes an irrational, absurdly dangerous leap of faith as the only way to overcome the despair of knowing the facts of our suffering and our mortality. In terms of political strategy, Christian liberalism, which reduces the religion to that blind faith, is likely to founder, especially when rationalists can move now from technoscientific strength to strength. Even if physicists may currently be reaching the limits of science, substituting open-ended string theory for a genuine Theory of Everything, a blind leap of faith in moral and political ideals seems not just absurd but gauche. Certainly, a liberal shouldnt admit openly, in sophisticated postmodern society, that liberalism is based on compassion for the poor which in turn is justified by nothing but Kierkegaardian blind faith. Such a defense of liberalism would be torn asunder by savvy, pseudo-rational journalists before the defense could even reach the subterranean lairs of conservative beasts. This is to say that Kierkegaard doesnt sit well with Wests professed pragmatism. Its one thing to fuel political action with prophetic rhetoric which calls attention to concrete injustices, but its another if the prophet in question is Kierkegaard who concedes that theism, the liberals ultimate motivation, has no rational justification whatsoever. But what of the more substantive question of whether Kierkegaardian liberalism is privately necessary, however publicly impractical this political philosophy may be? Kierkegaardian theism is consistent with what Ive called postmodern liberalism. A postmodern liberal cant subscribe to exoteric, literalistic theism, since that theism is plainly irrational and unlike the conservative, the liberal is afflicted with the capacity for shame, which compels her to respect the power of Reason. However, instead of subscribing to one-sided rationalism, which leads to the fallacy of scientism, the liberal can be an existentialist who understands that reasons power is limited, especially for the adapted animals that we are. If all worldviews are ultimately irrational, resting on emotion, instinct, and faith, why not trust in constructive Christianity rather than in selfdestructive Reason? This is the existential argument put forward at the end of the popular novel, The Life of Pi.

358 Consistency, however, is too minimal a standard for philosophical purposes. When deciding what to believe at the philosophical level, were inevitably guided by other values that help discount certain choices. One such value, the aesthetic one, derives from our instinctive (sexual) preference for beauty. Why didnt Kierkegaard leap to faith in Hinduism rather than in Christianity? Obviously because he lived in 19th C. Denmark which was culturally Christian. That coincidence calls into question the notion that he exercised radical, absolute freedom in leaping from nothing to something. He began not with doubt about reasons capacity to provide a satisfying philosophy, but with his differential familiarity with cultures. The same is true with respect to Cornel West: he grew up in an African-American culture which adopted European Christianity. This is to say that the leap of faith can be clichd and thus aesthetically suspect if its not truly blind or original. Originality is praiseworthy, according to the modern ideal of progress due to our divine creativity. But a truly despairing omega person, an outsider who knows not what to believe because shes lost in lamentations for the death of God, wont be caught with such a telltale bias. Her choice of a philosophy will be radical because shell be a genuinely alienated outcast, beginning her philosophical journey from nowhere in particular. Shell be guided not by a fully-formed, presupposed ideology, but by her character, instincts, and experience. And as I said, that means shell have an aesthetic sense for which ideas feel right to her. As I show in Christian Crudities, Christianity may feel right within Christian culture, but not within a modern, rationalistic one. Now, an existential philosopher, a radical who questions everything in pursuit of ultimate truth, can be expected to question Enlightenment philosophy along with all other cultures and ideologies, but questioning technoscience itself on non-normative grounds isnt part of any search for knowledge. You can doubt the optional and especially dubious philosophies that crop up around technoscience, like scientism, naturalism, pragmatism, and social Darwinism, but no one whos interested in knowledge can doubt the cognitive merit and power of scientific methods and their results. To that extent, modernism must now be presupposed along with the ideal of good taste in ideas.

359 However, certain values seem to follow inevitably from that appreciation of technoscience, such as those of human ingenuity as a source of progress, and of intellectual adulthood, meaning self-knowledge and personal integrity which are antithetical to delusion. As I show in Christian Crudities, even from the most alienated, detached and aesthetic viewpoint, Christianity now looks especially foolish and degrading. What this means for Kierkegaard and Cornel West is that the proper suspicion of rationalism, which can be expected to lead at some point to a leap of faith to escape the pangs of angst, shouldnt end in an embrace of Christianity--even when the leaper lives in a Christian culture, given that certain modern values presently trump Christian ones.

Solidarity, Pity, and Disgust

Leaving aside, then, Wests Christian basis for liberalism, what of the point that we should still seek justice for the downtrodden rather than renounce our public responsibilities, as bitter, postmodern ascetics and outsiders, leaving the field to the vile oligarchs and their pets? There are two main points I want to make in this connection, which Ill address in turn. The first pertains to Leopardis philosophy of solidarity, the second to the irony of equal rights. West says in his interview with Sharlit that his favourite poem by Leopardi is The Broom, which is indeed a moving work. Leopardis main point there is that we humans ought to stick together, given that our common enemy is Mother Nature. Nature causes the majority of our grief, as symbolized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Instead of attacking each other, bringing all of us down like a wayward soldier who flails about on the battlefield and harms both friend and foe, we should unite and square off against inhumane natural forces. That, then, is a nonChristian reason for compassion, namely pity for all fellow sufferers at the hands of the undead god, the mercilessly evolving natural universe. As I say at the end of my dialogue between New Atheists and spiritual ones, I too think that pity is a fitting basis for morality. However, pity goes hand in hand with disgust. In so far as our plight is pitiful, our victimhood is also disgusting. When we suffer from

360 being thrown into the world, as the existentialist Heidegger says, and from being cursed with the accidental godlike power of reason which shows us too much of the universe for us to fulfill in good faith our primitive urge for happiness, were revealed as ugly creatures. Contrary to the secular humanistic philistines who vacuously mouth the meme that nature is a beautiful place, with humans being the most glorious and fortunate species, nature is comparable to a decaying zombie and humans to flies that zip absurdly from one spot to the next to burrow in and feast on undead flesh. Of course, much in nature is beautiful when compared to the well-proportioned human body which we instinctively prefer; thus, were biased to admire symmetry, averages, and other physical signs of health. But the overreaching application of that standard to scientific theories or to anything other than the sexual context is preposterous and worthy of ridicule. Nature is hideous and terrifying because of the grotesque disharmony between its mindlessness and the minds which nevertheless naturally evolve. What this means is that universal pity for our natural predicament should be mixed with disgust. Thus, sentimental compassion is as inappropriate as is the incapacity for shame or the predators egoistic dehumanization of his victims. Whats more inspiring, I think, is a grim camaraderie as depicted at the end of Stapledons First and Last Men or as surely felt on actual battlefields, by soldiers whore forced to face death together. As Chris Hedges points out in War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, and as became apparent from the debacle of the neoconservatives war on Iraq, under Bush, war seems glorious only to psychopaths, chickenhawks, or academics who havent actually fought in any capacity, let alone in a war. Well-trained soldiers do indeed feel strong solidarity, banding together in the foxhole as they must to live through the hell of a military conflict. But their solidarity shouldnt be sentimentalized or otherwise whitewashed: they desperately need to rely on each other because bullets whiz by them which could just as easily penetrate and maim their bodies. Any unity we might feel with all people, as equal in our victimization by Mother Nature, would be more like a harebrained scheme to preserve our sanity than a heros formulaic conviction that he fights on the side of absolute Right. After all, were not literally at war with natural forces, since theyre not deployed by any Mother Nature.

361

Leopardis human solidarity, then, can be based just as embarrassingly on anthropomorphism as can theism. Another way this moral pity can go wrong is if, instead of projecting human properties onto the rest of nature, we draw a Cartesian line between humans and everything else. If the world is an undead god, were the flies that inhabit that strange cadaver. After all, were also natural beings. Thus, we can develop into symbols of natures inhumanity, into oligarchs who rule over dominance hierarchies, the Great Chains of Being. Out of Christian sentiment, West will likely say that he ought to feel compassion for oligarchs as well as for their poor victims. And indeed, the tragedy of the existential insignificance of oligarchic hegemony renders the oligarch pitiful, to some extent. But the more fitting feelings are disgust for the oligarchs betrayal of his fellow humans and for his sociopathic identification with the undead god; fear of the reality of the natural power over humanity which the oligarchs supremacy represents; and despair because there seems no escape from our natural prison. The poor masses, too, are thoroughly natural creatures: not wholly innocent victims, but weak animals that nevertheless seek power, animals that are easily corrupted or manipulated and whose destruction is but a step in natures creative evolution.

Oligarchy and the Irony of Civil Rights

This brings me to my second point, which is in response to Wests interesting reminder in his video that African-Americans fought their oppression not by seeking revenge against whites, but by winning civil rights for all Americans. The Christian spirit of forgiveness caused these children of slaves to act not as animals, West would say, but as morally superior beings, and their compassion brought about genuine social progress. According to West, we should follow their lead and lean towards universal compassion rather than bitterness which exacerbates our plight, further alienating us. I assume Wests historical narrative here is more or less accurate. Still, West has reason to doubt his prescription of unconditional compassion and human solidarity. This reason is provided by a case study of President Obama. As West points out, he

362 campaigned for Obama, suspecting that Obama would succumb to temptation while in office and betray his liberal principles. As is clear from Obamas foreign and economic policies, he has indeed so succumbed, aligning himself with the American oligarchs and managing the status quo as a nihilistic, centrist postmodern liberal. What must be especially galling to West is that Obama has done so little particularly for AfricanAmericans, whove suffered the most from the fallout from the oligarchs recent economic games. For example, the June 2012 unemployment rate in the US remained stable among whites and Hispanics, but has increased only among African-Americans. (See the Business Insider article, June Jobs Report Misses Expectations, Unemployment 8.2%.) Far from tilting his administration towards the Christian goal of helping the poor, a disproportionate number of whom share the Presidents skin colour, at least, Obama bailed out Wall Street, neglecting even to reframe the American economic debate with his bully pulpit (until his reelection campaign), let alone pursuing progressive policies--contrary to clueless conservatives who demonize Obama as a socialist without knowing what the word means. So taking a long view, the liberation of slaves allowed an African-American eventually to become President and to govern as a figurehead for oligarchs, like so many other dead white guys. West himself has said as much, but he calls this merely a setback for the progressive movement, failing to appreciate the irony, I think. Although Obama is only one person whose behaviour hardly represents that of all African-Americans, his shedding of his liberal ideology at the behest of oligarchs cant responsibly be interpreted as accidental. All signs point to the fact that Obama used to be a nave (academic) liberal as a community organizer, before he taught constitutional law and ran for politics. As many commentators have noted, Obama campaigned for President with moderates and progressives like Volcker and Cornel West, only to ditch them at the outset of his time in office, populating his cabinet with pro-oligarchy, free market Clintonites like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. This was no accident, if only because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, according to which oligarchy is natural and thus inevitable. Just try to manage a large group of people without centralizing power and delegating responsibility, thus creating a dominance hierarchy, and just try to exercise

363 power as a saint instead of being corrupted by it. In effect, then, Obama benefited from the liberation of African-Americans in that he earned the right to become corrupted like any other powerful person. What sort of congratulations are in order? Of course, African-Americans would prefer to be so betrayed by one of their own than to be slaves with no human rights; theyd prefer to vote for a puppet of oligarchs than to lack the right to vote in the first place. But once again, informed liberals should remind themselves that their ideals of liberty, justice and equality are delusions. Those who occupy the lower levels of the power hierarchy may change, but the hierarchy remains. The US freed its domestic slave labourers only to exploit wage slaves elsewhere, turning to South America, India, China, and the Middle East. Moreover, in the very basement of our power hierarchies are found the many nonhuman animal species that we domesticate (enslave) or extinguish. Even if all nations came together under a global government and social classes were abolished, wed rely on our machines (private properties) to sustain our high standard of living, and these machines would eventually become sufficiently intelligent that our use of them would amount to enslavement.

Bitterness and Compassion

West may not be a nave utopian with unrealistic political expectations, but publicly hes an enthusiastic advocate of compassion and solidarity, condemning what hed call counterproductive bitterness. Instead of drinking from the cup of bitterness, he says, we should forgive and show universal compassion. Ive argued that the Christian justification for this is dubious and that the results of this Christian or humanitarian attitude are perfectly ironic and thus not in keeping with pragmatism. But what exactly is bitterness? Resentment, cynicism, stemming from indignation or in less righteous cases, from rationalization for ones own regrets. If were speaking of our proper attitude towards natural forces, theres nothing to resent, since theres nothing personal about our natural victimization. Thus, as I said, ascetic detachment or grim humour is more appropriate. Grimness is sternness, an unyielding, harsh attitude befitting a soldiers dire circumstances. The stress from wearing such a warriors face will likely overwhelm

364 the average person, and so grimness should be leavened with gallows humour, like a bagpipes tune played on the battlefield. Now which is superior, grim humour or Wests catastrophic loving-kindness? This may just reduce to a question of personal character, but unconditional compassion seems deluded without even addressing its Christian origin. To return to Lombardis metaphor, compassion has no room on the battlefield. With respect to our position in nature, were not literally at war, nor are we literally imprisoned, nor is nature literally undead. But natural forces are literally mindless and they therefore only accidentally create intelligent beings who suffer from their knowledge that they dont belong in the natural world. Given our existential predicament, love along with happiness are misplaced. Suppose you show a homeless person compassion, offering him a blanket and a meal. You thus place a Band-Aid on a wound that will naturally run its course regardless or your intervention. You offer false hope that ignores the tragedys scope. If oligarchy is natural and so inevitable, there will always be poor masses at the bottom of the economic pyramid; as West says in the video, theres always a catastrophe for the poor. But if this is just the nature of animal life, with no hope for a deus ex machina, why pretend that any of us is special enough that he or she deserves loving-kindness? A homeless person is actually a fitting symbol for all of us, given the alienation caused by our liberating intelligence. Were all homeless in the inhuman cosmos: our claims to own parts of the planet are laughably myopic; no god hears them. Of course, we are special in the sense that were very rare, but thats the source of our existential problem, which calls for pity tinged with disgust, for awe, angst, dread, and grim humour, not loving-kindness--as though we have reason to hope that everything will work out in the end. West defines compassion as steadfast commitment to others well-being, and thats the heart of the delusion right there, the notion that we should be well; happiness is for disembodied spirits in an ethereal heaven, not for homeless, trespassing animals that concoct fantasies to escape the horror of being what we are. West is pessimistic, but he still feels the need for compassion if only because he thinks this upbeat attitude is socially useful. It may well be, but so too are the existential emotions like grim

365 acceptance of reality and the artists detached joy in creating a new world by way of conducting a doomed, foolhardy rebellion against the prior, natural one.

Political Action
Finally, what about political action? Clearly, existential or mystical detachment can lead to asceticism, which is practically the opposite of a politically active outlook. Ascetics have sometimes been forced into political action, though, as in the cases of Hindus under Gandhi against the British Empire, Tibetan Buddhists against communist China, and indeed the early Gnostic Christians against the Roman Empire. Gandhi was outmaneuvered by the more modern Nehru who became independent Indias first Prime Minister, and in any case so-called mystically enlightened India has had a caste system, that is, a transparent dominance hierarchy, for thousands of years. The Tibetans suffered the worst during Chinas Great Leap Forward, with hundreds of thousands killed and most of their monasteries destroyed. And as I show in Christian Chutzpah, the Gnostic Christians were outmaneuvered by the exoteric literalists who partnered with the very Empire that crushed Jesus. Politics is the exercise of vice in the covert maintenance of naturally unjust power structures. Mystics and other tenderhearted spiritual folk are infamously ill-suited to outcompete the bloodthirsty sociopaths in a political contest. Indeed, as nave a liberal as Obama may once have been, he personally outmaneuvered Cornel West, the spiritual academic, exploiting him to please his base supporters. West will point to the success of the American civil rights movement under Martin Luther King, and once again Ill agree that that improved the lives of African-Americans, but Ill maintain that that success shouldnt be idealized: it led to the grotesque ironies of Obamas Presidency and to the externalization of US slave labour. In any case, the Messiah still hasnt returned--no, Obama wasnt the Messiah--and the American oligarchy endures like a mountain.

366 All of this is to say only that if enlightened people deem political action necessary, they should expect the aesthetically worst-case scenario and the greatest ironies, including the well-known capacity for political entanglement to corrupt a noble character. The political realist would step in at this juncture and protest that this is the counsel of despair, a rationalization that saves face for the outsider who lacks the courage to take up real-life responsibilities. In the case of politics, these responsibilities would be those of the informed citizen whos duty-bound to democratically oversee the governments activities. This so-called realist who sneers at the idealists presumed cowardice and naivety demonstrates that their relative positions are actually reversed. No informed person can look at the US today and call it a functioning democratic republic. Yet that nation hardly descends into chaos: business commences, power is channeled, and a relatively high standard of living is maintained. That must be because some underlying power structure is actually operative in the US, namely a stealth oligarchy in which democratic oversight is irrelevant. The real-life civic responsibility of the American masses isnt to pretend to control the government; its to do what George W. Bush was reckless enough to tell them to their face to do: to consume (like grazing cattle). They carried out that responsibility with such fervor that they went into severe debt; thus, the pecking order is maintained as the weaker masses sacrifice themselves for the greater glory of their true gods, the plutocrats and other insiders who profit from economic collapses as well as from booms, playing games with their pawns like the Olympian gods of yore.

367

Atheism Plus and the Liberal Conceit of Hyper-Rationality ____________________________________________________

Jen McCreight is a blogger at Freethought Blogs and recently she stirred the pot of the New Atheistic movement, by arguing that a third wave of atheism is needed to replace the Boys Club that currently rules and makes those like McCreight who say they apply skepticism to everything feel uncomfortable. Atheists like McCreight who are politically liberal and thus, as she says, who care about social justice, support womens rights, protest racism, fight homophobia and transphobia, and use critical thinking and skepticism, dont want to be called atheists when atheism is consistent with the opposite of those liberal views. She calls for Atheism Plus, a liberal form of atheism, and Greta Christina, another blogger at Freethought Blogs, distinguishes that form from secular humanism--mostly for strategic reasons: Atheism Plus is clearer than secular humanism, since atheism is currently more familiar to the public, and so forth. I empathize with liberal atheists who want to belong to a social movement but who feel marginalized or patronized in the New Atheistic one. Personally, being part of a social movement doesnt interest me, but I can understand why feminist atheists, for example, would want to start a new wave of atheism, assuming they feel that many New Atheists are conservatives or sexists.

368 However, I suspect that were Atheism Plus to become popular and even replace New Atheism as the main expression of the atheistic social movement in the US, UK, and elsewhere, this would be due almost entirely to politically correct affirmation of liberal talking points. The problem is the one Ive taken up repeatedly in my philosophical rants: reason is a curse. That is to say that when you apply skepticism to everything, including social issues, you end up not with liberalism but with something like what Im calling existential cosmicism (until I think of a better label--talk about a social position that needs rebranding!). Ive argued this at some length elsewhere, but Ill summarize the main points here. Skepticism is epitomized by the scientific methods of inquiry. So what is the scientific picture of human nature? Is it equivalent to or even consistent with the liberal picture? No, liberalism is as Nietzsche and John Gray say, a vestige of theistic morality, an Enlightenment inheritance of Christian attitudes minus the theistic metaphysics that gives those attitudes the appearance of being rationally justified. Granted, Christians borrow their morality, in turn, from our innate, naturally selected inclinations towards social, altruistic behavior. But biology explains only the causes of those inclinations, not their philosophical justifications. That were instinctively driven to live together in societies may be a matter of biological fact, but that doesnt mean that thats how we ought to live. The normative question of whether Christian or otherwise altruistic morality is best isnt settled by science, but by philosophy. Nevertheless, when skeptical philosophers turn to the scientific picture to inform our reasoning, we find unsettling truths. First, we discover that were not as free or as rational as we think we are. Second, we find that were animals that live under delusions of grandeur, of transcending nature as angels or transhumans. Were driven to sexually reproduce because our genetic code dictates much of our behavior. We learn also that just as the design of organisms is illusory, what with natural selection doing the work of an intelligent designer, so too much of our normative self-conception is removed from reality. Moral commandments dont fall from the sky nor are they carved into stone, because were not artifacts of a god. In particular, its not obvious that we have nearly

369 as many rights as we feel politically entitled to claim. And this is the key point, since liberalism depends on the notion of human rights. Women deserve just as much respect as men, says the liberal, because women and men both have the same human rights. Likewise, gays, lesbians, and heterosexuals are thought to have equal rights, as are the poor and the rich, and the blacks and the whites, and so on. Without the notion of human rights, theres no reason to be socially liberal. Liberals like McCreight claim that they merely apply skepticism to social questions, just as atheists apply that rigorous, objective mode of inquiry to religious ones. But when you think objectively about whether we have rights that flow from human nature, you run up against a series of brick walls. First of all, theres the naturalistic fallacy. Just because were special in light of our reason, freedom, and social instinct--even if, again, were not as special as we think we are, as cognitive scientists have discovered-doesnt mean theres anything right, or normatively correct, about those attributes. Next, theres the genetic fallacy: just because social values are explained by our evolutionary past and so secured by being normal, doesnt mean those values are justified; for example, just because we evolved to be sociable, doesnt mean extroverts are healthier or otherwise better than antisocial introverts. All youre entitled to conclude from some such evolutionary premise is that outgoing folks are normal and perhaps happier, meaning merely that theyre in the majority and that their lives are more pleasurable. To leap from that premise to the conclusion that the majority are also in the right is to commit a fallacious appeal to popularity, to quantitative predominance. Likewise, to say that because something is pleasurable, its also right, is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. You can go down the list of liberal positions on social issues and ask whether a liberal really has so easy a time with them, given her rational methods. I suspect that while a case can be made for some liberal views, based on a Nietzschean, aesthetic approach to ethics, the notion that liberalism wins the day just on rational grounds is merely a politically correct meme. Reason is largely neutral with respect to normative questions, but when reason is relevant, that is, when we think of how we ought to live given what

370 scientists have shown that we actually are, mainstream liberalism seems a mere conceit. This isnt to say we shouldnt help each other--especially minorities who are most desperate. In my view, altruism is justified only by the pain of feeling pity due to empathy with other peoples suffering; we act to alleviate that shared pain. Those with no such empathy have no reason to help others, and so they tend to focus on selfish endeavours and to rise to positions of great power in our dominance hierarchies. Liberals fool themselves with their scientistic quasireligion, when they pretend that their emotional bias follows neutrally from something they call skepticism, from the alleged application of Reason to all questions. Are liberals unaware that David Hume, the great skeptic, performed a reductio on rationalism, using reason to show that were not so rational? Far from merely thinking logically or looking at the empirical facts, what liberals actually do is suffer from pity on account of how pathetic women, gays, blacks, poor people, and other downtrodden groups seem in their lowly positions in the pecking order. Nevertheless, modern liberalism is scientistic, and so postmodern liberals earn a cheap pass when they pretend that their social attitudes are in line with Reason. Reason doesnt carry the day for the liberal ideal of equality; instead, people are trained to nod deferentially in the presence of anything associated with the awesome power of technoscience. Postmodern liberalism, which is what liberalism becomes when faith in modern myths of human greatness doesn't survive the death of God, is merely a piece of political correctness, an empty shell of a philosophy, a song stuck in our head because we cant stand the cosmic silence, the undead gods dearth of any advice at all on how we should pass our time. One philosophy that makes sense of the liberals aesthetic mode of inference and of the emotional basis of her values is existential cosmicism. According to this philosophy, we should feel embarrassed rather than proud every single time we think logically or empirically about some problem. We should never forget that the cognitive dissonance that permits clever mammals both to rationalize their pity for the weak and to humiliate themselves with sex acts which they must keep private to preserve their dignity, is

371 eminently ripe for satire. We are all pathetic, every one of us. We suffer tragically and absurdly with no one but equally pathetic and deluded mammals to aid us. Liberal saviours of the 99% arent flawless superheroes. Their scientism and hyper-rational skepticism are politically correct delusions, nothing more. Reason spells the death of God but also the unraveling of every myth, the bursting of every bubble, the transition from modern naivety to postmodern cynicism. I dont trust the liberal's self-conception nor do I admire the interest in seeking a community of like-minded people, in the first place. As is well known, democracy and the internet fragment populations, creating echo chambers the divisions between which are exploitable by demagogues. For example, New Atheists must be divided from Atheism Plussers, who must likewise be divided from secular humanists. Thus, were like birds that flock together because of our similar feathers. Thats all perfectly natural but uninspiring, not a mark of progressive transhumanity, of a gnostic revelation of something truly elevated above the grotesque natural order. Still, I wish Atheism Plussers luck. Helping the downtrodden is aesthetically better than dominating them. Liberals act on pity for the other, while conservatives act on disgust for the foreign. Both spin tall tales to rationalize their character, but at least the liberal doesnt sell us out so thoroughly to the tender mercies of the undead god and to its mechanism of maintaining social order, which is the oligarchic centralization of power.

372

Conservatism: Myth-Making for Oligarchy ____________________________________________________

Ill ask the same question that I asked about the liberal: What does the conservative believe, deep-down, if anything? While liberalism is rooted in the Scientific Revolution, conservatism has a much more ancient pedigree, stretching back to ancient monarchies and aristocracies, to prehistoric nomadic tribes, and even to the dominance hierarchies in most social species, from fish to birds to mammals, in which a minority of elite members rule over the majority by force, for the groups stability. Prior to the advent of capitalism and the rise of modern science and the middle class, resources were lacking to educate the majority of people to make them fit to rule; the majority had to work tirelessly on the farm and had no time for more intellectual pursuits. Elites and predators arose to occupy the power vacuums, and the paths they carved established pecking orders. Myths accumulated to rationalize those unequal social arrangements, associating the leaders with gods and positing the wickedness of human nature thats overcome either by the will of God bestowed on the king whos given the divine right to rule through his bloodline, or by intensive training in a religious or secular institution. The British conservative, Edmund Burke, argued that this traditional form of minority government is the most prudent and shouldnt be tampered with by rationalist radicals, such as the Jacobins who were to do just that in the French Revolution. Conservatism is thus opposed to scientism, to optimism about the prospect for social progress that

373 mimics the scientific kind, making government out to be social engineering. According to Burke, traditions that stand the test of time have more authority than an unproven abstract theory of how a society might be designed from scratch. Moreover, democracy is an unwise system for the above reason having to do with original sin. Whereas liberals trust in human nature, replacing God, angels, and other supernatural forces with human technocrats, conservatives are pessimistic about human beings: we tend to behave wickedly because were innately depraved. Were lucky that some few of us manage to control their beastly impulses, excel in their education, and act for the general welfare by taking up the thankless task of government.

Elitist Conservatism
Talk of original sin is, of course, the oldest form of monumental fear-mongering for narrow political advantage. Granted, there must have been nomadic tribes or villages whose ignorant members were indeed thankful that theyd been blessed with leaders who stood out from the crowd by being not just more intelligent but more virtuous. The majority then would have benefited from the work of that elite minority, and the inequality between them would have been not just real but relevant to the different tasks for each social class. But in a larger state, the inequality becomes a liability and the greater power needed to run that state tends to corrupt the rulers. Moreover, the myth of original sin contradicts elitism. If human nature is depraved, how can anyone overcome that innate depravity, by human effort? If God can overcome it by somehow purifying royal bloodlines, why doesnt God grant everyone the same favour? When the king says that he deserves to rule because God wiped away his corrupt nature, he appeals to a miracle, which is tantamount to saying that no one but God understands why he should rule. Besides being childishly anthropocentric, the myth that God hand-picks human rulers has been all-too self-serving: long before the televised Kennedy-Nixon political debate, monarchs learned to appear majestic in public, keeping their debaucheries secret.

374 And we should concede, too, that in evolutionary terms a dominance hierarchy benefits the whole social group by preventing unnecessary damage to the members, making the group more stable, the alternative being constant internal conflicts in aggressive competitions for scarce resources. Clearly, though, the existence of liberal democratic societies shows that humans arent as limited as fish or birds in their capacities to solve such conflicts. We can imagine alternative, less exploitative and self-corrupting ways of organizing people than naked or covert oligarchy. The liberal thinks this can be done scientifically, with social engineering, ignoring the nonrational factors such as the need for inspiring visions, myths, ideals, and principles. The conservative seems to think this cant be done at all and that when a democratic society emerges, appearing to disclose the possibility of an alternative to the primitive pecking order, the conservative should hide the evidence by sabotaging that societys ability to challenge the oligarchs privileges. The upshot is that Burkean conservatism is a form of what I called Straussian, Platonic elitism and is quite comparable to the liberal version. The difference between the two is just that conservative elitism is much more brazen in its noble lies. The liberal humanist has only the stale, derivative myths of civic religions to appeal to, pretending to uphold the values of reason, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all the while suffering internally from postmodern nihilism and angst. The conservative elitist taps into much better-tested myths, flowing from ancient monotheistic religions. You might think the conservatives brazenness in this regard must be matched by a more chaotic inner life for the conservative, since the conservative has to live with his or her more-stupendous hypocrisy. When a liberal system manager falls short of humanmade law, this is no more egregious a crime than failing to follow the instructions in setting up a microwave oven: since in liberalism theres no evaluation of the systems ultimate goal, the liberals crime can be one only of inefficiency. But the conservative elitist scares the majority into docility with wild, utterly anachronistic and manifestly absurd myths, and the conservatives failure to live up to them should naturally be understood in just as grandiose terms. (Goebels must have been thinking of theology

375 when he said that the greater the lie, the more people are willing to believe it--if only because it so taxes faith in human decency to try to imagine the scale of monstrosity needed to tell such a lie.) But this isnt necessarily so, because the mental compartmentalization and other capacities for cognitive dissonance needed to pull off the conservatives whoppers in the first place can be just as effective in rationalizing the conservatives inevitable hypocrisy.

Religious Conservatism
So far, Ive suggested that Burkean conservatives are Straussian elitists. But those are just the secular conservatives, who may pretend to be religious. What about the truly religious conservatives? What do they really believe? The easy answer is just to look at what their religions proclaim. So religious American conservatives, for example, would be Christians and that would be that. But no one can understand religious conservatives just by assuming that their fundamental beliefs are dictated by their religion. The main reason this is so is that theres an insuperable hermeneutic problem of interpreting religious texts. Especially when the texts have multiple authors and are written over a period of centuries, as is the case with the Bible, the texts admit of endless interpretations, making the religion flexible enough to survive for millennia by transforming itself as needed. Saying, then, that religious conservatism is defined by a religious text only pushes the problem back a step: the reason conservatives interpret their scriptures as they do, ignoring swaths of teachings and emphasizing others, is that they already have fundamental beliefs which dont derive from their religion. Theres abundant evidence that the deepest beliefs of religious Republicans, for example, arent religious. Their religion would be Christianity, but both the New Testament and early Church traditions are obviously at odds with Republican foreign and domestic policies. According to objective (as opposed to dogmatic) New Testament scholarship, the few scraps of information that have a chance of tracing back to an historical Jesus indicate that Jesus was, in effect, a hippie who believed that the worlds end was somehow imminent in his own time. Therefore, people needed to quit their

376 worldly concerns, such as their family relations, political squabbles and material possessions, and focus obsessively on relating to God. In other words, Jesus was, roughly speaking, an Essene, a type of Jewish radical in his day. Instead of the world literally ending in the way expected by Jesus confused earliest followers, Jesus himself ended on the Roman cross, and Paul provided an elaborate theological excuse that preserved Jesus ethical message only by tearing it to pieces and replacing it with his own in Jesus name. Pauls message was that we cant improve ourselves enough to please God, because of that handy horror story of original sin, which is why Jesus came to please God by dying as our sacrifice. All we need to do is believe that Jesus did so and our inner nature will be magically transformed, giving us the power to please God by living up to Jesus ascetic social standards. When the world stubbornly continued instead of ending in apocalypse--the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE notwithstanding--and Christianity accidentally became the official religion of the collapsing Roman empire, the religion transformed itself again, to justify the power that Christian officials would need to hold together the empires remnants. Thus, by Catholic decrees that supplement what little is known about the Christian founder, Christians could eliminate heresies, persecute pagans, and war with the Muslim world. Whereas Jesus preached pacifism and impractical love of enemies-again, because his ethical standards presuppose the terrifying mystical nearness of Gods rule on Earth--later so-called Christians could act as though they hate their enemies enough to torture or kill them, and that behaviour has been sanctioned by the later Church officials. Now, Republican policies (minimal if any government help for the domestic poor, socialism for the wealthy, warmongering, etc.) may be more or less in line with late Christianity, but this alignment is as political--rather than religious--as has been the Churchs transformation over the centuries. Late Christianity reflects a secularization of the religion, a necessary compromise so that the religion could survive despite its foundation in Jesus absurd life and death. So once again, we cant say that the

377 fundamental beliefs of a Christian conservative, at least, are religious, because those so-called religious beliefs (Family Values, Just War Theory, Prosperity Theology that rationalizes material wealth, etc.) have nothing to do with religion, and thats the case even when those beliefs are blessed by the official Church, which itself long ago became a cryptosecular institution bent on surviving regardless of the cost to its spiritual side. A similar argument can be made about conservative Muslims, especially the militant Wahhabis who adapted Muslim traditions to fulfill their secular, anticolonial agenda of ridding Muslim countries of occupying military forces, such as those of the Soviet Union or the US. Regardless of whether theres a kernel of truth in the militants interpretation of his scriptures and religious traditions--theres no doubt a kernel of truth in any logically possible interpretation of them, given their poetic character--that interpretation is clearly selected because of the militants prior interpretation of what seem to be principles of social justice and tribal ambition. While Islamic theism and supernaturalism surely exacerbate tribal instincts, the militants are defined not by certain contents of their scriptures, but by their secular emphasis on those contents. At least, I think theres something deeper going on in so-called religious conservatism. Note that Im saying not that religious conservatives are really atheists who are pretending to be religious. Im assuming that theyre theists and therefore different from the conservative variety of Straussian elitists. But their brand of theism is chosen for secular reasons; once chosen, they believe in that brand as members of their sect. While these conservatives are religious, then, their conservatism isnt explainable simply in religious terms, because their religious beliefs, which they genuinely possess, serve a deeper secular purpose which Ive yet to explain.

Evangelical Conservatives
What, then, does a religious conservative believe, deeper down? Why does that conservative warm to a certain interpretation of scripture despite the plethora of

378 alternative interpretations? In my view, the religious conservative believes simply in the default form of government that was more or less universal prior to modern times: the rule of the many by the few. This dominance hierarchy can be despotic, as in a dictatorship, or linear when there are multiple levels of power, each dominating only those below it (as in a complex oligarchy or a monarchy with a court beneath the king). Those primitive evolutionary patterns are the traditions that religious conservatives wish to conserve, their arch opponents being the scientistic, democratic liberals who, inspired by modern scientific progress, trusted in the universality of human reason but then found that that trust produces only rudderless, nihilistic technocracies (see Canada and Europe), turning liberals into pragmatic centrists or systems managers like so many desiccated Darth Vaders. Liberals want the majority to rule, because theyre humanists who regard everyone as equal by their power of human reason. Conservatives want a minority to rule, because they reject the scientistic reduction of human society to the rest of nature, maintaining that just because reason can rule the latter through technological uses of scientific theories, doesnt mean it can rule the former through big, bureaucratic governments. Which minority should rule, according to modern religious conservatives? There are at least two answers, accounting for the division, for example, between evangelical Christian Republicans and superficially-secular, libertarian Republicans. Ill consider each in turn. To cut to the chase, evangelical Christianity is theocratic. The evangelical Christian believes that Christians are superior to non-Christians, because the latter are controlled by Satans demonic forces while the former alone are liberated by the power of faith in Christs sacrifice. So this Christian rejects the social extension of the Scientific Revolution in the Enlightenment, and is left with a preference for the default social structure, common to primitive tribes overseen by elders, to empires run by monarchs or aristocracies, and to police states ruled by dictators, not to mention most of the social animal world. The conservative Christians deepest defining belief, then, is a preference for autocratic rule by some elite minority over the inferior majority. That preference causes the conservative Christian to favour a conservative interpretation of Christianity, which in turn dictates the identities of the minority and of the majority. The minority who

379 ought to rule is made up of born-again, Bible-believing evangelical Christians, while the majority who ought to be ruled consists of everyone else, especially those who explicitly reject Christianity. Of course, Im not saying that conservative Christians call themselves theocrats (some do, known as Dominionists, Christian Reconstructionists, or The Fellowship, but most dont) or even that they understand themselves to be such. What Im saying is that their secular conservatism (their desire for autocratic order established by the capable few) plus their chosen religion (a cherry-picked interpretation of myths and legends, providing a theological rationale for their political preference) entail theocracy.

Libertarian Conservatives
As for the libertarian conservatives, they substitute the free market for the supernatural power of God. Instead of miracles brought about by Gods invisible hand, Darwinian competition in a marketplace is supposed to be meritocratic and self-regulating. Just as natural selection produces the miracle of designed (adapted) organisms, the unfettered market in which competition is allowed to occur with minimal if any interference produces the miracles of the correct price of goods, innovative products, and growing economies. The market is an environment that selects for economic excellence by bankrupting failures, producing a functional economy that preserves everyones freedom to compete. Note that the libertarian is as scientistic as the liberal humanist, effectively reducing economics to biology (the reduction is thought to be accomplished by Game Theory). Note also that self-consistent libertarianism must speak only of functional markets, not of meritocratic or otherwise normative ones. This is because there are no norms or values--such as ethical or aesthetic ones--in the part of the world explained by biologists. Natural selection creates functional traits, in that the traits will work as their ancestors did, because the ancestors and descendents are built by the same genetic code, which is all thats directly selected by the environment in which the host

380 organisms live long enough to sexually reproduce members of their type. The prevailing designs in an environment thats home to replicators are in no sense objectively best; theyre simply the results of some animals survival under certain conditions. When the conditions change, other species are built by mutated genes, and the process goes on and on. The animals themselves may approve of their ability to survive thanks to their adapted body-types, but thats a subjective source of the value of those types. Now, if thats all a free market is, an arena for an economic version of natural selection, the products of free market forces are in no way objectively right or wrong, or better or worse. The myths to the contrary, put out by economic conservatives to hype various bubble markets and persuade people to support deregulation, commit the fallacy of social Darwinism, which is a variant of the naturalistic fallacy that infers an ought from an is, a prescription by a norm or value from a description of an objective fact. A social Darwinist takes Darwins biological theory to imply that human societies ought to be just like life in the wild, and that raw competition between humans is best because thats our most natural state. Theres no such implication, and to the extent that free market libertarianism is a version of social Darwinism, libertarianism is logically flawed. What the libertarian can add, by way of showing how the free market could be meritocratic, is that the free market produces goods that are appreciated, in that theyre goods that people choose to buy. The value of those goods, though, would be subjective and thus dependent on the quality of the consumers. The questions would remain whether a free market economy tends to elevate or lower the standard of the character of participants in that economy, and whether, in the latter case, the laissez faire economy is sustainable. In any case, talk of subjective value has no place in libertarian conservatism if the libertarian has scientific aspirations for her political theory. And once we appreciate the scientism of that political theory, we can identify the minority whom the libertarian must say should rule over the majority. The minority must be just those select predators who do actually rise to the top of their food chain in the wild (free) economy. The libertarian

381 isnt committed to preserving a bloodline, like a defender of aristocracy; instead, the libertarian is religiously adamant that what must be preserved at all costs is an economys wildness, since brutal struggle in the wilderness is the selection mechanism for functional, well-adapted members of a society. Oligarchs may come and go, but what should be constant is everyones freedom to leap into the capitalistic jungle and do battle, to test his or her capacity to succeed in the conflict of ideas or wills, or whatever is supposed to be the social analogue of genes. The majority who should be ruled, then, consists just of those who are actually ruled in a free market, namely those who wind up having relatively little money or control over the mainstream media or the superficiallydemocratic political system. Again, the scientistic reduction of economics to biology has no normative implications. But what makes some libertarian conservatives religious is their use of myths to sanctify the marketplace and to veer into fallacious social Darwinian glorification of economic struggles. (The historian Thomas Frank documents much of this in One Market Under God.) Its one thing to compare economic competition in a harsh marketplace to natural selection, but its another to help oneself to normative evaluations of either natural process, worshipping business leaders for being rewarded by something ethereal and reified called The Market, and hyping capitalism as qualitatively superior to any other economic system. Whether capitalism is superior depends on which social goals are best, and thus on the relevance of those sets of statistics that the libertarian conservative likes to trot out when in a scientistic mood. And as a pseudoscientist, that sort of conservative has no authority to speak on the normative, cultural question of the direction in which a society should head. It may be that a fine social goal is to maintain the ecosystem so that organisms can continue to live in it, and that capitalistic systems tend not to be so self-regulating that they take that long-term concern into account. Regardless, the religious libertarian conservative (as opposed to a traditional monotheistic one) adds a half-baked theology to quasibiological economics, mythologizing and obscuring what actually happens in a minimally-regulated market. For example, competition tends to stop when a monopoly or an oligopoly naturally forms

382 and potential competitors are bought up before they can effectively challenge the ruling companies. The rulers then rig the system in their favour, purchasing politicians with campaign contributions and with the implicit promise of a cushy private sector job; writing bills with their armies of lobbyists; and concocting bubble markets that amount to massive frauds, escaping unpunished when their handiwork--planned for obsoleteness-crumbles. Thus, the winners in a once-competitive market tend to violate the libertarians creed that the market shall not be artificially regulated, since the oligarchs eliminate competition or uncertainty for themselves whenever possible, preferring socialism for the wealthy and wild competition for the rabble.

What about democratic conservatives?

Theres an obvious objection to what Ive been saying, which is that most modern conservatives are democrats and therefore dont prefer rule by the few over the many. In the US, for example, most Republicans treasure the civic duty of voting, love to write to their congressperson, and idolize the Founding Fathers of the American democratic republic. So how can this love of democracy be reconciled with the prizing of vast social inequality in a natural dominance hierarchy? Heres the reconciliation: the conservative loves democracy as a means to an undemocratic end, not as an end in itself. The American experiment in democracy was an exercise largely in liberal, humanistic scientism. Democracy as an ideal makes sense only on the liberals rationalist assumption that were all equal, given our capacity to reason, and thus that we all deserve an equal vote by way of holding the government accountable. The conservative doesnt share that optimism. Instead, the conservative is pessimistic about human nature: we all suffer from a spiritual original sin or from the beastly egoism of deluded animals that have been cursed with consciousness. Giving political power to beasts is obscene. At best, then, the conservative can be interested in democracy as a mechanism for sustaining the preferred form of government in which the beasts are ruled by the exceptional few whom God favours (theocratic

383 conservatism) or by the super-beasts who prove fittest (libertarian, social Darwinian conservatism). An oligarchy that disguises itself as a republican form of democracy prevents the sort of rabbles backlash that happened in the French Revolution. When the aristocracys corruption and hypocrisy become too much to bear, and the myths explaining the inequality between the rulers and the ruled no longer enchant, the ruled masses can revolt, execute the aristocrats, and even set up their own barbaric government. The American founders evidently learned that lesson and theorized that as long as the masses believe they have ultimate control over the government, they wont revolt no matter what economic inequalities ensue, because to do so theyd have to revolt against what theyd think of as themselves (those who enjoy ultimate power over the elected officials). A conservative, then, can consistently be thankful for this instrumental value of superficial democracy in an oligarchy.

Liberals and Conservatives

What to make of my analyses of liberalism and conservatism? The mainstream media portray liberals and conservatives as being in perpetual conflict, but as media-savvy people know nowadays, that portrayal serves the purpose merely of infotainment. Conflict sells. There are some differences between the two sides of the so-called political spectrum, but theres also an underlying agreement between them. Specifically, postmodern liberals have come around to the conservatives surrender to natural inequalities. Enlightenment notions of rationalism, equality, and individual liberty made for a genuine alternative to rule by the elite few, but because the alternative rested on a scientistic overextension of the Scientific Revolution, that is, on a weak analogy between the physical and normative, social worlds, the liberal defenders of the democratic experiments were bound to lose their faith. Rationalists make for poor storytellers, because story-telling is an art. And if reason is the only mental faculty worth taking seriously, according to the liberals scientistic faith, there must be nothing worthwhile to say about values or ideals, social vision, ethics, or myths. Hence, liberals

384 devolved into nihilistic, pseudoscientific managers of systems, otherwise known as technocrats, or pragmatic centrists. They thus lost the ability to challenge the status quo, to maintain the alternative to the more primitive social pattern. And so in North America and Europe, anachronistic liberals, who still hold onto the outdated Enlightenment fantasies, are horrified when Obama turns out not to be a liberal Messiah who can subdue his irrational conservative foes by masterfully shaming them with his superior logic and awakening them to their innate capacity to help achieve a rational consensus. These liberals are shocked to discover not just that reason has no place at all in postmodern politics, but that Obama, the erstwhile incarnation of Logos, uses his power of reason for ill, triangulating like Clinton to appeal to independents and win the next election, and generally continuing Bushs foreign and domestic policies. When liberals look at Obama, they see what liberalism has become: bloodless social engineering in the service of a prewritten master plan, namely the plan written by Mother Nature, according to which order tends to be kept in surviving social species when an elite few rise to the top and rule over the rest by force. If he didnt already learn about it at Harvard, Obama eventually found the US to have a power elite ruling within an oligarchic infrastructure, and who was he to challenge that status quo? Saying it should be challenged is easy; anyone can read from a teleprompter. But actually challenging the prehistoric power dynamic of the dominance hierarchy requires courage that comes from faith in a myth or vision that stirs the soul. Liberal myths are insipid, politically correct delusions; after all, they were authored by Enlightenment rationalists, not by artists. Just as libertarian conservatives make for dreadful governors, believing as they do that government is a force for evil that dares question the miraculous authority of natural selection by wild competition, liberals make for dreary visionaries. Their scientism causes them to don their Darth Vader armor, to pretend that in postmodern times their obsolete Enlightenment myths can enchant for longer than a passing fad. There may well be an uplifting naturalistic religion waiting to awe the masses and to inspire the creation of original social orders, but liberals havent found it.

385

Meanwhile, conservative elected politicians have by far the easiest job in the world. Cleaning tables at McDonalds takes more effort than being a conservative politician in an oligarchy, opposed only by postmodern liberals. Just imagine: youre given the job of being the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse. You walk the halls of government buildings, most of which you want to see burned to the ground. But actually setting them ablaze would require more skill than what youre charged to do as a conservative mouthpiece of oligarchs: you simply have to perform incompetently in office, taking orders from corporate lobbyists, and keeping the downtrodden from rebelling by pushing their buttons with reliable religious myths. Worshipping reason as they do, liberals no doubt feel anxious and dirty when they have to stoop to telling noble lies, as elite social engineers who are contracted to keep the system running smoothly. Conservatives have more worthy objects of worship: God himself or the evolutionary power of nature to create novel forms of complexity. It should go without saying that the conservatives theologies are absurd, but thats only the verdict of reason. Being largely nonrational, unconscious, and instinctive animals, we can be moved by rhetorical messages that have emotional force. Conservatives rule mainly by exploiting peoples fear of the Other and of the Unknown, and theyre therefore much superior spellbinders than liberals. One cost of lowering the social bar to such depths, though, is that the conservative loses the capacity for feeling even a hint of shame.

Appendix: The Definition of Conservatism

Conservatism: a paradigm of shamefulness. Conservatism is a cynical rallying cry against what liberals have wrought, when powerful conservatives pretend to favour premodern traditions while relishing the modern way of imposing the eternal dominance hierarchy. However, when preached by the poor, social conservatives, conservatisms a preference for premodern myths that please, at least,

386 compared to the modern ones that evoke horror and angst. Either way, conservatism is the sheerest chutzpah, the most appalling concatenation of noises by those with the least capacity for shame. Theoretically, a retrograde mindset is a check on the excesses of modern liberalism, but in practice the conservative either approves of the modern form of social engineering, worshipping the apex predators who emerge triumphant from the social Darwinian struggle, or else actually espouses a preposterous premodern worldview (Christianity, Islam, etc), as though she arrived from a time machine, skipping over the European Age of Reason. Conservatives pretend to cherish ancient wisdom, but they embrace either the stealth oligarchy, which deploys modern methods of social control, or else ancient theistic drivel. The United States was founded by deistic hyper-rationalists who wanted to build a New World, free from Old World religious tyrannies. Today, the U.S. is perhaps the most conservative and thus the most confused modern Western society, reveling in the military power and wealth that flow from technoscience and from individualistic institutions (democracy and capitalism), while paying lip service to old time, authoritarian religion. Freedom and liberty are American shibboleths, but Americans have managed to make liberalism taboo. Liberalism, says the American conservative, is socialism, a form of tyranny in which the individual serves the State. But a stealth oligarchy can also be officially individualistic, as in the U.S since its founding. American conservatism is thus a colossal distraction, a carnival of follies that prevents many Americans from appreciating where they actually stand as victims of scientistic, selfdestructive modernism.

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Oligarchy: Natures Inhumanity to Humans ____________________________________________________

In my rants on liberalism, conservatism, and happiness, I contrast some myths we live by with unsettling natural realities. Liberals believe weve progressed socially as well as scientifically and technologically, that weve discovered civil rights and the superiority of capitalism and democracy over all other economic and political systems. Unfortunately, liberals borrow their unidirectional, teleological notion of history from monotheism, and while modern, secular humanistic societies have moved forward in that theyve developed--which is virtually a tautology--theyve entered a postmodern stage of decline by way of nihilism. Oswald Spengler may have been correct when he observed that, much like an organism, a culture passes through inevitable stages, leading from energetic growth, when the citizens believe fervently in an ideal that distinguishes their culture, to corruption and extinction when the people lose confidence in that ideal. Mesmerized by technoscientific advances, liberals assumed that scientific methods can be applied to social problems. But science cant tell anyone what ought to be done. When social progress failed to materialize as expected--witness the many wars and holocausts in the last century--liberals lost their faith even in their substitute religion, which is scientism. And so liberal myths have become mere shibboleths, empty, politically correct slogans and talking points that no one would die for.

388 Conservatives have two myths: theism and social Darwinism. Science and philosophy have demolished the rational basis for theism, a point to which Ill return in my next rant, and social Darwinism is both internally and externally inconsistent. The libertarian faith in the wild market commits the naturalistic fallacy of inferring that because natural selection actually makes use of brutal competitions in the biological sphere, economies ought to be similarly structured. Moreover, the evidence shows that a wild market simply clears the way for the default social order, for the dominance hierarchy, which is what the religious and libertarian conservative actually defend, whether that oligarchy takes the form of a theocracy (on Earth as in Heaven) or of a plutocracy (rule by the wealthy) or kleptocracy (rule by the vicious). Unlike the narrow liberal myth of scientism, which captivates only Philistines in certain scientific circles, conservative myths are still powerful. Most westerners think of themselves as monotheists, although their behaviour shows clearly that their true religion is the libertarians faith in the economists god, in the creative force unleashed by a free-for-all of human vice. A consumers true faith is that when were at our egoistic worst, society is miraculously at its best, because of the invisible hand of natural selection. Again, though, while this myth still enchants, the myth is a noble lie rather than a spiritually uplifting narrative, since the myth rationalizes the gross, natural inequalities that inevitably result from vicious competition.

Consumerism and Oligarchy

Most people want to be happy, but the worthiness of happiness as our ultimate goal is another delusion, one which ought to be replaced by the nobler goal of creatively overcoming the knowledge of where we stand in nature. In Western, pseudodemocratic oligarchies, happiness is also misconstrued: the rich are presumed to be happier than the poor, because money buys pleasure and contentment indirectly, with the purchase of material goods such as high tech gadgets, luxury cars, or even fast food. Studies show that the rich are just as stressed as the poor, if not more so, but the materialistic delusion persists because of its usefulness in stabilizing society. Materialistic happiness is quantifiable: the more private possessions someone has, the greater his or her happiness; indeed, money is countable, so following the myth of happiness through to

389 its absurd end, precise judgments can be made about degrees of happiness depending on the consumers calculable net worth. Tangible status symbols, like bank accounts, home appliances, fashionable clothing, home square footage, and so on, indicate a persons place in the pecking order. If happiness is pleasure, everyone has the capacity to be happy, but if pleasure is caused by ownership of material products--as associative advertisements fallaciously suggest 24/7 on most surfaces of modern cities--theres a happiness hierarchy. Now, the money that buys those products also buys power, and so the happiness hierarchy corresponds to the dominance hierarchy, which is the shape of an oligarchy in which the many are ruled by the few. After the French Revolution, the trick of oligarchy is to maintain the obscene social inequalities and thus the stability of this social order, by preventing a rebellion of the have-nots. Were a pecking order dictated by something like personal physical strength, weaker persons couldnt invest themselves in the society, because theyd lack any hope that they could elevate their social position. The genius of a capitalistic pecking order is its offering of the real possibility of social mobility, as a means of protecting the forces that work against such mobility, namely money and power. In the first place, anyone can be happy, to some extent or other, because every human brain is capable of some kind of pleasure. And anyone can go from rags to riches in the US, for example, as long as the person has a great idea, works hard, and maybe gets a little lucky--thats the capitalistic legend which isnt wholly false, although the US isnt as socially mobile as it once was. So a pleasure-obsessed, capitalistic society becomes a Melting Pot, winning the goodwill of all of its members. But a truly democratic society works by mob rule, which is unstable. Only certain elite members are fit to rule, and their fitness must be clearly signaled without disrupting the whole society by antagonizing the ruled majority. Were the majority to know nothing at all of the fact that theyre ruled by a minority, the majority might think theyre in control and so unwittingly challenge the true holders of power, which would lead to conflict. The signals therefore need to be given in the cherished language spoken by the majority, using symbols of the societys superficial fairness and equality. Happiness, the universal

390 goal, is therefore quantified, by associating the hedonic mental states with the ownership of material goods, so that degrees of happiness can be easily, albeit indirectly perceived, by perceiving a consumers amassed possessions. The hedonic ladder attracts the members of this society--and indeed many immigrants as well, since the more ethical ideal of dealing heroically with our existential predicament is a tragic one. Meanwhile, the rungs on that ladder indicate also the consumers degree of power, which is to say his or her position in the pecking order. The minority at the top dominates all of those below. And so the poor members of this stealth oligarchy see their society as being equal and fair (in so far as theyre mesmerized by the chance of ascending the hedonic ladder) even while they know, if only in the back of their minds, that theyre ruled by a minority over which they have no control (in so far as the poor are aware of the corresponding wealth gaps). The poor majority dont want to rebel, because theyre emotionally invested in a social game with clearly distinguished positions: their position is one that affords them little power, because theyre poor, and they submit to those who are clearly in control due to their wealth and social connections, because the elevated position of these rulers is measured monetarily, which also happens to be the more egalitarian measure of materialistic happiness. In a semi-democratic oligarchy, that which divides the members also unites them: material wealth divides the positions in the dominance hierarchy, but this wealth also distributes degrees of happiness. The poor have practically no control over how their oligarchic society is run, but as long as they can afford fast food and other cheap goods, they have some tangible degree of associated pleasure, given the materialists degraded notion of happiness. The key to the way the myth of happiness can hold together a stealth oligarchy is thus the ambiguity of money. Even in a democracy money provides power, but money also provides happiness. In a materialistic oligarchy, happiness is more evenly distributed than power, because even a little pleasure can satisfy an individual whereas a little amount of power has no social effect. The poor majority have reason to rebel against the wealthy minority, because the wealthy have power over the poor which they use to

391 the latters detriment. But the majority also have reason to preserve the dominance hierarchy, because this hierarchy corresponds to the happiness hierarchy in which the majority are emotionally invested. The economic inequality translates into a dangerous centralization of power, but the ability of money to buy a base form of happiness, through the consumption of cheap material products, endears the whole social order even to its victims.

Free and Tyrannical Oligarchies

A critic of what Ive been saying about oligarchies might protest that the US and other democracies cant be oligarchic because theyre so different from tyrannical dictatorships in which alone the few obviously rule over the many. In particular, the majority in a dictatorship lack freedom of movement or of thought, equality under the rule of law, and human rights. Victims of a police state can be kidnapped at midnight and tortured without trial just for politically unpopular speech. In a democracy, however, people are free, governed by the rule of law, and enjoy basic rights. There is, then, no worthwhile comparison between a democracy and a totalitarian dictatorship. Indeed, there are those three differences between them. Those differences, however, have to do only with the means by which power is exercised and protected, not with the question of whether the majority or a minority truly rule. A dictator has absolute power and terrorizes his population so that their fear keeps them docile and functional. Historically, that social system has had severe drawbacks. Absolute power also corrupts the dictator or renders him insane, and brutalizing the populace makes them fearful but also enraged, so that theyre vigilant for any opportunity to rebel. Knowing this, the dictator becomes paranoid, surrounding himself with obsequious underlings who ingratiate themselves by keeping bad news from him, so that the dictator becomes further removed from reality. Eventually, the people revolt or an external power intervenes, and the dictator is rounded up and torn limb from limb. A police state is a crude, unsustainable way of keeping social order, because the rulers arbitrary use of power antagonizes most of his population.

392

Americans, by contrast, do enjoy more freedom, rule of law, and human rights, and these facts can be expected to maintain their social cohesion. But lets look more closely at how the US lives up to each of those three ideals. With regard to freedom, its important to distinguish between what the political philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, calls positive and negative liberty. Positive liberty is the ability to live well that comes from following whats assumed to be an objectively correct ideal. Typically, socialist nations and dictatorships hold up one ideal or another and their elites claim to instill the freedom of the rest of their people, by indoctrinating them or forcing their compliance, equipping them to embrace the ultimate value. Negative liberty is the ability to choose ones own way of life, according to whats treated as a subjectively valued ideal, where the ability follows from the preservation of a private domain in which theres no coercion by the state or by anyone else. Classically liberal nations like the US are supposed to defend only negative liberty. The problem with positive liberty is that if the state picks the wrong ideal, the sacrifices involved in purifying the people are worthless and absurd, and who can prove which ideal way of life is objectively supreme? The problem with negative liberty is that the outsiders scientistic faith in the rational individuals autonomy is belied by the insiders confidence that people are fundamentally irrational and subject to manipulation through the expert use of propaganda, as in the case of the governments market-researched talking points or corporate advertising. This problem can be seen in the fact that the US defends positive liberty, after all: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Far from being a Christian nation, the god that Americans actually obey is the creative chaos of the wild capitalistic economy, the god that commands consumers--through its economic and political spokespeople--to consume material goods for pleasure. And while Americans arent tortured or imprisoned just for denying this ideal, they are indoctrinated with a barrage of propaganda that links happiness to consumption. They have the option of living privately with no such propaganda, in a log cabin in Alaska, for example, but this is just to say that theres no such privacy anywhere in American

393 society, that the propaganda is inescapable unless you leave American civilization for the wilderness or for another country altogether. So the US guards both positive and negative freedom. The so-called American Dream is to be rich and happy, to move up the happiness ladder and thus the pecking order. The ideal way of life in the US, which Americans hold to be objectively correct, is the technologically-enabled pursuit of pleasure. Negative freedom in American society is enjoyed only within the parameters set by that guiding American myth--pockets of antisocial wilderness in the geographical US notwithstanding. Thus, once an American is trained from infancy to consume parasitically, without regard for the planets long-term sustainability, he or she has an endless choice between brands and products. As I argue in the Introduction, though, the pursuit of happiness is not objectively the best goal, regardless of whether the happiness is materialistic or otherwise. Ethically speaking, happiness is unbecoming to sentient creatures who understand their grim existential situation. So even if a consumer acquires a trove of material possessions and the corresponding pleasures, the consumers happiness still tends to be rudely interrupted by anxiety caused by the extent to which he or she understands that situation. This anxiety often manifests itself in the feeling that the Americans narrow negative liberty is meaningless. So many choices, so little quality! So many superficial differences between techniques for feeling pleasure, so little contentment in the end, because nature is inhumane, the patterns in its processes are alien to our preferences, and natural forces accidentally undermine our little games a thousand times each day. The consumer whos left with the free choice between products that are supposed to bring happiness is in a similar position to the postmodern liberal whos left with nihilistic instrumentalism, who dreads normative questions and who can only calculate which means most efficiently brings about a predetermined end. In any case, the main point I want to make here about freedom and oligarchy is that the peculiar mix of American freedoms seems the product of a stealth oligarchy. What the critic should expect, assuming theres no useful comparison between an alleged

394 democracy like the US and a tyranny, is that theres freedom in the former but none in the latter. Instead, what we find is that theres positive freedom in both and superfluous negative freedom in the former. In either case, the positive ideal seems erroneous, whether it be that of the Soviet Union, of an Islamic dictatorship, or of the materialistic US, and in the case of the US the negative freedom, that is, the bewildering choice between a superabundance of hedonic devices, provides another illusion that the majority have ultimate control over their lives. This is just an illusion and the US is in fact an oligarchy, because the choice is confined to the means of achieving the preestablished goal of materialistic happiness, a goal not intrinsically preferred by people but set by a capitalistic economy that happens to run on myths that drive consumption, rather than on, say, the export of natural resources. Instead of coercing people to consume products in a democracy, those with power over the consumers bombard them with materialistic myths, exploiting peoples innate cognitive deficiencies. The US isnt a tyranny, but it seems a more stable form of minority-rule, despite its illusions of democracy and of the rational autonomy of its citizens.

Equality Under the Law?

How about the rule of law? Once again, the US and other democracies have more equality under the law than there is in a dictatorship, but the difference isnt as stark as might be expected. In a dictatorship, theres rampant nepotism and the whim of an evil or insane ruler or cabal of oligarchs. Any law in such a society expresses the will of the powerful, so that power rules over the law rather than the other way around. But nowhere does the law interpret or enforce itself. People must do so and people can be corrupted--even in a democracy. So in a democracy, rich people can afford better lawyers and also lobbyists to write the laws in their favour, buying off regulators and politicians so that their injurious business practices become legal. The US, the so-called freest of the democracies, has the worlds highest incarceration rate. The American god of the free market has corrupted not just US medical care and its scientific institutions, but also the countrys law enforcement, so that its prison system has become a thriving business. Police, judges, lawyers, and prison builders profit from certain interpretations

395 and enforcements of the law, and the conflict between that narrow self-interest and their obligation to seek justice or to otherwise protect the society must be just another bit of chaos on which Mother Nature thrives. (Let those profiting from the legal system and its impoverished victims sort out their conflict by a brutal struggle! Natural forces will reach an equilibrium that represents the optimal end state. As I point out in Conservatism, by optimal the economist can mean only descriptively functional, meaning that a predetermined end state which the economist cant prescribe, will thus be most efficiently realized.) As is evident from the familiar fiasco of the O.J. Simpson trial, to the capture of the MMS regulators who were charged to prevent catastrophes like the BP oil spill, to Obamas ability to let the Bush administration and Wall Street bankers escape legal inquiries, the US clearly doesnt have simple equality under its law. Instead, the US weds its legal system to a vicious capitalistic economy which corrupts everything it touches. Under that circumstance, the law becomes another weapon in the hands of the powerful rulers to control the poor majority, to keep the latter class in its low position in the power hierarchy. This is done by dividing the poor against each other, largely through the drug war which promotes tribal warfare in the ghettos and creates lost generations who are further spoiled by the prison system. Again, what the critic should expect is that a totalitarian dictatorship is lawless, whereas a democracy has equality under the law, but what we find are shades of gray. Power distorts justice in a democracy too, because humans are in charge of any legal system and humans are vicious, mostly irrational animals that readily give in to temptation. In a wild capitalistic democracy, our corruption is even encouraged by a pagan faith in the divinity of evolutionary forces. (These forces may be divinely creative, but why suppose that they work inevitably in our favour? The economists optimism here is so childish that it must be disingenuous, and the pagan faith must be a noble lie meant to maintain an oligarchic social order.) Hence, the comparison between even a democratic republic like the US and a totalitarian dictatorship: both are oligarchies, or rather the US recurrently devolves into an oligarchy as domestic liberals and socialists lose their

396 confidence in the viability of their scientistic, progressive alternative to the oligarchic status quo that obtains in most groups of social animals. The legal system thus becomes more and more undermined by natural forces, with ever less equality under it, with more legal exceptions for the powerful, and with more crushing weight on the weak. In the American free-for-all, both the powerful and the powerless want to nurture their vices, but only the powerful can codify their white collar misdeeds and create or exploit a legal system that persecutes the poor under the pretexts of a drug war and of holy social Darwinism.

Human Rights?
Finally, there are those unalienable human rights that are enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence but which are conspicuously absent in a tyrannical oligarchy. A dictatorship is a dystopia in which some self-serving goal, such as that of glorifying the Leader or the State, overrides all other values so that most of the citizens are reduced to means of achieving that goal. Just as you can sacrifice part of a machine if the part prevents the whole from functioning, so dehumanized people in a dictatorship can be killed if that sacrifice is called for by the Leaders vision. In a classically liberal democracy like the US, by contrast, all of its citizens are supposed to have rights as autonomous, rational beings. As the philosopher Kant said, each person spontaneously creates her own experience, by applying concepts to sensations, giving the person a kind of godlike sovereignty over that cognitive labour and over the mental tools used, which means that we each own ourselves and, like any piece of private property, a person ought to have sole authority over how shes treated. Our reason dignifies us, gives us godlike insight, freedom, and creativity, and so were each an end in ourselves, not merely an object that might be useful to someone else. As I say in Liberalism, however, this Enlightenment rationalism has fallen apart. Cognitive scientists have shown that reason, being the product of natural selection, consists mostly of heuristics, or rules of thumb, which are actually so many biases and fallacies. Moreover, this rationalism commits the naturalistic fallacy of inferring that

397 were valuable or that we have rights, just because we think a lot. In the current postmodern period, liberals have therefore slipped into nihilism, realizing that no normative conclusions follow from factual premises about our cognitive powers (even assuming these premises are accurate, which theyre not). Even before postmodernism, the myth of human rights hardly persuaded many Americans. African-Americans were enslaved and half of the US wanted to go to war to follow the capitalistic (vicious) imperative that slave labour should be exploited for profit. Women were not allowed to vote until 1920. Like most other people, many Americans are still racist and sexist. In foreign affairs, the American military has no difficulty suspending the ideal of human rights, torturing foreigners in Abu Ghraib prison or rendering captives to be tortured by foreign middlemen. Indeed, the unalienable right to life conflicts with the waging of any war, and American society is highly militaristic. Note that it would be self-contradictory to reply that the US Declaration is meant to recognize the human rights only of American citizens, since Americans arent the only humans around. Once you assume that some people have rights in virtue of their humanity and not just their nationality, you have to recognize that all people have those rights. But the point is that Americans evidently arent convinced that there are any such rights. Take, for example, the issue of gay marriage. Proponents frame the issue in terms of a civil right, as though all people ought to marry and have a family, and since homosexuals are people they have that same obligation. Says who? Why believe theres any such obligation to get married or to respect the institution of marriage? Like other animal species, humans seem to be at least serially monogamous, but thats just to speak of a biological function which has precisely no normative implication. Just because people tend to marry doesnt mean they ought to. Therefore, we dont yet have a right to marry; that is, we havent yet shown that marriage, or a monogamous relationship, is to be valued as a good thing. Is there a religious reason to believe we ought to marry? Dont make me laugh! At best, marriage is a legal contract, which means only that consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want as long as they dont thereby deprive anyone else of the same freedom. This makes marriage

398 something thats actually desired, which gives marriage mere subjective value, putting the interest in marriage in the same category as the taste for, say, spicy food. No such rights or tastes are unalienable; on the contrary, they can change as passing fads. Is our ability to do what we want in this way itself a good, so that whatever we thereby do is right? How so, without committing the naturalistic fallacy? Now that Ive disposed of some fatuous myths surrounding the debate about gay marriage, I can ask whats really going on. My answer: postmodern nihilism. Just as with postmodern visual art, in which anything goes because people have lost their faith in any grand metanarrative, ideal, or myth that inspires a healthy culture prior to its inevitable death and decay, so too with postmodern sexual relations. What decides a social debate between liberals who believe in nothing is just a handful of empty, politically correct slogans. Liberals want to believe we should all be happy; they no longer subscribe to the Enlightenment myths that once justified that imperative, so they presuppose it and focus on how to advance society in the interest of spreading happiness. If gay people are unhappy because they cant yet marry, then the institutions should change to accommodate them. The most efficient way to change social norms is to deploy such Machiavellian tricks as the use of vacuous but nonetheless effective rhetoric, given our cognitive deficiencies. Nihilistic liberals, who are the chief proponents of gay marriage, think in such instrumental terms; they can do no other. Mind you, Im not saying gays shouldnt be allowed to marry. My point is just that human rights have nothing to do with the debate. So even if people are more respected and better treated in a democracy than in a dictatorship, theres hardly a guarantee of human rights in the former. What are called civil rights have legal protections in a modern democracy, but the reasons given in support of those laws are noble lies. The discourse of human rights is, at this point, thoroughly instrumental and scientistic, which is to say that the meaning of the politically correct slogans about the dignity of all kinds of people, whatever their natural inequalities or handicaps, is much less important than the effect of those slogans. As with most of the words spoken by democratic politicians, the point of postmodern liberal

399 speech isnt to reach philosophical understanding, but to apply the social sciences, to re-engineer people and their institutions. Liberals behave as though they were technocrats; unfortunately, some of their social technologies rest on pseudosciences such as economics. A social science that has genuine force, though, in terms of a theory or model that predicts the future in such a way that technologies can be invented to apply that empirical knowledge, is cognitive science, which is actually a cluster of sciences. And the main finding of cognitive science is that people are animals, not gods. For example, we dont reason as well as we often boast. Liberal politicians, pundits, and public relations folks (propagandists) are doers, not idealists, and so when they speak about human rights, theyre trying not to appeal to you as a rational agent, but to spin you or to push your buttons, meaning that they want to train you to obey like a pet. Thats the function of instrumental rhetoric: its used as a piece of technology that has predictable effects. The remaining question is whether the rhetoric of human rights is useful to oligarchs, so that we can see that theres no internal conflict, at least, in saying that a stealth, semidemocratic oligarchy might protect human rights, to some extent. Clearly, a dictatorship has no use for those rights, since the rulers in that sort of society rule by terror caused by physical brutality. But in an oligarchy that pretends to be a democracy, the minority rule not by such a blunt, counter-productive tactic, but by granting the majority superficial control over the government so that they identify with the leaders and wont rebel against them. This control is exercised by voting, and a myth about the equality of all people naturally surfaces, complimenting this use of democracy. For the majority to believe that they hold ultimate political power in their democracy, they must believe that theyre at least as important as their elected representatives. Hence the egalitarian notions of human rights and of equality under the law. In actuality, assuming minimal democracy can be used as a cover for a stealth oligarchy, ultimate power is held not by the majority of voters, but by a minority who enjoy undemocratic control over not just the politicians (through campaign contributions and the revolving door between public and private sectors), but lawmakers (through lobbyists and the revolving door), the economy

400 (by capturing regulators and creating too-big-to-fail institutions that hold the nation hostage), and the minds of the majority (with scientifically-crafted, multimillion dollar ad campaigns, training even the likes of evangelical Christians to be pleasure-obsessed consumers).

Just a Conspiracy Theory?

Lastly, Id like to consider another likely objection to what Ive been saying about stealth oligarchy in a putative democracy, which is that this is all just a conspiracy theory. Strictly speaking, this is no objection since there are such things as conspiracies and so there can be theories of how they work. As conspiracy theorists like to say, many people are actually in prison for committing crimes that the law itself calls conspiracies. But this response misses the objections point. Conspiracy theory has a pejorative sense, and its important to see exactly whats wrong with such theories as that the Bush regime was responsible for the 911 terrorist attack, that extraterrestrials crash-landed in Roswell, or that the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Business Roundtable, and the Illuminati cabal secretly run the whole world. Whats wrong with these theories, I take it, is that given what their conclusions say, the proponents of these theories couldnt possibly know enough to put the theories forward in a sensible manner. The theories tend to be about the secret machinations of quintessential insiders, whereas the theorists themselves tend to live in basements, with access only to exoteric information. Conspiracy theories fill this gap, between what the theories say and who the theorists are, with loose associative reasoning and other such tactics of obfuscating the theories' necessary lack of sufficient evidence to justify much confidence in them. Is what Ive said about stealth oligarchy a conspiracy theory in that sense? I think not, because Ive proposed mainly a metatheory that operates at a philosophical rather than an empirical level. I havent pretended that I can name all the oligarchs or specify the dates, locations, and other details of their activities. Thus, I havent needed to resort to loose reasoning to tenuously link fragments of evidence. What Ive concluded is that

401 even while the majority are supposed to hold ultimate power in a democracy, what tends to happen is that a minority holds that power instead, and that in the US the minoritys power derives mainly from its wealth. Moreover, Ive identified oligarchy with the natural dominance hierarchy, making this social order the norm rather than the exception. Granted, this theory predicts that those with the most money are fine candidates for oligarchs, so if we wanted to investigate how a stealth oligarchy works, the preliminary step would be to follow the money. The US is well-known for being the most economically inegalitarian of modern democracies, with the largest inequality between its rich and poor. So the US oligarchs shouldnt be hard to find; theyre the ones with almost all the money. However, on my naturalistic picture of politics, its unlikely that the true rulers of capitalistic democracies cook up schemes in secret meetings. Even were there such meetings, they wouldnt be crucial to maintaining the power inequality. On the contrary, my point is that natural selection takes care of an oligarchys details. Just as fish, birds, and chimpanzees dont establish their pecking orders self-consciously, but just follow their instincts which naturally sort the strong from the weak, so too in a capitalistic democracy a dominance hierarchy happens as a matter of course--unless a heroic effort is made to counteract that force of evolutionary gravity. In particular, capitalism is a version of natural selection, and the struggle to compete in a wild, minimally regulated market is comparable to the way so-called uncivilized, wild animals struggle to survive in their environments. The point is that humans are animals too, our vainglorious delusions notwithstanding, and so we should expect that in a capitalistic free-for-all in which the pagan, virtually Satanic cult of free market economics celebrates vice as the engine that drives Mother Nature to grow an economy, growth is nothing less than the establishment of a stable dominance hierarchy. Thus, Id dump my critics objection back into his or her lap. Far from my philosophical account of stealth oligarchy being a dubious conspiracy theory, just such a theory is needed to explain how a capitalistic democracy could fail to naturally degenerate into an oligarchy. The main countervailing force is liberalism/socialism, which strengthens

402 government regulation and creates a middle class that stands as a bulwark against powerful special interests who naturally seek undemocratic control over the society. But this only pushes my counter-objection back a step, because now a dubious conspiracy theory is needed to justify liberalism/socialism, or to explain how that countervailing force could fail to dwindle in a postmodern climate. What gives humans unnalienable rights as equally rational, free, conscious and otherwise godlike persons, given that science has undermined those Enlightenment myths? Most of these myths were borrowed, in any case, from utterly hopeless monotheistic religions. Or why should a natural dominance hierarchy be prevented in a human society, given the liberals commitment to the scientific picture of the world? What makes the weak and the poor in the lowest class of a pecking order deserving of a more elevated position? What justifies the normative dimension of liberalism/socialism? How can the naturalistic fallacy be dodged without precisely a dubious, loosely-reasoned conspiracy theory of natural rights thats no real dodge at all?

Appendix: The Definition of Oligarchy

Oligarchy: rule by the most vicious few over the more innocent many; the default way of organizing societies. There are in practice three kinds of government: naked oligarchies, covert oligarchies, and non-oligarchies which tend to degenerate into oligarchies. The explanation of why this is so has at least three levels, each deeper and broader than the next. At the highest, most apparent level, there is what Robert Michels called in 1911 the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is that the centralization of power is the most efficient way of organizing large groups. Bureaucracies form as control needs to be specialized and delegated, and as the bureaucracy grows, higher and higher levels of command need to be put into place to avoid a regress to anarchy, whereupon those near the pyramids apex tend either to be corrupted by the greater power they acquire or to have been sufficiently vicious in advance to have successfully worked their way to the top of the hierarchy, wining out against cut-throat competitors.

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More broadly, the most stable social structure in species whose members live in large groups, including birds, fish, and primates, is the dominance hierarchy in which power is centralized in a minority of alpha males or females who maintain a social order by rigorously enforcing rules of which members enjoy such benefits as privileged access to food or to mates. Oligarchy in human societies is just our form of the dominance hierarchy, which is to say that the underlying structure of our myriad social systems is naturally selected. Deeper still, the inevitability of oligarchy and the injustice entailed by any such gross inequality have Gnostic flavours, revealing the existential, mythical status of our ultimate position within nature as accursed, imprisoned beings too clever to maintain our peace of mind. The undead god, which is the monstrous power of cosmic creativity, blindly spits up creatures that are instinctively opposed to living alone, only to create a second dead end for these social beings: when they huddle to escape the anguish of loneliness, the majority who are relatively docile place themselves in the clutches of oligarchs.

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How Godlike Oligarchs Train Consumers by Eliminating Babies and Old People from Pop Culture ____________________________________________________

Personal liberty is mythologized by two kinds of people, whom Ill call oligarchs and consumers. I focus here on the psychological sense of the word oligarch. Economically, an oligarch is someone in the minority who has undemocratic political power over the majority, due to wealth, social connections, or some other special strength. But oligarchs tend to share a social Darwinian mindset, according to which the most powerful people are, as Nietzsche said, beyond good and evil and thus above the law. The advantage of being more powerful than most isnt just that you can afford the best lawyers, who give you practical immunity from prosecution; no, in the first place, the oligarch arrogantly assumes that no one has the right to judge him, that social laws are for those who are forced to be interdependent because theyre not completely independent. Those who can care for themselves without anyone elses aid are gods, and gods are lawgivers not law-abiders. Historically in Europe, Catholic oligarchs lost their political power to modern, rationalistic ones. The Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment replaced the medieval rationalization of aristocracy with the modern rationalization of stealth oligarchy by way of democracy and capitalism. In the medieval scheme, peasants served lords as more divinely blessed thanks to their blood relation

405 or social connection to the royals whose privileges were sanctioned by the utterlycompromised, anti-Jesus Catholic Church. As money fell into the private hands of merchants and as scientists discovered more and more discrepancies between Christian theology and natural reality, the Christian myth became obsolete and modernists duly replaced it with secular humanism. According to the new myth, the individual human has the potential to be a god, depending on whether he has sufficient empowering knowledge. Eventually, this myth was extended to women, but initially faith in mortal reason and freedom was both sexist and class-based. Moreover, modernism combined elements of what are now called political liberalism and conservatism: modernism was liberal in requiring faith in human progress from the unrestricted and thus untraditional exercise of reason, as demonstrated best by the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin; but modernism was conservative in requiring a naturalistic view of human nature, according to which inequalities in rational self-control entail unequal rights to happiness or political power. In these ways, modernism was at least implicitly scientistic and social Darwinian. In medieval terms, social progress is senseless, since God supposedly already revealed the blueprint for the perfect society, for the so-called kingdom of God, millennia ago. Modernists lost faith in that theistic metanarrative, owing largely to the Churchs elaborate betrayal of Jesus for secular power, but were inspired by demonstrations of human creativity in the Renaissance and of the power of technoscience in the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Freedom of thought evidently empowers people, which raises the standard of living and is thus socially progressive. That scientism, which reduces the improvement of values to increases in knowledge and power, is at the heart of political liberalism. But this very science-centered, naturalistic perspective entails class divisions between those who are naturally smarter or stronger and thus better equipped to enhance society in the scientistic manner, and those with natural and thus scientifically recognizable deficiencies, who depend on charity for their survival. With the death of God in the modern age, charity becomes much less motivated, and so the modernist tends to be either a libertarian, economic conservative; a warped theist who pretends to follow a humane ancient tradition but instead cherry-picks from that tradition

406 with the impunity of a modern individualist whose trust in her apelike ego substitutes for fear of God; or a postmodern liberal, whose liberalism is only a mask for nihilistic instrumentalism. When I say, then, that the oligarch is one of two types who cherish personal liberty, what I mean is that the arch modernist (libertarian, fundamentalist, postmodern liberal) resorts to noble lies about the benefits of freedom, to justify the greater bestial vices that attend godlike knowledge and power. The oligarch is smarter, more powerful and independent, and thus more liberated from social conventions, than those who are compelled to obey received wisdom. That politically incorrect liberty, which is the gods freedom to sin, is the secret content of banal glorifications of freedom in modern democracies. As was known in ancient Greece, democracies devolve into stealth oligarchies, due to the potential for demagoguery, for mass manipulation by those who prey on the herd. Oligarchs demand the freedom of self-rule because they alone are fully capable of being autonomous, of being free from coercion whether by natural or social forces, due often to their greater wealth which supplies them with cutting-edge technology and with oligopolies in minimally-regulated capitalistic societies. Oligarchs are thus the truest lovers of the divine, because theyre the most narcissistic and godlike. They love to create their own worlds, like the mythical gods of yore, and so they protect the freedom needed by natural gods to rule over their pets, who are the mass of relative weaklings. When the modernist spoke of the need for rational selfcontrol, then, he was effectively prescribing negative liberty, which is the freedom from any external force, and thus the open-ended positive liberty of anyone so empowered to do whatever he wants as a carefree god toying with his inferiors. And so rationalistic modernity devolves into chaotic postmodernity. However, as I said, the modern myth of secular humanism has a liberal, progressive side, which has the potential for socialism, as became apparent in communist societies in the last century. Modern socialism combines theistic irrationality and supernaturalism with the scientistic notion of social progress. The socialist ignores natural differences between human capacities and idolizes the group rather than the individual. Progress

407 then becomes a matter of enhancing society as a whole which requires economic equality or at least no evidence of any vastly unequal individual. While there are group dynamics and while no individual is as rational, free, or conscious as affirmed in modern myths, psychology and biology provide a wealth of evidence that individuals have limited or at least illusory degrees of rational autonomy. Socialists must ignore all of that evidence, since the latter challenges the worship of the State with the more compelling form of pseudotheism which substitutes the powerful mortal for the classic deity. One problem with socialism, then, is its aesthetic weakness, since a group--being an abstraction--cant literally speak for itself and so doesnt make for a compelling dramatic character. A powerful individual, however, can plainly speak and act much like an ancient god and thus can attract the same sort of adoration as was thought to be enjoyed by Zeus, Yahweh, or Allah. (This is why nationalism in general, from that of the Nazis to that of the Americans, prospers only with a cult of personality, whether the Leader is found in politics or on the silver screen.) Nevertheless, the progressive side of modernism (the liberals naturalistic fallacy committed as a result of religious faith ultimately in science) can trump modernisms naturalistic, rationalistic side, which makes for the spectacle of gods being brought low by lesser beings whose minds, at least, are potentially created (indoctrinated and trained) by their superiors. The first such modern spectacle was the French Revolution, from which American oligarchs learned to appreciate the need for effective noble lies, to prevent a similar sort of perverse revolution in the New World (supposedly a world of raw materials with which European immigrants could practice their godhood). The trick was to use a limited form of democracy that has only superficial consequences, setting the branches of government against each other by way of dividing and conquering the masses. This was done not just to forestall the rise of a classic tyrant with a direct political monopoly, but to prevent either any such tyrant or the population of weaklings as a whole from revolting against those with indirect political monopolies, namely the stealth oligarchs, such as the plutocrats who in the last couple of centuries came to run the large American banks.

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The Disappearance of Babies and Old People

All of that is background to what I want to discuss, which is one means by which those who enjoy godlike freedom (the oligarchs) sustain the illusion of freedom of their pets (the consumers). By consumer I mean someone who sacralizes the consumption of material goods, whose deepest values are therefore the most politically correct ones, instilled by popular culture which is dominated by the mass media and the entertainment industry, which in turn have been consolidated by the handful of megacorporations that comprise the military-industrial-entertainment complex. While consumers dont identify themselves primarily as such, those whose behaviour indicates that they worship the companies that brand them and that rain down techno toys like manna from heaven should be thought of as consumers in this religious sense. Psychologically, consumers identify with the celebrities and fictional heroes who lead popular culture, but these characters become popular because they serve the modern metanarrative. As the (relatively unpopular) science fiction movie, Cube, points out so well, there need be no conspiracy in the Creationist sense, since design can be accomplished in the Darwinian manner, by natural selection. While modern societies are stealth oligarchies in which a minority of superpowerful persons negate the socialist tendencies of democracy, oligarchs are only false gods, themselves being playthings of the inhumane cosmos. With all their knowledge and power, they cant predict how economies will develop in the long-term and thus cant fully control them. Instead, what happens is that dominance hierarchies evolve as stable, albeit apparently cruel social organizations, with human predators naturally winning wild competitions and acquiring monopolies, and with myths arising to reinforce that naturally advantageous order by captivating the human herd. Like everything else in nature, human society is a process in what I call figuratively the decay of the undead god. Clearly, nature is divine since natural forces produce everything from galaxies to planets to organisms. But nature is neither alive nor dead, neither a personal god nor inert and static; as argued by the biologist Stuart Kauffman, in Reinventing the Sacred, nature is creative, but nature thereby gives only

409 the superficial appearance of being alive without actually being so, like a zombie. And like a zombies undeadness, natures sham vitality is horrible, because of its alien endpoint, because actual organic life is only a byproduct of cosmic development, with life having no necessarily uplifting ultimate role in the universe. So consumers are enthusiastic participants in popular culture who thus most successfully fulfill whatever mysterious function is needed to help maintain the modern social order. Biologically, religious consumerism serves the genes by stabilizing a dominance hierarchy, the latter being a social structure thats proven to prevent social collapse in most mammalian species but that in our freer, more intelligent species may not likewise succeed. In any case, the ultimate end of the subset of biological processes within the grander cosmic evolution is quite unknown. But, captivated by modern myths that reinforce grotesque power inequalities, empowering vicious human predators as oligarchs at the majoritys expense, consumers are blindly locked into that cosmic process, which makes for an aesthetically questionable lifestyle. How, though, are so many people captured by modern myths? How do so many succumb to liberal Scientism, to the colossal naturalistic fallacy of trusting that society generally can progress just as obviously as can technoscience? I want to explore here just one facet of this domestication of the herd. Since consumers are chained to popular culture, it behooves us to investigate that cultures content, and one curious feature of that content is well-known, which is the pretense that old people dont exist. The Simpsons cartoon, for example, has for a couple of decades now satirized retirement homes, contrasting the modernists penchant for eliminating old people from public view, with the more traditional culture in which old people are respected and more directly cared for by their relatives. In addition to being abandoned by their modern families, old people seldom appear in the mass media or in any form of mass entertainment. Sterilized representatives may be concocted to sell life insurance or drugs on television, but you rarely see old people in mass-consumed contents. Even though their job consists of reading from teleprompters, when a news anchor reaches a certain age, he or shes often replaced by a younger mouthpiece, and the same is true

410 of movie or television actors. Moreover, not just the living old people are conspicuously absent from modern society, but so are dead bodies. In a traditional or so-called premodern society, the dead are more visible, sometimes even paraded in public or left to rot with no pretense of an afterlife, as in the Tibetan practice of the sky burial in which the corpse is left to rot out in the open. In modern society, though, corpses are rushed to funeral homes where theyre burned to ashes or secreted within coffins and buried, sparing friends or relatives the hardship of looking Death in its hideously alien face. Less well appreciated is the fact that the same phenomenon is found at the opposite end of the spectrum: babies are also kept as secrets in modern societies, seldom appearing anywhere in public, including the narratives of pop culture. The point isnt just that babies are rarely shown in movies or in magazines, for example, but that babies are hardly ever even the subjects of public discourse. Indirectly, of course, many aspects of popular culture bear on old people and on babies, but theres little direct observation or discussion of what we might call the alpha and the omega of the human life cycle. Two tempting explanations of these curious facts can be dismissed, I think. First, the fiction writer will point out that babies obviously make for poor actors and thus are useless as stars of advertisements, movies, novels, and so on. At best, babies are used as props in the entertainment industry, because this industry is in the business of telling stories/spreading myths, and babies are incapable of acting. This explanation has two drawbacks. First, it doesnt account as well for the comparable banishment of old people, since older people can act and indeed may have all the more experience in that respect. Second, this doesnt address the neglect that occurs outside of commercial enterprises, by modern families themselves. The second explanation is the evolutionary one that old people naturally wont become the focus of a human culture which must ultimately be directed towards the fulfillment of our biological function of sexual reproduction. Old people no longer carry out that function and thus tend to fall by the wayside. As it stands, this explanation has

411 numerous problems. For one thing, its major premise seems false, since while all human cultures may affirm our biological function, thus instituting marriage, for example, cultures can do this by indirect means. Thus, far from ignoring old people, traditional cultures treasure them, giving them pride of place and codifying or mythologizing respect for old people. Also, this explanation doesnt account for the dearth of babies in modern public places. On the contrary, the nave evolutionist should predict that babies are culturally central: at least, any culture that deals explicitly with sexual reproduction should prize the biological result, which is of course the birth of infants. Part of a more satisfying explanation, though, is related to the second one, which is that in the case of commercial endeavours, at least, such as advertising, neither babies nor old people are most welcome, because sexuality is the primary technique for selling merchandise, and those in the eighteen to thirty-five age group are naturally the sexiest.

Sustaining Individualism by an Illusion

But more generally, I propose, people at their youngest or their oldest are detrimental to the myth of freedom on which consumerism and thus the whole modern social order depend. As I said, oligarchic freedom is just the lack of inhibitions and of any external restriction on the will to get what it wants. In this respect, oligarchs are like infants as much as gods, but however objectionable their exploitations, oppressions, or fraudulent extractions of wealth, and however incompatible their infantile recklessness may be with the modern myth of rational self-control, theyre ensconced in their privately-operated worlds and thus likely beyond reform. However, the consumer cant afford to recognize the sham of the modern ideal of human nature. The passive downloader of pop culture mustnt become aware of the dark pseudo-agenda of the undead god, of the natural powers behind the cultural Matrix; instead, the consumer must blindly follow the modern ideal as though it were just a harmless conventional stipulation, like another rule of the road. This modern ideal is called Individualism, since it depicts a person as an independent entity walled-off from

412 everything else by the trinity of Consciousness, Reason, and Freedom. These forces unite to empower a person, to make her the master of her destiny. Modern liberty is freedom from tradition, from preposterous institutions like the Church, from antiprogressive forces such as superstition, from tyrannical governments, and from the whims of Mother Nature. Consumption of material goods, then, is the fuelling of the ego, the divorce between the increasingly-autonomous individual and the rest of the world, the spinning of a cocoon to nurture a god-in-training. Less figuratively, the point is that material goods add to a persons control--supposedly over herself as well as nature-since theyre artificially functional and thus more predictable and benevolent than natural processes. Also, consumption of mass-produced toys and of other luxuries is pleasurable, which reassures the consumer that modernism is worthwhile. But as an ingredient of the modern myth, consumerism is broader than the commercial sphere, extending to politics, sexuality, family dynamics, and to any egocentric, individualistic endeavour. The individual is supposed to exercise perfectly free choice not just in the supermarket, when faced with aisles of stacked products that tower overhead, but in democratic elections. Liberated men and women are free also to have recreational sex with no limits between consenting adults, selecting among the myriad ways in which bodies can be conjoined. And being an autonomous, self-sufficient pseudogod, with no overriding social obligations, an adult can dispense with his or her old parents when they become burdensome, hiding their bodies again when they die, in graves or urns. With this modern ideal in mind, there are a host of reasons why the public presence of old people and of infants is awkward in any society committed to that ideal. The fantasy of technoscientific mastery over natural forces is shown to be ludicrous by evidence of natures mastery over us, which is found all over the deteriorating bodies of old people, still plagued as they are by diseases despite all the advances in medical science. Their organs and mental faculties fail them as they near the permanent cessation of their inner being, which cessation is so incomprehensible to the living. No one escapes that submission to natural forces, not even the oligarch who is the most godlike among us.

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While old people show that even godlike humans are conquered by natural forces, babies give the lie to modernism by showing how most of us can be conquered by social ones. In the first place, a baby is a sponge, mimicking what those around it do. In this way, a baby is transparently trained like any pet. By analogy, weaker adults may be trained by stronger ones. Granted, babies and children occupy biologically formative stages of development, but even the adult brain is highly adaptable, changing to suit stimuli from different environments. Moreover, as shown by cognitive scientists, even an average adult is much less rational than classic rationalists assumed. Adults are susceptible to many fallacies and biases. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt says in The Righteous Mind, reason evolved not to discover the ultimate truth but to flatter the ego and to navigate social networks. (Unfortunately, Haidts defense of political conservatism commits the naturalistic fallacy in an egregious fashion.) All of which strengthens the analogy between a parents evident training of her baby with the prospect of an oligarchs training of a consumer. But a consumer whos effectively a domesticated pet of godlike predators obviously falls short of the modern myth of the rationally self-determining agent. So the existence of babies is politically incorrect in a stealth oligarchy. Moreover, a baby is perfectly innocent and nave, content with the most trivial activities such as scrunching a piece of paper or throwing a toy across the floor. An existential cosmicist, with a merciless philosophical perspective on our tragic position in nature, should be heartbroken whenever she confirms that a babys bliss depends on the babys complete ignorance. Again, then, by a reasonable analogy, anyone can infer that just as a babys happiness is both tragically doomed, as the baby grows and loses its ignorance, and also absurdly inconsequential and out-of-touch with natural reality, so too an adult consumers lifestyle is doomed and ridiculous from an even broader perspective. This analogy undermines faith in the sacredness of a technologicallyenhanced, self-directing individual. Just as a modern baby is surrounded by a toy environment that separates the baby from the dangers of the rest of the household, so too an adult consumers artificial world separates the individual from the natural

414 wilderness, conferring the illusion of independence as long as the consumers vision is limited to the dreams and fantasies purveyed by pop culture. Just as in the Gnostic science fiction movie, The Matrix, we live with illusions that spare us from confronting harsh reality. If the artificial intelligence of the futuristic machines that enslave humans and install virtual reality software programs in their minds, as shown in the movie, is comparable to the undeadness of natures creativity that operates via the oligarchs (the Agents) and their industries, The Matrix is an apt dramatization of consumerism and only barely metaphorical. In addition, a baby is, of course, physically helpless, with a head thats initially too big for its body, requiring an adult to carry and feed the baby, and with instinctively grasping, puny hands that cant yet manipulate its environment with any sophistication. And then theres the babys naked egoism, its wailing whenever it doesnt get its way, its self-centered disdain for anything in its dream world which the baby doesnt identify as an extension of itself. When the baby eventually learns to distinguish between itself and other things, one of the first lessons it learns in modern society is that of private property, as the babys asked to hand over its toy but often refuses and cries when forcibly separated from its presumed property. I trust that, following the above lines of argument, the further analogies with adults along these lines are plain. Compared to hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and the potential of a huge meteor's collision with Earth, an adult human is just as helpless as a baby without the charity of adults. Oligarchs are relatively self-sufficient, but they bless consumers with the gifts of modern myths and a toy environment that save the fragile masses from the horror and the angst that follow from existential insight. And all secular humanists, including modern oligarchs and consumers, are egotists, idolizing the godlike human as a stand-in for the dead and buried God. Little do these enthusiastic modernists appreciate that the ancient gods of theists, killed off, as it were, by modern scientists and philosophers, were pipsqueaks next to the undead monster of the natural universe, which evidently builds on itself in a mindless, pointless evolutionary process in which even liberated humanists are imprisoned.

415 In short, from the esoteric, existential perspective, the baby is a fitting symbol of the adult. As Ive said, both the consumer and the oligarch are infantile in their own ways, but when the oligarch appreciates the fictional nature of modern myths and so suffers the stress of cognitive dissonance when he fails to live as an awe-inspiring god, the oligarch can fall back on the infinite distractions supplied by his wealth, as well as on the thrill of abusing his immense power with impunity. An oligarch can afford to recognize his relative infancy compared to mighty Mother Nature, but a modern dominance hierarchy could collapse were the masses generally to become disenchanted with the myths that prop up the practice of endless consumption. And this isnt just speculation. The social revolution in the 1960s was led by anarchist hippies who deprogrammed themselves with psychedelic drugs, thereby attaining the broader, existential perspective by means of which they grasped precisely the absurdity of the modern worldview. Lacking a viable alternative after the Soviet Union imploded, though, the hippies sold out and the modern scientistic and social Darwinian dominance hierarchies in the US and Europe reestablished themselves in the 80s. Still, the French Revolution and the 60s social revolution both demonstrate a power hierarchys vulnerability, given sufficient disenchantment with the noble lies that rationalize gross political and economic inequalities. One of the ways in which modern dominance hierarchies are maintained, Im suggesting, is by excluding babies and old people from politically correct discourse, effectively identifying them as taboo. That way, consumers tend to live only with others of our ilk, which allows us to retain our warped ideal of human nature. Were led to think that humans are essentially autonomous, responsible adults, and that babies and old people are subhuman; after all, in the majority of public contents, from mass media and entertainment narratives to the sorts of people who literally tend to exist in public spaces, we adult consumers are narcissistically treated to reflections of ourselves. Sure, like most adults throughout history, we modern consumers have our own children, but we tend to cherish our careers, daycare services, or nannies which separate parent from child for much of the day. Thus, the immersion in pop culture and in the world of

416 godlike adult responsibilities can compete successfully with the nagging existential worries that should follow from much experience with babies. And sure, there are public places dominated by old people, such as cruise ships and certain beaches in Florida, but those places function as extended retirement homes which younger consumers duly tend to avoid.

Conclusion
To summarize the overall argument, then, the modernist upholds an ideology that celebrates individual freedom, explaining this freedom as an inheritance of Reason. Reason frees us from the dead weight of the past and creates a progressive future in which were further empowered. While this ideology is hardly baseless, it does replace a theistic religion only by becoming a science-centered one, which inevitably renders the commitment to modernism an irrational leap of faith. Logic and empirical evidence wont suffice to sustain that faith; force of some sort is needed. When inherent wishes and predilections for fallacies dont ensure faith in the myths that prop up modern stealth oligarchies, external pressures may emerge. One such pressure seems to be the illusion in modern society that that society is populated exclusively by the freest, most rational and godlike humans, by young and middle-aged adults. This illusion reinforces the modern conceit that we have the potential to be godlike, a potential thats supposedly fulfilled by the oligarchs who climb to the top of the power pyramid. Too much familiarity with the physical and mental weaknesses to which old people are prone and with the habits of babies threatens the consumers--who comprise the majority of modernists--with a debilitating existential perspective that could undermine the modern social order. Thus, one way or another, babies and old people are excluded from modern public spaces, to help sustain secular humanistic narcissism and arrogance which are hallmarks of consumerism, the latter being the way in which the majority of modernists express their so-called freedom.

417

Untangling Liberalism and Libertarianism ____________________________________________________

Liberalism and libertarianism share a root word as well as a common history, but today liberals and libertarians are often far apart on economic and political issues, especially in the US. Ill try to get to the bottom of the current divisions, giving due respect to the self-serving talking points repeated by each side, which is to say no respect at all to what partisan liberals and libertarians pretend to believe. Im more interested in the principles that can be deduced from what such partisans say or that are indicated by their political actions. The principles I detect are rather shocking. As Ive spelled out in Liberalism and elsewhere, modern liberals must be distinguished from postmodern ones, and postmodern liberals are disgraced, nihilistic servants of stealth oligarchies; moreover, as Ive explained in Conservatism, libertarians craft noble lies on behalf of those same oligarchies. But in the present philosophical rant, I explore further the nature of those lies, to lay bare the current difference between liberalism and libertarianism.

The Ironic Undoing of Liberalism

Modern liberalism is a scientistic application of rationalism, which imports scientific methods and standards from the empirical study of nature to the management of society. By way of a decline from a modern to a so-called postmodern state, liberalism

418 comes to bridge secular individualism and technocracy in the following way. Historically, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of the merchant class, and the power of modern scientific inquiries undermined the medieval European social structure, the authority of the Catholic Church, and thus the basis for deferring to Christian dogmas. Faith in received wisdom was replaced with the Renaissance confidence in human creativity and progress. The godlike human, who replaces the theistic deity by learning how the world actually works and re-engineering it to our benefit instead of trusting in revelation, and by freely creating worlds of culture, inherits the prestige and the rights once conventionally thought to belong to God. Now, as a sovereign gifted with the powers of rational self-control and thus of some freedom from natural forces, the secular humanist acquires the rights to create and to profit from that labour, free from traditional strictures. This freedom of thought and of labour requires democracy and capitalism. Liberal rights flow from the rationality of human nature, and so all people are assumed to have these rights. Moreover, since the modern liberal is optimistic about the prospect for social progress by an application of reason similar to the one in technoscience, liberalism entails a protection of human rights and of our equality by a progressive government. This is to say that liberal rationalism has socialist implications: by replacing Faith with Reason and God with Homo sapiens, the liberal hopes that social progress can be engineered just as well as technoscientific progress in controlling natural processes. Each rationally-sovereign person progresses by exercising her divine creativity and self-control, and just as God is assumed to benefit from some religious hierarchy such as the Catholic Church, which takes up the intermediary burden of managing Earth as the pinnacle of God's Creation, a powerful bureaucratic government is needed to protect secular creations. This liberal government will be technocratic in its aping of technoscience: instead of improving on nature, a liberal government perfects society, but in each case the goal is rational selfempowerment. And a liberal government will be socialist in its expansive view of human rights shared equally by every rationally-autonomous person. Reason dignifies and indeed deifies a person, and so just as a Church or other holy ground must be highly regulated and safeguarded, much governmental care must be taken even with a

419 pauper. Hence, we have the secular liberals technocratic administration of a social safety net. As Ive explained elsewhere, the modern liberal society degenerates into what Ive called its postmodern version. Ironically, the very scientific progress that so inspired secular humanists in the Enlightenment is largely responsible for this decline. What happened is just that evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences showed that humans arent divine after all; specifically, were not as free, conscious, nor as rational as assumed by the Enlightenment metanarrative. On the contrary, were embodied animals with no immaterial or supernatural spirit, our minds are mostly unconscious, and our capacity for reason evolved alongside more prodigious capacities for unreason-for fallacies and biases--which play their own evolutionary roles. Thus, informed liberals eventually lost confidence in the myths of modernity, and what Ive called the religion of Scientism entered its arid scholastic phase in which politically correct censorship replaces the modern premium on originality. Moreover, precisely because we were merely clever animals all along, the liberals championing of freedom in the forms of democracy and capitalism naturally ushered in stealth oligarchies which liberated and more truly deified minorities at the expense of great majorities. In a free Western society, the socialist powers of technocratic government are usurped by the minority who profit most from economic competition, and are then applied to the exclusive preservation of their wealth. In the nadir of postmodern liberalism, which is the current farce with the politically correct title, The American Leadership of the Free World, the majority are degraded rather than dignified, whether by an overactive prison system with the worlds highest incarceration rate, by a governmental duopoly that responds much more to money than to votes, or by the spectacle that the top tenth of the top one percent of wealthiest Americans, or one in a thousand American households, made one out of every eight dollars in the US economy prior to the recent recession, despite the obvious fact that that lopsided share hardly corresponds to any superhuman social contribution on the part of those elite beneficiaries. (See Winner-Take-All Politics, by Hacker and Pierson.)

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The result is an apathetic, cynical, largely impoverished and suckered majority governed by godlike oligarchs in the private sector who manipulate mass opinion through their control of the corporate media and their financed and lobbied political representatives. Postmodern secular liberals, meaning scientifically-informed ones whove lost faith in Enlightenment ideals of rational progress, are now mere nihilistic functionaries in this greater oligarchic technocracy. These functionaries, who are said euphemistically to be pragmatic, "centrist, or moderate, are actually neutral, which is to say passive, managers of an inherited system. This system is just the junk pile remaining from the implosion of modern, idealistic secular liberalism.

Libertarianism as Disguised Social Darwinism

Libertarianism has complex historical connections to whats now called liberalism. But the key to what currently distinguishes the two political viewpoints is that the libertarian holds out the individuals divine freedom to create as an aspiration, or as an end of a process, not as an inalienable right possessed equally by everyone. In effect, the libertarian picks up where the postmodern liberal leaves off, accepting the disheartening scientific discoveries of human beastliness, and thus rejects two liberal assumptions: first, that all people deserve respect as substitutes for the traditional monotheistic deity; and consequently second, that we should have general confidence in social work performed by groups of people. Specifically, the deeds of a democratic government which even partly represents the mobs interests must be suspect. Thus, the libertarian is in favour of marginalizing government as an instrument of the mob, since contrary to modern liberal hype, a human mob isnt necessarily comprised of rationally selfcontrolled, godlike agents whose handiwork must be revered. Still, the libertarian now accepts the liberal ideal of individual freedom. This freedom, however, isnt something that can be stipulated, but tends actually to be enjoyed only by a small minority. How does anyone become truly free? Not by governmental regulation or tinkering with a welfare state, since again, democratic government is controlled at

421 least partly by beastly (ignorant, gullible, cowardly, selfish, etc.) humans who arent fit to rule over anyone else because they lack even the power of rational self-control, being as biologists and cognitive scientists find them. Instead, libertarian freedom, which still needs to be defined, is won in a natural competition occurring in whats euphemistically called a free market. That is, liberty, in the libertarians sense, can only be a product of mighty nature, like anything else of highest value, and the free market is just a human recreation of a precivilized state of wilderness in which a social Darwinian struggle for survival plays out. The fittest humans, namely those who achieve the most economic success, are naturally the most vicious, predatorial, and sociopathic. (See, for example, the study reported in Shame on the Rich, at sciencemag.org.) Ironically, those who thus prove themselves to be truest to our animal nature win the right to transcend that nature by way of achieving financial independence and the godlike power not of freedom as rational self-control, but of a libertine license to live as decadent kings, as conquerors of the rabble. The current main difference between liberalism and libertarianism can be summarized as follows. The postmodern liberal is an instrumentalist who prizes a sprawling bureaucratic government as the best tool for hiding the liberals loss of faith in modern ideals and for exercising technocratic control over the citizenry. Ensconced in the government structure, a liberal can pretend to be just a partisan machine who follows orders, with no way of appreciating the conflict between the liberals secular assumptions and her ideal of human divinity. Moreover, the postmodern liberal consoles herself with the thought that scientism is vindicated by the governments quasitechnological applications, which is to say by its regulations of the economy and of the culture at large. This is a delusion, though, because the regulation now applies no scientific theory, but just propaganda written by the minions of oligarchs. By contrast, the libertarian is a social Darwinian who prizes natural selection as the best tool for camouflaging the libertarians fascist preferences for dominance hierarchy and for enforcing a clique of wild human predators control over the citizenry. The libertarian trusts in the quasi-divinity of subhuman natural forces, not in universal and innate

422 human greatness as expressed by a powerful political representation of the masses will. As science has shown, to the chagrin of modern liberals, most people arent free at all, but are slaves to natural forces and to the environment created by the minority of supreme winners; again, most people arent rationally self-controlled, but are controlled externally by the wildest, cruelest, most irrational and impulsive beasts, namely by the oligarchs. The libertarian effectively worships those beasts for their freedom, which is to say their earned or inherited power to rule over the majority and their liberation from conventions of good and evil.

Liberal vs Libertarian Freedoms

In the mass media, the libertarian talks endlessly of the need to secure our precious liberties and freedoms, but what can the libertarian mean? Suppose she means that everyone always has certain human rights in virtue of our power of self-determination. After all, from at least Reagan onward, Republican politicians tap into libertarian sentiment by saying to the little guy, Do you need Big Brother from the government telling you how you should live? No, youre wise enough to take care of your money, which is why taxes should be dramatically lowered. You can take care of yourself as a rugged individualist, like one of our American forebears in the Wild West or in the pioneering days. The presumption here is that when each is left to fend for himself in such a wild free-for-all, there can be only winners. Left unstated is that when human life is reduced to a natural competition, there will necessarily be many losers. Likewise, in the Wild West, when gun fighters were left to fend for themselves with no sheriff around, one would shoot the other, leaving a loser to complement the others victory. Were the strong permitted to prey on the weak without governmental intervention, the minority who are naturally the most vicious and the least capable of shame would accumulate most of the wealth and so impoverish and radicalize the majority, thus guaranteeing the oligarchs eventual downfall as the vices needed to propel them to the top of the dominance hierarchy preclude their having the humility to appreciate a stable mobs role in their own survival. In short, the uncivilized struggle for power plays out as an analogue of the sexual game between sadists and masochists.

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But to return to the point, we need to ask why the libertarian seldom speaks at any length about the necessity of losers in her social Darwinian dream in which the government mainly preserves a field of wild competition by militarily preventing foreign intervention and by punishing theft of private property won in the natural struggle for survival. The reason is that any such reference to the losers points to the contradiction at the heart of libertarianism. On the one hand, the libertarian wants a society in which everyone is free to compete. On the other, such a society necessarily develops into a dominance hierarchy in which the majority are deprived of that freedom, as power and wealth are monopolized at the very top of the social pyramid and social forces of upward mobility, such as welfare for the poor or what Chris Hedges calls the pillars of a liberal establishment, including unions and a progressive Democratic Party in the US, are eliminated. The libertarian pretends that everyone wins in a wild, that is, a free, market, or that, at worst, if you go bankrupt, you can pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, work hard, and win out in the end. The cold, hard fact is that just as most mammals come to grisly ends as theyre eaten by predators or else starve to death due to exposure to the elements, most people in an unregulated competition for economic survival naturally lose outright, meaning that they become impoverished and dependent on the victors' largesse, like peasants living off of the nobles land. The contradiction, then, is that in selling her political viewpoint, the libertarian simultaneously holds out a carrot and a stick: first, she flatters her listeners by calling them heroic individualists, but then she implies that in a libertarian society most of them will go belly-up and rot in the street like worthless animals. Recall that its the liberal, not the libertarian, who follows through on the assumption that everyone deserves respect simply for being individual humans. After all, its the liberal who means to ensure that were anyone to fail, that precious person wouldnt be permitted to go to waste, but would be nurtured back to health by the state. Perhaps the libertarian would insist that the losers are respected all the more by allowing them to face the dire consequences if they should fail in the competition they

424 freely choose to enter. In so far as everyone is equally free, according to libertarianism, this freedom thus would be everyones implicit consent given to the competition by their participation in it. This consent would be the so-called rational social contract: we each calculate that we can gain more by competing with minimal government protection of our winnings than we can under anarchy. But faced with the honestly spelled-out choice between the libertarians wild competition with its necessary conversion of the majority into a pile of rotting corpses just prior to the oligarchys self-destruction, and the liberals more civilized society in which private winnings are mostly protected but also taxed sufficiently to preserve the dignity of the majority who, once again, inevitably fail in any competition for survival, all but the vicious free-riders and potential oligarchs would surely opt for the latter society. As the philosopher John Rawls famously argues, behind a veil of ignorance as to our future, and with the crucial piece of information in hand, that a competition necessitates a great many losers along with the winners, the rational choice is to err on the side of caution and to create a social safety net. So the freedom praised by the libertarian isnt any choice to heroically enter a free market at our own peril, with the expectation that in such a society the majority are likely doomed to failure and to suffer the costs like wild beasts punished by natural forces. Hardly anyone would exercise freedom by making such a choice. As Thomas Frank and many others point out, to the extent that many people claim to prefer a so-called free market, they do so unknowingly on the basis of carefully-arranged misinformation, such as the libertarians hiding of the true cost of living in a Darwinian world. Such a choice is grotesque rather than praiseworthy. Again, then, the libertarian can only pretend to laud people generally for their right to liberty. As Ive said, what libertarianism actually entails is a very narrow role for liberty as an outcome for the minority of victors in a natural competition. These victors win the right to indulge their appetites, to live in luxury, and to flout the politically correct rules that govern the petty lives of lesser mortals. Libertarian freedom is just the oligarchs leisure to indulge his or her superhuman vices.

425 In summary, modern liberal freedom is the rational self-controlling humans liberation from natural forces, as the creator who replaces God. That sacred freedom is awesome in its implications, and so all rational beings must be treasured at all costs and the public must be taxed to preserve the lives of social victims or losers. Postmodern liberal freedom is a set of civil rights, enforced by a code of political correctness that creates a bland monoculture of consumers for the benefit of the oligarchs who profit most from the sociopolitical system managed either by retrograde conservatives or by lapsed liberals turned into nihilistic automatons. Libertarian freedom is the power of the most vicious among us to demonstrate their superior beastliness by using the majority of people as pawns in a hideous Darwinian game with the sole, self-destructive goal of maintaining as much social inequality as possible in the form of a dominance hierarchy. A move from liberalism to libertarianism thus entails a novel theistic development, from the stale, scientistic apotheosis, or divination of humanity, with its socialist implications, to a more Lovecraftian theology. Instead of deifying all people equally just for our rational autonomy, most people are condemned in the libertarian scheme to being fodder for the games of oligarchs who are like Lovecrafts gods that transcend human expectations. Somewhat paradoxically, the oligarchs, that is, the most vicious among us who naturally horde wealth to their advantage, are rewarded with posthuman status even though in a sense theyre the most human of all. These gods are above both actual laws and politically correct strictures for the weak; theyre the powers behind the throne, they dwell in their own gated realms, sitting on riches that could eliminate world hunger in the blink of an eye, but that instead are squandered on luxuries to signal the gods' contempt for slave morality. There is no rational justification for this state of affairs. By cheerleading for the free market, which serves effectively as a cocoon for the spawning of Lovecraftian gods, the libertarian may be likened to that typical Lovecraftian character, the hapless cultist who worships the alien gods even as the cultist is squashed beneath their colossal, quivering tentacles.

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Appendix: The Definition of Politics

Politics: the secret application of vices in preserving group cohesion; in professional circles, politics features the art of telling noble lies to convince people, in effect, that Sartre was wrong when he said that hell is other people. When many people choose to live together in cities and nations, a dominance hierarchy emerges as the most stable social structure, as it does in most social animal species. However, most people are too vain to consider themselves animals whose lives are governed largely by power relations. From a genetic viewpoint, our great intelligence is a byproduct that leads us astray, filling our heads with diversions and delusions of grandeur. Whereas many kings, emperors, tsars, and dictators have foregone the political enterprise, preferring to rule as unashamed beasts with displays of absolute power, modern rulers are forced to resort to Machiavellian maneuvers. This is because modernists preach secular humanism, which inspires people to think of themselves as heroes, boldly confronting the forces that hinder our progress. Spreading that myth and then undermining it with brutal oppression of the masses would obviously be counterproductive, and yet modern myths hardly prevent the emergence of dominance hierarchies. Thus, modern politicians apologize for and exploit power imbalances with covert rather than with open forms of corruption. Politics is a charade in which leaders and followers pretend to be rational and virtuous while demonstrating the opposite at every opportunity. After all, politics isnt just for professional politicians; no, whenever people interact socially in a group of whatever size, we resort to political maneuvers to maintain the power dynamic while distracting ourselves with our groups loftier stated purpose--lest we break our social bonds, since were too vain and clever to sustain transparently-degrading group dynamics. With political posturing, spin-doctoring, white lying, backstabbing, double dealing, flipflopping, gossip, and brinksmanship, we concede that were animals vying for power while maintaining the legend of our nobility.

427

Political Correctness: Spellbinding the Masses ____________________________________________________

In Scientism, I argued that the modern science-centered worldview is religious rather than strictly secular. This religion, which I call scientism, isnt just academic positivism or behaviourism, but the popular worship of technoscientific power and the divinely creative forces revealed or enthroned by that power, such as natural selection in the minimally-regulated (mostly uncivilized) market. Pitiless Mother Nature reigns in capitalistic oases, as in Edenic jungle paradises, intervening in human affairs by separating winners from losers in every wild, entirely unchristian struggle for profit. The god of the free market, which must be the very same cosmic creativity that evolves solar systems and galaxies, is omnipresent in modern economies, at one with our vices that compel us to compete in a short-sighted, self-destructive fashion, leading presumably to our eventual extinction and replacement by some other chosen species. All hail Cosmic Creativity! And until that glorious future, when well likely sacrifice ourselves for the sake of mindless evolution, a handful of mandarins, tycoons, magnates, and other lords of commerce rule as demigods, prophets and champions of that model sociopath, the creative force of natural selection. These oligarchs are elevated by the free market and so chosen by Mother Nature to rule in her social order, which is the dominance hierarchy, or pecking order. Thanks to their cunning, modern wealthy societies protect that underlying hierarchy with faades of democracy and with bribes of technologicallyachieved pleasure.

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How could scientism be religious, though, without some scripture recited in holy places, causing knees to bow in reverence for the revealed Word of the Almighty? Where is the so-called secularists holy book of divine wisdom, if so-called secularists really are closet religionists? My answer: the verses of scientisms scripture are repeated hourly on the mountain tops of television and radio airtime; they're the politically correct slogans, the spin-doctored and market-tested rhetoric, and the instrumental talking points for the Pavlovian training of human cattle. Were that scripture confined to a single book, its title might be Political Correctness: Sacred Verses for Spellbinding Consumers; instead, scientism uses modern technology to piggyback its messages on those of popular entertainments so that you hear them even when you think you dont. Remember that scientism is a paradoxical faith, a religion that pretends to be opposed to all religious follies. Just as an oligarchy can disguise itself as a democratic republic, pagan worship of nature can disguise itself as scientific rationalism and as postreligious humanism. To see the religious aspect of so-called secular society, you have to step back from it and ask yourself whether theres any reason to believe that our innate tribalism and creative urge to speculate, which are primary causes of religion, were shut down by modern forces of progress. Sure, in the name of that progress, the old gods of supernatural monotheism were dethroned and the perennial religious philosophies of mystics were ignored or ridiculed, but since religions are found in all times and places occupied by human beings, due to innate causes within us, we should expect that modern naturalists deify whatevers left to replace the outmoded objects of worship.

Taboo and the Sacred

What is political correctness? Officially, politically correct speech and attitudes are conventions that respect social discoveries, such as the existence of civil rights due to the equality of humans as free, rational persons. Its merely good manners in the face of the facts to tell the truth, for example, about the dignity of the poor and the rich alike. The social discoveries are like mathematically necessary truths, and the student can just tick the appropriate boxes in the Quiz of Life, thanks to regular tutoring from the

429 authorities, such as politicians, pundits, celebrities--indeed, virtually anyone performing her public function (her job) and certainly anyone on mainstream media. Your private thoughts are more or less your own, but there are rules for public behaviour, besides those recognized in courts of law, and the penalty for disobeying them is to be shunned or ostracized. This official account can be dismissed just by pointing out that there are incompatible notions of whats politically correct. For example, there are liberal and conservative myths that contradict each other in speaking of different social facts that are supposed to be respected. Perhaps one myth is correct and another is false, but its more likely that scientific standards are inapplicable to political theory, since politics is the study of power in human societies, and the act of putting forward a political explanation is itself a move in that power dynamic. Natural scientists can be objective because they dont anthropomorphize their objects of study, and so their biases that are likely activated when dealing with other people are held in check when investigating atoms, rocks, or galaxies. When prescribing a social structure, however, the political theorist cant be doing science in that sense, and so her political rationale can be neither objectively true nor false. The more appropriate standards of evaluation in politics are ethical and aesthetic ones, and the political theorist is better regarded as a myth-maker. In any case, liberal myths are more readily associated with political correctness than are conservative ones, and the reason for this is just that postmodern liberals have lost faith in their myths, whereas conservatives, lacking the strength of character or the intellectual integrity to admit that their myths are grotesque when applied to whats now known about nature, hold fast to their monotheism or their social Darwinism. Liberals therefore force themselves to belittle their myths, reducing them to Life Quizzes, and their absolute imperatives to multiple choice questions with pseudoscientifically correct answers. Liberalism, after all, begins with the naturalistic fallacy that since the natural sciences have cognitively progressed, so too can societies normatively progress. But the point I want to stress is that the notion of political correctness is a misnomer, since political myths and scientific theories shouldnt be evaluated with the same criteria; the

430 latter can correspond to facts, because of scientific objectivity, whereas the former can be ethically or aesthetically impressive. For what, then, is political correctness a euphemism? Certainly, politically correct speech is safe, inoffensive speech, the verbal equivalent of Muzak. But more precisely, the rules of political correctness are meant to steer people away from committing taboo acts. Every religious society has its division between the sacred and the profane. Liberal and conservative myths about us and our social institutions prescribe what should be worshipped as holy, as worthy of approval despite the fear which the holy arouses in us due to its inhumane displays of awesome power. Modern, classic liberals deified the rationality, freewill, and consciousness of human nature, and natural forces were to have feared us, as it were, for our determination to bend them to our will. Again, though, postmodern liberals no longer believe we live up to Enlightenment hype. Meanwhile, conservatives seem to deify traditional supernatural forces, but the gods they actually follow are money and earthly power and pleasure. After all, Christian and Muslim conservatives have underlying secular agendas, such as the imposition of theocracies. According to the monotheistic myth, we should all fear the supernatural God, but that God is modeled on the human dictator. And according to implications of libertarian (explicitly economic) conservatism, the weak should fear the strong whose greater strength gives them all the right in the world to sacrifice the weak and the poor for the dominators pleasure. In a hyper-rational liberal society, humans are divine and the sacred space extends to whatever part of nature we transform by our labour; whatever we touch turns to gold, as it were. Wild nature is profane, like the face of the waters before Gods spirit brooded over them and created the universe from those raw materials. The wilderness is profane because it dares to oppose noble humankind instead of offering us its teat whenever we whine like the infants we are, as implied by this instrumentalistic myth. With the glorious power of science, we reconnoiter the indifferent enemys territory and smite the inhumane elements, engineering them to our benefit. In a postmodern liberal society, however, nothing is sacred or profane exactly, and instead theres the distinction

431 between the Serious and the Radical. The Serious citizen operates entirely within the social system without questioning its assumptions and who dedicates herself to making the system more efficient, while the Radical questions those assumptions and aims to upset society. (Remember, from Liberalism, that the postmodern liberal is a wannabe technocrat, a partisan nihilistic machine that views the world in pragmatic, nonnormative terms, seeking only to tinker around the edges to maintain the conservative, naturally oligarchic status quo. President Obama is currently the leading example of this sort of liberal; for more examples, see all those who call themselves centrists or pragmatists.) Now, in a theocracy, the sacred is defined not by religious scripture, but by the might of the ruler who cherry-picks the interpretation of the scripture that best excuses the preposterous imbalance of power in that society. Typically, for example, the ruler is a man, whose vices tend to be more politically advantageous than a womans, and so women become profane while masculine vices become sacred. To the extent that science empowers a middle class that can challenge the monarchs sovereignty, through mass production and capitalism, science and technology also become profane. This is, of course, the story of Catholic theocracies in the middle ages and of presentday Islamic ones. With regard to capitalistic free markets, money, earthly power and pleasure are sacred, since these and the vices needed to win those goods are fuels for the engine that turns the natural cycle of evolution, which cycle is the ultimate divinity in pagan scientism. Government regulations of economic activity are profane for daring to restrain Mother Nature and to reverse her judgment as to who should or shouldnt possess wealth. More generally, anything that deviates from primitive instinct must be profane; hence, the Republicans false populist rhetoric against the snobbery of intellectual elites who fantasize that they can run an economy better than can an egoistic, chaotic free-for-all. Just because we learned how to reach the moon doesnt mean we should step outside of the savage jungle when thinking of how we should live together.

432 The taboo, then, is the sacrilege of profaning what is sacred, by mixing up the two spaces. For example, a classically liberal taboo is to discriminate against anyones human rights, by calling attention to natural differences such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, culture, or history and ignoring everyones equal measures of rational capacity, autonomy, and consciousness. The sin is to ignore a persons sacred, godlike qualities and to elevate the profane, animalistic ones that place us in the wilderness. By contrast, a postmodern liberal taboo is to ask a deep, normative question instead of being realistic and taking a present system for granted. Typically, the progressive base of the Democratic Party commits this sin against the grown-up interests of the Serious, corporate Democrats. Thus, the classic liberal is an idealist whereas the postmodern liberal is a realist. Again, the taboo for religious conservatives isnt disobedience to Gods commandments; rather, its disobedience to a human interpretation of those commandments, where the scripture is used in a secular ploy to establish a theocracy, which is a natural dominance hierarchy. While the myths speak of rebellion against God, the immediate, tangible sin is to rebel against Gods human representative, whether its a priest, a televangelist, a Republican President, a cult leader, or an Imam, Shiekh, or Ayatollah. The taboo for a libertarian conservative is to deign to exercise godlike power to miraculously extricate yourself from your position in a natural pecking order. Thus, its a sin to share resources, giving the poor a free ride. Cooperation is supposedly unknown in the wild, and natural selection favours only the exercise of our vices, not our virtues such as empathy or humility. Of course, the libertarian supposedly permits charity as long as its not theft, which is to say that individuals should be free to dispose of their possessions as they like, but the government shouldnt be allowed to use taxes to transfer money from the rich to the poor. There is, however, no political principle at work here. In theory, people in a democracy voluntarily submit to the will of the majority, so if the majority elect a party that favours the redistribution of wealth through taxation, or rather the ideal of peoples equality, even those who vote for a different party indirectly consent to the taxes. Why,

433 then, is the libertarian actually opposed to a democratic governments socialist use of taxes? Because thats the most effective kind of charity, which plays havoc with the natural pecking order. And the reason the libertarian emphasizes vice over virtue is because social Darwinism is a myth that rationalizes power that happens to be acquired by vicious, human predators. When sociopaths overpower everyone else, they position themselves to tout the benefits of their monstrous way of life, and so they can broadcast their egoistic, social Darwinian celebration of their defining characteristics, such as selfishness, ambition, pitilessness, hedonism, and short-sightedness. When even poor people respect those vices, despite their having failed in the economic competition due presumably to their greater degree of virtue, they dont rebel against the power inequality.

The Magic of Political Correctness

So much for a general theory of the religious nature of political correctness. Is there any evidence that that theory applies to actual political correctness? Theres a clue that the theory does apply, which is that we adopt and defend politically correct slogans with primitive displays of emotion rather than with logical arguments. Often, the slogans are repeated so many times that we become bored of questioning them or else the slogans tap into mythical imagery, whether the images are from political rhetoric, commercials, or the entertainment industry. For example, note the difference between the belief that men and women are equal in terms of their personhood, and the belief that women should be given preferential treatment, along with children, when theres a desperate choice between saving a woman or a man, but not both, in a natural catastrophe. The first convention is backed up by a wealth of well-known scientific evidence that men and women have similar brain structures, and its just this rational basis that makes the convention scientifically rather than merely politically correct. Theres no such rational basis for the second convention, especially given the first one. Granted, theres some suggestion that women are needed to reproduce, and so for the sake of future generations a womans life is worth more than a mans. But of course, men are also

434 needed for sexual reproduction. That second belief is merely politically correct because its justified, instead, by romantic myths of chivalry. As for postmodern liberalism, take Obamas dismissal of progressive calls for Bush administration and Wall Street accountability through prosecutions. Obama and his spokespeople ridiculed the progressives as hysterical children who dont understand how the system works. Whether Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wall Street bankers should have been prosecuted just to eliminate moral hazard, even if the prosecutions would have been doomed to failure, is a normative question that a pragmatic liberal doesnt waste time contemplating. All postmodern liberal decisions must meet solely the engineers standard of making the most efficient use of available resources within a predetermined system. In the political system, a President loses prestige for tilting at windmills. The idealism of progressives is nave and counterproductive, according to the realistic liberal who effectively has no values. But the point I want to emphasize here is that this progressivism is politically incorrect, because the liberal centrist typically doesnt bother to justify the dismissal, but merely relies on the comparisons to children or to crazy extremists. To venture an explanation of the rebuff, the postmodern liberal would have to reveal the realists functional nihilism, which would vitiate liberalism as a viable, uplifting school of political thought. That would be most impractical. There are many religious conservative slogans that are merely politically correct and thus lacking even the pretense of a rational justification, such as the anti-science slogans, Global warming is a hoax or Humans didnt evolve along with monkeys. One reason for this hostility to science is, of course, the god-of-the-gaps problem, which is that the more scientists learn about nature, the more divorced from reality become traditional theistic beliefs about God, spirits, and miracles. But science is also a whipping boy for most religious conservatives: they berate scientific theories without knowing even what a theory generally is in the scientific sense, let alone understanding the details of how climate and natural selection are thought to work. The politically correct belittling of scientific theories, in Republican campaign rallies or in televised political debates, for example, would be just like a know-nothing hobbits carping about

435 Gandalfs magic spells--as if the hobbit were remotely qualified to say anything worth listening to on such esoteric subjects. Still, the religious conservative picks up and repeats these memes, dutifully signaling her political membership. Likewise, libertarian myths about the evils of taxation and the need for market freedom are driven into conservatives through relentless political and commercial advertising, which is repeated over and over and which taps into American mythology of rugged individualism, coloured by Hollywood images of the Wild West. Political correctness seems, then, to function as a form of arresting magic, a way of policing the borders of sacred or profane spaces, with verbal hypnotism. The hypnotism works by the nonrational power of subjectively magical formulas that dare the hypnotized individual to gainsay a certain convention, commit a taboo act, and thus be ostracized. By arresting I mean that the politically correct speaker is held in sacred space by her chanting of the formula, since she thereby signals her allegiance to the group. The in-group slogans test the members commitment, because she must be willing to mindlessly repeat them rather than challenge them with a skeptical mindset. Liberals make a pseudoscience out of their dehumanizing use of language, pretending to engineer society with talking points as though the liberals were in possession of a blueprint of society which specifies how people are components of a social machine. The conservative politician or pundit relies on talking points as well, but the liberal shares the advertisers cynical view that consumers need to be manipulated by elites for their own good, whereas the conservative is in the grip of idolatry that would elevate the masses. Like the advertiser and the disillusioned radical, the postmodern liberal suffers from self-loathing and from misanthropy: having lost faith in her rationalist, utopian ideals, the latter-day liberal assumes theres no compelling defense of any values and the responsible adult should simply get on with work like Sisyphus pointlessly rolling his rock up the hill. The liberals job is to defend big government, which in turn safeguards the oligarchic arrangement, and the liberals chief tool is her mastery of politically correct rhetoric, including platitudes, slogans, talking points, and a thousand kinds of lies such as spin, obfuscation, and evasion, not to mention a legion of fallacies. The

436 liberal operative thus practices the phony science of public relations, which aims at managing public opinion the way a master trains his dog. The idea is to tell the public what they unconsciously want to hear, as determined by polls and other forms of market research. Telling the unvarnished truth is always anathema to the paternalistic liberal. Again, the consumers and voters are taken to consist of levers, dials, and buttons on a social machine, and the liberal is supposed to be a technician who manipulates them. But because theres no rigorous science of social engineering, and the liberals scientism represents liberalisms collapse after the twentieth centurys mockery of Enlightenment expectations, the liberals rhetoric must be operating on a wing and a prayer, like psychic mind reading or other dubious, so-called paranormal phenomena. There may be no real magic in the sense of a violation of natural law, but theres surely subjective magic, which is just a matter of ignorance on the perceivers part. As Arthur C. Clarke said, sufficiently advanced technology appears magical. Even if the technology is a simple game of twenty questions, as in the case of John Edwards shenanigans, if the audience is prevented from appreciating that game, due to sleightof-hand mischief, the questioner can appear psychic. What the liberal actually manages by chanting slogans, pandering, spinning, and resorting to numerous other tricks is peoples perception of reality; she is thus a spell-binding magician, not an engineer with her arms elbow-deep in realitys underbelly. The liberal spin-doctor simply takes advantage of peoples ignorance, gullibility, and fallacious thought routines and manipulates them into buying the lemon of liberal orthodoxy. Conservative elites are more brazen in the verbal abuse of their flock, encoding their rallying cries in religious verbiage and thus playing the ancient game of enlisting God in support of their prejudices. A clear instance of this is the evangelical Christians selling of family values despite the New Testaments anti-family message. The family value slogans are thus at best politically, rather than historically, correct, but conservative demagogues also indulge in the sordid business of exploiting poor peoples ignorance of the Bible, pretending their retrograde ideal of the Cleaver family is founded on biblical principles. It should go without saying that a fair summary of Jesus ethical teachings is

437 the following: the more content someone is in worldly, secular terms, the less esteemed that person is by God, since God favours those who fail in the secular rat race. According to Jesus good news for drop-outs and losers, by preferring conventional happiness to the higher mission of seeking Gods heavenly kingdom, the middle class parents who raise a family in the suburbs, with a white picket fence, a dog, and a twocar garage are actually hell-bound souls who got their priorities all wrong. But the feelgood contrary message, that aims at reconciling Jesus spiritual radicalism with modern hedonism, need only be tenuously connected to the Bible, thanks to the indispensable art of cherry-picking, and the nominal Christian masses can fantasize that these demagogues are prophets in their midst. Having absorbed at least some basic biblical imagery, from movies if not from the Bible itself, the masses are hungry to associate any passionate conviction with divine inspiration and so even Bushs neoconservatives could sell their preventative wars on pseudo-Christian grounds. The religious aspect of the economic conservatives politically correct rhetoric is more scientistic than monotheistic. The libertarian trades on the masses fear not of the dead supernatural God, but of the living demigods who fly from mansion to mansion and run their corporate empires from Babel-like towers. Relying not on prior monotheistic infantilization but on the corporate variety in advertising, the libertarian preaches an anti-government creed that invokes the unconscious craving for a return to perfect consumption in the womb. First the propaganda for endless consumption of material products is digested in enormous quantities, in the form of omnipresent advertising, and then economic conservatives press their advantage by advocating a form of selfdestructive government that empowers those who satisfy that infantile demand. Again, there should be no illusion here that the slogans of small government, individual liberty, and the free market are rationally embraced by the majority of economic conservatives. Granted, theres such a thing as libertarian philosophy, as spouted by Ron Paul, for example, but that philosophy is mostly a rationalization for the true causes of libertarian membership: the force of having read Ayn Rands paeans to capitalism while the libertarian was still young, and the understandable deification of technoscience and its oligarchic champions. Once the consumer glorifies the pseudo-Nietzschean ego and

438 replaces her fear of a supernatural God with that of natural gods, shes ready to regurgitate laissez faire propaganda.

White Lies
Finally, I want to consider a more common kind of politically correct speech: the white lie. Conventionally, a white lie is a lie told with benevolent rather than malicious intention. But theres another, more popular kind of non-malicious deception, which is the speech emitted by what Freud called the persona, the selfs public side that plays various social roles. The lies we tell to prop up our self-image and to maintain acquaintances and group cohesion are legion. Almost every word we speak in public is a white lie in that what we say isnt what we really believe, deep down, as it were: we speak knowing that were not speaking our mind, but were compelled to lie just like actors reading from a script. We say what were expected to say, what weve been trained to say, and we say what makes us happy. The exceptions to white lying, then, are the heart-to-heart conversations good friends or loved ones sometimes have and the times we level with each other or tell it like it is. We white-lie when we humour someone, when we pretend to be optimistic to avoid an awkward confrontation or to spare someones feelings, or when we say to an acquaintance, Ill call you later or Lets get together in a couple of weeks, with no intention of following up. You might think that the traditional lies told in a political campaign are clearly white lies, assuming theyre aspirational promises as opposed to malicious attempts to mislead. But white lying with benevolent intentions is only a subtype of the kind of lying I have in mind, namely the kind that doesnt proceed from negative intentions. The more common kind of non-malicious lying happens routinely, with no conscious intention at all. Some political speech may be deceptive but intended to help the voters rather than just the lying politician, while other kinds of deceptive political speech may be compulsive and impersonal or unmotivated, and its the latter kind Im more interested in here.

439 Habitual white lying is the adult equivalent of childrens play in a fantasy world that lives only in their shared imagination space. Children pretend that a large box is a spaceship, freely making the best of what theyre given, fantasizing because they prefer an ideal world to the one they actually inhabit. We seldom grow out of that tendency to delude ourselves and others. White lies are pretenses, playful verbal constructions that shouldnt be evaluated in terms of their truth status or their conventional meaning. Instead, the lies we routinely tell to avoid dealing with uncomfortable truths are means by which we reinforce our social status and the enchantments of political correctness. For example, when acquaintances pretend that theyre better friends than they know they are, congenially promising to keep in touch, they might as well be chimpanzees picking nits out of each others fur. The semantic content of their blather is irrelevant to its function, which is to help hold together their tribe. Their smiles are forced, their promises like the sing-song baby talks that soothe infants. White lies are politically correct, because theyre not directed at individuals, but play to people's social functions. When we speak reflexively, putting no thought into what were saying and feeling no shame in slipping on a persona, playing a role, and acting according to a conventional script, like a puppet on a string, we dont honour what little dignity or autonomy we have. Only when we engage in heart-to-heart dialogues and rant like prophets possessed by the power of a muse or of Logos, the divine reason shaping the universe, do we speak directly to each other as individual, potentially godlike persons. When we dress in mind-garments, in phony personalities that are just social constructs rather than our true characters, we perform in the show of conventional social interaction, the evolutionary point of which is surely to keep us happy long enough, at least, to reproduce and contribute to the gene pools flexibility for the benefit of future mutants and their offspring. This conventional interaction is the real Matrix, the mass hallucination that keeps us functional. In public, were bombarded by lies that hypnotize, enchant, and comfort us. This is the nature of political correctness, of speech thats merely socially useful: we chant mantras and feel-good slogans or read from conventional scripts, modeling our behaviour on the

440 iconic images we see in commercials or in movies--all to remain in our sacred spaces, to avoid taboos, and to keep in the good graces of what we secularists worship: the mindless cosmic creativity that abuses self-aware creatures, programming us with mesmerizing formulas spewed from our own mouths, and also the champions of that natural force, the winners of the rat race, the predatorial oligarchs who reside at the apex of a power hierarchy and who earn the most rewards from the cosmos for best imitating its inhumanity.

441

Obama or Romney? ____________________________________________________

Id like to set down some of my thoughts here on the coming American presidential election. Im not an American, so American readers may wonder why I dont restrict my attention to the politics of my country, which happens to be Canada. There are a couple of reasons why I dont do so. First, American politics are approximately ten thousand times more interesting than the Canadian variety. For example, when a so-called religious social conservative gets into office in the US, his or her religion is (superficially) front and center, as in the case of George W. Bush. Mitt Romney is the exception that proves the rule, since he hides his religion in his campaign only because hes a member of an odd religious minority. American Christians prefer that their Republicans be Christian, even though Jesus would cast almost every single modern Christian into hell for selling him out to one secular empire or another. By contrast, Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, is allegedly a religious social conservative, but youd never tell this from his speeches or policies. This is because Canadian politicians are boringly amoral pragmatists, lacking any principled vision of what Canadian society should be like in the near future. The second reason is that Ill be commenting only on the public aspect of American politics, on the absurdist infotainment which, like all great forms of entertainment, has universal appeal.

442 What, then, do I make of the coming US election? Who will win and whose victory would be best for the country? I dont know who will win, because by some apparent miracle the American electorate is so evenly divided. Although half of eligible Americans dont vote at all, and havent voted for much of the twentieth century (see Wikipedia: Voter turnout in the United States presidential elections), the Gore-Bush election was still decided by just several hundred votes in Florida. Since the 1950s, the margin separating the popular votes for each presidential candidate has usually been less than 10%. The difference between Kennedys win over Nixon, for example, was 0.17%; 0.70% for Nixons win over Humphrey; - 0.51% for Bushs win over Gore; 2.46% for Bushs win over Kerry; and still only 7.27% for Obamas messianic win over McCain, after the fiasco of the Bush decade (see Wikipedia: List of United States presidential elections by popular vote margin). Now again, polls have Obama and Romney in a dead heat. And according to a chart on US voter turnout, the percentage of voting age Americans who vote for representatives in the House and Senate, when the presidency isnt at stake, has consistently been in the mere 30s since the 1970s (see National Voter Turnout in Federal Elections: 19602010 at infoplease.com). Has anyone studied the odds of such a close and persistent divide arising naturally in such a large country? Whats the likelihood that the liberal and conservative states would so nearly cancel each other out in terms of their states electors, leaving just ten or so battleground states populated by swing voters? What are the odds that just enough millions of Americans would be so apathetic or disenfranchised that they would tend not to vote, leaving--of all mathematically possible splits--a 50-50 split among the rest? And what are the odds that such dead heats would be perfect for the corporate media that have mastered the art of selling infotainment by drumming up conflicts? This highly artificial political gridlock seems not so much designed or engineered, but favoured and accelerated by multiple social elements, including the media, plutocrats, demagogic culture warriors, and consumers. Theres a proverbial military tactic of conquering by dividing your foes against each other. American politics are now so hyper-partisan and dysfunctional (relative to the democratic ideal), because the US has

443 both external and internal sources of division and thus of decline. Their wealth is being extracted by oligarchs who, as Simon Johnson says in "The Quiet Coup," were only practicing their free market techniques of exploitation on poorer countries, some decades ago, before hunting for richer prey like middle-class Americans. But these Americans have also learned to destroy each other with their inane culture wars. If I had to bet, Id guess that Obama will win a relatively narrow victory over Romney. But I hope Obama will lose. This isnt to say that I think Romney would be better for the US or for the world, for that matter. The main difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the former ambivalently apply old and failing brakes to the stealth oligarchs' race to centralize power, whereas the latter hit the gas pedal. There are plenty of cultural differences between American liberals and conservatives, too, but these are mostly farcical and trumped up.

The Greater Comedic Value of American Conservatism

So why should Romney win? There are two main reasons, both of which I see as aesthetic. The first reason is that a Republican victory would make American politics even more entertaining than it already is under no-drama Obama, and in particular would be a boon to the comedy industry, as was Obamas predecessor. Im being only slightly facetious here. On my view, oligarchy, which is to say minority rule over the majority, is naturally the default way of organizing large groups for most social species and thus also for humans. We can challenge that status quo, as in the cases of communism and egalitarian liberalism, but communists and liberals are rebels who wage an uphill battle against natural forces. The Soviet Union devolved into a kleptocratic oligarchy, as has China, and the US is also very clearly now a stealth plutocracy, operating under the guise of a classically liberal democracy. Whether the oligarchy works in secret or in plain sight, the results are the same: gross inequality, corruption, and social implosion.

444 Given that backdrop, the question for Americans should be not how to save their nation, but whether they want their inevitable decline to be mitigated at least by high-quality entertainment. Reportedly, when the Titanic sank the band continued to play. Had you been on that doomed ship, would you have preferred to drown in silence? No, oligarchy is inevitable in any free society, especially in postmodern and high technoscientific times in which people are, respectively, cynical about all myths and thus about any inspired alternative to our natural lot (decay within the undead god), and subject to more and more powerful measures of social control thanks to advances in cognitive science. Therefore, there should be a premium on entertainment and especially on comedy in such societies. Its no accident, then, that the freest country, the US, is also home of the most popular entertainment industry. You can actually measure the difference in comedic value between the Democrats and the Republicans, by comparing the levels of inspiration in Daily Show skits or Bill Maher monologues over the Bush and Obama years. Theres no question that Bush afforded them much richer material. There was even a spike in the inspiration of recent Daily Show comedy, due to the Clint Eastwood farce in the Republican Convention. However centrist and pragmatic Romney may personally be, a Romney win would empower the Tea Party, the neoconservatives, and the fundamentalist Christians. This is because a pragmatic centrist lacks principles and thus the courage to make tough choices that create enemies. Obama is also a pragmatic centrist and his compromises likewise emboldened the far right, but again, Obamas lip service to vestigial liberal values only spoils the fun for the shrinking middle class. At any rate, the deal in US political entertainment is that the Right provides the comedic material by their manifestly absurd actions, and the Left provides the comedic discourse by mocking the right for that absurdity. (You might think Clintons sex scandals were exceptions, but remember that those scandals were brought before the public eye only by a monumental effort of the Republicans to sabotage his presidency. So while Clinton was merely an adulterer who had sex in the oval office--offenses which arent all that funny, by themselves--the

445 comedy came from the public humiliation of a very powerful man, or at least from the revelation that the conservatives think that lying about sex is a worse moral offense than any moderns Republican presidents selling out of most Americans a thousand times over in deference to oligarchs.) Thats why most professional comedians are liberals. Conservatives are too busy wrecking the planet to mock themselves for the irony of their business of selfdestruction. Yes, there are popular comedians who are political conservatives, such as Ann Coulter, Glen Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, but their humour is fuelled strictly by schadenfreude. Conservative comedians are forced to root for the overdog, because conservatives are myth-makers for the rationalization of oligarchy, whereas sophisticated comedy requires the comedians humility so that the audience can fall for the anthropocentric illusion of human greatness which the comedian typically reimposes after a shakeup by natural forces. By rationalizing rather than rebelling against oligarchy, conservatives side with inhumane nature against human welfare, whereas the function of comedy is to give us hope that in the end well not succumb to mindless natural processes, such as the superhuman corruption and grotesque inequality that typify a dominance hierarchy. For this reason, conservative schadenfreude-style comedy of bullying the weak doesnt work, which is to say that the conservatives commentaries are rarely funny.

The Greater Power of Republican Myths

So thats one reason to hope that the Republicans take the White House. The ensuing comedy would be topnotch. The second reason is to reward Republicans for their superior myths. Both Parties propagate myths to sell their presidential candidate, and both sides myths are gratuitous misrepresentations. Part of the current Republican distortion is that Obamas to blame for the weakness of the US economy, since Obama is a big government socialist who deprives Americans of their freedoms. The corresponding part of the Democratic myth is that Republican free market ideology is to

446 blame for the economic troubles, and that while Romney would return the nation to Bush-style deregulation, Obama is trying to heal the economy by changing course. The reality is that both Parties are equally to blame for the state of the economy, beginning with Reagans deregulations; continuing with Clintons Free Trade deals and his unleashing of Wall Street with the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the deregulation of financial derivatives; subsequently there was Bushs cowboy enthusiasm for oligarchy on all fronts; and that led, finally, to Obamas capitulation to Wall Street insiders. As soon as Obama took office he surrounded himself with free trade veterans of the Bush and Clinton administrations; he bailed out the auto industry only by restructuring it, cutting many workers benefits and pensions, but he signed the tax payers blank check that bailed out Wall Street and got nothing in return for Main Street, permitting the banks even to award huge bonuses to the very bankers who ran their banks into the ground (later, Obama capped executive pay for banks receiving bailout money, at $500,000; instead, Obama should have required that any such executive be fired outright for requiring the bailout in the first place); Obama hasnt insisted on significant reform of the financial markets, nor has he sought prosecutions of fraudsters in the big American banks, to deal with the problem of moral hazard. The reason for this continuity is apparent: the US dominated after WWII when most of the world lay in ruins. But when developing countries like China and India took over many global manufacturing jobs, the US couldnt compete while maintaining its middle class, and so the US had to pay for its continuing global military dominance by inventing a kind of business in which it could excel. That business is the financialization of everything that can be traded in a stock market. Financialization is largely a matter of borrowing and hiding money for the sake of gambling. But unlike manufactured goods, which have tangible and verifiable attributes, financial speculation is the continual betting on a future that always lies ahead. Its worth reminding you here that likely the oldest fraud in history is the theists promise of eternal life or punishment, depending on whether people obey certain religious

447 officials, and that this fraud still works because the promise cant be tested by the living. Likewise, since the future doesnt yet exist to be examined, bets on the future can be won in the present by fraud. Theoretically, as we move forward in time, of course, we can always confirm which predictions in the stock market turn out correct. Some people end up losing money in their trades while others win. But like the religious officials who profit from their control of the afterlife narrative, sophisticated traders and money managers profit by controlling the way financial bets are made. And what bankers have discovered is that they can profit most by perpetrating frauds, using sophisticated mathematics and automation of trades, which exploit the inherently ethereal nature of the business of gambling on the future. Once enough profit is made from their frauds, the titans of the financial industry become too big to fail and the quality of their products cant be confirmed. The upshot of this is that no US president can afford to fix the US economy for the majority of Americans, since an indispensable US business is the financing of gambling in stock markets, the highest profit in that business is made from fraud which requires a host of suckers and dupes (middle class investors), and the profit is needed to pay for the US military by taxes on the rich, without which the US would be overwhelmed by blowback from its numerous clandestine adventures abroad. Luckily, one reason many Americans excel at frauds is that their idol of personal liberty entails freedom from moral principles. But to return to the aesthetic point about myths: while neither Romneys nor Obamas campaign narrative is told in anything like good faith, Obamas distortions are actually less in touch with reality and less inspiring. Recall that Romneys deceptions are that the Democrats are to blame for the stalling economy, and more generally that the Republicans aim to achieve something other than the further entrenchment of the wealthiest class of Americans. (See, for example, Mike Lofgrens book, The Party is Over.) These myths are plainly needed as lies to ensure that the American oligarchy remains in stealth mode. Once out in the open, an oligarchy can succumb to angry mobs.

448

Still, the sense that Republicans are always more masculine and powerful than the Democrats, even when the Democrats are in charge, is due to the fact that Republicans stand squarely behind the greatest power of all, which is the undead god and its natural forces that evolve complex forms like you and me. Republicans are shameless defenders of oligarchy, which is the human form of dominance hierarchy, and that hierarchy is natures way of maintaining social structures in bird, fish, and mammal species. By their policies and actions, the Republicans signal that they represent just the oligarchs who are natures champions, the sociopathic predators who rule our dominance hierarchies and whose vices best approximate the undead gods inhumanity. Of course, none of this is said publicly by any elected Republican. But this is the ultimate strength of Republican myths. By contrast, Obamas deceptions are that social progress, which is to say a deviation from the natural state of oligarchy, is sustainable, and that the Democratic Party strives wholeheartedly for that progress. Despite the liberals pretentions to hyper-rationality, Obamas progressive rhetoric is actually more faith-based than Romneys. Whereas conservative theism is superficially supernatural, fundamentalist theism being a rationalization of earthly dominance hierarchies, conservative political myths are actually naturalistic. And whereas liberal theism is superficially secular, liberal theism being scientistic, politically progressive myths are actually highly supernatural. Much irrational faith is needed to think that mobs of weak people cant just unseat the minority of very powerful individuals who happen to rule in a given time and place, but also violate the Iron Law of Oligarchy and establish a viable alternative to natures way of organizing social groups. And that same sort of faith is needed now to uphold Obama as a messianic agent of change. When the Democrats economic actions reveal that their liberal values are postmodern, meaning that those politicians are actually nihilistic pragmatists, Obamas liberal myth loses even its subliminal capacity to inspire. Again, on the surface the myth is preposterous, since even though Bush is indeed largely to blame for the current economic crisis in the US, so too is Clinton and so is Obama for following both Bush and Clinton even to the point of rehiring their crony capitalist

449 economic managers. But while Romneys distortions retain their power because of their deeper naturalism and because of our existential horror of our position within the undead god, Obamas campaign rhetoric is sickly to its core. A vote for Obama now is a vote for a weaker, less aesthetically appealing myth to live by. Progressive myths are bound to be disappointing, since they require faith in a supernatural, transhuman revolt against natural forces. By contrast, conservative myths are always vindicated by demonstrations of the power of the true god: oligarchy abides and oligarchs enjoy their godlike lifestyle while even the alleged revolutionary progressives--the Democrats, in this case--kowtow to the avatars of cosmic creativity. To be sure, or to vomit up the politicians meme, "make no mistake"--like most professionals, politicians need worry only about making innocent mistakes, never about perpetrating moral outrages--Republican leaders and conservative politicians in general are thoroughly despicable human beings. Were Romney to win, most Americans would suffer horribly as a direct result and no one should want that--least of all an existential cosmicist whose basic moral sentiment is pity for fellow sufferers. Those who suffer for their dark philosophical viewpoint should empathize with those whose suffering is perfectly explicable from that viewpoint. And in a perfect world, a clownish figure like Romney or George W. Bush could go nowhere without being relentlessly mocked for his superhuman vices and palpable inhumanity. Sure, these tools of oligarchs can feel superior for their great wealth, power, and celebrity, but the price of their unqualified service to the morally neutral social structure is their sociopathy. Only emotionally hollowed-out wretches could so successfully perform their political function, and those who speak of human rights might ponder whether biological humanity is as crucial to those rights as is the psychological sort. Those who are genetically human, but whose minds have been so warped by years of training in secret societies and business schools, that they have no qualms about the consequences of their treacherous complicity in the undead gods torture of most sentient creatures, should be classified as psychologically subhuman, in which case a license might conceivably be granted to hunt those elites like wild animals. Instead, Republican politicians prance and preen like

450 beasts in zoo cages. These creatures are myth-makers, actors on a stage, professional liars with no trace of respect for average people, let alone pangs of conscience. Their political myths are so many mantras chanted to symbolically affirm their allegiance to the ultimate Beast whose inhumanity they must incorporate to ascend in a power hierarchy. So rather than voting for Romney, the more poetically pleasing option would be to ceaselessly ridicule him and his ilk for their literal subhumanity. Nevertheless, while conservative politicians never deserve votes on account of their character or depth of humanity, their myths should be honoured for inadvertently indicating the deepest philosophical truths. Democratic politicians arent saints in contrast to demonic Republicans; the latter are more or less evil, while the former are just pathetic. Both work towards maintaining the American stealth oligarchy, but at least liberals yearn for an alternative. As I explain elsewhere, liberal scientism has failed and led to the liberals postmodern conundrum. Liberals are thus ineffectual as inhibitors of the conservatives channeling of evolutionary forces. My point here, though, is that the distortions in Obamas campaign speeches, for example, arent even accidentally beneficial. All we learn from scrutinizing liberal interpretations of Obamas first term in office--these being that he tried to reform the system but was stymied at every turn by the apocalyptic Republican cult, and anyway that Bush is to blame for everything--is that liberals have mastered the same class of vices as the Republicans (cynicism, spin-doctoring, pandering, hypocrisy, etc.), which are prerequisites for all politicians in free societies. But instead of being distinguished by a shameless embrace of the natural order, liberals are identified by their cowardice. Caught between the undead god, with its oligarchic kingdom that brings the cosmic hell of the ghastly void above down to Earth, and the scientistic fallacy of rational social progress, postmodern liberals obscure their service to the former with obsolete rhetoric that lacks even subliminal force. Postmodern liberals are aimless and impotent figures, either clinging to discredited modern ideals or mistaking technocratic efficiency for the rightness of social goals, as though social sciences could dictate what society ought to

451 be like. Liberals may be better human beings than are Republicans, but their political message is presently useless. Were Romney to win, Republicans would surely spin the election as a triumph of American freedom over the tyranny of Obamas central economic planning. As is usually the case when a Republican politician speaks, his or her chutzpah here would be breathtaking. Obamas rhetoric may have been mildly socialist in that he spoke out against social Darwinism and stressed the need for bipartisan unity, and Obamas pitiful negotiating skills may also have exhibited a willingness to follow up on that belief that the public good is more important than the political gains of either Party or of any one politician. But as for his policies and his actions, Obama has clearly been a centrist who has maintained the status quo, rather than even a liberal, let alone a socialist. Everyone who knows what these words mean knows that this is so. Thus, the Republican spin would distort reality. Nevertheless, Obama does deserve to be punished by voters for his mendacious capitulation to the far right and thus to the demands of American oligopolists. The reason Obama isnt an all-powerful state planner is that when he bailed out the car companies or the big banks, he was only a wannabe technocrat following orders from some of the special interests that do hold the economy hostage by being too big to fail. When Bush was president, he enriched private military contractors and oil companies, that is, a different group of oligarchs who have long-standing connections with his family. The ruling special interests that actively employ the government to do their bidding may change, depending on the circumstances and the Party in the White House, but the nature of American corporate capitalism remains plutocratic; the Tea Party critics of this state of affairs merely mistake the employee for the boss. At least the Republicans, though, dont put so much effort into pretending that they stand for anything more elevated than the moral and economic quagmire of a stealth oligarchy.

452

The Subtext of the First Romney-Obama Debate ____________________________________________________

The consensus of pundit reaction to the first debate between Romney and Obama is that Romney won on style if not also on substance. Liberal pundits point out that Romney lied over and over again in the debate, flip-flopping or shaking his Etch A Sketch; these pundits concede, though, that while the Republican nominee was smug, condescending, and arrogant, smirking and squinting at Obama, Romney showed much more enthusiasm. Conservative pundits gloat that Romney stood toe-to-toe with the President and delivered the policy specifics that Americans allegedly requested. Obama was professorial, making solid, well-worn points against Romney, but with atrocious delivery: the President didnt dumb-down or speak in punchy, pithy sound bites, and he kept looking down while writing notes instead of maintaining eye contact with his opponent, as though he were physically submitting to Romney; moreover, Obama missed all sorts of opportunities to go after Romney, to vanquish his unworthy foe, to speak the truth about the abysmal state of the Republican Party. Arguably, Romney had more to lose so he came better prepared in addition to having more recent debating experience--albeit with the clown car of the other Republican contenders, like Bachmann, Cain, and Perry. Obama may have been distracted by pressing political matters like Syria or Iran, he may not like debates, and he may have been coached to sit on his lead in the polls and thus to not take any chances. But as

453 psychologist, Drew Westen, pointed out a year ago in the NY Times, Obamas lack of passion throughout his time in office has been not just disappointing but baffling to liberals (see What Happened to Obama?). While still a senator, Obama campaigned for the presidency with such fervor that Democrats thought he was the anti-Bush Messiah. In reality, it turns out that anyone with even minimal acting ability can read a teleprompter with a fiery tone; plus, most of Obamas memorable campaign rhetoric-Change! and Yes, we can!--was amorphous. Obama wanted to restore bipartisan sanity to Washington and was rewarded with the descent of the GOP into an apocalyptic cult that brooked no compromise with the Democrats, and was bent on annihilating liberalism and ensuring that Obama was a one-term President. Republicans would vote even against legislation they themselves proposed, to deny Obama a legislative victory. The biggest lie Republicans now tell is that such vitriolic hatred of liberals is justified by Obamas socialist extremism. Republican leaders have learned from cognitive science, as well as from the New Testament, that the best way to sell your policies is to couch them in opposition to a mortal enemy, to activate your minions fight-or-flight instinct. When Republicans distort Democratic policies, pretending that American liberals want to impose a communist dictatorship on the US, outlawing capitalism, and so forth, they not only demonize their opponents but reinforce an equally stark definition of what it means to be a Republican. This is the underlying reason why Romney was so energized in his first debate with Obama. Even though Romney is personally a moderate, pragmatic centrist, which is to say a nihilistic, Machiavellian sociopath who will say anything to get elected, hes immersed in a miasma of Republican myths, in the so-called Fox News bubble, which inspires him to pretend that Obama has a diabolic plan to steal from hard-working, job-creating capitalists to further spoil the 47% of donothing moochers. The reason this is a lie is that Obamas actual ideology is just as much an empty shell as Romneys. Both men know that political ideology in the US is a sideshow, since the economic power of the wealthy elites dictates the political agenda and holds the country

454 hostage. For example, this is what it means for Wall Street banks to be too big to fail. As the radical pundit Max Keiser says, the American plutocrats function as parasites and financial terrorists, literally holding the power to sink the American economy unless the government swears fealty to their plan of establishing a neo-feudal social order. As Ive explained elsewhere, Obama is a postmodern and thus a disenchanted liberal. Hes too smart to believe in anything; certainly, his liberal Christianity is vacuous, consisting of feel-good New Age slogans that cant withstand three seconds of rational examination. And this is why, as Westen says, When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others misery has no agency and hence no culpability. Obama cant even directly criticize Republicans, let alone demonize them, because far from being a zealous socialist he personally stands for absolutely nothing--and this, despite the fact that hes confronted with Republicans who are actually more or less evil! Perhaps mesmerized by the audacity of that evil, Obama retreats to relativist, multicultural, post-Enlightenment liberalism, which means his principles dissipate as soon as theyre called to action. Is evil too strong a word for the Republicans social Darwinism and Ayn Randian egoism? Of course not. As became clear when Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul in a debate whether libertarianism implies that an uninsured sick person should be left to die if he cant afford health care, and Paul was forced to backtrack and obfuscate when a thrall from the audience cried out in ecstasy, Yeah!, the selfishness at the root of economic conservatism is the same that motivates all wicked acts. Amoral social Darwinism, according to which the social safety net should be torn away to preserve the freedom to profit from the application of vices in a beastly competition, is the same worldview that rationalizes blue collar forms of evil, such as first degree murder. As horrible as murder is, the white collar sabotaging of progressive government institutions so that theyre

455 helpless to prevent the re-naturalization of the social order, which is to say the reconstitution of jungle-style dominance hierarchies, is no less evil for being a much less direct form of violence. Callous henchmen get their hands dirty while a heartless mastermind pushes buttons in his underground lair, but both are forms of wickedness. And even after being humiliated by Republicans, who won back the House, obstructed the Democrats despite their holy mandate for change after eight execrable years of George W. Bush, and stooped to exploiting American racism to paint Obama as unAmerican, Obama sleepwalks through his first chance to personally slay the dragon. Face to face with the chief representative of the toxic Republican Party, Obama still shies away from drama, from conflict. For numerous reasons, Obama cant afford to tell Americans the truth about the decline of their political system, but one such reason which isnt widely known is that Obama has no philosophical grounds to reverse that decline or to condemn the juggernaut thats chiefly to blame for the US implosion. Even if Obama wanted to be cautious, to protect his lead by avoiding gaffes, a true-believing liberal would have been unable to stop himself from eviscerating the leader of the odious Republicans, were he given Obama's chance. Like King Denethor from Lord of the Rings, who succumbs to terror after peaking over his parapets and beholding the vastness of evil Saurons might in the form of his horde of monsters and demons that stretches to the horizon, Obamas hesitance speaks to a larger problem: the bankruptcy of postmodern liberalism. There is currently no viable philosophy or religion to resist the conservative myths that favour a reconstituting of what Lewis Mumford calls the megamachine, which I interpret as the natural state of oligarchy. Ancient religions are hopelessly anachronistic if not also compromised, while Scientism (secular humanism) eliminates the whole field of normative inquiry as unsusceptible to scientific solutions. I submit, though, that a prerequisite of a more worthy alternative is what I call existential cosmicism.

456

The Closely-Divided United States: A Case Study of the Matrix ____________________________________________________

The so-called great political horse race is finally over: Obama has won reelection. For months now, the mainstream media have cited polls showing that the country is split 5050, that most of the states are solidly Democratic or Repubican, leaving around ten battleground states that would be decided by a narrow slice of undecided independents. Endlessly, media pundits return to this theme, that the US is a narrowly divided country in cultural and political terms. And sure enough, when the election finally happened, the votes in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and elsewhere were very evenly split (51% to 49%, etc). Do yourself a favour, though: the next time you hear someone repeat the meme that the US electorate is politically split down the middle, with half the country being Democrat and the other half Republican, pinch that persons arm in an earnest effort to awaken him from his slumber in the pod that evidently feeds him his daily dose of virtual reality. The fact is that the country is not so split; only the likely and actual voters are. Half of the country doesnt vote and hasnt voted in large numbers since the nineteenth century, when the average turnout percentage in presidential elections was in the high 70s. In 1904 it dropped to 65%, in 1912 to 59%. In 1920 it fell below 50% for the first time in US history. It stayed mostly in the 40s and 50s until 1952 when it hit 63% and stayed in the 60s until 1972, when it fell back to the 50s where its been ever since,

457 falling again to 49% in 1996. (For the numbers, see the above Wikipedia articles on voter turnout.) According to a report from the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, the voter turnout in the 2012 US presidential election was 57.5% of all eligible voters. What does this mean, you ask? Well, how can the recent closely-fought elections be taken to represent the state of the electorate when some half of the country consistently doesnt participate in those elections? Sure, some of those who dont vote in one election might vote in the next one, so the non-voters dont comprise a monolithic group; no group so large is homogenous in its outlook or in its reasons or causes, in this case, for not voting. Obviously, the Great Depression and the World Wars impacted the voting. But there is a pattern here, nonetheless: throughout its history the US president has usually garnered roughly half of the popular vote, sometimes as much as 60% but more often just below 50%, and since the beginning of the last century, only around half of the country has been voting at all in those elections. Granted, theres sometimes been a third party, and the voters were evenly divided a century before voter turnout tended to drop below 60%. Still, for the last hundred years, theres been no reason to say that the electorate as a whole is evenly divided. This is because the electorate includes those who are eligible to vote but who dont do so, and for decades this portion of the electorate has been quite sizable. Thus, for a century now, the even splits in the election results havent reflected the state of the country. The polls you keep hearing about, which can be misinterpreted as referring to a split of the American electorate in general, are usually only of so-called likely voters, meaning that half of the country isnt represented in those polls. Obviously, the exit polls likewise reflect only the actual voters, not the half of the country that doesnt show up. And the election results themselves obviously again represent only half of the country when the other half doesnt vote. So for decades now, the United States has not been split down the middle, with only a narrow slice of undecided independents separating the Democrats and Republicans. Instead, all of that action takes place on a playing field in a stadium which seats only half of the country, as it were. The other half, which may

458 change its ranks from election to election, but which has remained as sizable for a century, stands outside that stadium altogether. Ive asked this before, but Id still like to know what the odds are that so many recent elections could be so close, given such factors as the electoral college map and the fact that half the country doesnt vote. Why, that is, should so much complexity and disparity throw up consistently close election results with respect to the popular vote? Another question: why do the two Parties restrict their attention to their base supporters and to a narrow band of ignoramuses, called the undecided voters? Why not reach out to the huge number of people who are the unlikely voters? I suggest that the main reason is that most of those who tend not to vote are cynical about the US political process: they observe that their country is a stealth oligarchy, that the conflict between the democratic Parties is a sham because the Parties have a duopoly, that those with the most money, who can afford full-time lobbyists, have a disproportionate impact on what the politicians actually do, and so on and so forth. Many of those who dont vote are unreachable by the politicians, because these nonvoters are radical outsiders who have no illusions to mitigate their knowledge of certain basic, natural facts, and so theyre left out of the political narrative. In any case, we can be confident that the mass media benefit from maintaining the illusion that the country itself is evenly divided. This became painfully clear to me as I ascetically mortified my flesh by watching CNN during last nights election. (Again, I follow US politics much more than the Canadian variety even though Im Canadian, because I cant remain awake long enough to learn the facts of nearly any political issue in Canada.) As early as around 9pm, ET, the analyst John King realized that although the Florida votes were very evenly split, with around 70% of the votes then counted, the remaining counties were Democratic strongholds, and if Romney lost Florida he had virtually no chance of winning the election, especially as other states began to fall Obamas way. But King stopped short of predicting an Obama victory on that basis, and CNN gave equal time to the results in each of the other states, hailing each as profoundly important breaking news. Then, an hour or so later, when the situation

459 looked even more hopeless for Romney in Florida and thus in the election as a whole, King once again went through the map of counties, making his point that he didnt see enough available votes for Romney. This time, though, King was more insistent, saying that it would be impossible for Romney to win the election at that point without Florida, and Florida looked like a lock for Obama. Immediately thereafter, after turning the floor over to Wolf Blitzer, Blitzer intoned--and Im paraphrasing--Every electoral college point matters a great deal. What Blitzer meant was that CNNs viewers should nevertheless keep watching the election, including the results in all of the states, even though King was announcing on the basis of the evidence at hand that the election was effectively over long before it was officially called for Obama. Evidently, then, the media benefit from the myth that the country is so closely divided, because conflict gets higher ratings and sells advertisements. Blitzers denial of the reality in Florida, getting his viewers to focus on the horse race in the rest of the country, provides a fine example of how the cultural matrix of illusions is actually maintained. The reality is that half of the country plays no part in the eternal war between Democrats and Republicans, so the country itself is not so evenly split. But the media, at least, profit from propping up the oversimplification.

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Part Three: Sexuality

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461

Is Love the Meaning of Life? ____________________________________________________

No, its not, contrary to the sentimental meme. Reading or hearing the sappier assurances that all you need is love triggers my gag reflex. For example, as quoted in Chris Hedges online article, "Acts of Love," even the existential psychologist Viktor Frankl rhapsodizes that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire, that the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart is that The salvation of man is through love and in love. Luckily, Chris Hedges' defense of the meme is slightly more readable, so I'll summarize and discuss his article to elucidate why love is not our highest good after all, contrary to popular opinion.

Chris Hedges on Love

Hedges summarizes his view of why love is so great: Love, the deepest human commitment, the force that defies empirical examination and yet is the defining and most glorious element in human life, the love between two people, between children and parents, between friends, between partners, reminds us of why we have been created for our brief sojourns on the planet. Those who cannot love--and I have seen these deformed human

462 beings in the wars and conflicts I covered--are spiritually and emotionally dead. They affirm themselves through destruction, first of others and then, finally, of themselves. Those incapable of love never live. According to Hedges, love is opposed to loneliness, which is the most acute form of human suffering. As he explains, The isolated human individual can never be fully human. And for those cut off from others, for those alienated from the world around them, the false covenants of race, nationalism, the glorious cause, class and gender compete, with great seduction, against the covenant of love. Indeed, Hedges subscribes to Freuds Manichean interpretation of the evolution of civilization as a conflict between instincts for love and for death and destruction. Neither extreme, though, is ideal. For example, Hedges says, materialistic happiness is a sort of pseudo-love of objects or of fame, which withers if there is no meaning. At the opposite end, to live only for meaning--indifferent to all happiness--makes us fanatic, self-righteous and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion. Hedges ties this notion of grace to the god of his moderate Christian theology. Indeed, he seems to identify love with the reality of the eternal, or of God, which must be grounded in that which we cannot touch, see or define, in mystery, in a kind of faith in the ultimate worth of compassion, even when the reality of the world around us seems to belittle compassion as futile. This is the sophisticated, still somewhat obscure way of saying more bluntly, with a variation on the meme that love is the highest good, that God is love. Continuing with his Manichean theme, Hedges opposes love to hate. According to him, we love due to knowledge of what unites us, namely the universal desire for love. But were tempted to hate when were distressed by uncertainty and fear. If you hate others they will soon hate or fear you. They will reject you. Your behavior assures it. And

463 through hate you become sucked into the sham covenants of the nation, the tribe, and you begin to speak in the language of violence, the language of death. Thus, the dark side of the force, as it were, which attracts lonely or fearful people, leads them to hate, which in turn leads to destructive worship of idols. By contrast, love is an action that makes a difference in the world for the better: If our body dies, it is the love that we have lived that will remain--what the religious understand as the soul--as the irreducible essence of life. It is the small, inconspicuous things we do that reveal the pity and beauty and ultimate power and mystery of human existence. Not only do lovers thus achieve a kind of immortality, but To survive as a human being is possible only through love. Love alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has the power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist and to affirm what we know we must affirm.

Love is No Mystery
I begin my deflation of the hot air balloon that carries the meme aloft on winds of mawkishness, by calling attention to Hedges curious notion that love is a force that defies empirical examination, and indeed that this force is somehow united with the eternal, irreducible mystery of God. I suspect his motive for saying this is to render his socialism unfalsifiable by hiding its foundation in an unfathomable mystery, thus securing his political beliefs in spite of all the evidence of natures palpable inhumanity. Thus, as Hedges quotes the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman as saying, the evil of the Nazi Holocaust was impotent before immortal, unconquerable Kindness, and history is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer. Hedges was a war correspondent for the NY Times, and he seems to defend his sanity against the horrors he witnessed by falling back on an abstract, demythologized version of the Christianity he studied beforehand, when he obtained his Masters of Divinity. Despite the abundant evidence of our beastliness which undermines socialist ideals, Hedges has faith that love wins out in the end or at least that the

464 covenant of love that justifies the socialist principle of equal rights can be upheld without embarrassment. Whatever his motivation, the ploy of hiding the goodness of love along with a god-ofthe-gaps fails. Putting aside the broad scientific picture of the universes magnificence in which our preoccupation with love falls out as at best parochial, theres the more specific evidence from neurology which refutes Hedges contention that love defies empirical investigation. In particular, neurologists now know that various so-called love hormones such as oxytocin cause strong emotional bonds in mammals. So what Hedges must mean when he insists that love is irreducibly mysterious is that altruism makes no sense in evolutionary terms. But even if we lay aside biologists theories of altruism, such as the peacocks tail comparison, the mystery is solved simply by assuming that altruism is a consequence of an adaptation rather than an adaptation itself, that is, a trait thats indirectly preserved as a result of another trait that was directly selected for its enhancement of our fitness to serve as hosts for our genes. In the same way, while our capacities to produce music or to scientifically study distant galaxies through a telescope may have negligible immediate evolutionary value, such capacities were opened up by our generic high intelligence which is itself naturally selected because of its utility to our genes. Whether were speaking of love for a family member or a life partner, or for a neighbour, nation or species, these benevolent impulses are at a minimum experimental riffs on the basic evolutionary theme, which is that of the human parents emotional bonds needed to procreate and to care for their helpless infant who carries their genetic legacy. The bonds between human parents and between them and their child arent at all mysterious in evolutionary terms, and our ancestors apparently learned that similar bonds can be formed in extended social relationships, giving rise to love of tribe or in much rarer cases of people in general. Thus, even when love causes us to sacrifice ourselves and our genes, as long as the evolutionary utility of the basic emotional bonds and of high intelligence is higher than the costs incurred in the trial-and-error process of putting those goods to work, theres no evolutionary mystery of love.

465

Indeed, even were the costs to prove greater, or to take another example, even were our high intelligence to lead ultimately to our extinction through our investigations in the evolutionarily-counterproductive area of weapons of mass destruction, there would be no mystery since the forces of natural selection are mindless. Nature has no allegiance to any species and creates them as freely and as indifferently as it creates solar systems and galaxies, often by destroying the earlier results of its work. Our extinction would make room for new forms of biological complexity, just as the death of the dinosaurs made way for the reign of mammals. And even were we to destroy our planets capacity to sustain any life at all, there would still be no evolutionary mystery, since the genes arent all-powerful, all-knowing gods: their natural process of replicating through the defense mechanism of creating host organisms would simply terminate and Earth might come to resemble something like Mars. On the contrary, the burden of having to believe that love is ineffable falls on the shoulders of even a cryptotheist like Hedges who is left to wonder where God must be hiding, given that God would have left us in a cosmos thats mostly hostile to life while still commanding us to be vulnerable by loving each other. Once the theistic projections of human self-centeredness are duly trashed if only on the aesthetic ground of being intolerably clichd, we can face the prospect not just that love is a thoroughly natural phenomenon, but that any such phenomenon comes and goes, serving no transcendent purpose.

No Refuge in Human Nature

Once we dispense, then, with the obfuscating god-of-the-gaps gambit, of conferring phony value to love by hiding that emotion, as it were, in a place that can never be found by a skeptic who can call upon all of nature to cast doubt on loves glory, we can deal more directly with the question at hand. Hedges argues that love is great because the alternatives are horrible. You can love people or you can wallow in loneliness, hatred, or idolatry and ultimately destroy yourself. Were these the only available paths, Hedges might be entitled to conclude that love is the highest good, assuming that love is better than the more destructive drives he condemns. But he doesnt show that there

466 are just those two paths and so most of his arguments are vulnerable to the charge that they rest on false dichotomies. Ill discuss a third path in a moment, which will show that Hedges article does indeed propose a series of false choices. First, though, I want to point out that the underlying disagreement has to do with different views of human nature. Several times Hedges says that the so-called negative alternatives to love cut us off from our humanity, that if you dont love youre not fully human, or that To survive as a human being is possible only through love. There are several problems with this appeal to a human essence. First, the empirical evidence shows that, if anything, our nature is mixed. The clearest way to see this is to look at how the human brain evolved by accruing new layers and modules. Thus, for example, the language-processing and other higher-reasoning functions are implemented by the most recent, outer neural layer called the mammalian cerebral cortex, whereas hormones and other substrates for emotions are secreted by more ancient structures in the limbic system which we share with even more species. Our identity as human beings would depend largely on our neural capacities, and since those capacities happen to conflict with each other, as in the infamous cases of logics frequent conflicts with feelings, it begs the question to say that love is more authentic to our nature than, say, reason or anxiety. Moreover, talk of love as necessary for a full human being begs the question as to whether a full or complete human is better than an incomplete one. We could just as easily say that men have an instinct to rape women and that to be fully male we must, therefore, succumb to that instinct. Finally, there is no human essence in any teleological sense, no transcendent plan we ought to follow. On the contrary, were constantly in the process of evolving, and again, if anything, were characterized by our control over our own evolution and thus over our nature. Instead of being engineered by our genes, for example, we stand at the threshold of being able to engineer them in the pursuit of our personal goals. As the existentialist philosopher Sartre said, for us existence precedes essence, meaning that were largely free to choose what we are

467 and ought to be. Any appeal to human essence, then, is lame since its easily met with the response that we neednt choose to be that way.

The Third Way

Now, as Ive laid out elsewhere, the results of these facts about our nature are that were uniquely prone to angst and that we preserve our peace of mind by entertaining fantasies and delusions. Clearly, reciprocated love feels better than loneliness or anxiety, so if you think happiness is the highest good in life, youll place a high value on love. I agree with Hedges, though, when he says that happiness is usually opposed to meaning. A simpleminded person might be content with meaningless pleasure, whereas someone with philosophical interests will prefer pleasure that arises from profound activities, which is to say activities that respond well to deep facts. One such fact would be our self-conflicted nature. Refined rather than trivial pleasure, therefore, might be taken in some way of appreciating the absurdity that we each cancel ourselves out. For example, theres the pleasure of gallows humour, such as the pleasure many people derive from watching the political satires of Jon Stewart or Bill Maher, and theres what Buddhists and other mystics call the bliss from meditating on the illusoriness of material distinctions. Contrary to Hedges, however, a philosophical passion for meaningful pursuits doesnt entail spiritual death and destructiveness, although it should cause the philosopher to suffer. To take the obvious example, a mystic may prefer an ascetic life which allows for maximal attention to the most profound matters. This ascetic may be lonely but will hardly be unspiritual or predatory. What Hedges misses, then, is the difference between what we can call, by way of much simplification, Western and Eastern approaches to ethical questions. Westerners are generally more optimistic, because Western religions, with the exception of present-day Islam, are friendlier to thrilling secular enterprises. That is, Judaism and Christianity are largely secularized, the fundamentalists oblivious protests against secular civilization notwithstanding, and so most Jews and Christians view history in terms of linear progress and their behaviour indicates that they effectively

468 welcome technoscientific advances. With some exceptions such as Confucianism and exoteric Hinduism, Eastern philosophies are more pessimistic precisely because theyre more mystical. Buddhists, for example, condemn the whole apparent material world for causing suffering, and hold out the hope not of happiness but of peace through detachment and renunciation, which extinguish the ego thats so cherished by individualistic Westerners. To come to the main point, then, the glorification of love seems a more Western proclivity, given that love is presumed to be necessary for happiness and only optimists are inclined to pursue that goal. Easterners are less likely to romanticize love; indeed, they still often have arranged marriages and think of familial relationships in terms of duties. This hardly means that Easterners are more lonely, idolatrous, or selfdestructive. What the lovesick Westerner might fail to realize is that a philosophically heroic, ethical, and pleasurable life is possible. This is the third path I have in mind. Instead of performing good deeds as a result of feeling compassion, kindness, or other optimistic or philosophically blind emotions, the humanitarianism of a melancholic philosopher who appreciates the existential or mystical context of human life can be motivated by pity, ironically-antisocial conscientiousness, or even an aesthetic passion for avoiding clichs. Just because someone is a Scrooge with respect to love doesnt mean he or she is cruel, contrary to Dickens morality tale. Indeed, constitutionallyantisocial folks, such as those suffering from Asperger Syndrome, are likely to compensate for the shallowness of their social emotions with excessive rule-following, which compels them to be scrupulous. (For dramatizations of this, see the Vulcans from Star Trek or Sheldon Cooper from TV comedy, The Big Bang Theory.) The point is that love is hardly the only source of morality. Compare two cases of altruism: on the one hand, a loving, upbeat person rescues a stranger out of compassion or some other tenderhearted sentiment; on the other, a melancholic person rescues a stranger out of pity for everyones existential plight, disgust with our haplessness, and distaste for ugly states of affairs. In the first case, the feeling may be based on the optimistic assumption that everyone has human rights, but

469 more fundamentally this feeling is caused directly or indirectly by the genes, as the altruist extends her parental instinct by way of some perceived similarity between the stranger and the altruists child or at least her image of what her child would be like. That is, the altruist identifies with the stranger so that her feeling of love compels her to act as though she were rescuing her child. In the second case, the altruist is also guided by feelings, but by pessimistic ones. The result is the same, but the two altruists characters and philosophical outlooks differ. Which case is superior depends on which philosophy is best. To think that love is our primary purpose in life is to adopt a very narrow, hopeful, and genetically determined viewpoint. Sure, there are sophisticated justifications of love, such as theological or New Age ones, but these are rationalizations since love is, first and foremost, a hormonal contribution to the proliferation of our genes. A loving person is optimistic in that she affirms the value of human nature--as that nature is given to us prior to philosophical reflection. That affirmation, in turn, is aligned with our genetically determined function. By contrast, a melancholy person is pessimistic in that she devalues that state of human nature; that is, shes repulsed by our inner conflicts, suffering the alienation and anxiety that are caused not by the genes but by skepticism of social conventions and politically correct traditions. By heroically overcoming the horror of facing the existential truth or by tragically failing to emerge intact from that confrontation, the introvert, philosopher, or mystic thus tends to malfunction as a vessel for microscopic replicators. Either way, the question of whether love or a less optimistic basis for morality makes for the best human life turns on a conflict between (1) the pragmatic consequentialist who prizes success above all else, ignoring the quality of the means by which the success is achieved, and (2) the existentialist who aesthetically rejects certain such means. A lover doesnt mind being a tool for the perpetuation of the human species, because she typically subscribes to some delusion that covers up her existential plight. A nonlover rebels against the natural order, preferring what shed call a higher grade of human being, such as a posthuman or a spiritual, tasteful, authentic, or enlightened person.

470 Optimistic love has no place in the latter's mind, since such an emotion is stamped out by her gloomier responses to a plague of unwelcome truths. When you loathe all our weaknesses, especially our gullibility and our susceptibility to wishful thinking and selfdeception; when you harbour absurd, fruitless contempt for the zombie-like mindlessness of natural forces which is the source of most suffering; and when youre inflicted with alienation and anxiety as the costs of doing philosophical business, you lose the childish innocence needed for love. You become cynical. But if you survive your ruminations, your standards are elevated and you become a mystical insider, an observer of human folly, with godlike detachment, and your suffering is alleviated by schadenfreude. Is love for people, then, the meaning of life? Perhaps for human cattle, but not for the enlightened ones who love instead knowledge enough to be horrified by the world. The meaning of the philosophers life is to rebel: to struggle, to overcome, and to create as a godlike animal. People dont deserve love; instead, we warrant pity, disgust, fear, or awe. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky says that hell is the inability to love, which is correct in the sense that a misanthrope suffers a lot and is demonic in that she makes a play for Gods throne; that is, she strives to become more than an animal and a slave to natural cycles. Arguably, where Dostoevsky errs, though, is in his Christian apology for our jailer, for his proscription of demigodhood and his conviction that existential insight is immoral and counterproductive. For a Christian, hell is the worst place to be, but for a philosopher, hell in the sense of an illuminated state of mind is an obligatory burden that a more promising beast shoulders out of courage that the fires of angst will burn away the chains that bind her to the cave of ignorance, so that she might be reborn with a nobler, posthuman character.

Appendix The Definition of Love

Love: key to the illusion of immortality.

471 Especially after the troubadours and thanks to the modern celebration of the individual, most people now think love is the most important and meaningful thing in the universe. And by love, they mean mainly romantic love between life partners and parental love for children. This conviction is represented in the philosophical movie (with the disappointing, New Agey ending), Tree of Life, in which a character says, Unless you love, your life will flash by. From a biological perspective, the centrality of those two kinds of love makes sense, since such strong emotional bonds are clearly mechanisms needed to preserve our genes: romantic love steps in after the particular sexual impulse wanes, keeping a couple together to care for the helpless infant thats naturally produced by the sex act, and parental love binds parents to their children, the latter being the vessels that carry their parents genes into the future. So indeed, if you dont love in those ways, the genetic code that supports your life, at least, will likely be erased with your death. The movie Tree of Life spiritualizes this biological truth, pandering to American theists with a vision of an afterlife, implying that love is needed to avoid hell or to maintain a social network to make heaven enjoyable, or some such mob fodder. Psychologically rather than biologically, the point would be that people who love tend to build up a rich store of memories, so that time doesnt seem to pass as quickly to them; theyre too busy living to notice the months and years ticking by. An existential cosmicist, though, would rewrite the movies line as follows: Unless you love, youll appreciate that all life flashes by (compared to the duration of the cosmos). Love preserves the genes and creates new individuals, but doesnt actually make anyone immortal; instead, love creates the illusion of immortality by preoccupying a person with a host of day-to-day familial chores, social functions, celebrations, and so on. Without the rich experience caused by romantic and parental love, a person is free to dwell on the horrible philosophical facts of natural life. The loveless soul then lapses into alienating angst, cutting the person off from the community and thus depriving him or her of a wealth of distracting memories. Time then seems to leap forward for such a

472 person, as shown in the film Synecdoche, New York. Love is crucial, then, not as the key to actual immortality, but as the stage for the play of a life well-lived, the bright lights and drama of which distract from the horrors that lie behind the scenes. Thus, the choice to succumb to biological instinct as opposed to philosophical or mystical anxiety is the choice between two forms of alienation. You can detach from cosmic reality and live in our now mass-concocted fantasy world in which romantic myths paper over uglier biological truths or you can commune with the undead god (mindlessly creative nature) and forgo the social games that most people play.

473

Embarrassment by Sexual Ecstasy ____________________________________________________

I want to consider a certain paradox. On the one hand, wealthy, modern, secular countries are obsessed with sexuality in public places, meaning that references to sex are found in most messages carried in all forms of media, including books, magazines, movies, news reports, and advertisements. The obvious explanation is that sexuality is central to human nature, and so naturally sex is much-discussed in open societies. But on the other hand, even in these liberal places, people are averse to divulging the concrete, personal details of their sex lives. Again, on the one hand, romantic love and sexual intimacy are ideals praised literally in most songs, poems, and paintings ever produced, and the marriage industry celebrates monogamous unions which are considered legally void without sexual consummation. On the other hand, while the value of romantic love in general is publicly affirmed, only arid signs of affection between partners are tolerated in public places. Even public kissing is scorned. You can hold hands or dance with your partner, but actual sex in public is, of course, typically illegal. You can carry a picture of your spouse in your wallet and wear a wedding ring to symbolize the exclusivity of your romantic love for your partner, but were a stranger to approach you and inquire as to your spouses favourite sexual position, you would probably punch that stranger in the face. So we praise sexuality and romantic love in the abstract, but we hide the actual cases of them. Why the discrepancy?

474 Before I come to my explanation, Ill note some complications. First, some societies have arranged rather than romantic unions, and to the extent that these are less intimate or sexual, they fall outside the purview of this rant. Second, some cultures are less prudish than others. Ancient Egypt, Rome, and India were more open to public nudity and representations of sex, featuring statues of phalluses and pornographic paintings. Even in ancient Rome and India, however, peoples sex lives were usually kept private. Third, although Judeo-Christian and Islamic societies are currently the most prudish, superficially because of the influence of the Eden myth, pornography is rampant in secularized Christian societies, largely because of those peoples relative wealth which enables their access to the internet. The stigma on porn, though, shows that the openness towards sex in porn is the exception that proves the rule that we fear there might be something amiss with sexuality, which is why we keep sex itself hidden and private. Also, porn is a substitute for actual sex, and so the widespread use of porn provides additional evidence of qualms about sexuality.

The Paradox of Human Sexuality

At first glance, the conflict between the two attitudes towards sexuality shows only that sex and romantic love are highly valued and thus not to be trivialized by public boasting or other outward displays. This sets up a false dichotomy, though, since theres a third possibility, between trivializing a highly valued sex life by making it public, and reinforcing a taboo on revealing intimate details, by publicly honouring your romantic love only with adherence to impersonal conventions. Indeed, just as the public rituals of secularized, civic religion mock the presumed depth of modern peoples commitment to traditional religions, so too the expression of romantic love through relatively stale conventional channels, like the wedding ceremony or the rituals of dancing or handholding, indicates, if anything, a willingness to sell-out that love. In the archetypal romantic story of Romeo and Juliet, the strength of the characters bond is demonstrated by their defiance of cultural convention. Their tragedy is that their romantic love has no home in public and must be kept secret. But thats true with regard to virtually every sexual relationship.

475

The deeper reason for the conflict, I think, is that although romantic love is highly valued, this love is also dangerous because it entails secrets which can be entrusted only to the partners in the relationship who form an emotional bond of trust between them. This raises the question of what sort of secret is at issue. In many cases, spouses alone become aware of business and financial secrets which must be kept private, and so the prospect of publicly displaying the inner workings of the relationship becomes a touchy subject. That is, the intimate relationship becomes tainted by an awareness of wrongdoing, and so while sexual intimacy in general may be praised, in practice these close relationships can become corrupted and shameful. Divulging what transpires behind closed doors would require the breaking of confidence and the revealing of personally-damaging information. This point, however, doesnt distinguish between sexually-intimate bonds and other relationships that require the keeping of such secrets. Lawyers, coworkers, and Catholic priests are also entrusted with dangerous information and so interactions with them are often kept private. The distinguishing feature of romantic love, of course, is its sexual dimension, and so the relevant secrets between lovers must be secrets about their sex life. A person can be blackmailed just with photographic evidence of that persons sexual infidelity or of his or her preference for some embarrassing, kinky sex act. A politician can be shamed out of office or his legacy can be tarnished by a public sex scandal. These are secrets that people kill or die for. Those who are given access to these pieces of life-threatening information are, ideally, just the romantic partners who are complicit in the risky acts. How can lovers live without tearing their hair out in panic, knowing that someone else walks around with private information which would ruin the other person, if revealed, breaking up friendships, making the person a public disgrace or a pariah? Ive already suggested a two-part answer. First, the select persons who are privy to that information tend to be those who have as much to lose by revealing it, since they themselves are partners in the sex life which is the source of the threat. Second, those select persons tend also to be just those who develop an emotional,

476 romantic bond, and the feelings of love for the sex partner counteract any fear of vulnerability as a result of the potential for public disclosure of what they do in private. This still leaves the question of what exactly is so dangerous about sex so that only impersonal, insipid or saccharine references to sex are tolerated in what are superficially highly-sexualized public places. Clearly, Western cultures are influenced by biblical myths, including the myth of the Fall, according to which disobedience to God distances the creature from God, which leads the creature into shameful sin. Members of most animal species know nothing of God and they sexually reproduce. In so far as we perpetuate our species in the same biological manner, were animals and thus distanced from God. Thus, our sexual nature reflects our original sin. But this theological explanation deals with a mere symptom of the perceived problem with sex, not with that problems cause. Just as Platos Euthyphro Dilemma shows that at best religions express our deeper, nonreligious concerns with morality, so too the biblical myths merely report on and exacerbate some deeper cause of our guilt about our sexuality. The question is what that deeper cause might be. Why does the myth of the Fall resonate and thus why has it been so influential? The reason seems clear: sexuality is the largest thorn in our side, the starkest and most unwelcome reminder that despite our pretensions to our unique value and to our transcendent stature as godlike beings, owing to our consciousness, rationality, and freedom, we are instead embodied animals whose behaviour is largely genetically determined, who live for some decades and inevitably die, to be forgotten in time in an inhumane, pointless, alienating universe. In short, our conflicting attitudes toward sex speak to what I call the horror of our existential situation. We delude ourselves, pretending not just that we can be happy in this world, nor even that we ought to be, but that happiness is our highest ideal. On the contrary, rational, conscious, free beings ought to be the most miserable, renouncing pleasures that are spoiled by knowledge of their natural source.

477 Sexuality is clearly the greatest such pleasure and thus its the cause of our greatest confusion. We can feel happy to some extent, because were only imperfectly conscious, rational, and free: we have the capacities for self-delusion, for sloppy thinking, and for being socially pressured or otherwise coerced, capacities that keep us sane and productive despite the angst that lies always under the surface of our life experience. And so we can give free rein to our delusions about the magnificence of romantic love and our innocence in sexual play--but only so far before the facts of the matter overwhelm us, our lies catch up to us and were confronted with the horrible truth about ourselves. We can tolerate superficial images of, or whitewashed references to, sexuality in public affairs, but come too close to publicly revealing the secret of what actually happens in our own sex acts and we feel threatened by guilt and shame which are preludes to existential horror and awe at the bleakness of our tragedy.

Sexualitys Awful Secret

What is that awful secret of sexuality? The secret is actually not so secret. Philosophers and scientists routinely speak about it, since the secret is implied by the secularists naturalistic worldview. This secret has at least three aspects, which Ill touch on, but generally the dark truth of sexuality is that were not as noble, unique, moral, elevated, rational, free, or as godlike as we prefer and need to think we are to live with what are nevertheless our evolutionary, booby-trapped gifts of sentience and intelligence. We are sentient and highly intelligent, but we like to think were thereby removed from the natural world, that we belong in heaven thanks to our true, immaterial nature, or that were not held hostage by natural forces since we can exploit them as masters of our own destiny. The secret is that were special only in the way that any distinguished animal species is special; indeed, the attributes that distinguish us merely adapt us to one niche rather than another, namely the niche of life in environments we create for ourselves from the raw material of ideas we instinctively generate. Likewise, spiders spin webs and excel in their own way of life, and every species under the sun is special in the sense that its adapted to its own form of survival.

478 The secret, then, is that were part of nature after all, not outsiders as the Gnostics, Hindus, and other theists say, with fragments of transcendent god-stuff in our innermost being, longing to be returned to our true home beyond the cosmos. Were part of nature in that were animals: our bodies are naturally selected and our behaviour is largely genetically determined. Our traits of reason and consciousness give us knowledge and control over some natural forces, but the fact that were nonetheless, first and foremost, animals, living and dying alongside the insects, fishes, birds, and beasts in the wild, means that that control must ultimately be futile and otherwise absurd. We struggle to transcend our natural limitations, to push the envelop of human achievement, to pursue our own goals and to judge by our own standards, but the traits that enable us to appear to be so supernaturally heroic are those that prove were mere animals after all, since those traits, we now know, are fruits of natural selection or are illusory. Sexuality is a startling reminder that our self-delusions are there to be deflated by natural facts. The pleasure from sex throws us into our own private world, literally shutting off our perception of anything outside itself. In that solipsistic world, were free to entertain one fantasy after another, taking our life partner into our confidence so that our emotional and intellectual backdrop, to which we prefer to return in our private moments, is empathically expanded to include the thoughts and feelings shared by that partner. Sexual ecstasy, then, reinforces the illusion that were supernaturally divorced from the cycles of nature, that like gods we create our own worlds of culture to inhabit. While we do create those worlds, that creativity is just what makes us animals in the greater wilderness. Spiders spin webs and humans spin ideas. Far from separating us from the animals, sexual ecstasy reduces us to their status since they have sex too! Sexual intercourse is the strategy that birds, reptiles, insects, and even one-celled organisms have evolved to survive and to spread their genes, despite the threat from coevolving parasites. For example, by mixing the gene pool, we put our eggs in multiple baskets, so that an expert at destroying one particular basket cant wipe us out all at once. Sex is what we cherish the most, what we cant live without, what we kill or die for. But sex reminds us of what we least want to dwell on, which is the fact that

479 were animals, that were driven to spread our genes, to use our reason and our social skills to succeed in the way of life to which those traits adapt us. Were created not by God but by proteins that build our bodies, cell by cell, using the self-replicating code in a sequence of DNA molecules. Even the orgasmic pleasure that seems to shut off the outside world and present us to ourselves as disembodied Cartesian egos is actually, of course, a step in the algorithm of natural selection. The pleasure is caused by the flooding of the brain with endorphin and other love hormones that bond us to our partner and encourage us to reproduce, to help shuffle the gene pool, immunizing us against parasitic attack and allowing for the future genetic assembly of our descendant species in altered environments. Our real objective on Earth isnt to be happy, to write a great novel, to travel here or there, or even to fall in love. We may prefer to pursue those goals, but theyre objectively meaningless and in so far as they blind us to our actual, primary mission, theyre delusions. That real mission is just the one we share with the other animals, which is to participate in the cycle of natural selection, by surviving long enough to help mix the gene pool, sexually reproducing with a mate and raising the child so that it too can one day do the same. Of course, to call this a mission is still to anthropomorphize the cycle and thus to flee from the dread of contemplating the Lovecraftian reality. Animals have no objective mission, since in so far as theyre considered as complex physical objects, they have no minds nor anything as commonsensical as values, goals, or even delusions. In physics, nothing has a mission, a purpose, or a value, and the same is true in biology and in psychology in so far as theyre objective, reductive, hard sciences. Granted, most people have sex not just to satisfy their primitive evolutionary impulse, but to explore the possibilities of pleasure for its own sake. Thus, we bend our hardware to our will, creatively adapting our instrumental reason to invent all manner of sexual games. We sexualize absolutely anything, so that there are potentially infinite kinks, fetishes, and other perversions of biologically normal, vanilla sexuality. But sex reminds us that our dream of freedom from nature is a delusion. Just as were misled by

480 the orgasm to deem ourselves free-floating lords of Creation, we take our sexual creativity as evidence of that freedom and of our elevated, unique status. Actually, the genes hold other species on what cognitive scientists call a similarly long leash, which is to say that they too toy with their bodies with no regard for their genes, playing sexual games including masturbation. But more importantly, these games are empty and ridiculous, which is surely why theyre kept secret and why their exposure threatens their participants social status. The former American senator Anthony Weiner sent lewd pictures of himself to his groupies, a game facilitated by recent technological developments, and when his game was exposed he was mocked and he lost his job. President Clinton was caught playing sexual games with cigars, overweight women, and blue dresses in the Oval Office, and conservatives impeached him, holding him up for national derision. The hypocrisy on the part of Clintons political enemies was, of course, stupendous, since those who most loudly proclaim the imperative of godliness protest too much: the deviant antics of conservative politicians who thrive on theological fantasies of angels and demons are likely quite beyond the pale. The point, though, is that everyone is tempted to creatively sexualize their lives, just as were tempted to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, over-extending the use of our talents. But were also ashamed to do so, not because of any biblical myth, but because we can easily perceive the idleness of those games. Sexual perversions are meaningless because theyre accidental: perverts sexualize everything from feet to black leather to the smearing of food on skin, using flimsy analogies between the primary sex act and anything else. Sure, these perversions can be aesthetically or morally evaluated, but because theyre purely for fun theyre also objectively pointless, which is why they really are games, with artificial, arbitrary rules. A sexual perversion is like a roller coaster ride: at some level, the thrill is embarrassing because of its uselessness. Just as we feel proudest when seen at work, were loath for anyone of substance to catch us at our leisure. Riders of roller coasters are sometimes automatically photographed so that when the ride is over they can mock each others grimaces, but I surmise that the true reason for the mockery is that the grimace

481 substitutes for the riders orgasmic face. And whats ridiculous is the riders suspected choice of indulging in some sexual version of the roller coaster, some perversion or other that serves no useful purpose and thats creatively divorced from evolutionary reality. Perverts are turned on by this or that sexual analogy or overextension, but the attractions are arbitrary, whimsical, and thus empty. This is why perverts, which is to say all who succumb to the temptation to creatively adapt the sexual instinct for the sake of personal pleasure rather than sexual reproduction--that is, just about all people who ever lived--often veer from one game to the next in a downward spiral of boredom until theyre thankful that their sexual lusts subside when Mother Nature is through with them and lowers her puppet strings. (For a dramatization of this futility of sexual creativity, see the film Bitter Moon.) I said there are at least three aspects of sexualitys awful secret. The first, then, is the existential emptiness of sex. Reproductive sex perpetuates genetic information and as far as anyone can tell, that reproduction serves no purpose, just as theres no purpose behind the suns shining or the winds blowing. Those phenomena are naturally caused, and causes are forces with no meaning or value of their own. Were desperate to find meaning in what we can rationally comprehend, and so we latch onto theistic and other myths that glorify sexual reproduction and the continuation of our species, but scientists have amassed mountains of evidence that were a comet to lower the final curtain on the sex lives of our planets animals, the cosmos would be forced to proceed along its tracks as laid out by natural laws. We are all insignificant except to ourselves and to each other. And reproductive sex is a link in the chain that binds us to the natural world of meaningless causes and effects in which our ideals and dreams are alien. As for playful, perverted sex, this is meaningless and frivolous as a deviation from the evolutionary force we serve as animals on genetic leashes. Indeed, most of what we civilized people do in our cultures is deviational in that regard, and so were the most alienated of animals in our state as emancipated slaves--free to pass the time playing fruitless games to distract us from our existential discomfort. Were secretly ashamed of nonreproductive sex, though, and not just of any frivolous cultural expression, because

482 this sex is a much more daring attempt to break free from natural forces. Perverted sex flouts the genes right on their doorstep, as it were, whereas painting, baseball, opera, or any other nonsexual cultural expression doesnt tease the forces that run our natural cycle, by approaching an act of sexual reproduction. The secrets second aspect is the way sex makes us all hypocrites: in public we play the role of serious, rational, civil adults, while in private we routinely shrug off that role to wallow in our juices like the most mindless of animals. Etiquette evidently consists of rules for a mere charade we play to pretend that were not slaves to natural forces. But because we maintain the delusion of our godhood, or to use the euphemism, the delusion of being creatures made in the image of God, were nonetheless ashamed of ourselves when we run afoul of those rules. Thus, the guilt we feel for our inevitable private betrayal of public norms is another reason we keep the details of our sex life secret. The third aspect is the way sex reveals that were soulless biological machines. After all, sex requires a focus on the body, the very body we now know is built from the groundup by natural processes. One of our main evolutionary gifts or curses is our ability to imagine whats in each other minds, and were so fond of this ability that we overuse it, seeing minds where there are none, such as in the clouds, the stars, or the artifacts we create. The fact that the fate of our minds depends on the state of our bodies is most unwelcome to us, especially in economically-advanced societies in which people have to compete against computers whose minds, in the form of their programming, can be laid bare as separate from their hardware. For hyper-intellectual creatures with Platonic aspirations of leaving our bodies altogether in an ethereal paradise after physical death, sexuality is an awkward reminder of our embodiment and of its ramifications. In an orgasm, for example, biomechanical stimulation causes pleasure that temporarily shuts down all other mental functions. Even lovers who are romantically bonded are forced to objectify their partner in the act of having sex, to manipulate the body for lack of any more direct access to that persons mind, besides communicating with it. Indeed, there are only so many sexual positions, so many ways in which bodies can pleasurably

483 interact, often leading couples to fall into anticlimactic sexual routines, and that also reminds us that while our imagination seems boundless, in dreams or in philosophical speculation, for example, our bodies obviously limit us. To take just the most depressing consequence of our embodiment, physical death amounts to the minds death as well. This in turn means that justice is imperfect and that morality is for the weak. In short, sexuality supports atheistic naturalism rather than monotheistic religions, which is a politically incorrect fact and itself a reason to pretend in public that sexuality doesnt exist.

The Existential Horror of Sex

In summary, the paradox of sexuality is explained by the fact that sex is existentially perilous. Were biologically compelled to uphold sexuality and the attendant conventions of romantic love, and to enjoy the love hormones, which is why sex and romantic love are publicly praised in general. But were also potentially horrified by what sex reminds us of, which is that our self-image as civilized, godlike, supernatural masters of the natural order is deluded. When we engage in the primary sex act, for reproduction, we behave as puppets on strings of DNA. When we go our own way, freely sexualizing this or that for our own pleasure regardless of the genetic consequences, we waste time playing meaningless games that distract us with arbitrary and thus ridiculous pleasures. Either way, were secretly ashamed of our sexuality, because were embarrassed and terrified to learn that were animals, not the fantastic heroes in our delusions of grandeur. Now, Im not so nave as to assume that most people are actually horrified by sex. Were there so much horror, there would be a lot less sex. My point about the disquieting secret of sex is that while having it, were obviously preoccupied by pleasure to think about whats happening, but that were we to speak of the details of our sex life in public, in the cold light of reason, those details would threaten us with horror. We therefore keep those details private to avoid that confrontation with our tragic existential situation.

484 Moreover, were so addicted to sexual pleasure, that we dare not bite the hand that feeds us. If you asked a person in the street whether he or she thinks sex is a source of horror as well as of pleasure or reproduction, that person would probably be mystified as to the questions meaning. But in so far as sex is just a means of pleasuring each other, this is a most peculiar pleasure, one that must be hidden from view and kept secret at all costs. Perhaps pleasure can be so intense that it becomes embarrassing; in particular, our orgasmic faces might best be kept private. But what gives facial or bodily gestures some emotional impact is their meaning, so an orgasmic face would have to be embarrassing because of what it represents, namely ecstasy that reduces the mighty human to a quivering, mindless receptacle for love hormones. Then again, perhaps were ashamed of our naked bodies because were not as beautiful as celebrities. But even celebrities keep their sex lives secret. The rich and powerful too would sooner be caught dead than in the middle of a sex act. Again, theres a small, ostracized minority of exhibitionists or porn stars, but the greater mass of deluded primates denies the obvious, that were potentially horrified by what we love the most. And thats the irony of human sexuality.

485

The Perversity of the Sexual Norm ____________________________________________________

Two curious facts surrounding sex are that those who are virgins even after their teens and twenties are deemed pathetic by virtually everyone else, while those who make a living in the sex industry, whether as prostitutes or as porn stars are likewise despised by most people. But not all is what it seems

Virgins and Sex Workers

There are a number of pretty obvious reasons for each of those attitudes. Most people assume that older involuntary virgins cant find a sex partner because theres something wrong with them: theyre physically unattractive, impoverished, and/or mentally ill. Thus, virginity would only be a symptom of the underlying cause of peoples disdain for these dregs of society. Those who want sex but are unsuccessful in their efforts to attract a mate seem to have lost out in life so badly that their loss becomes offensive. This is because sex seems such an obvious good while also being relatively easy to have. After all, animals--including humans--are compelled to want sex, so all people have to do is go with the genetic flow. If someone finds a perverse way to paddle upstream, against this force of nature, that failure seems almost miraculous and so certainly worthy of ridicule. Moreover, for the same reason, those who claim they prefer not to have sex, whether for religious reasons or because theyre opposed to sex in general,

486 are suspected of hiding some personal defect thats the true cause of their virginity. The genetic floodwaters flow so freely, as it were, that virginity in an older person, say one in his or her twenties or thirties, is more likely caused by a monumental personal failure or character defect, as opposed to being a choice. Thus, screwball comedy movies, featuring young people possessed by their sex hormones, typically ridicule the pathetic loser who emerges from puberty with no sexual accomplishments. The movie The 40 Year Old Virgin is exceptional in being more sympathetic to the older virgin, criticizing the characters who mock the virgin, Andy, for the deficiency of their sexual relationships. The movie explains Andys plight as being the result partly of his decision to wait for the right partner to come along, meaning one to whom he feels an emotional connection. But Andy develops into someone whos unlikely to find a partner without help; hes depicted as being frozen in his teenage years, collecting comic books and action figures, and of course hes unskilled in the art of wooing women. These movies typify Western societys attitude towards those who should but don't have sex. Whether on a street corner, in a restaurant, an office, or anywhere else, were an older virgin to admit his or her sexual status, the virgin would be either immediately ridiculed, shunned, or pitied, depending on the situation. Even those who have some sympathy for the weaknesses that cause the virgins failure will condescend to the virgin, treating that person as inferior and perhaps even as literally beneath contempt. The feeling is that someone whos lost out so tremendously can no longer be taken seriously as a competitor in any walk of life. As for reasons for hostility towards sex workers, there are the assumptions that they desecrate that which is sacred, that they spread diseases, break up families (in the case of prostitutes) or, like their virgin counterparts, have personal deficiencies forcing them to enter this despised industry. For example, porn stars may be addicted to sex, while a prostitute may be forced to earn a lot of money quickly to pay for drugs or to feed her child whom she had at too young an age. Just as a known older virgins embarrassment

487 makes any social situation a hundred times more awkward, a sex workers shame or presumed filthiness sullies nearly any occasion on which the porn star or prostitute turns up. Prostitutes, for example, typically reveal themselves only at night and in taboo areas such as a red light district, and were they to wear their sexy clothing outside of those contexts, they could expect to be glared at with palpable loathing, if not more aggressively ostracized. The movie Pretty Woman depicts this hostility, when the prostitute character is refused service at a boutique. Of course, there are exceptions, but these are exceptions that prove the rule. For example, there are sex conventions in which thousands of people emerge to worship porn stars as celebrities. After all, the porn industry thrives because a great many people avail themselves of the sex workers services. But the expectation is that this celebration of pornography be kept relatively secret, because sex workers are so revolting that you shouldnt be proud even to be in their vicinity. Thus, the people who frequent sex conventions, strip clubs, or a prostitutes street corner must conceal their identity as they tread upon these profane grounds and live with the burden of knowing that were their dealing with sex workers made public knowledge, the sex workers loathsomeness would transfer to them like cooties.

The Self-Loathing of Sexual Normals

So much for what I assume would be the standard defenses of these attitudes towards virgins and sex workers. In either case, the sexually normal folks would claim to be disgusted merely by evident personal weakness, failure, or depravity. But none of these defenses will do, as they stand, because of a third curious fact about sex which is that all of these normal folks would be humiliated were their sex life exposed to the light of day. If sex is so great that not having sex when you should be able to is pathetic and worthy of open ridicule, why also be so ashamed of having sex that youd sooner jump off of a bridge than show a stranger a recording of your sex act? And if sex is so sacred that sex workers are disgusting defilers who must be shunned by all decent, upstanding citizens, why are these same citizens so obviously ashamed of that allegedly sacred act

488 that they must hide their sex life at all costs? As I argue elsewhere, Christianity doesnt fully account for this shame. Indeed, Christianitys opposition to sex falls out of preChristian ascetic traditions which respond to the disturbing existential issues that sexuality makes plain. I submit, then, the following hypothesis for your consideration: hostility towards virgins and sex workers is the sexually normal persons projection of his or her self-loathing. Even a normal, sexually active man, for example, must keep his sex life secret, just like a virgin or a sex worker, because the sex act itself is contemptible, disgusting, and profane rather than sacred. The sex act attests to our finitude, contingency, and animal heritage; to our spiritless, mechanistic nature and the selfdeception behind all politically correct, feel-good myths. The sex act realizes our worst fears about ourselves and our position in nature, about the lack of God and perfect justice or morality, and so those creatures that are sufficiently intelligent to understand sexs implications naturally preserve their sanity and peace of mind--despite the Darwinian necessity of sex--by making sex itself taboo. So a sexually normal person has self-respect in public only when no one else is thinking of that persons sex life. To reveal, say, that youre picturing a waitress naked or to present to a taxi driver a photograph of him in the sex act is to humiliate and to dehumanize either person. Nevertheless, with their drapes drawn tightly closed, normal people do have sex and so the average persons self-respect must conceal a deeper layer of self-loathing. If sex is embarrassing and awkward, because of what it reveals about our existential predicament, we must forget about our sex lives to preserve our dignity. But now older virgins and sex workers come along and disturb this fragile compromise. Virgins, after all, arent tainted by sex; that is, they havent earned their stripes by confronting the horror of natural life under such traumatic circumstances. Thus, despite their alienation from sexually normal society, older virgins are unburdened by direct experience of the horrors of sex. Sexually normal people seem to envy whats sometimes tellingly called the innocence of virgins, even while the trauma of facing our existential plight of being self-deluded animals, by engaging in sex, is obfuscated by talk

489 of the maturity of sexual normals. The notion that having sex is a prerequisite of human maturity presupposes a normative construal of our biological function, as though the wandering of genes from one generation to the next--not to speak of the genes purpose since they have none--ought to automatically govern how we live. Just because were genetically pressured to have sex, and sex is--on one level at least--highly pleasurable, doesnt mean that the normals fulfill the Form or Ideal of humanity, so that they can be called more mature than older virgins. There may be some such ideal, but this will derive from philosophy, not from biology or psychology. Meanwhile, sex workers are secretly envied for the opposite reason: they have altogether too much sex without mentally breaking down, despite their familiarity with such abundant evidence that our politically correct self-assurances are comically amiss. Sex workers demonstrate fortitude and great mental agility when they can live most of their waking hours as animals in the pejorative sense, and then turn around and pretend to be members of a socially advanced species in their off-hours. This envy mustnt see the light of day, however, since this admiration complements sexually normal peoples contempt for themselves, for wallowing in such animalistic endeavours while typically ignoring the existential ramifications in their public life as responsible, mature, adult citizens of an advanced civilization. Thus, the normals use virgins and sex workers as scapegoats, taking out the contempt they have for themselves onto these others. All sex is a degrading business for those who think of themselves as more elevated than the animals we keep as pets or as spectacles in zoos, or that we exterminate in the wild. The standard reasons for hostility towards older virgins and sex workers are untenable because of normal peoples embarrassment regarding the very practice thats supposed to endow us with more respect than the losers and deviants. So the normals must despise themselves for having sex, sometimes even disgusting themselves while theyre in the throes of passion and possessed by hormones and lusts. But because they tend to have no philosophical inclinations, especially in a postmodern society, they cant address this response to their animal nature with much existential authenticity, and so they direct their contempt that they themselves deserve to those who, in their own ways, deserve less of it. To be sure,

490 virgins and sex workers likely have their personal flaws and these may even be related to their dealings with sex; moreover, these outsiders may even be contemptible for those reasons. But this doesnt change the fact that the sexual normals hardly cover themselves in glory with respect either to their attitudes towards the abnormals or to their own sexual behaviour in the first place.

The Need for our Hourly Ridicule

All in all, sex makes for a degenerate, awkward topic of discussion, but thats also why sex is so revealing and thus eminently worthy of rants. Sex is so obviously compromising to our conventional self-image, to what Freud called our persona, that of all the inspirations for our comforting myths, sex is the most in need of such mental gymnastics. Generally speaking, the way we deal with sex is so ludicrous that we ought to be mocked hourly for the lies we tell to endure as such misguided animals, let alone for the compromises we make when we betray our principles and actually indulge in instincts wed be fired or arrested for expressing at work or elsewhere in public. Sex must be kept secret because sex makes us all pathetic, and that fact is intolerable to such proud beasts that believe weve tamed most of the planet. Sex is our Achilles Heel, the tragic fault that humiliates us all, casting doubt on every optimistic myth, on every politically correct delusion we entertain to avoid our existential, philosophical responsibility as creatures cursed with excess reason and awareness.

491

Sex is Violent: Why the F-Word is Taboo ____________________________________________________

Romantic love is frequently touted as the chief politically correct prerequisite for being happy in secular society. But because the causal relationship between finding a life partner and being happy is politically correct, you can be sure that the idea of this relationship is metaphysically, naturally, and in all other ways that matter to those who care about knowledge, wrong. Politically correct notions are propaganda signals that beam back and forth between social interest groups to maintain power imbalances; these notions are tools of social manipulation, not propositions backed up by critical thinking, scientific investigation, or artistic vision. A connoisseur of human folly evaluates mainly the aesthetics of politically correct blather, appreciating the efficiency with which PC notions distort reality sometimes in the service of human vice. That the idea that romantic love makes you happy is merely politically correct, and thus substantively erroneous, is apparent from the attendant language game. Of course, romantic love culminates in the sex act, and yet the double standard in our treatment of words that refer to sex is most curious. The clinical word sex is perfectly acceptable in the mass media, but the F-word is taboo even while superficially those two words are synonymous. The trick is that their connotations differ. Sex calls to mind the biological process of having sex, as in sexual intercourse or copulation. The F-word, however, has metaphysical rather than mere scientific force, calling to mind the sex acts deeper

492 meaning. What is this deeper meaning? Well, the F-word gives away the game in its nonsexual uses, as in Fuck him up, Fuck off! or Hes fucked. In these uses, the Fword refers to violence or ruination. You might be wondering what violence has to do with the sex act, with the consummation of romantic love which is supposed to elevate us like nothing else, according to the PC happy-talk. Clearly, the reason the F-word is usually censored in the media is that this word calls to mind facts about sex which undermine PC propaganda. After all, sex is obviously violent (to paraphrase the Janes Addiction song). Not only is sex violent, but symbols emerge from the biological process of sex which threaten PC fantasies about equality between men and women and about human nobility. Spelling out these symbols is probably unnecessary, since theyre so obvious that to appreciate them you merely have to think about sex as would a child, casting off the feel-good obfuscations. But Ill spell them out anyway. As everyone knows, the penis is symbolically a weapon, often compared to a sword, spear, or gun. Less fortunately, the vagina represents a gaping wound, since thats what the female sex organ looks like, especially when paired with the male organ. Thus, when the male penetrates the female in the sex act, the very reproduction of human life looks aesthetically or metaphysically like a negation of life, as in an act of murder. The male stabs the female and slays her, leaving her for dead afterward or cuddling to symbolically resurrect her. This is to say only that the biological accident of the sexual process inevitably strikes the minds of symbol-using creatures such as us as horribly ironic, mixing up our ideas of life and death, of love and murder, and of immortality through reproduction and mortality through killing. From these primordial symbols issue rationalizations of patriarchy, such as the myths of female masochism or of the womans secret attraction to the tough guy. These myths are so well-established, buttressed as they are by the most nave symbolic interpretation of the universal sex act, that many women find themselves playing their assigned roles. So sex has its ugly side and yet sex is at the heart of romantic love even while love is supposedly the most beautiful good. Any reference to sex which naughtily threatens the PC myths is therefore anathema. Hollywood provides many of the fantasies of romantic

493 love, proliferating dramas that depict the fun and frolic of falling in love, the emotional ups and downs which supposedly are hallmarks of mature adult life, as well as the sappy New Age obfuscations of the natural, sociopolitical, and aesthetic reality of sexual love. And yet these fantasies are so vulnerable and otherworldly that the mere utterance of the F-word is apparently feared for its power to magically counteract Hollywoods whole wizards spell-book of enchantments. The myth-makers goal is to regulate social relationships with conventions that maintain an inevitably-unjust social order. Were you resident in a perfectly just society, youd have no need for myths or apologies; youd simply point to heaven without uttering a word and get on with the thrill of participating in a utopia. In nature utopia is impossible, so white lies and other techniques of social engineering are needed to maintain social orders that offer stability and other compromises as well as absurdities and tragedies. The roots of all human societies are the biological facts of reproduction and childbirth. Societies are needed in the first place to care for helpless infants, and to perpetuate our species and more specifically our genetic code. However, those abstract and biochemical ends are perfectly insignificant as far as people are concerned. And so we need to be manipulated to play our natural roles as hosts of replicators. That manipulation begins with such measures as the evolutionary designs of a babys cuteness and of the adults innate approval of that cuteness. The manipulation continues socially with mainstream myths. But we have the power to see through the myths and to confront the horrible truth. We celebrate the experience of romantic love even while were horrified by that experience, sustained as it is by hormones and by our servitude to genes. Thats why secular myths are needed to hold together families, especially after the Scientific Revolution when theistic myths lost their hold of peoples imagination. Instead of glorifying sexual reproduction, the raising of a family, and the biologically-dictated perpetuation of our species, with myths of divine commandments, modern secularists appeal to the business-oriented agenda of seeking a life partner or to New Age pseudoscientific claptrap which whitewashes nature with excruciating sentimentality. In

494 either case, the raw, politically incorrect power of sex becomes an embarrassing reminder that we so-called emotionally mature adults are only kidding ourselves with our euphemisms. We apologize for the sex act with feel-good egalitarian myths of romantic partnerships or soul mates, and we censor whistle-blowing labels like the Fword, because were ashamed of sex, and were ashamed because our most fitting reaction to our natural reality as alienated animals is to writhe in sheer angst. The primitive symbolism of the sex act is an unwelcome reminder that most of our myths are arbitrary and worthy of mockery in the alien face of the inhumane universe. Of course, no one is really killed in the functional sex act, but the symbols, of penis=weapon and vagina=mortal wound, nevertheless compel men to lord it over women and women to dehumanize themselves, because healthy adults are necessarily gullible, needing myths to retain our sanity. Were eager to believe in one myth, delusion, or preposterous fantasy or another to escape the default reaction of horror when we philosophically understand our existential plight. The violence of sex isnt just symbolic, however. According to the big biological picture (and the Red Queen hypothesis), sexual reproduction is a genetic strategy in an arms race with parasites that prey on the macroscopic hosts of genes such as us. Mixing up the gene pool forces viruses and bacteria to mutate to overcome the animals evolving immune systems. But the adaptation of sexual reproduction was only haphazard since natural creativity is mindless, and so there has never been any guarantee of equality between the sexes or even of any dignity in sex. Just as a battlefield can unleash chaos, there are plenty of casualties on this front of the biological war between genes and asexual viruses. Putting aside STDs, theres the design of the unequal sex organs and the biochemical parameters of the sex act, which degrade us on the symbolic level discussed above, but also by imposing the requirement of penetration which is an invasion of privacy. On the one hand, the genes help build our higher brain functions which give us some degrees of autonomy and dignity, but on the other, the genes force us to disregard our higher nature and to copulate like animals. In the case of traumatic insemination in invertebrates such as bugs, the male sex organ literally pierces the females abdomen, creating its own hole, which is deleterious to the female. Thats the

495 brutal essence of sexual reproduction: on the macro level, the male must invade the females body, sometimes causing her pain, just as on the micro level the males sperm must bypass the females biochemical defenses. This is because, like any genetically adapted design, the rigmarole of sex evolved partly by accident and with no sympathy for the host organisms in mind. Whole cultures have sprung up to rationalize the need to objectify our sex partner even while we prize our sentience and intelligence which we think distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom. For example, instead of viewing sexual penetration as an act of necessary force (for the sake of conception), sex is deemed a test of intimacy, a matter of sharing or cooperation. The glaring biological inequality of sex is thus equalized with politically correct narratives. Indeed, fucking is commonly distinguished from making love. The latter is supposed to be sex without the violence, or at least sex with an emphasis on the emotional bond. Making love is slower and more intimate, whereas fucking is animalistic, instinctive, and might as well occur between strangers (as it often does, even among adolescents in countries like the US). But, to use the euphemisms, lovers in the act of making love are still penetrating or being penetrated; theyre merely so filled with love hormones or with memories of shared experiences, that theyre able to overlook the acts humiliating biomechanics. To be clear, almost everyone who has ever had sex has been ashamed of it, though few would ever admit as much; otherwise, sex would be much more public and people wouldnt be offended were they asked merely to describe their sex life. Sure, popular Western cultures are filled with sex-related imagery, since sex sells, but not with images of sex itself. Porn is a booming business on the internet, but this is an exception that proves the rule since the internet facilitates the private consumption of porn. When we say that sex ought to be "private," were concealing our disgust with what sex demonstrates is our thoroughly animal and mortal nature. Of course, any such disgust or embarrassment is routinely overcome by the pleasure of sex, which is why animals have so much sex despite the burdens. Most animal species

496 lack the intelligence to understand irony and so theyre not faced with the existential predicament of being biologically driven to procreate even with an appreciation of sexs total lack of dignity. Sexual pleasure is now well-understood as a hormonal carrot held out to us by the genes so that we fulfill our evolutionary function. Moreover, this pleasure is tainted by the context in which naked bodies are forced to interact to achieve it: the male is forced to repeatedly stab the female, which induces the pair to mentally associate our ultimate creative act (the conception of human life) with our ultimate destructive one (murder). Sexual pleasure can therefore never be innocent or harmless. Putting aside rape or any minor physical harm that may be incurred while performing the voluntary sex act, sex is always existentially traumatizing because it shatters our idealistic self-image with our animalistic reality. In fact, this is the heart of sexs so-called naughtiness: sexual pleasure is the highest valued good, but its also accompanied by undertones of violence, aggression, abuse, and domination even if these undertones manifest only in fleeting images in our minds or in the choice of sexual position. You might be wondering whether theres any evidence of trauma caused by ordinary sexual intercourse; on the contrary, most people think, sex is normal and healthy. But the effects of trauma from the inequality built into sex are felt everywhere in society, ranging from patriarchy, to the battle between the sexes, to the mental compartmentalization needed to avoid angst, to the feminists over-reactive misandry. Sex is indeed normal, but social norms are seldom healthy. Luckily, our high intelligence is double-sided: were horrified by our mortality and our puppet-like nature, but were also able to ignore those sources of angst and to deal underhandedly with states of cognitive dissonance. Thus, we can enjoy sex even while sexs shocking, quite politically incorrect reality inevitably distorts our relationships. I questioned at the outset whether sexual love leads to happiness. Certainly, sex and intimate relationships are enjoyable, but far from being sources of happiness in the sense of contentment, they unsettle us with the threat of angst. This is why in our case the biological compulsion to procreate requires waves of politically correct defenses,

497 because were conscious and intelligent enough to appreciate sexs absurdity and to recoil from the prospect of being degraded as we perform our mammalian duty and invade our mates body or submit to such an invasion. Those who abstain from sex have even less of a chance at contentment, since theyre alienated from the highly sexual human world and must repress their sex drive. Whichever predicament you find yourself in, whether its hypocritically pretending to be a dignified, mature person in public while in private groping a naked body like the sort of wild beast you routinely consume for dinner, or whether its ascetically renouncing the force of cosmic creativity and abstaining from sex as an outcast, happiness is unbecoming. So the fragility of politically correct fantasies, such as those dispelled merely by uttering the F-word, is hardly lamentable.

498

Individualism and the Sexual Attraction of Opposites ____________________________________________________

In Platos dialogue Symposium, Aristophanes delivers a humorous speech that provides a mythical origin of sexual attraction. Aristophanes explains the romantic seeking for our complement in someone else, for our so-called soul mate, by imagining that humans were once physically very different: each member of an earlier form of our species had two heads, four arms, and four legs. As in the biblical Tower of Babel story, these creatures tried to storm heaven, and so the gods punished them, not by fragmenting their language, but by splitting each prehuman in two, condemning each of us now to long for reunion with our other half. Indeed, human sexual attraction is ripe for such satire, partly because of sexualitys conflict with the modern ideology of individualism. On the one hand, theres a natural heterosexual instinct, which causes most men and women to bond hormonally with a member of the opposite sex. The differences between the sexes are psychological as well as biological: notoriously, men and women think differently, thanks to our different hormones and evolutionary social roles; moreover, these gendered thought pattern are often opposed to each other. For example, while some female politicians, such as Margaret Thatcher, are just as capable of masculine vices as male ones, women are often noted for their disinclination to fall into the same traps as men when exercising political power. While testosterone-filled, often sociopathic men aggressively compete

499 for selfish advantage in a power hierarchy, estrogen-filled, baby-bonded women use their greater capacity for empathy to cooperate with their opponents to reach political compromises. The point, though, is that most men and women, who are psychologically at odds with each other, are naturally compelled to be yoked with such opponents, to live together as we fulfill our biological function of raising a family and preserving our genes after our death. On the other hand, modern men and women are beholden to the values of individualism, believing were each sovereign agents with rights of ownership over our private property, including our own bodies. This ideology is a secularized form of Western monotheism, substituting the rational, technoscientifically creative human for the divine Creator of the universe. Modernists believe that our intelligence, freedom, and consciousness dignify us, giving us intrinsic value and inalienable rights. This atomistic view of human nature glorifies the ego, the self-conscious, logical, and pragmatic side of ourselves that was so instrumental in the Scientific Revolution and thats celebrated in capitalistic democracies. According to the commonplace selective reading of Adam Smiths idea of the invisible hand, for example, social Darwinian capitalism is supposed to unleash the unintended altruistic consequences of the practically necessary vice of egoism (selfishness). The legitimacy of this ideology has come into question in our so-called postmodern period, due to hyper-skepticism, feminism, the hollowness of utopian rationalism, and the familiar oligarchic reality of individualistic societies. Nevertheless, the myths of secular individualism are the most influential replacements for those of anachronistic theism. Again, the clash between our natural embodiment and our cultural self-identification is embarrassing and worthy of ridicule. The film Pulp Fiction makes light of just this aspect of sexual attraction. The Bruce Willis character, Butch, is a tough, antiheroic boxer who we learn lives with his girlishly feminine girlfriend, Fabienne, rendering that title of hers literally true. Although shes an adult, psychologically shes an insecure child, preoccupied with adolescent fantasies and affecting infantile mannerisms. When theyre together, Butch is forced to engage in her baby-talk, concealing his macho impulses.

500 Meanwhile, Fabiennes girlish innocence is made hypocritical by her submission to Butch, that is, by the fact that shes attracted to the masculine ideal which is so opposite to her feminine one. Although this device serves several discernable roles in Pulp Fiction, which are irrelevant to my point, we can see the movies treatment of that duo as a caricature of most heterosexual relationships, as an exaggeration of the genderbased conflicts between most hapless life partners. (I leave aside here the complicated question of whether the foregoing analysis applies to homosexual couples.) The incongruity between sexual attraction and the ideal of individualism comes into view when we consider how the former deprives us of our intellectual integrity. After all, the emptiness of masculine and feminine ideals is revealed by their instrumentality: the instinct to be macho or submissive is thrown up by natural forces as a mere device, as a set of signifiers to attract a member of the opposite sex, and when we hold our gender role to be essential to our character, were duped by those forces. Moreover, were punished for that obliviousness, with the loss of our authentic character, as the union of opposites nullifies both extremes. Butch demonstrates his bravery and killer instinct by defeating evil foes, but the film deconstructs those antiheroic virtues, revealing them as mere pretenses, given Butchs underlying attraction to the opposite qualities of girlishness. A callous antihero cant simultaneously lay claim to the prerogatives of manliness and fulfill the nave expectations of a sissy. Thus, Butch must hide from Fabienne the depravities hes forced to commit when surviving in the hellish, sadomasochistic mans worlds of the boxing ring and the gun stores basement, just as shes forced to feign ignorance of Butchs beastliness even while shes hypocritically attracted to that very quality which is foreign to her. Granted, there would be a vicarious satisfaction in completing yourself by living through someone elses strengths, but this would reduce sexual love to an egoistic game, which in turn would spoil each lovers mood to maintain the modern fiction that he or she is loved as an individual and not as a means to a selfish end. Instead of being a method of vicarious self-completion, the sexual attraction of opposites typically thrives on delusion, which maintains the charade. The attraction becomes a repulsion as soon as were

501 forced to confront the contradiction between the ideals cherished by different sides of ourselves. Butch loves both his macho violence and Fabiennes nave innocence, and that requires mental partitions. When taking up his sword against demonic villains, he must surely banish the fear that only a sissy could care for a sissy, and that he therefore lacks the killer instinct to vanquish them. Again, a feminine woman tends to resort to similar self-mesmerism to maintain the illusion of her identitys coherence, pretending that her tough guy boyfriend is actually a baby, repeatedly calling him that as though she were chanting a mantra. With no loss of personal integrity, a girlish woman can, of course, love babies--along with unicorns, stuffed animals, and fairy tale ideals of romance. But just such a woman is infamous for being sexually attracted to her opposite, to the powerful, arrogant, sadistic alpha male. She retains the illusion of her dignity by hypnotizing herself into believing that her thug of a sexual partner is a helpless little baby who wuvs his wittle sweetums, calling him baby at every opportunity.

The Elements of our Sexual Comedy

As standup comedians know, theres no end to the wealth of ridiculous absurdities that can be mined from the material of human sexual attraction. But the main reason why that attraction is laughable is less appreciated. At its root, this comedy depends on the thrill of witnessing an arrogant persons comeuppance. Modernity delivers the pretense that were Lords of the Earth and thus that we neednt project that desire for godhood onto any nonhuman Creator. But that same source of our divinity, our technoscience, ironically delivers the news that were biochemical machines and playthings of cosmic evolutionary forces. We pride ourselves on our value as individual persons, as dignified, self-aware sovereigns, but were actually pets on Mother Natures leash. We pretend that were autonomous and responsible for our actions, but we now know were exploited by genes as vehicles for their replication. Thus, we value personal integrity and coherence of character, but those values are dragged through the mud by the true, horrifyingly mindless but still divinely creative forces, which compel us to betray our cultural ideals by playing the roles assigned us by our headless directors.

502

So why is most human sexual attraction now so laughable? Because the spectacle of that attraction affords us a view of modernitys implosion, leaving behind the postmodern wasteland. Sexual attraction reveals the secular heros tragic flaw: the noble, self-determining human Master of the Elements is compelled by instincts, hormones, and cultural signifiers to betray the ideals of modern myths and perform a degrading role. Most sexual attraction is between persons with more or less opposite characters and thought patterns (as well as sex organs). The gender differences are now largely vestigial, having originated in the prehistoric environment that selected a protohuman mammalian species for neurological adaptation, an environment that no longer obtains thanks to our selection of preferred habitats within the higher dimension of cultural possibilities. In any event, psychological as well as biological gender differences are byproducts of sexual reproduction, which is itself an evolutionary mechanism for preserving the genes from microscopic parasites. Again, in that higher, cultural dimension that highly intelligent animals inhabit, we invent myths to mitigate the alienation and horror which are curses of Reason. Theistic myths reigned for millennia until the Scientific Revolution replaced them with modern ideologies of rationalism and individualism. Ironically, these modern myths celebrate human achievements and glorify our nature while simultaneously sowing the poisonous seed of postmodern decline, castigating Faith and thus clearing a path for hyperskepticism. The modern individual, rationally sovereign over inner as well as outer nature, responsible for her mental states and exploiting universal physical processes; democratically empowered, capitalistically enriched, and humanistically virtuous: not gullible and submissive, but enlightened and courageously, freely pursuing personal happiness--this hero is brought to heel every day, yanked by the leash on which is found the tag with our natural identity scrawled across its face: Homo sapiens, clever mammal, inhabitant of the cosmic wilderness, with no owner; thus homeless, desperate, and properly horrified.

503 Masculinity and femininity are leashes that make fools of most modern men and women, proving our mammalian continuity with the other doomed species on Earth in spite of our fantasies of transcendence. We long to escape from our animal nature: even we progressive modern heroes, with a world of scientific knowledge and an army of machines at our fingertips, require delusions to rationalize the effects of that knowledge and power. But the modern myth of the heroic secular individual is openly mocked by our sexuality.The masculine man is forced to concede that the macho ideal holds no profound meaning of life, since this man is sexually driven to his opposite, like a child who pretends to prefer vegetables even as his hand reflexively reaches for candy. The feminine woman is also humbled by the farce of how she must act to attract what she most wants: she must be internally divided, playing submissive games to live with an aggressor. The comical discord between our natural role and our artificial modern ideal of selfdetermination extends even to the physical aspect of sexual attraction. The masculine man tends to have a firm, muscular body, so that his body type symbolizes his genders characteristics, yet this same man is usually attracted to a creature with the opposite body type, to a woman with a rounded, soft figure. Thus, the masculine man is forced into the ridiculous contortion of both prizing his muscles as symbolic of his mental toughness, and of sexually desiring to possess, by way of manhandling, a body type that bears the opposite significance. This striking contrast is displayed on the cover of most romance novels: the swooning female, a sample of her soft curves prominently unclothed, falls into the mans muscular arms. Thus, she proves the incoherence of her sexual appetite and her egoistic self-identification, as she must preserve her feminine beauty not just as a means to attract a mate, but to safeguard the symbol of her feminine individuality, even while her commitment to feminine values is negated by her lust for the symbol of masculine ones. I imagine the following response to this analysis of sexual comedy. Opposites sexually attract, to encourage humility and to challenge brave people who must test their wits in dealing with life partners with opposing personalities. Thus, for example, the Republican

504 Arnold Schwarzenegger married the Democrat Maria Shriver, and the Democratic consultant James Carville married the Republican consultant Mary Matalin. Birds of a feather may flock together, but individualistic humans prefer variety, the spice of life. This response makes a virtue out of necessity. Combative persons may well prefer to challenge themselves by associating with a variety of people, but this incidental reward of an adventurous social life doesnt render the above conflict any less ridiculous. Moreover, differences mustnt be mistaken for oppositions. Liberals and conservatives may have different political viewpoints, but if both types of people are politically active, as in the above two cases, they must also share a number of personal qualities. In the US, in particular, the marginal social differences between liberals and conservatives mask the economic consensus of the upper class, that they prefer a stealth oligarchy. Of course, most sexual relationships arent as ideally oppositional as the one between Pulp Fictions Butch and Fabienne, but each is more or less so and any irreconcilable, gender-based conflict between life partners threatens the credibility of modern individualism. If were supposed to be self-controlling, creative and powerful individuals, why must we belittle ourselves at evolutions behest, fleeing from our personal values out of lust for our relative opposite?

Transhuman Coda
The upshot is that sexual attraction in modern societies provokes the sort of gallows humour I speak of elsewhere. However, I want to close on an optimistic note. Another reaction to this conflict is to praise modernists for attempting to engineer a transcendent posthuman from the materials provided by the naturally selected human animal. Im not speaking of a biological transformation by genetic engineering or nanomachines, but of a psychological one, a global indoctrination that challenges not just stale theistic religions but natures leash around our necks. As hinted at above, this challenge wouldnt operate yet on the level of our physical form, but in the cultural dimension. After all, modern people really do feel happy, free, powerful and virtually omniscient. Paradoxically, modern secularists keep sexuality both highly public and private, so

505 despite the boon it provides the comedy industry, the clash Ive been speaking of here doesnt actually spoil many peoples illusions. We can speculate that a posthuman mind is an emergent phenomenon, a way of thinking that requires not just highly advanced hardware but a radical transhuman ideology that prepares us for our more total apotheosis. Modern individualism was devised largely with this progressive end of view. Rather than overturning anthropocentrism, Copernicus set in motion a secular, scientistic form of selfcenteredness. Descartes, for example, could doubt that everything but himself as a thinking thing is illusory; Kant contended that the all-important appearance of everything around us depends on our way of perceiving; and democratic and capitalistic thinkers counseled that we neednt fear a vast sharing of power with the common person, since everyone is sufficiently rational to deserve to freely fulfill their own needs. Comedy enters the stage when we observe the ironic contrast between that humanistic self-image and our baser reality as sexual animals. Nevertheless, that self-image may have its own emergent level of reality and causal power. As always, humour--along with angst--are found by stepping back and taking a wider perspective, temporarily detaching from our preoccupations and pondering how they fit into the bigger picture. I happen to doubt the nobility of any transhuman, or any modern autonomous person, who ignores the Leash and the cosmicism latent in free thinking. But perhaps rather than leading just to a postmodern dead end, modern individualism is a crutch that will enable us to live proudly alongside our evermore majestic technological creations. Maybe we must believe fervently in our individual worth to counteract the trend of cultural homogenization and the increasing psychological understanding of our universal cognitive processes. A myth that captures the imagination of huge populations is no arbitrary matter. Nevertheless, we shouldnt take ourselves so seriously.

Appendix: The Definition of Beauty

Beauty: in the human form, the biological equivalent of a backhanded compliment.

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One of the biological markers of facial beauty is averageness: those faces that stray from the human or from a racial average are considered plain or ugly, while faces that are most average are the most beautiful--and by average, I take it, the finding is that a beautiful face is the one whose measurements occupy middle positions and are thus average in the sense of the median rather than the mean or the mode. For example, most noses are either large or small, round or thin, whereas the beautiful nose falls somewhere in between. (See faceresearch.org/demos/average.) Of course, theres also a qualitative aspect of beauty, which is that the most normal face is commonly identified as the most desirable. This teleological aspect seems strongly influenced by Plato, the point being that normality reflects ideality: the most normal face, for example, stands as an exemplar of the abstract Form of the perfect face, a face that doesnt exist in nature, like the perfect circle or the perfectly straight line; meanwhile, actual faces strive to embody that ideal, as imperfect copies. Thus, we sometimes say someone is achingly beautiful, and the ache is due to the reminder when we behold such a face that the whole natural order is flawed compared to a more ideal realm that taunts most of us with such blatant evidence of our deficiencies. A similarly curious reaction to a beautiful body occurs when a male sees a curvaceous female and feels compelled to exclaim Damn!--short for "God damn that ass!" Often, the man who's struck by those curves is left with his eyes squinting and mouth agape from exasperation, as though he'd been punched in the gut. Why the apparent anger or frustration with such a beautiful sight? There are mundane reasons, such as the fact that seeing a womans extreme curves can cause a man to have an uncomfortable erection and may compel him to think, at least, of going through the time-consuming and humiliating rigmarole of wooing her. He may also be jealous of the shapely womans boyfriend or husband. But theres a deeper reason for the oddness of any hidden hostility to beauty, which is that we dread the prospect of an alien, supernatural realm that surpasses our

507 understanding. Whereas facial beauty is largely a matter of the faces abundant normality, the parts of a womans body most likely to arouse a curiously mixed reaction from a heterosexual man, which is to say her large and round, or phat, buttocks, are recognized for their strangeness. The mans reaction to a womans phat rear is similar to how a person would respond to the sight of an extraterrestrial creature: with shock, incomprehension, and even annoyance that the sight is so apparent even as it defies familiar categories. And so physical beauty can be otherworldly, symbolizing the limits of our understanding and thus the absurdity of our way of life from an objective or foreign perspective that transcends those limits. Thus, beauty can repel even as it attracts, like a backhanded compliment.

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Should we Procreate to Honour our Ancestors? ____________________________________________________

There are at least three pressures to procreate. First, theres the lure of pleasure from sex hormones that are released during sex. Humans have learned to control that pressure by separating the pleasure from procreation, with birth control techniques. Second, theres a limited time in which reproduction is biologically feasible, so that if youre interested in having children, youre pressured to do so within only a certain number of years. To some extent, humans have learned to control this pressure too, by setting up infrastructures for child adoption or for raising children by the extended family. Plus, you may not be interested in having children in the first place.

Procreation and the River of DNA

But the third pressure pertains to that question of interest, although this pressure is so mind-shattering that its seldom consciously considered. Every animal is chemically connected to what the biologist Richard Dawkins, in his book River Out of Eden, calls a river of DNA that stretches back to the origin of life on this planet. This is to say that were each alive not just because of the obvious facts that our parents reproduced and that their parents did as well, but because a continuous stream of our ancestors did so, including the evolutionary ancestors of our species and the ancestors of those ancestral species, and so on back to the simplest sexually reproducing organisms. This is a

509 biological fact rather than just a metaphor and the point isnt merely the abstract one that humans descended from other species; rather, each one of us, and each animal currently alive, is alive only because that animals germ cells were produced by its parents sperm and egg, which themselves were produced by their germ cells, which in turn were produced by that animals grandparents' sperm and egg, and so on, going back countless generations and thousands and millions and billions of years. Each one of us, therefore, was literally produced indirectly by certain dinosaurs, for example, who stomped around on prehistoric Earth long enough to procreate. The third pressure, then, is that when an animal fails to reproduce, for whatever reason, that failure is the termination of a multibillion-year-old chemical process that created millions of generations of creatures that necessarily succeeded in sexually reproducing. Theres the sense that although most of our ancestors, including our nonhuman ones, cant know when we fail to pass their genetic material to a new generation, we nevertheless let them down when we fail in that regard, since we render their struggles ultimately inconsequential. When a person dies without reproducing and raising a child to be able to carry on the genetic legacy, the person is a dam blocking the river of DNA from flowing onward. Did the river flow for countless miles and for billions of years, through its dinosaurian and mammalian host organisms, only to be stopped by Joe Blow, who slips on a sidewalk and dies prematurely or, even worse, who chooses not to have children even when he has the resources to honour his ancestors victories by letting their river of DNA flow through him as well? Theres the feeling that life is precious and that if everyone ceased reproducing, ending life on this planet, the loss to the universe would be unfathomable. Thus, when even a single person takes a step towards realizing that possible lifeless future, by failing to procreate, the person sins against the sacredness of life. In his post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy depicts the end of most life on Earth and the correspondingly increased pressure on a surviving father to keep the fire of life lit, to protect whats most precious, namely the life of his son, who represents the continuation of life after the fathers eventual death. According to this grim thought

510 experiment, then, we regard life as so precious that wed cheer for its continuation even when the world has ended and reasonable hope for happiness has been lost. The symbolism of the Olympic passing of the torch is apt here as well: if the torch represents life, we each have the solemn obligation to receive the torch from our parents and to pass it to a new generation, by having and raising kids ourselves. If we drop the torch, we literally cant even imagine the enormity of our blunder. For example, we lack the brainpower to empathize with each one of our millions of ancestors whose often triumphant survival we negate with that failure.

Should Life be Valued?

Is this third pressure to procreate real or imaginary? Is it like our fear of threats in the dark, caused by mere paranoia? Fear of the dark isnt necessarily irrational, though, for creatures who depend on their vision which in turn works best with adequate lighting. But is it likewise rational to think of the river of DNA or the passing of the torch as a reason to procreate? Only if life were precious, and this raises the question whether the high value of life in turn is justified. Most people who ever lived regarded life as precious because they assumed organic life was created by God who himself judges that life to be good. At any rate, given this theistic assumption, we wouldnt be merely imagining that a universe without life in it would be bad, since a nonhuman intelligence, whose perfect judgment wed have to respect, would deem it so. However, theism is no longer the default worldview, not after the Scientific Revolution and the influence of modern rationalism in philosophy and in public affairs. So suppose theres no viable theistic reason to believe that life is precious. Is our urgency to protect our DNA, to pass the torch, rational or irrational? This is to ask whether this urgency is caused ultimately by a fact of life that makes it worthy of our esteem. Perhaps the most promising reason to think theres such a fact derives from naturalistic philosophy, which posits our biological functions. A function is a purpose or a reason to exist. For example, the hearts physiological function is to circulate blood, and an organisms evolutionary function may be, in large part, to sexually reproduce. In the

511 case of artifacts that we create, like shovels or computers, their functions are normative, and so we can speak of a shovels failure when it breaks and is unable to fulfill its function, because the shovel doesnt measure up to its designers or its users intention. Once we dispense with theism, there is no intention behind the design of a so-called biological function, because natural selection has no plan. At most, then, the host organism that uses its organs could be let down when those organs malfunction, and so we could speak of the value of body parts to the user of those parts. This would locate the value of life, though, in our own minds rather than in some objective fact. Were we to change our mind, or our plan for our body parts, wed alter the normative status of their biological functions, just as nothing would prevent a shovels function from changing were we all to favour some new use for it. Again, were someone to commit suicide, deeming her life to be worthless, there would be no fact of the matter to counter her negative evaluation, assuming the preciousness of life is due to a biological purpose that has only that subjective use value. Suppose this suicidal person is a hermit with no social ties to anyone, so that no one indirectly makes use of her functional body parts. For example, suppose she has no employer who makes use of her brain. In that case, there wouldnt be even a conflicting subjective basis for her lifes value. As soon as she deems her life to be worthless, her judgment would make it so. Therefore, were life to have factual value because of evolutionary purposes, these purposes would have to depend on something other than the goals of the user of the functional body parts. Without theism, the only alternative is a version of panspermia, according to which life on Earth was seeded by intelligent extraterrestrials. This only pushes the question back a step, since now wed have to ask whether we could trust the judgment of those imperfect intelligent designers and whether the preciousness of their own life is factual or delusory. These considerations dont prevent some naturalistic philosophers and biologists like Dawkins himself from smuggling normative judgments into their talk of natural selection and of biological functions. Dawkins shows us the genes perspective as the immortal gene sends its instructions to protein machinery that builds its host

512 bodies, discarding generations of them as it floats along waves of sexual reproduction. The sole merit of this extended metaphor of the "selfish gene," however, is its usefulness in simplifying a complex biological theory. We should remind ourselves that this metaphor doesnt report any scientific discovery that genes actually have a perspective or that they instruct machines. These anthropomorphic images are empirically gratuitous. At the genetic level, evolution is a chemical process, whereas in the well-understood case of the function of artifacts, the functions value derives from intentions which are psychological. So if genes have no minds, they cant confer any value to the body types they help produce. Likewise, if the process of natural selection has no mind of its own, neither can it confer any such value. It seems, then, that biology gives us no reason to think that life is precious as a matter of fact. On the contrary, by replacing Creationism and theistic Intelligent Design theories, evolutionary biology supplies us with abundant reasons to think that, like any physical system that exists ultimately as a matter of inexplicable brute fact (due to a random quantum fluctuation that produced the big bang and natural laws, for example), life is objectively, factually worthless. Indeed, to speak of worth in the absence of the mind of a beholder is to commit a category error. What this means is that if we subtract our personal goals and standards which were free to change, and restrict our attention to natural facts that are what they are regardless of whats in our immediate--mental as opposed to bodily--capacity to affect, we find that as far as biologists are entitled to say, life has no value one way or the other. There would be no more objective loss were life to wink out of existence than were an asteroid, traveling along its path for millions of years like the DNA river, to be suddenly blown apart. Again, whats at stake here is that, roughly speaking, if life isnt precious theres no failure in dying without procreating, in the sense of any dishonour to the ancestors. More precisely, if theres no objective fact that makes life precious, the high value we put on life would depend entirely on our lifeaffirming interests which wed be free to change. But this suggests another basis for thinking that life has a kind of objective value. Instead of biology, we can turn to society. Even were lifes value to depend entirely on

513 our minds, we have limited control over them. In particular, we have the most control over merely our own mental states, and few if any people can affect how everyone in a society thinks or feels. So if lifes value derives from a social convention, the value is objective and factual in that the value persists regardless of what each person individually has to say about it. Only were the social convention widely rejected and were most of a population thus to regard life, say, as profane rather than sacred, would lifes corresponding value change. Presumably, such a society would implode and so wouldnt remain long to influence other peoples attitude toward life, which is a Darwinian reason why social conventions tend to be life-affirming. Still, a convention can be more or less justifiable. Some conventions can even be absurd, so while the true source of the third pressure on people to procreate may be that of mass preference, this doesnt afford much of a reason to procreate. As I said, weve decreased the first two pressures, and an individual, if not society as a whole, can shrug off the third by reminding herself that just because someone else acts questionably doesnt mean she has to follow. For example, just because nonNietzschean secularists cling to outmoded theistic values doesnt mean all secularists should do so.

Evolution as a Ponzi Scheme

If life isnt precious, and thus the river of DNA doesnt make for a good reason to have and to raise children, how should we regard life? There are more than the two possibilities Ive so far discussed, that life is either precious or of no value at all. If we assume that life has no objective or factual value, because it exists ultimately as a brute fact, theres still the question of whether life should be subjectively valued and if so, what that value should be. Ill assume that life should somehow be so valued or at least that most people cant help but be somehow interested in their own and in other creatures lives. And Ill assume the post-Nietzschean context in which theistic values are for clueless zombies. Instead of deluding ourselves with faulty evaluations that no longer make sense, what story should we tell ourselves about the strange existence of

514 living things? What myth about the value of life has a chance of compelling authentic nontheists? Ill assume also, as a starting place, the existential conviction that human life especially is absurd and tragic. Were the victims of a perfect cosmic storm: weve evolved to be social and thus to be skilled mind-readers, and so we think in anthropocentric terms, positing not just gods but meanings and purposes where there are objectively none; we instinctively delude ourselves, clinging to comforting, politically correct fairytales even while our consciousness, reason, and freedom alienate us from the rest of the world; were self-conflicted, and the culprits, natural selection, the genes, and the laws of nature have no ears to hear our complaints. Job could call on Yahweh to answer his accusations, but we who understand such anthropomorphism as childish or lazy have no such recourse. Ultimately, were destined to be unfulfilled, to prefer what can never be, to be pawns in a game played by impersonal forces that we cant help but personalize. In these facts lie the ridiculousness and the grotesqueness of our existential situation. With these assumptions in mind, Id say that instead of a river or a sport of passing a torch that holds the precious flame, a more fitting metaphor for the profound continuity between sexually reproducing creatures in a genetic lineage is that of the Ponzi scheme. In this fraud, insiders steal money from a multitude of ignorant followers, by selling them on a false promise that if they invest, theyll each receive a high return. As long as enough people continue to believe the promise and to invest their share, the insiders can temporarily siphon funds for their own enrichment and pay back a limited number of contributors to maintain the appearance of a thriving business. What makes this a fraud is that the promise to the mass of investors is a lie: were everyone to be rewarded as promised, the business would collapse, and indeed the business cant sustain itself in the long-term. The scheme requires that there be a minority of insiders with secret knowledge who manipulate fresh legions of fooled outsiders whose investments replenish the system.

515 The proliferation of creatures by sexual reproduction can be likened to a Ponzi scheme. The fooled majority are those who in nonhuman species have no conception of their existential situation or, in the case of humans, who are misled by theistic delusions into believing that living things are precious. The same neural mechanisms that cause the projection of psychological categories onto inhumane natural processes compel the majority to anticipate a lavish payoff in heaven if they follow divine commandments, by multiplying and respecting Gods creatures. Some can interpret their relative success and happiness on Earth, at least, as preliminary rewards for their contributions to the kingdom of heaven, while unhappy folk obey and are seemingly punished for no known reason. But if there are no gods, who are the sophisticated insiders that exploit the system? I submit that the authentic nontheists can occupy that role. Granted, they dont direct natural selection or even necessarily concoct the religious narratives that propel the fraud, but they can exploit the system in which we all find ourselves. This is because only the authentic, post-Nietzschean nontheists understand the absurd, tragic nature of that system. Only the insiders realize that human life has persisted despite our exclusive ability to comprehend the horrifying truth, because of our compensating capacity for self-delusion. How, though, can the existentialist profit from natures Ponzi scheme? Some charlatans pretend to be religious and, as televangelists, cult leaders, or pandering politicians, exploit peoples gullibility, literally stealing from them and setting up classic mini Ponzi schemes within the greater one that perpetuates our species as a whole. I reject that option as distasteful. A more minor but aesthetically more refined payoff for the secular insider is schadenfreude, amusement at other peoples expense. The value of life is that in the minds of insiders, our tragedy can be transmuted into a comedy, and the profit for sophisticated observers who exploit the victims of the evolutionary Ponzi scheme is their extraction of humour from the haplessness of their more ignorant fellows. Insiders should laugh inwardly, if not also outwardly, at the expense of adult humans who, despite their godlike cognitive powers, act like hallucinating children.

516 What does this mean for procreation? On the one hand, the insider can bear children and raise them as insiders, spreading the wealth of schadenfreude. Should the offspring wilt under social pressures and become duped outsiders, victims of the cosmic Ponzi scheme, the parent may be forced to pass them off as hot potatoes, exploiting them too for bittersweet pleasure. Here, then, is a mixed reason for even the authentic nontheist, who regards life as objectively worthless and as subjectively ridiculous and largely tragic, to procreate. On the other hand, merely coping with knowledge of our dark existential situation requires great stamina and toughness. Facing the prospect of bursting a childs balloon by informing her that most people who ever lived have lived as unknowing clowns or puppets, as victims of a monstrous system of natural forces that renders the whole human endeavour laughable at best, may be daunting for even the stout cosmicist. Then again, facing the potential tragedy that your own child may be mesmerized by politically correct fictions and join the unknowing mass of cosmic victims has a silver lining, since ignorance can be bliss. I see, then, no obvious implication as to whether an authentic nontheist, a post-Nietzschean cosmicist and existentialist should procreate. This depends on the individuals fortitude and capacity to derive pleasure from circumstances that might just as well be interpreted as exquisitely painful.

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Part Four: Pop Culture

____________________________________________________ Ethics and Culture Entertainment Mental Health

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Modernism and Postmodernism ____________________________________________________

In my rants here Ive been throwing around the words modern and postmodern, and Id like to set forth what I mean by that highly general, and thus potentially quite useful distinction.

Modernism
In my view, the essential difference between the modern and the postmodern is that modernity is the purported cultural progress, in architecture, painting, music, mass media, and philosophy, resulting from the Scientific Revolution, while postmodernity is the cultural disarray resulting from the depletion of the fuel needed for that progress. The fuel in question is faith in what postmodernists call the modern master metanarrative or myth which I call Scientism. This myth presumes that society in general can progress just as well as can institutional science, that just as scientists discover how nature operates according to laws, we can discover the rules of how we ought to behave and were able to follow those rules and so progress towards a perfect union. In either case, the abilities needed for that progress are, first of all, Reason as opposed to tradition, authority, intuition, faith, or revelation, but also the scientistic virtues (or vices, depending on your viewpoint) that motivate the modern experiment. These virtues include intellectual curiosity; optimism about our cognitive potential,

519 including our abilities to discover, to comprehend, and to digest the natural truths; and pride in the autonomy and dignity of hyper-rational scientists and their analogues in the other social spheres. In short, modernism, the set of ideas implicit in the cultural phenomenon of modernity, is equivalent to secular humanism, to the ideology that reason, freewill, and sentience render us godlike, equipping us with the potential not just for omniscience through scientific methods, but for happiness and prosperity. The so-called New World of North America, colonized by Europeans, became the testing ground for the modern hypothesis that social progress is possible by liberally employing reason in all walks of life, without hindrance from tradition or special interests. In particular, the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence enshrined the values of secular humanism. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the stated or implicit rights of people in a capitalistic, democratic society. Those three values are maintained, first, by using relatively unrestricted science to produce lesser goods as demanded by an equally unrestricted marketplace, that is, by a population thats allowed to develop its own desires instead of having them controlled by a powerful institution like the Church; and second, by relying on the wisdom of rational, free citizens to hold the reigns of political power through elections of political representatives. Theoretically, then, the Western success in using technoscience to raise the standard of living with machines (robots or armies of human labourers) that mass produce goods to satisfy basic needs and whims alike, is cause for celebrating the modern metanarrative. Whats become apparent, instead, is that modern history is greater cause for mourning. Scientism, in the sense of faith in social progress through hyper-rationality (the application of reason throughout society at the expense of nonrational sources of beliefs), is widely regarded as bankrupt. This is because the promised progress has either not materialized or been revealed as a charade. Far from dignifying people in a modern society, capitalism and democracy degrade the majority, both at home and abroad. Democracy and capitalism are vulnerable to hijacking from special interests that replace the Catholic Churchs autocrats in the medieval period. These modern

520 oligarchs are the wealthiest managers and bankers who use technoscience to consolidate their power, including public relations to demagogue the masses, supercomputers to manipulate the stock market, and scientifically-managed political campaigns to ensure that only Serious, Centrist politicians, friendly to the permanent oligarchy, are nominated and elected. In the British industrial revolution, material goods were produced by virtual slaves under horrendous conditions, reestablishing a class of miserable labourers to service the elites decadence. (Something similar is presently happening in capitalist China.) After the New Deal and WWII, the American middle class was created, raising the standard of living for most Americans and not just for the upper crust, but this entailed the exporting of American manufacturing jobs to third world peoples who live in relative squalor, so that once again life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness depend on a gross power inequality between consumers and producers. The cheaper the goods are produced, the more profit for owners of the means of production and the cheaper the price for consumers; but the wealthier the consumers, the greater their pride and thus the less content they are actually to get their hands dirty and work hard to produce their luxuries. Of course, the Great Depression, the World Wars, and the many genocides of the last century helped to disabuse modern folk of the scientistic myth of progress. One of the natural truths discovered by scientists and engineers is the means to create the nuclear bomb. This weapon of mass destruction ended WWII but also threatens us with Armageddon, with the final war. Whether we can digest that particular piece of scientific knowledge depends on whether were smart and noble enough to manage nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, as cognitive scientists have investigated human nature itself, weve learned that were not nearly as rational, free, or as conscious as modernists boast in their humanistic myth. For the most part, were deluded, easily manipulated animals whose capacities for reason, freedom, and consciousness are islands floating on seas of biases and preferences for fallacies, biochemical and physical processes that determine our behaviour, and unconscious, modular neural programs.

521

Postmodernism
And so we arrive at the postmodern malaise, at the disenchantment, cynicism, apathy, and nihilism that follow from the collapse of the justifications for the modern project. To be sure, modern infrastructures, including the institutions of science, democracy, and capitalism remain intact. Whats collapsed is peoples confidence in the utopian benefits of those institutions. Modernists are hyper-rational whereas postmodernists are hyperskeptical, meaning that modernism presupposes the excellence of reason and of the secular humanistic character, whereas the postmodernist doesnt take those valuations for granted, but systematically deconstructs all metanarratives so that, through her, Reason destroys itself and the Promethean hero. For example, the philosopher David Hume pointed out that no one perceives a unified self through ordinary introspection; instead, we perceive a not-so-godlike bundle of associated thoughts and feelings. And Nietzsche called attention to the will to power that lies behind pretenses to pure rationality. More recently, academic postmodernists reject all manner of authority by cynically reducing the epistemic value of any statement to an expression of some personal quality of the speaker. For example, the pragmatist Richard Rorty maintained that instead of pretending to be objective seekers of absolute truth, we should admit that ideological differences are based on nothing more than feelings of social solidarity. One of the defining characteristics of postmodernism, then, is endless selfconsciousness: a postmodernist has no religious faith, takes nothing for granted, and so is preoccupied with unmasking other peoples delusions and underhanded stratagems for acquiring power, and with proving that she herself is innocent of such sins. Always on guard against hoodwinking with a myth that merely masks the speakers crude personal agenda, the academic postmodernist speaks in concentric circles of qualifications and apologies, taking back with one hand whats offered with the other so that nothing is left but noise and the stench of condescension. And thus, more broadly, postmodern culture is filled with self-referential phenomena like The Simpsons and the Scream movies; what Jay Rosen calls savvy journalism that pretends to be neutral and

522 objective; the postmodern novel that eschews character and plot as modern devices for reinforcing faith in absolute knowledge of a pre-established order; the postmodern painting or sculpture which is celebrated not for its beauty but for its demonstration of the artists impudence; and disposable postmodern pop music which consumers prefer to steal on the internet, because of its worthlessness. Ironically, then, postmodernism brings to fruition the modern exploration of the self. When the Church lost its control over European thought, as medieval merchants acquired their own economic power and Renaissance ideals took hold, making way for the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the Europeans cognitive capacities were further unleashed in the Enlightenment. Modernism is largely the celebration of that growing freedom of thought. Modern painters, for example, created abstract works to experiment with the artistic media, traversing the range of our possible modes of expression. The more closely we look at ourselves, though, without the blinders of religious dogmas, the more unsettled we are by the disparity between what we wish we were, according to premodern or modern myths, and what we actually are. In the postmodern period, we look at ourselves and see not dignified, rational, godlike beings, but enslaved, selfish, largely irrational dupes or alienated cynics. As to what I personally take from postmodernism, I agree that modern metanarratives have run their course. However, I reject postmodern nihilism and fatalism, and the contention that no conceivable myth is suitable or necessary to live an elevated life. In fact, true nihilism is probably impossible for any human being, since were hardwired to resolve our disparate experiences with a coherent worldview, which requires the engagement with philosophy; to express our emotions in a normative distinction between what we regard as sacred or profane; and to justify that distinction even in the inevitable absence of sufficient reason, taking a leap of faith. The most general stories we tell to rationalize those human practices are myths. As Nietzsche and Joseph Campbell said, the difficulty is creating, in effect, a suitable postmodern myth, a myth that enchants even after science disenchanted the world.

523 Granted, as I say in my rant on scientism, following Erik Davis thesis in Techgnosis, David Nobles The Religion of Technology, and other works, we should expect that the scientific disenchantment of nature is only superficial. So-called postmodern secular culture has its religious aspects, but the myth that best captures the postmodern zeitgeist is as yet unclear to me. What I mean is that identifying just what we authentically believe, deep down, in our postmodern culture, about ourselves and our place in the universe, is exceedingly difficult. There are still plenty of vestigial modern or premodern myths (philosophies of life) which must be discarded as irrelevant. Moreover, many unknowing postmodernists and victims of efficient public relations campaigns are beholden to mere memes, delusions, or propaganda, which dont rise to the level of myths. Certainly, theres no shortage of postmodern philosophy, but much of this philosophy is pretentious posturing and gamesmanship, gibberish, or dreadful prose poetry that doesnt come to grips with the modern inheritance that surely mustnt be abandoned, which is modern sciences accumulation of empirical knowledge.

524

The Philosophy of Existential Cosmicism ____________________________________________________

Whats the difference between truths and facts? Truth requires living things whereas facts dont. There could be a universe of facts even with no intelligent creatures to appreciate them, but there would be no truth in a lifeless universe, because truth is a relationship between facts and what are called symbols or representations of those facts, and symbols are tools used by living things. To see the difference, suppose theres a lifeless world in a distant galaxy, and on that world theres a range of mountains and also a lake with waves that lap against a sandy beach. Now suppose that by chance, as the froth is deposited onto the beach, the froth creates the spitting image of those mountains, picturing their peaks and valleys as they would have been seen were someone standing on that beach. In this case, there would be physical facts of how the mountains are arranged and of their different sizes, but there would be no truth in the froths accidental map of those facts, because the froth wouldnt be a tool used by any creature in its dealings with the world. Now, from a highly objective perspective, the difference between the froths picture of the mountains, and a persons thought that one mountain is larger than another vanishes; in each case, we might say, theres just a pair of patterns that happen to match in some respects. The information in the waves can be mapped onto the information in the mountains, just as the neural activity in the viewers brain could be

525 mapped onto what shed view, were she standing on that beach. So maybe neither a fact nor a truth needs any living user of information, after all; maybe truth is just a certain abstract correspondence between patterns. This is how some philosophers think of truth, as an isomorphism between certain sets of data. And indeed, when this match between patterns is lacking, you dont have truth and you may even have falsehood, but this match alone isnt enough: one of the patterns must be made up of symbols, and to have symbols you need meaning. A pattern, like a picture of mountains or the sentence, One of those mountains is larger than the other, carries meaning in relation to the mountains if that pattern is directed towards them. But what is it for one thing to be thusly about something? I think we can answer this by comparing symbols to something like guidelines on the tarmac used by a pilot to land the plane. The lines hook up with the pilot in the cockpit (through his eyes and his brain) and direct the plane to its landing position, which is where the pilot wants to go. In the same way, mental symbols--our thoughts, feelings, images, and other mental states--facilitate our negotiations with the outside world. They do this by their useful associations with other mental states, as in a train of thought, and by their access to our motor responses, so that we can intelligently move our body, guided by that inner map. Mental symbols have those features because theyre made up of highly interconnected brain states which, of course, have executive control over the body. So what is it for a symbol to mean something? This kind of meaning has at least two aspects. First, if you put certain symbols together under certain circumstances, such as the time and place of their occurrence, their directedness towards something adds up to a truth relation, as Ive said, or else lives up to some other ideal, as in the case of motivational symbols, which Ill come to in a moment. By itself, this first criterion of meaning is relatively trivial since, as the above thought experiment shows, any patterns might match by chance or else might be interpreted as matching by some arbitrary hermeneutic principle. Second, though, even when theyre not so put together, as in the case of isolated words that arent used to form a sentence, symbols guide the symbolusers use of that to which the symbols are directed, such as the referent. The semantic

526 relation, then, is like a path extending from the symbol-user to something that might be used, and the path features relevant tools that give the user options in dealing with what the symbol potentially directs the user toward. Again, these other tools consist of the associated symbols, each taking the user down a slightly different path, and also of the symbols access to the users body, which allows action to be intelligently guided. A symbols reference to something, then, is invisible because that meaning is a set of potential relationships between symbol-user and the referent. Indeed, symbols tend to be public property, so the referent isnt just an idiosyncratic interpretation of whats out there, like the mountain range, but the conventionally relevant information pertaining to mountains in general. If a mental symbol is a tool, like a shovel, is it just the symbol that has this one-way relation to something, called in this case the symbols meaning? In fact, all tools are likewise directed towards something in what we can call an active-passive relationship. Just like a fact-related symbol (a concept or belief), we use a shovel to achieve some goal in the real world. Like a symbol, a shovel presents us with a way of interacting with parts of the world, depending on the shovels capacities. A shovel is normally used to dig holes, but it can be used for other purposes as well; moreover, like a symbol, a shovel can be misused: for example, a shovel would make for a poor toothpick. Just as the thought of shovels presents the thinker with an array of options, as the relevant information streams across her inner vision like the Terminators cynical assessments of its surroundings, an actual shovel triggers the users relevant know-how when the use of the shovel becomes second nature to her. (On this point, see Andy Clarks book, Natural-Born Cyborgs, and the philosophical theory of the extended mind.) So the opportunity to apply a symbol in various potential ways directs the user to the world, while other, non-semantic tools direct the user to something in a similar sort of activepassive relationship (the user does things to the used). What gives neural activity or the word shovel, but not an actual shovel, semantic content? Concepts and linguistic symbols are digital rather than analogue, meaning that their physical or biological characteristics are irrelevant to the user, whereas a shovels

527 size, shape, and so on are crucial to the users ability to carry out the shovels function. True, as I said, mental representations can drive behavior only by physically tapping into the brains motor center, but the user is typically quite unaware of the mechanisms involved. When you think of shovels, youre aware only of a rush of cognitive associations, images, memories, and feelings. But when you pick up a shovel, your know-how consists of your experience with the shovels physical properties: for example, you have to learn which is the business end, how to bend your back to get enough leverage, and so on. A non-symbolic tools active-passive relation to whats used by means of the tool is thus less ghostly, as it were, than the abstract relation between a symbol and what the symbol is about. But note that the more complex the technology, the more the lay user is inclined to assign the equivalent of a semantic relation between the machine and whatevers acted upon by the machine. That is, when were mystified as to how a machine works, we treat the fulfillment of its function as a kind of magic, attributing the machines effectiveness to ghostly forces or to angels or other spirits. For example, a computers electrical connections to its peripherals might as well be digital, semantic relations, since our bodies hardly come into contact with most of the computers parts, just as were mostly ignorant of how the neural basis of a thought works. This second aspect of meaning is, of course, a pragmatic one, and it can be used to distinguish facts from truth. Again, truth is a match between two patterns, where one of those patterns consists of symbols, and symbols are tools that guide action, helping the user to succeed in some fashion (to satisfy certain wants or needs). By contrast, facts are how things are either before theyre so used or when something is considered objectively, independent of any such particular use. For example, physical facts of mountains pertain to what mountains would be like even were there no such thing as symbols or their users. Facts pertaining to artificial kinds, like toys, clothing, or symbols themselves, which wouldnt exist without symbol-users, are what these kinds are like regardless of any independent interpretation. In the case of a highly subjective item, like an art work, there may be no facts of the matter but just a host of symbolic pathways

528 leading to no common ground and just connecting symbol-users as they trade their interpretations. This way of distinguishing facts and truths raises the question of normativity, since the practical aspect of symbols entails that some uses of symbols are more successful than others. Thus, the symbols that relate creatures to facts depend on a separate, more obviously normative class of symbols, which we can call desires. Suppose someone wants to climb a mountain, but instead of acquiring useful gear for the endeavor, the climber uses a shovel to dig his way underneath the mountain, saying If I dig deep enough, I might just climb this mountain. In this case, theres a mismatch between the persons goal and his means of achieving it. One of these means is his inner, cognitive tool, his mental representation of mountains, which differs strangely from the standard concept of mountains. If your goal is to stand on top of the mountain, you need a useful mental representation to guide your planning and your actions. And if you fail miserably in achieving your goal, theres a greater chance that you lack the relevant concept in the first place. Moreover, the more limited a species goals, that is, the simpler its habits and its life cycle, the fewer symbols its members possess. The pragmatic aspect of meaning, then, is normative, because actions depend on intentions, and intentions spring from character or from disposition, which consists of a mix of virtues and vices, according to an ethical or aesthetic ideal for judging such things. Instrumentally speaking, the efficiency of tool-use can be evaluated just in case the tool achieves the goal; that is, the tools value can be relative just to the specific desire, so that the use is neutral with respect to any ideal that governs the value of desires themselves. For example, a murderers use of a weapon can be more or less effective in achieving his goal even though that goal is evil. But then theres the deeper rightness or wrongness of our goals. Goals motivate us to act and thus drive our use of fact-directed symbols, charging them with meaning. Moreover, goals range from those which are unique to each person to those of wider and wider social networks, such as family, country, and the whole set of language speakers, including the long dead ones whose past experiences help shape the present meaning of words; on top of those,

529 there are the species-wide instincts we inherit from evolution. Each of these motivations pressures the symbol-user to take up symbols and walk down the path that leads to some use of the referent. The more general the motivation, the more well-worn the path and the greater the impact on the symbols particular meaning. For example, the lay concept of mountains includes just the stereotypical information thats useful for fulfilling most peoples potential use of mountians, including the facts that a mountain is an abrupt rising of the earths surface, rising to an altitude greater than that of a hill, which amount to a warning that you shouldnt trifle with a mountain. After all, a mountain has many other properties, but only the practically relevant ones, given most peoples interests, are picked out by the standard concept of mountains. The word mountain has several senses, though, and the context of the particular speakers interest will decide in which sense the word or thought is intended. Our mental tools can be divided roughly into beliefs and desires. Beliefs aim towards facts, and the aiming is a matter of the beliefs usefulness in achieving some potential objectives. The concept of mountains contains information that helps us deal with mountains, and this information includes the concepts associations with relevant concepts, such as those of hills, rugged terrain, avalanches, and so on. By contrast, desires aim towards not something in the actual world, but towards a possibility wed prefer to be factual. You can think about this in terms of possible worlds. If a belief is true, it usefully connects the believer to part of the actual world, and if the belief is false it connects the believer to a possible, counterfactual world. Some misuse of symbols can be counterproductive or useful, depending on whether the symbol is used in a lie or in a comforting delusion. Now, a desire connects the symbol-user not just to any possible world, but to a preferred one, and the preference derives from a value, ideal, or a vision of how the facts should be. Typically, a desire motivates the user to take some action to conform the actual world with that vision, but some desires, like hopes, dont have that effect. In any case, a belief, or an objective fact-directed symbol, is supposed to live up to the ideal of truth, as it were, while a desire, or a preferred-fact-directed symbol,

530 is governed by some other ideal. And the pragmatic aspect of beliefs connects beliefs to desires: we use beliefs to guide our actions, because we prefer a certain state of the world, and beliefs help us maintain or produce that state.

The Meaning of Asceticism

The normative aspect of meaning raises three issues that will lead us to consider existential cosmicism. First, is there a goal presupposed by all human symbol-use, which is partly what enables us to distinguish between symbols and non-symbols, and if so, whats that goal? Second, assuming there is such a goal, is the corresponding notion of success deficient according to a higher ideal? Third, how can we explain the emergence of normativity (of values, ideals, and so on) without committing the naturalistic fallacy? As I said, the particular context of each use of a symbol may affect its meaning, but theres an underlying role of symbols, which is the biological one. Our mental categories are tools used by the genes to manipulate us to survive, reproduce, and transmit the genetic information to the next generation. I discuss one such method of control in Cosmicism and Technology, where I point out that the source of our anthropomorphic projections onto alien nature, which usefully delude us, sparing us the ravages of existential angst, is the associational aspect of our neural nets. We understand something by relating it to whats more familiar, and were most familiar with how we appear to ourselves. Thus, one such underlying purpose of symbol-use is to protect the genotype, by deluding the genes host: we instinctively and naively presume the world is personal and humane. As in all biological purposes or functions, though, the appearance of intelligent design is a trick of human perception. All of nature is mysteriously neither alive nor lifeless, but undead like a zombie abomination. What this means is that the use of people by our genes is merely apparent; theres no ghost in the machine, but spiritless matter is more active than any known biological life, having mindlessly evolved the whole universe.

531 Another such underlying purpose of symbol-use derives from reason: we play with symbols in a social game of climbing to the apex of our dominance hierarchy, thus again earning privileged positions for our progeny and our genetic lineage, and distracting ourselves with those ulterior pseudomotives instead of taking a good look at our existential predicament. Reason evolved as a tool for Machiavellian manipulation, for spin-doctoring and the rhetorical art of persuasion, for the sake of protecting our personal brand, that is, our status in the tribe. Thus, our typical thought patterns are rife with biases and fallacies, as cognitive science shows. The answer to the first question, then, is that there is such an underlying purpose, and its well-symbolized by the fiction of the machines self-serving maintenance of the matrixs virtual reality. In effect, the primary users of symbols are the genes and the other forces of natural selection, which build our bodies including our instincts to think and react in ways that further the overriding process which is the evolution of biological life. How is this relevant to the meaning of our thoughts? Well, if Im right and meaning is like the line on the tarmac that guides a pilots landing of the plane--except that a thought is connected to a fact only by a ghostly version of such a line, namely by the opportunity for the symbol-user to act on that fact, afforded by the thoughts ability to control the users body--then a symbol is directed towards something mainly by our naturally evolved opportunities. The force of natural selection is like a fleet of machines that digs a maze of paths leading from each of us to various ports of call, and most of our activity in life is confined to that pre-existing infrastructure. Our opportunities to influence the world are naturally limited by how we tend to think and by what our bodies can do, which limits are culturally and biologically set. Within those limits, we can choose to take one path or another, as we put our symbols together in different combinations to suit our parochial interests; we can modify the pre-established landscape, changing the meaning of our symbols as cultures and languages develop, digging new pathways and opening up new opportunities. But the main driving force of symbol-use, which sets symbols apart from non-symbols, by giving symbols meaning and thus a causal role in the symbol-users behavior, is that of natural selection, which

532 is to say that theres a foreign zombie hand reaching into everyones head, infecting us with the plague of undeadness and coercing us to shamble along well-worn roads. As to the second question, indeed I think there are higher ideals and thus what we might call a transhuman use of symbols, that is, a way that truly sets us apart from most animal species. Most thinking is done directly or indirectly in the service of our zombie masters, the micro machines and environmental forces that build our bodies; these thought patterns include the politically correct myths and conventions that distract and delude us, appealing to our vanity even as the narratives act as blinders and leashes around our necks. For thousands of years, though, theres been the spiritual, mystical, ascetic alternative, reformulated in existentialist terms after the World Wars. This esoteric culture for detached, angst-ridden outcasts, misfits, seekers, and mentally unbalanced freaks of nature is governed by anti-natural ethical or aesthetic standards that put us at odds with the natural world and thus with ourselves. In religious terms, the goal is to escape our cosmic prison, what I call the decaying corpse of the undead god, and this liberation is accomplished by saying No! a thousand times to natural impulses, to abstain from many biological and mainstream cultural endeavours, to malfunction, as it were, condemning nature as a monstrosity and throwing a wrench into the works. Ascetic, existential rebellion against natural processes is ethical, because it calls for the ultimate virtues of self-knowledge and integrity. Perhaps more importantly, this rebellion is aesthetic in that it amounts to any creatures supremely creative act. You might be wondering, if nature is an undead monstrosity inhabited by mini undead monsters, how could one way of life be better than another? Surely, then, its all just rot and decay, the spiritless shuffling along of physically interacting chunks of matter, yielding more and more complex patterns of monstrosity, from molecules to galaxies to alternate dimensions and universes. But this is the point: one such emergence seems to be natures ability to deny itself, to look upon itself in horror, through the mystics eyes, and to reject our position as instruments in Mother Natures experiment on this planet. Plato interpreted the rise of abstraction in normative terms, so that the more general the

533 phenomenon the better it is, with mathematical objects, for example, being better than particular physical things which he saw as copies of their categories. I would replace his measure of abstraction with that of complexity, and instead of calling the increase in emergent complexity generally good, Id call it beautiful solely in the sense that an emergent phenomenon is original and thus not clichd. There should be no illusion that whats new is necessarily progressive. As John Gray says in Black Mass, that linear, teleological way of telling history is an inheritance from Zoroastrianism. But the vertical dimension of Platos hierarchy remains in a measure of complexity and thus of natural originality and beauty. The point is that whereas slavish adherence to our biofunctions is conformist, ascetic rebellion is creative and thus aesthetically superior as a life option. In terms of symboluse, the ascetic goal of detaching, to some extent, from natural processes invests the ascetics symbols with an ironic sort of self-destructive meaning, since the ascetic uses symbols to formulate paradoxes (in myths and parables) that reveal how reason traps and curses us; alternatively, the mystic may attempt to abstain from thinking, to free her mind from the matrix of biologically- and culturally-imposed virtual reality. The mystical ascetic or rebellious existentialist creates a higher plain in the pattern of her renunciation, which is to say that any degree of asceticism is more creative than conformity to processes that are explainable in strictly lower-level terms, such as biological ones. Granted, rebellion against nature conforms to the metaphysical pattern of natures evolution of emergent levels of complexity, and the universe does regularly deny itself, in a sense, by creatively destroying parts of itself, as in the case of a black hole that swallows star systems. But the emergence of what Schopenhauer calls the denial of the will to live raises the stakes, because this denial occurs within the undead gods crown jewel which is the brain, the most complex, improbable, and thus original and aesthetically praiseworthy object. Theres more to be said, though, in comparing the conformist and the artistically creative cultures. There is, I think, a tragedy in the machines simulation of a supernatural spirit, and the emotional power of this tragedy in the case of rebellion

534 against nature adds to the beauty of antiheroic life. What I mean is that the best mythical way of thinking of the worlds creation, to which were led by our social instinct which compels us to personify the impersonal, is to assume that God became corrupted by his absolute power and destroyed himself out of horror at his self-reflection, creating the universe literally out of his miraculously undying, mindlessly creative body. Thats just a speculative myth, of course, although I think its more psychologically plausible than the commonplace Creation myths. But the aesthetic point is that surely there can be no greater tragedy than such an act of divine suicide, a tragedy which Christianity effectively bastardizes and whitewashes. Theres honour in the idea of a great persons vindication after she falls, even if that vindication is tragic, given that the only way of improving her situation is to destroy herself. I take this to be the best interpretation of the idea of monotheism. (As to whether God exists or once existed, thats merely a childishly exoteric question, as I argue in From Theism to Cosmicism.) An atheist is free to say, Who cares?--except that even an atheist is stuck with a human brain that cant help but rally around something she holds to be sacred, such as human nature, which she instinctively anthropomorphizes just as the theist does with respect to the First Cause. If the atheist can have her fun with secular humanism, glorifying human nature and our scientific progress despite the fact that according to Darwinism were a species of enslaved zombie, the atheist shouldnt begrudge the mystic her entertaining speculations about the ultimate cause. (Of course, when the emotional power of myths drives people to evil behavior, as in the case of monotheistic religions and scientistic cults like Nazism, the evil-doers should be spanked like naughty children for failing to distinguish between reality and their bedtime stories.) Anyway, the relevance of this tragic Creation myth is that human asceticism is like an echo of that ultimately moving event, of the literal death of God. The idea is that an omniscient and omnipotent being sees and does everything, but that instead of settling into the life of an insipid father figure, God would have become cynical and repulsed by all possibilities except for the most radical one of escaping his godhood through a form of ironically-creative self-destruction. Such would be the fate of pure spirit, of the life we

535 naively imagine we possess. Instead, were mere machines playing at life, zombies that mistake our twitches and moans for noble gestures. The best we can do is to simulate a novel level of reality. Our experiences of ourselves and of the outer world are in fact models, which is to say simplifications of what we encounter. So too we undead things can pretend that we were all along meant to be virtuous or beautiful; we can choose to adopt anti-natural ideals that dont figure so easily in the abominable evolutionary process, which births new life by means of mass executions of all previous generations. The greatest of our simplifications is surely our simulation of Gods tragic denial of the will to life. This calls not for suicide in the sense of the total extinction of life, since this would cut the rebellion short, whereas our foe deserves to witness, as it were, the prolongation of the act of extending our middle finger, just as the most probable God wouldnt have replaced himself with nothing at all, but would have transformed himself into the mindlessly creative behemoth which is the natural universe. Likewise, the ascetic who detaches from the more egregious biological and politically correct processes sees herself as the shell she is, which frees her to become something new, a creature that dares to perform the divine pattern of coming honourably face to face with the ultimate horror of our existential predicament, and creatively transcending that horror. God would have done this by the ultimate act of rebellion, by slaying the Almighty and exchanging his supernatural personage with a natural and thus entropically doomed, yet curiously creative and thus undying corpse. And a mere animal can do this by imitating that pattern to some degree, at least, participating in the ancient ascetic tradition. Finally, I want to ask how all of this ethical and aesthetic talk avoids the naturalistic fallacy. Recall that this fallacy is to say that a prescription of what we ought to do might follow logically just from a description of how things are. There is supposed to be, then, a dichotomy between facts and values. But Darwinism removes this dichotomy, just as it renders obsolete the nave distinction between life and non-life. Instead, there are just simulations of life by spiritless things which are thus, intuitively speaking, neither living

536 nor lifeless but undead. If spiritless matter can accomplish the work of the evidentlyabsent God, creating all natural forms by mindless evolution and complexification, the barrier between the logically separate spheres of facts and values is shattered. In a pantheistic scheme, questions of value arise not just for creatures who are alive in the technical, biological sense, but for the whole universe which likewise plays at being alive, albeit with no brain and thus with no mind or intelligence. Hence the Eastern mystics judgment that the whole apparent world is a hideous prison, a diabolical system of manufacturing and tricking creatures, thus increasing the amount of suffering. Sure, these ethical and aesthetic judgments are subjective, but theyre likewise subjective when applied to human patterns of behavior; that is, these judgments all depend not just on the observed patterns but on the cognitive tools brought to bear in interpreting them. We instinctively personify what we observe, because were social mammals; thus, when we philosophize, attempting to make a coherent whole out of scientific knowledge and our everyday experience, we mythologize and rationalize our vain anthropomorphic projections. At any rate, the naturalistic fallacy presupposes a Cartesian dualism between facts and values. That dualism is no longer tenable. Note, though, that those who avail themselves of this monistic response to the charge of having committed that fallacy, are all the closer to existential cosmicism, since the metaphysical oneness of everything provides a basis for condemning what Descartes called the entirely lifeless machine of the material world. With that judgment in mind, some sort of rebellion against nature is in order. Hence the need for a viable--as opposed to crudely pseudoscientific or childishly theistic--postmodern religion.

Conclusion
To summarize, there are facts, symbols and values. The metaphysical facts of nature are horrifying, and our existential predicament is that reason curses us to discover them and thus to suffer debilitating angst and alienation. Because we have a biological job to do, the forces of natural selection save most of us from that fate, by putting blinders

537 around our minds, designing our bodies to prefer the straight and narrow path along which we act as clownish hosts of our genes. We tend to use mental symbols to bind us to that path and to help us succeed in evolutionary terms while traversing it, surviving, reproducing, raising a family, and climbing the social ladder. But theres another, antinatural path, which calls for a higher class of interests and ideals, and by higher I mean to say elevated in the hierarchy of complexity, which earns that level aesthetic praise. The ideal that motivates most symbol-use and intelligent behavior derives from the undead god whose forces of natural selection are set along the absurd path of maintaining an endless flow of genes into the future. Most of us adopt that ideal, that zombie moan of our monstrous god, as sacred, even if we rationalize such primitive nature worship with a thousand popular delusions. Some of us choose, instead, to sacrifice their happiness the way the living God would have been forced to, leaving for dead the repellent parts of themselves, and rebelling--however futilely and to whatever degree--against the natural order. The ascetic ideal, then, is the aesthetically-inviting opportunity to create an original level of reality, a cosmic play of rebellion in which natures crowning achievement, the clever ape, tears to shreds the monstrous hand that feeds it.

538

Morality and the Aesthetic Conception of Life ____________________________________________________

In a numerous writings here, Ive distinguished between moral and aesthetic standards, and referred to Nietzsches argument that slave morality becomes obsolete with the embarrassment of theism by modern science and that this morality needs to be replaced by a new, aesthetic conception of the ideal life. But what is the aesthetic perspective and how is it superior to a moral one?

Morality and the Naturalistic Fallacy

Instead of following Nietzsches atheistic reason for abandoning what we think of as morality, Id like to give a different one. The problem I have in mind is that morality comes to suffer inexorably in comparison with scientific knowledge. Heres how this has come about. In the first place, morality in the sense of rules for what people ought to do or to avoid doing, arose in a social context, as people found themselves living in larger and larger groups (as hunting and farming methods were improved, and so on). Resolving conflicts by violence, prompted by each individual who deems himself wronged, would defeat the point of living in society as opposed to the wild, which is precisely to escape what Hobbes called the war of all against all in which each creatures life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. And so members of society stipulate certain modes of conduct to govern group behaviour. Note, for example, that

539 the Ten Commandments presuppose a set of social circumstances: whats forbidden is the killing of another, the stealing of anothers possessions, the worship of other gods, and whats prescribed is the honouring of your parents and the performance of the religious rituals that bind the society together (the Sabbath, for the ancient Jews). In this respect, morality and religion functioned together, as ways of maintaining social cohesion. As cognitive scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out, reason evolved as a way of measuring status in a social hierarchy, of persuading others in a Machiavellian, egocentric fashion, as opposed to being a matter of impartial, objective logic or science for discovering the absolute Truth. Just as religions were terribly biased in favour of each self-interested tribe, reason was biased in favour of each individual who must balance the tribes interests with his or her own. This state of affairs was eventually unsettled by human curiosity, which led to the discovery of cognitive methods that undermined rather than upheld social institutions such as the Catholic Church. With the ascent of modern science, European rationalists elevated pure Reason as a precondition of social progress, which is to say that these rationalists duly ridiculed social conventions and overturned traditions. Modern rationalists learned how nature actually works and developed technological means of applying that knowledge, which created modern civilization, typically held, according to the scientistic fallacy, to be an unqualified improvement on primitive, benighted ways of life. Shortly after these developments, hyper-rationalists (empiricists, positivists, skeptics) took modern science to be the standard for all beliefs, which means that, as David Hume said, nonscientific writings should figuratively if not actually be set to the flames, including metaphysical and theological texts. With progress in view--which is to say liberalism in the classic sense, relative to which current centrist liberalism is a cover for postmodern nihilism and a pragmatic ideology for enforcing the oligarchs' control of the mob--rationalists thus became aware of the startling paradox that while the sciencecentered worship of Reason generates social progress at one level by enabling higher

540 degrees of happiness, with greater control of natural processes, this progressive society threatens to destroy itself. For along with pseudoscience, superstition, and theological dogma, morality appears to be a set of beliefs not acquired by the approved scientific methods, which is to say roughly, by observation or by mathematical logic, as Hume put it. As Hume pointed out, moral statements about how we ought to act dont follow rationally from scientific statements about what the natural facts are or from analyses of concepts or definitions. Just because humans actually want to live together instead of alone in the wild, for example, doesnt mean we should live peacefully, respecting our neighbours. All that follows is the calculation that living peacefully is a more or less effective means of holding society together, and thus a means of satisfying our desire to preserve society. But the moral force is lost in this pragmatic translation of a moral imperative. And so rationalism tends to reduce morality to pragmatism, which applies technoscientific standards of knowledge-driven human empowerment, to the social sphere. Likewise, just because we actually stipulate that stealing is wrong and assign a linguistic label to that concept, doesnt mean the stipulation is morally right; after all, evil people can devise a concept for their antisocial purposes and if theyre sufficiently persuasive or powerful, as in a dictatorship, the stipulation can become conventional (popular). Might doesnt make right, nor does popularity. This is the essence of the naturalistic fallacy, which was discovered due to the hyperrationalists contrast of modern scientific beliefs (i.e. of certain mental representations held to be true or false) with any other kind. Scientific statements are justified by induction, deduction, appeal to the best explanation, or some other rational method, whereas moral commandments, needed to maintain social order, are unscientific and thus as suspicious as any anti-progressive dogma. Arguably, the current postmodern period exhibits the social disharmony and fragmentation that result from greater awareness of how the liberals scientistic notion of progress ironically threatens to implode so-called advanced societies. Modern noble lies and science-centered myths no longer enchant; on the contrary, they terrify when their radical implications are

541 appreciated. As Nietzsche showed, rationalism destroys theism and morality, which have always been needed to pacify clever, power-seeking animals like us. Rationalists such as postmodern liberals attempt to compensate by combining their faith in Reason with oligarchy-subservient consumerism, as though Nietzsche and Lovecraft had not already shown that hyper-rationalism, the consistent application of reason in all walks of life, renders a person insane, not to mention unhappy, and as though the clich hadnt already been disseminated that money cant buy happiness. To be sure, modernists proposed other secular defenses of morality besides pragmatism, such as Kants duty-based approach and Benthams utilitarianism. In each case, the name of the game is Scientism and the game is to provide a pseudoscientific justification of moral judgments, as though any normative statement follows from the fact that our cognitive faculties work by generalizing (Kant) or from the pretense of quantifying and calculating moral values such as happiness (Bentham). Because of the naturalistic fallacy, these secular theories obfuscate or take as self-evident some initial moral ideal, whether it be duty or happiness, since rational argument alone cant justify such an ideal. As for Aristotles virtue ethics, his theory relies on the quasi-teleological notion of biological function, which makes his theory comparable to theistic divine command theory. In either of the latter cases, we have anti-naturalistic anthropocentrism, a projection of the human notion of purpose onto the whole of nature. So much for traditional morality. Note, though, that the problem stems from moralitys social aspect. The point of moral judgments was to regulate society by offering incentives to compromise. Instead of preying on each other or acting as vigilantes, we should strive to be good, to be in the moral right, even if that means we must sacrifice for the groups greater well-being. This social function invites reason to replace violence as the mode of resolving conflicts. Rationalists become radicalized with the Scientific Revolution, which leads to the discovery of the naturalistic fallacy, which in turn delegitimizes morality.

542

The Aesthetic Perspective

Aesthetics, however, lacks this social function and thus neednt collapse under its weight as does morality. Whereas moral rules are about how to behave in a group, aesthetic judgments are individual reactions to certain qualities. Take, first, the aesthetic distinction between ugliness and beauty. As the psychologist Rachel Herz shows, in Thats Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion, we each have a culturally learned hostility to disgusting sensations, because these tend to remind us of our mortality of which were terrified, and thus we associate them with poisonous foods against which a universal form of disgust evolved as a warning mechanism. For example, however politically incorrect this reaction might be, a malformed human body revolts us because the offending spectacle shows that were produced by mindless natural forces with which we cant sympathize. Our sense of physical beauty is also instinctive, evolving not just as the complement of our fear of ugliness, but as a way of measuring the fitness of a potential mate, given certain outward indicators of health such as symmetric, average, and youthful facial features and proportionality in waist-hip ratio. In either case, the individual rather than the group is central to the aesthetic sense--although indirectly the question of genetic fitness bears on the health of future generations. Second, theres the modern aesthetic preference for originality over the clich. Again, this distinction is about the individual, not the group--in this case, about individual achievement; indeed, the ideal of originality is the antisocial one of overcoming social pressures, including popular standards and all manner of received wisdom, and daring to be different, to heroically pursue a creative vision. Now, were you to try to rationally support your preference for beauty or for originality, entering your judgment as the conclusion of a logical argument or a scientific experiment, youd run up against the naturalistic fallacy just as in the case of a moral judgment. For example, youd have to cite the fact that we have an inborn distaste for certain sensations and thus naturally incline to their opposites, and then youd have to call a halt to the proceedings since no normative or value-laden statement follows just from such a factual one. However, the intrusion of reason into the aesthetic sphere is

543 arbitrary in a way that it isnt in the moral one, and so theres no self-destructive dialectic in the former as there is in the latter. Theres no need to rationally prove the merit of an aesthetic preference, just as theres no need to compare the taste of an apple to that of an orange. Taking up an aesthetic perspective is just the having of a taste for certain sensations and a primitive opposition to others, the putting aside of our empirical understanding of something as we attend to its surface features and to their subjective impact on us; thus we distinguish between beauty and ugliness. In the case of clichs, we hope for progress in the future and, buoyed by the undeniable advances in science and technology, were ashamed of backwards institutions that bind geniuses in red tape; we prefer originality as a sign of insight or vision and we loathe clich as an indicator of somnolence.

How Aesthetics Can Replace Morality

How, then, does aesthetics bear on morality? Well, if we put aside the preoccupation with the goal of unifying society, we can recover moral distinctions in aesthetic terms. Take, for example, the prohibition of parasitic behaviour, including murder, theft, rape, and so on. All such behaviours are viscerally disgusting, if nothing else, because they involve violence or sadden the victim, and the sight of blood, tears, or facial expressions of pain alert us to our mortality and thus arouse our primal fear of death. Moreover, parasitic behaviour counts as clichd, because it blindly follows low-level natural law. A parasitic person resorts to trickery, calculating, in effect, that he can preserve his genes best by exploiting the docility of those who play by societys rules, if only the parasite is sufficiently sneaky to avoid getting caught. More generally, parasitism follows the ironclad biological principle that the vicious abuse the docile. Whats original, morally speaking? One answer seems to be this, rebellion against nature, as demonstrated by mystical ascetics and by so-called omegas (dysfunctional, antisocial drop-outs). Of course, defined broadly enough, everything in the universe is natural, so theres no unnatural behaviour. But the freedom to refuse to play the evolutionary game, on some level at least, is a surprising development, placing personal

544 integrity and a unique sense of propriety above biological or social function. Again, defined broadly, everything that happens in society, including the partial or complete dropping out thereof, fulfills some social role. But in a more interesting sense, ascetics, drop-outs, or at least jaded and apathetic postmodernists are socially dysfunctional, threatening social collapse with their skepticism and misanthropy, because theyre disenchanted with the promise of what they regard as inauthentic happiness from the assimilation of consensus reality. Instead of succumbing to pressures from biological urges or from the Matrix of conventional wisdom, these rebels dare to risk public disapproval and to sacrifice those pleasures that require ignorance, opposing the whole world like Job who called God down from his throne to account for the apparent injustice within Creation. This latter biblical allusion shows the need to distinguish between what we might call theological and philosophical aesthetics. The story of Job is theological in that the bulk of it assumes the exoteric, anthropocentric perspective, according to which theres a personal cause of nature who can be blamed in the first place. The story ends with a hint of the esoteric, philosophical viewpoint, namely that of mysterianism or cosmicism, according to which people arent central to the universe. Thus, God humiliates Job by insulting him in his littleness and in his ignorance of the inhuman plan that any being capable of creating the cosmos would likely devise. Of course, a full-blown cosmicist tale, such as one penned by H. P. Lovecraft, would dispense with a personal First Cause altogether and really rub our noses in our cosmic insignificance. I raise this point because a modern aesthetic reconstruction of morality should value originality, identifying the latter with the progressive genius that artistically overcomes the horror of appreciating our existential predicament. A traditional, theological reconstruction, however, might also celebrate originality while defining the latter as anything made in Gods image, in which case moral behaviour becomes that which is godlike. But originality isnt simply rarity. The problem with a theological conception of our creativity is that this creativity is highly limited since we must each conform to Gods revealed plan. Even Gods creativity is often thought to be limited by his moral nature.

545 At any rate, the theological notion of originality is opposed to the modern one, since the latter always allows for the possibility that contravening a tradition is progressive. The point, then, is that the aesthetic distinction between originality and clich captures the difference between heroic independence and conformity, which in turn can be used to reconstruct basic moral values. This doesnt mean that a shift from a moral to an aesthetic perspective on normative questions is arbitrary or superficially semantic. On the contrary, moralitys social context means that someone who thinks in (theologically or scientistically) moral terms will be partial to conservative values, whereas someone with a modern aesthetic perspective, at least, favours liberal, progressive, and indeed antisocial ones. This isnt to say that an aesthetic moralist preys on the traditional one, since as I said, the aesthetic ideal precludes predatory behaviour. But unlike morality, aesthetics also devalues conformity and compromise for group welfare; its just that, while a predator refuses to compromise when satisfying his base, clichd and thus aesthetically repellent desires, an aesthetic moralist prioritizes his personal pursuit of a creative vision above any need for moderation for the sake of preserving socially useful delusions. To see how this works, lets take the example of altruism. Morally speaking, selflessness is justified because God, Reason, or natural function commands it. Either way, theres a moral rule which everyone in society needs to follow. This framework breaks down with the rise of science, once scientific knowledge came to be contrasted with all other contenders; in particular, the rational defenses of moral imperatives convince no one but cloistered academic philosophers, and the actual reigning values in a postmodern capitalistic society arent just antisocial; theyre the grim social Darwinian preconceptions of vain, duped consumers and of sociopathic oligarchs. The public outcry against Wall Street stems not from moral opposition but from jealousy or from fear of being the victim rather than the ruthless winner in the prevailing wild competition between selfish agents.

546 So what would the aesthetic moralist, which is to say someone who replaces moral with aesthetic reasoning, say about altruism? On the one hand, self-sacrifice for someone elses benefit can be clichd, especially if it follows straightforwardly from evolutionary theory. Moreover, theistically motivated charity is hideous when it brings to mind the thought of God, the latter being a transparent strategy for dealing with the fear of our mortality. And yet the value of helping others follows from the ideal of originality when the latter is construed as that of rebellion. After all, the motivation for avoiding clichs, for being creative rather than conforming, is disgust for what passes for normal. There would be no reason to progress were the present state of affairs ideal, and its because someone with an artistic frame of mind is appalled by so much in nature that he or she is driven to create something superior. But someone whos antagonistic to so much of whats normal is bound to pity fellow victims of those commonplace abuses, and that pity will motivate altruism. So whether the aesthetic defense of moral values preserves altruism depends on how the altruistic act is motivated and performed. Another difference between the moralistic and the aesthetic approach to how we should live is found in the general outlooks. A moralist views a person as a follower of socially useful rules. Modern morality is scientistic and so obscures the difference between a rule and a natural law, giving morality the appearance of being scientific. By contrast, an aesthetic moralist sympathizes with a person as a victim of some degree of suffering who copes best by interpreting her actions as artworks. Artists are known for their civil disobedience, but when moral values are understood as merely aesthetic, all human endeavours are viewed from an artistic perspective. At her best, an artist is a creative genius, obeying not political compromises, but her inner voice, her flashes of insight that provide her a vision of what ought to be. This is the essence of personal and social progress: such progress depends not on the technoscientific standard of control, but on faith in the rightness of inspired novelty, on the prospect that an uplifting and comforting home for poor humans can emerge even in a universe of horribly undead natural forces. By elevating society above the individual, the moralist restrains genius, turning the individual into a conformist. (Even Kant, who

547 did much to illuminate human autonomy, says in effect that the individual is bound by the dictates of the general form of Reason which is common to everyone.) Because our existential situation is absurd and tragic, blind obedience ultimately to the avoidable evolutionary processes that set the stage for our suffering is as disgraceful as the treachery of those Jewish kapos who gained favour with the Nazis by collaborating with them in concentration camps. The wrongness of conforming to natural norms, which traditional moral rules tend to rationalize, is perceivable from an all-encompassing aesthetic perspective, from the sense that compromising with society against your inner creative promptings is distasteful.

548

Case Studies of Aesthetic Morality: Abortion and Gay Marriage ____________________________________________________

In Morality and Aesthetics, I argue that an aesthetic conception of what we ought to do should replace the moral view, since morality is as defunct as exoteric theism. The aesthetic conception includes the distinctions between ugliness and beauty, and between clich and originality. The former distinction identifies ugliness as a startling reminder of our existential situation, including our mortality which horrifies us. The latter one amounts to the difference between conformity and rebellion, prescribing that we should resist degrading natural processes and social traditions instead of succumbing to them with no creative vision. From a broader aesthetic standpoint, each side of an issue should be appraised according to artistic standards, and then a judgment should be made as to which side is aesthetically preferable, just as though the appraiser were evaluating two paintings side-by-side in a gallery. To clarify further how the aesthetic norms would work outside of aesthetics proper (painting, sculpture, music, etc), Id like to apply what I said to two hot-button issues: abortion and gay marriage.

The Mediocre Art of the Pro-life and Pro-choice Positions

According to what Ill call the Rule of Infotainments Antithetical Relation to Philosophy, the more a philosophical issue appears in the news, the more the discussion of that issue is characterized by confusion. There are at least two reasons for this. First, when

549 an issue is discussed not just once but repeatedly in the mainstream media, especially on the American 24-hour cable news stations (Fox, MSNBC, CNN), this indicates a high public interest in the issue, but since the majority are opposed to, or ignorant of, philosophical standards of argument, those people will degrade the discussion with their biases and fallacies. To please their audience, the news stations will dutifully reflect the publics cognitive deficiencies, because of the second reason which is the following. As is well-known, the corporate media are currently in the business mainly of entertaining rather than investigating or educating, and so the media are more interested in pleasing the intellectually lazy members of the public than in challenging them with rigorous analyses. Both abortion and gay marriage are highly controversial and thus popular subjects of conversation, especially in socially conservative places like the US, which means that, as these issues are sliced and diced on the major cable news shows, the quality of the public discussion of them is bound to be appalling. This is certainly the case regarding abortion. The moral issue of abortion is whether parents should be able to terminate their fetus or whether the fetus has the right to live, in which case abortion amounts to murder. Now, the expression pro-life is an abuse of language, one which is more clumsy than bold since the abuse is unintentional. Obviously, the issue isnt as general as the question of life or death, since most of the anti-abortion folks are in favour of killing nonhuman animals for food and dont contend that all animals have a moral right to live. Even the slogan pro human life would be a misnomer, since the anti-abortion side tends to favour war and capital punishment. The slogan pro innocent human life would be counterproductive, since it would call attention to the fact that whatever you think of a fetus, its far too early to speak of whether a person has lived well or badly, before the person has done anything. A fetus isnt innocent as much as morally neutral, since the fetus could develop into a saint or into an evil-doer. The reason that one side nevertheless favours the slogan pro-life appears to be that this slogan (very superficially) handles the primary retort which is stunningly hardly ever heard in the mainstream media. This retort is that a fetus isnt a person, that is, a

550 member of the species Homo sapiens--especially if were talking about the first trimester when the vast majority of abortions are performed in the US. The anti-abortion crowd attempts to get around this fact by pretending that the issue is only whether a fetus is alive in general--which it may well be in a biological sense, if something as simple as a virus is considered thusly alive. Pro-lifers then equivocate, shifting from talk of life to talk of human life, leaping to the conclusion that because a fetus is biologically alive (like a virus), the fetus has the right to live (like a human person). Because this fallacy is here so recklessly committed, it calls to mind our irrational nature and our slavery to instinct, to genetic manipulation, and to social pressures, which in turn remind us of our existential predicament. Thus, the so-called pro-life side is hideous to look upon. Their hyperbolic outcries at rallies, as well as the evasive talking-points of their professional defenders are like so many grating noises from a fingernail running down a chalkboard. Their placards depicting bloody infants are shamefully irrelevant, and because those placards are created out of ignorance of the point at which most abortions occur, whats shameful is the pro-lifers lack of humility, given that were all bound to so err at times because of our animal nature. That is to say, the anti-abortion side is guilty of the clich of being overwhelmed by natural and social forces instead of artistically using or rebelling against them, even if only with a trace of humility or shame. However, the anti-abortion side makes a comeback with its theistic response that even a first trimester fetus is a human person, with the right to live, because this fetus is supernaturally linked to an immaterial spirit. At first glance, the theistic invention of the immortal spirit is a creative response to the fact of natural death. However, theres a difference between art and delusion. Art should benefit the user by uplifting her, enabling her to overcome obstacles by opening up an elevated perspective. Delusions, or fantasies that invite a retreat rather than a transformation of natural reality, are traps that stultify rather than dignify the victim. Whether theism is aesthetically praiseworthy or delusory is a big question I wont try to answer here. Theisms certainly irrational, but that doesnt settle the matter. At any rate, the artistic merit of inventing the spirit (or of

551 interpreting consciousness as being spiritual in the theistic sense) and then of assigning this essence of personhood to a speck of cells is questionable. The many fallacies sustaining theistic notions do count against theisms artistic value, for the above reason regarding clich. But theistic religion has clearly been crucial to social cohesion for thousands of years. Its possible that theism once had artistic merit but that presently theism functions as a delusion, in which case the theistic notion of personhood wouldnt save the pro-life position, after all, aesthetically speaking. What of the so-called pro-choice side? Pro-choice is an interesting label since it calls attention to a weakness of the argument in favour of the choice to abort. The pro-choice side says that since a first trimester fetus isnt a person but merely part of the womans body, the woman, together with her partner, have the right to choose what to do with that body part. The opponent sometimes replies that even if no fetus is actually a fullgrown person, every fetus is potentially one. The pro-choicer then sometimes attempts to parody this reply by saying that sperm released from masturbation is potentially a person and so the pro-life crowd should be just as opposed to masturbation, which would be absurd. But this parody doesnt work, because the probabilities involved in the two cases differ by orders of magnitude: when one of the millions of sperm cells inseminates an egg and the process of conception begins, so much work has been accomplished, including the finding of a mate and the establishment of a pair bond, that the probability is very high that the fetus would develop into a person--short of a spontaneous or artificial abortion; biology deals in ceteris paribus laws, after all. Because of this high probability, a fetus is properly regarded as an early stage of the fully-formed animal. But masturbation has no such natural connection to conception; sperm by itself obviously wont miraculously become a person. The slogan pro-choice, then, concedes this point about the fetuss special status, since were the fetus more like sperm by itself, there would be no choice, in the sense of a hard decision, of what to do with the fetus. Its only because a fetus will very probably become a person that the potential parents face a decision of which

552 future to create, the one that includes or excludes an additional person. The moral question, then, is whether personhood extends to this still-early stage of a person. Consider this analogy. A woman is stabbed to death while she slumbers. Is that murder? Well, the victim isnt then actually using the faculties that make her a person with moral rights, because shes unconscious while she sleeps. But because sleep is a normal recurrence for a person, the probability is extremely high that were she not then stabbed, she would have awoken and behaved as a semi-rational, free, and conscious person like anyone else. Granted, the probability is higher in the connection between sleeping and waking than in the development of a fetus into a full-grown human, since many factors can intervene between the stages in the latter process. But do the probabilities here differ by orders of magnitude? Just as there are natural abortions of fetuses, a person can die naturally in her sleep. Broadly speaking, though, just as a sleeper will very probably awaken and act as a person who has moral rights, if anything does, so too a first trimester human fetus (likewise a part of a process) will very probably become a person, albeit after a number of years rather than hours. If killing a sleeper is murder, why isnt killing a human fetus? Such are the moral quandaries which are seldom aired in canned mass media presentations of the abortion issue. But I raise them here only to get at the aesthetic merit of the pro-choice position. Given that the masturbation parody of the point about potential personhood is spurious, and thus that the choice as to whether to abort the fetus is at the very least a grave decision, if not an act of murder, whether abortion is original or clichd, superficially appealing or off-putting, depends on how the choice is made. If a fetus is aborted because the woman is raped and doesnt want to bear the rapists child, the act of abortion resists the evolutionary forces that compel the beastly male to prey on the weak and to spread his genes. That resistance is novel, a middle finger surprisingly held up to the face of Mother Nature, a condemnation of natural suffering by a self-aware being and a refusal to submit to the forces that impose that suffering. That rebellion is of the essence of modern art.

553 But suppose, as is more likely the case, the parents undertake the abortion with little or no appreciation of the situations gravity, aborting the fetus as though undergoing cosmetic surgery on a whim. Were abortion the tail-end of a process of promiscuous sex, the act of abortion would be no such creative rebellion against oppressive forces; on the contrary, the act would conform to one of the most prevalent patterns in human life, being a technological enabler of a degrading lifestyle, like birth control. Of course, individualistic societies have social revolutions which are thought to bestow rights on men and women to do what they like as long as they dont hurt anyone else. So the received wisdom in liberal, modern societies is that if people choose to have a lot of sex, theyre perfectly entitled. And so they might well morally be were it not for the fact that morality is bunk, as determined by the same self-destructive naturalistic perspective that ushers in the social revolutions in question. Looked at aesthetically, sex is embarrassing, as I argue elsewhere. Those proud feminists who see no shame in having abortions should be as open about their sex lives to which birth control and abortion are only accomplices. When someone is proud of the freedom to abort a fetus, but secretive about the details of his or her sex life, that persons suffering from cognitive dissonance. If youre secretly ashamed of humping like an animal, like a puppet of mindless genes that perpetuate themselves as the undead god which is the natural cosmos unfolds to some inhuman end, you should be just as ashamed of, or at least worried about, the enablers of sex. To clarify, my point isnt remotely that birth control or abortion should be banned. Im saying just that abortion can be as conformist and thus as aesthetically unappealing as sex. When an art critic pans a work of art, the critic doesnt try to ban the artist from producing art. Rather, the critic lays out her reasons and lets others decide what to think. Both moral and aesthetic values are separate from legal responsibility. Whether action should be taken against anyone depends on legal institutions which are intertwined as much with politics as with moral traditions. Moral or aesthetic values determine how we live our private lives, and so just because an act is morally or aesthetically dubious doesnt mean there should be any legal or other public consequence. On the contrary, the more natural and thus inhumane a society, the

554 greater the discrepancy between the results of its legal system and the moral or aesthetic recommendations. What, though, is my final analysis of the two positions? Were the pro-life and pro-choice stances reduced to works of art, and were I to compare them, side-by-side in a gallery, as it were, Id be unmoved by either of them since in neither case are the aesthetic ideals unambiguously met. Neither stance inspires me with confidence that progress can be made in alleviating our dismal condition. Granted, the pro-choice position is less objectionable, but mediocre art is closer to failure than to success. One of the more aesthetically appealing options is asceticism, which bypasses the whole issue.

Dubious Arguments Against Gay Marriage

What of the current hot topic of gay marriage? Once again, Ill summarize the moral arguments and then aesthetically evaluate them. From a modern perspective, there is no issue of homosexuality or of gay marriage. As long as gays, lesbians, and others with unusual sexual orientations are full-fledged people, capable of rational decisionmaking, and they dont harm anyone else by having long-term relationships capable of being legally regulated, the modern verdict is surely that they have the right to marry. Opponents say that when homosexuals adopt and raise children, the children are harmed by not having a female and a male for parents. This is unlikely, though, since the practice of raising a child in a household dominated by a single mother and a father is uncommon in human history; more commonly, children have been raised by the extended family or by the mans multiple wives, so that the childs impression of her parents has been of a small community rather than just of mother and father figures. For thousands of years, humans have been serially monogamous or, in most cases, polygamous. Only in industrially advanced societies, in which communities are fragmented and families are cut off and dehumanized by their local portals into the world of electronic hallucinations, beamed from their TVs, computer screens, and handheld devices, has the Western social breakdown been rationalized with the notion

555 that a child should be reared primarily by one man and one woman. Half of Western marriages end in divorce; teens in impoverished Western communities have unprotected sex at ever-younger ages; and wealthier individuals follow the European model of virtually arranging marriages to forge economic alliances and of indulging in affairs out of lust. Conservatives hold up the 1950s American fantasy of the nuclear family as the solution, whereas this fantasy is a source of the problem because it runs against the most powerful instincts. Another argument against gay marriage is that such marriage would cheapen the heterosexual institution and further degrade the social fabric. In advanced Western countries like the US, this argument is made most frequently by conservatives who live under rocks, unaware of the postmodern state of affairs in which the younger generations are hyper-skeptical of everything under the sun, including marriage. When they do get married at all, rather than just shacking, younger Westerners tend to get married for the legal benefits, not out of respect for the saccharine metanarratives spun around the institution of marriage in romantic comedies or in ads for wedding dresses and so forth. On the contrary, just as Jesus alleged birthday has been taken over by businesses with purely commercial interests, the secular marriage industry is a thoroughly commercial affair. A marriage is an excuse to throw a huge, fabulously expensive party, and the materialistic pleasures of weddings would be enjoyable by the relatives, friends, and associates regardless of the married couples sexual orientation. No, the true source of opposition to gay marriage is religious. The prejudice in question derives from the tribal societies that produced the Bible and the Koran and has memetically made its way to present-day ignoramuses who know half as much about their own holy scriptures as does the average atheist. Nevertheless, the fact is that the Torah, Pauls letters, and the Koran contain statements that are unequivocally opposed to homosexual sex. Moreover, the Genesis account of Creation, common to the main monotheistic religions, allegedly lays out Gods model for human social relations: God created Adam and then he created Eve to alleviate Adams loneliness (It is not good for the man to be alone (Gen.2:18), as Yahweh says), giving the impression that men and

556 women are supposed to be sexually intimate just with each other, leaving no room for homosexuality. The embarrassing weaknesses of this line of argument are as shockingly numerous as are the stars in a clear night sky. First, as Jack Miles shows in God: A Biography, the notion that the Hebrew Bible presents God as a figure who even has a clue what hes doing from the outset, let alone as an omniscient mastermind who reveals a flawless life manual for humanity, is woefully wrongheaded and refuted by nearly every biblical line. Take, for example, the creation of Adam and Eve. God makes Adam first, then Adam gets lonely, and God learns from this unsatisfactory result of his initial handiwork that hed better improve on what hes made, and so he creates Eve. Thus, God didnt always have in mind the ideal of heterosexual union. Then, of course, the heterosexual pairing of Adam and Eve proves self-destructive, as the two get entangled in intrigue with the serpent, and God punishes them for their evidently flawed relationship, by condemning them to a harsher life. What this means is that the alleged biblical blueprint for human sexual relations is nothing of the kind; if anything, what we learn from Genesis is that men and women shouldnt live together, that the ideal human relationship--if there is such a thing--is something God hadnt conceived of when he first populated Eden with people. As for Leviticus, Christians can naturally exploit those biblical death threats against homosexuals only with extreme prejudice and with cynical contempt for the bulk of the Bible, since they ignore the comparable laws against blasphemy, apostasy, witchcraft, adultery, and so on. On the one hand, Christians say that Jesus life and death made Judaism obsolete; on the other, they cherry-pick useful passages from the Jewish scriptures, purely for political reasons (in the US, the culture war distracts Republicans from their Partys key role in maintaining the American oligarchy). These conservative Christians are thus much like the Pharisees whom Jesus condemned for being preoccupied with their position in earthly hierarchies. As for Pauls letters, I explain why most Christians hold his teachings to be on equal ground with Jesus, in Christian Chutzpah. Jesus was a Gnostic, Essenic hippie who was opposed to what are now

557 called family values, preferring asceticism which precludes such sexual controversies as gay marriage. Of course, the more obvious--and for more consistently-rational people, decisive-objection to the exoteric scriptural influence on any present-day social phenomenon is that theres no good reason whatsoever to defer now to the opinions of Iron Age priests, fishermen, and raving lunatics. If the Jewish and Christian conservative thought is that social relations were ideal thousands of years ago, which is why we should model our society on that of the ancient Israelites, why dont these conservatives emigrate from modern nations like Israel or the US to impoverished, premodern zones like Afghanistan, Pakistan or large parts of India or China? These so-called conservatives want to have it both ways, taking advantage of the technoscientific fruits of modernism and longing for archaic social arrangements. But conservatives are barred from fairly having it thus, since technoscientific progress doesnt happen in such tribal, oppressive societies. Witness much of the Muslim world, which is consistently conservative, or backward-looking, and duly impoverished for lack of modern advances. Muslim conservatives at least have a modicum of intellectual integrity on their side when they rage against homosexuality. Mind you, the refutation of their religious arguments against gay marriage can come in the form of a finger pointed at the squalor of their living conditions, together with the following sort of rebuke. If your social conservatism is so ideal for humanity, having been revealed by God, why is the more secular and liberal standard of living in the West so much higher than that in socially conservative Muslim countries? Why are modern secularists so much happier than impoverished Muslims who have memorized the Koran and who follow it to the letter, bringing them little more than a desert wasteland ruled by opulent Middle Eastern dictators? Sure, these rulers are often supported by secular Western powers, but the point remains that God would had to have foreseen that strict Islamic societies would be so easily conquered by modern liberal ones. For all the problems with modernity, the evidence on the ground is that, if anything, God favours liberal secularism, not Islamic orthodoxy, which is why Muslims are currently so frustrated that they riot at the drop of a hat.

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So much for the religious arguments against homosexual relationships. One final objection before I turn to the aesthetic evaluation: social conservatives tend to conflate biological with social laws, assuming both that God created nature, in which case biological functions are normative, and that homosexuality is biologically dysfunctional. The pseudoscientific conclusion is that gay marriage is wrong because its unnatural. Ill be brief with this. First, theres homosexuality, as well as all manner of sexual perversions, elsewhere in nature. See, for example, the recently released 1910 records on the depraved acts of certain penguins, reported on Jerry Coynes blog, Why Evolution is True. In a moment Ill come to the reason for the difference between the repressed conservatives nave outlook on sexuality and the reality of life in the wild. Second, natural laws arent prescriptions and so biological functions arent normative. The exoteric theistic conception of the ultimate creative force as personal is strictly for children or for adults who will be manipulated as children by wily demagogues. Thus, whatever the natural status of homosexuality, biology has no implications for how people should live; moreover, exoteric theology is incompatible with evolutionary biology, especially at the epistemological level.

Homophobia as an Aesthetic Judgment

What, though, is the natural status of homosexuality? This question brings me to the main aesthetic point I want to make about gay marriage. From all of the above, it follows that opposition to gay marriage is repugnant because the blatant cognitive defects of that opposition indicate our smallness in the universe; any creatures who could reason so poorly must be fodder for natural forces, and the social conservatives arguments against homosexuality should thus be panned for reminding us of that sad fact about our position in nature. But any headway a proponent of gay rights makes by so refuting the objections is undone by the vacuity of moral argumentation in the postmodern context. As for the aesthetic standing of homosexuality, then, the problem is that even though the

559 abnormality of homosexuality doesnt make this orientation immoral, this abnormality may leave the impression that this orientation is ugly. Now, gays can be admired for trying to improve their sociopolitical situation, for overcoming the stigma which people attach to homosexuality. Perhaps the notion of Gay Pride is politically useful, to prevent the abuse of gay people at the hands of so-called homophobic bullies. Gay Pride parades and the prevalence of gay characters in sitcoms and movies have helped to normalize those with abnormal sexual orientations. Even were homophobia a natural and aesthetically telling reaction, this reaction would go too far were it to lead to the assault or murder of gays--and it has so led. As I said above, Im not addressing here the question of legal rights. Legally, gays can obtain the right to marry if they can empower lawmakers to write the appropriate laws. My issue here is the aesthetic status of gay marriage. The aesthetic problem I see with homosexuality is that the political strategies that seem necessary to improve the gay persons precarious position in heterosexual society run counter to a realistic appreciation of how homosexuality exacerbates our existential predicament. In evolutionary terms, there may be a complicated story about how this abnormal sexual orientation is naturally selected, whether because gays somehow increase the fitness of certain heterosexual peoples genes or because homosexuality is a byproduct of some naturally selected trait. Either way, whats evidently happened is that in the case of our species, natural forces have thrown together a majority of heterosexuals and a minority of homosexuals, supplying the former with a powerful instinct to favour heterosexual unions for the sake of spreading genes, and this instinct causes the oppression of gays. My question is whether this natural process is aesthetically pleasing or off-putting, and I suspect that the answer for most people is the latter. This doesnt mean that gays should stop fighting for their legal rights. But I do think much of the hostility to Gay Pride parades and to any public flaunting of gay sexuality stems from this negative aesthetic reaction to gay peoples apparent delusional celebration of their sexuality. Again, I understand how this celebration can politically

560 empower the gay community, but it seems to have the unintended consequence of trivializing homosexualitys existential significance. In short, gay people protest too much: when they deliriously revel in their sexuality, they act as though they had not been cursed, as it were, by mindless yet undead, naturally creative forces, to square off against biochemically-biased heterosexuals, for precisely no greater rhyme or reason. Its well and good to exercise willpower in the Nietzschean fashion, to overcome obstacles, putting on a brave face and affirming harsh facts. But this existential battle requires in the first place a frank, no-nonsense assessment of where you naturally stand. In all cases, that assessment causes angst and horror, because our natural situation is absurd and tragic. How we creatively improve on our existential situation proceeds from that point, but I fear that those with minority sexual orientations skip the existential reckoning with their lot and leap to baseless enthusiasm. Perhaps theyre wise to do so to prevent the victimization of gay people, but all delusions are naturally off-putting. The paradigmatic delusion is the insane persons which indicates a fundamental detachment from reality and an escape into an imaginary world that doesnt redeem itself by enabling an uplifting transformation of the real one. To the extent that Gay Pride resembles that sort of delusion and gay marriage is made possible by that sociopolitical movement, gay marriage is marred, aesthetically speaking.

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Comedy and Existential Cosmicism ____________________________________________________

In Inkling of an Unembarrassing Postmodern Religion, I suggest that a certain sense of humour is needed to sustain a naturalistic spiritual perspective, one thats viable despite modern sciences disenchantment of the world. But what is comedy and how is it relevant to existential cosmicism? Ill address these questions in order.

What is Comedy?
There are several types of comedy, but the relevant one has been explained as an instinctive response to the perception of cognitive incongruity. When a concept is used to make sense of some real situation, but the concept doesnt fit, theres pleasure in recognizing and rectifying the disharmony by supplying the appropriate concept. This is the basis of irony, for example. Irony is a discrepancy between intended and literal meaning. For example, suppose a dog owner is worried that his dog will bite people, so he muzzles the dog when walking him, but then during the walk the dog owner is mugged and the dog is rendered useless for defense. The owner intends to protect bystanders and ultimately himself from the repercussions were his dog to harm someone, since he would be responsible. But what the owner effectively does is harm himself, by preventing his dog from attacking someone who should be attacked. (This example is derived from a Sergio Aragones cartoon.) So the owners thought about

562 walking his dog, that hes being a responsible owner for protecting public safety, doesnt fit the facts of the situation he finds himself in. This sort of story is amusing, because in recognizing the incongruity we see both the mistake and the correct way of thinking about what happens: we recognize the dog owners faulty, doomed conception of what hes doing, and we add the correct conception, which is that by muzzling his dog the owner unknowingly exerts much effort in sabotaging his welfare. In his book, On the Problem of the Comic, Peter Marteinson develops the Incongruity Theory, explaining that laughter restores the anthropomorphic hallucination of the world, by distracting us from situations that demonstrate the worlds impersonality. Normally, he says, we project social categories onto nature, personifying the world so that we feel comfortable in it, treating the wilderness as societys mere backyard, as it were. The alternative is to worry about whether a horrible mistake has been made in some cosmic boardroom, when creatures like us evolve who are predisposed to seek the comfort of social belonging but who are intelligent enough to discover that theyre surrounded on all sides by alien territories that stretch to infinity, by the entire natural universe outside of our artificial dwellings. A humourous situation arises when either natural facts disprove our anthropocentric metaphors, which Marteinson calls a process of Deculturation, or one such metaphor conflicts with another, which he calls Relativization. Returning to the dog owner, by muzzling his dog he assumes hes surrounded by civilized people who will appreciate his safety precautions, whereas thats proven to be a presumption by the existence of a parasite who preys on society. The optimistic expectation is rendered dubious by its conflict with natural reality. Relativization would be apparent from the clash between social conventions: in some cultures dogs are pets, whereas in others theyre eaten or used in combat sports. When we appreciate that societies have conflicting conventions for personifying nature, we suspect that our culture is arbitrary and worthless--at least from most foreign perspectives.

563 Either way, the anthropomorphic view of the world is unsettled. However, laughter rescues us from anxiety by causing us to forget the conflict that threatens the contentment we feel from the childlike enchantments we cast on the world. Laughter returns us to Eden, to a childlike conception of nature in which the self isnt ruthlessly distinguished from the rest of the world; instead, we project our psychological attributes onto what modern science shows are impersonal forces and processes. As indicated in the Genesis myth, in conceptualizing or naming things, we gain power over them in that we lose fear of their otherness by bringing to bear the brains power of associative thinking; that is, we metaphorically compare anything in the world to what were most comfortable with, namely our conscious selves. When the world shakes us from this dream world, from this mass hallucination or Matrix that sustains our beastly preoccupations with procreation and personal happiness, and thus our enslavement to our genetic program, were initially caught between a dark existential reaction and the comedic, reassuring one. We see that our nave personifications of the world falsify natural reality, but instead of succumbing to horror or angst, we immediately reach for the cure: we laugh the fear away. The staccato beat and the ups and downs of pitch in laughter seem to express the role of comedy in drawing us away from a constant threat. A humourous situation is one in which were free to go back and forth between the mystical, scientific, objective view from nowhere, which doesnt indulge in childish enchantment of nature, and the massively metaphorical perspective with its spillover socialization. The pleasure of laughter is the experience of being easily, cheaply rescued, of feeling invulnerable and in command. The world forces us to doubt the veracity of our anthropomorphic projections, by deviating from our expectations or preferences, and we appreciate the difference between the subjective and objective conceptions, but we restore the subjective one, escaping from the philosophy-induced miseries of living with natures inhumanity, with no illusions. We do this by finding humour in the difference between the humanized and the alien worlds; we make fun of the incongruity instead of dispensing with our folk metaphors; we laugh, and the laughter is like the song of the Pied Piper, which leads children back to the cave of ignorance.

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Gallows Humour and Existential Cosmicism

The philosophical relevance of this kind of comedy should be clear. Laughter typically distracts us so that we can instinctively reintegrate our anthropocentric metaphors with natural reality. This prevents an outbreak of philosophical awakening. Indeed, the modern, Scientistic Enlightenment is followed by postmodern trivialization and satire. In the postmodern frame of mind, we mock the absurdities and tragedies that follow from sciences demolition of the metaphors that keep us happy and productive, just as on the micro scale, an individual defensively laughs when the undead cosmos, which is the mindlessly creative universe, casts off the mask we hold over its horribly alien face. Why, then, do I say that laughter has a positive role in a viable naturalistic religion, that is, in a religion that doesnt effectively advocate a retreat to delusion like all exoteric branches of theism? I distinguish between delusion-reinforcing comedy, which is opposed to noble spirituality, and grim, gallows humour, the sort we might imagine displayed at the moment of our species extinction as depicted by Olaf Stapledon at the end of Last and First Men. As explained above, the first type of humour soothes our nerves as a prelude to restoring the degrading, childlike viewpoint. But the second type soothes only to permit us to live heroically with the disenchanted outlook. In the first case, comedy is an ignoble lie that distracts to restore a false sense of security, but in the second case comedy is a noble lie that gives the weary cosmicist a break from contemplating cosmic undeadness. The default mindset in bad humour is defined by the mainstream Matrix, by the conventions that re-enchant nature with happy-talk and fantasies of personification, whereas the default mindset in good humour is the humiliating, ethically and aesthetically superior philosophical one that so taxes an outcast, loser, or other omega person that she makes ironic use of irony, laughing wistfully to preserve that which ordinary humour represses, which is the mystical viewpoint.

565 Both kinds of humour are means of escaping from the horror of impersonal cosmic reality, but admirable humour requires visceral hostility to delusions and the will to rest from ennobling philosophical contemplation only as needed to return to the burden in the long run. With those philosophical commitments in the background, much light can be made of our existential predicament, and this humour at our expense is like a bagpipes tune played on the field of war, to inspire the troops to face their doom with honour. Grim humour works the same as the ordinary kind, except that instead of numbing us to the mismatch between our mainstream ways of thinking and the worlds manifest inhumanity, grim laughter is bittersweet and reminds us instead of our mission as creative rebels: to understand our position within the undead god and to artistically make the best of it.

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Philosophy and Social Engineering ____________________________________________________

Most of whats said in public consists of various kinds of lies, including half-truths, spindoctoring, lies of omission, self-delusions, exaggerations, equivocations, evasions, distortions, white lies, frauds, and other pretenses. Often, a professional or public figure has no beliefs on some issue but only uninformed opinion, and merely pretends to know what shes talking about to save face or to manipulate an audience. Theres an old distinction, originating in Platos dialogues, between the philosopher and the sophist. The philosopher loves knowledge more than opinion, while the sophist makes a business of selling or otherwise persuading with useful works of rhetoric. The sophist doesnt lie exactly, but merely denies that truth is relevant to business. Regardless of whether Platos distinction was biased in favour of Socrates, theres a very important, similar difference between two present-day characters, which Ill call those of The Philosopher and of The Social Engineer.

Philosophy, Humility, and Truth

By philosopher, I dont mean an academic necessarily, whose profession is to teach philosophy; Im speaking rather of philosophy in a psychological sense. Psychologically, some people are preoccupied with the task of creating a perfect map of reality. This sort of philosopher may be intellectually curious or perhaps possessed of a religious faith

567 that promises a convergence of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Alternatively, the philosopher may have a sort of death wish, a suspicion that the ultimate truth will be horrible to know, but that we should annihilate ourselves with that knowledge like moths rushing to the flame. Whatever her motivation, the philosopher assumes theres a special relationship between the rational mind and the rest of the world: such a mind can know the facts. Although rational knowing here isnt the biblical kind of knowing, which is to say a sexual experience between persons, the philosopher assumes that the rational mind does possess a sort of key that unlocks natures door or a mirror that reflects the world. Just as convention dictates that men and women have a functionally correct relationship between their sex organs, the philosopher assumes that the rational mind can be properly or improperly related to the external world. Moreover, just as sexist cultures dictate that men are active while women are passive, the philosophers metaphor implies that the rational mind is masculine in aggressively seeking to know the world, while the known world passively awaits our attentions (or seduces the scientist with tantalizing clues to solving its mysteries, etc). The key or mirror in question is just the symbol, the word or thought that carries a meaning. Put a set of symbols in the correct order and the key unlocks the door, the mirror captures the light and the Truth shines forth; that is, the sentence or thought agrees with an objective fact. For centuries, Western and Eastern epistemologists have tried to explain the nature of this relationship between the knowing mind and that which is rationally known. Its hard to see how the traditional metaphors that glorify rationality are justified in a naturalistic worldview, according to which the rational person is just an especially clever animal, not an immaterial spirit that transcends nature and obtains a transhistorical perspective on the perfect, eternal Truth. As the postmodern hyper-skeptic says, were there no such Truth to be known by natural beings, the philosophers myth of a correct relationship between the rational mind and the external world would stand itself as a noble lie: instead of searching for Truth, with no hidden agenda, the philosopher would serve a power structure or play a social game. As is now well-known, though, this postmodern

568 hyper-skepticism does away with itself since it presupposes the fundamental, natural Truth that even rational people are mere power-seeking or playful animals. Putting aside the question of whether the search for pure knowledge has a satisfying epistemological explanation, theres surely at least a distinctive philosophical character, best exemplified by Platos Socrates. Unwilling to exchange knowledge for useful fictions, Socrates ruthlessly exposed self-deception in himself and in anyone else. His ultimate goal was to know himself. As is clearest from Eastern traditions, this goal was part of the mystical project of appreciating our divinity as a precondition of freeing ourselves from suffering. In the West, this religious aspect of philosophy has been deemphasized if not dropped altogether, and so the narrower philosophical point of selfknowledge is to attain virtue as a precondition of knowing the truth--whatever the ultimate nature of that truth. The idea is to purge your mind of the moral failings that are fertile grounds for self-deception. In Buddhist terms, the philosopher destroys her ego, abandoning her selfish impulses that cause her to cling to flattering delusions and to forge an elaborate, wholly erroneous self-conception. The upshot is that the philosopher must be humble to avoid the first level of fraud, which is the level we each instinctively create for ourselves in our minds. Plato said that Socrates knew most of all that he knew nothing. This means that Socrates relentlessly pursued pretenses to knowledge that indicate overbearing pride and underlying ignorance. Socrates had no interest in imposing his viewpoint on others, in overpowering them with tricky rhetoric. Instead--and here the medium is the message-he dialogued with others, cooperating with them in a constructive, shared search for the truth, by asking ever-deepening questions that not only forced his partners to reassess their beliefs, but that humiliated them in the process. Socrates destroyed egos along with delusions. According to Plato, he was executed because his philosophical way of life was socially subversive: as a matter of course, Socrates demolished the religious and political fictions that maintained his societys dominance hierarchy.

569 Turning to the current scene, what confronts the Western philosopher when she consumes mass culture is well-symbolized by the Wachowski brothers as the matrix, a sort of phony reality. Politicians, lawyers, CEOs, doctors, academics, public school teachers, salespeople, cashiers, novelists, filmmakers--people in all walks of postmodern life simply lie most of the time. We lie to ourselves and to others. We lack the humility to know ourselves as we truly are, to abandon our fantasies of transcendence. Even the Wachowski brothers sometimes dumb-down the Gnostic vision of their Matrix film trilogy by way of pandering to Christians. With what are often called good intentions we tell half truths, to spare someones feelings, but this pity depends on the liars conceit that shes in a superior position. Indeed, liars may be differently stationed in a social hierarchy, possessing more or less power over others, but no person deserves to condescend to anyone else, because all of our social games are equally foolish. To confirm this, just note how each generation looks back on its ancients as embarrassingly childish by comparison. This isnt because of any social progress; instead, each generation arrogantly and myopically presumes that its the most perfect one, that all foreign cultures are wrongheaded. And each generation becomes the next ones laughingstock. As Wittgenstein said, any language game looks silly from an outsiders perspective, because the rules of any game are largely arbitrary. (Were there an ideal map of normative, as opposed to empirical truth, or a perfect life manual, then indeed cultures could follow or depart from those moral commandments. But this notion of objective normative truth rests on the naturalistic fallacy of mistaking normative for empirical truth. As best as epistemologists can tell, empirical truth is a matter of correspondence between symbols and facts. So take the rule that we shouldnt steal, for example. To the extent that that rules construed as objectively true, its no longer normative but is reduced to a mere report of a fact such as that an ancient book proscribes stealing. Prescriptions of moral norms of conduct are neither true nor false in that empirical sense, and should be assessed in other terms such as aesthetic ones.)

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In any case, all cultural norms are absurd compared to less complex natural processes, because those norms are relatively freely chosen, which is the extent to which we rational beings do transcend, which is to say, stand alienated from, the rest of nature. True, according to quantum mechanics, even physical laws may be likewise arbitrary and spontaneous, popping into existence along with a cosmos from what physicists call nothing. That would make physical laws inexplicable but not ridiculous, though, since there would be no one to mock for gratuitously creating and then living under them. What I mean is that even were all of nature ultimately as arbitrary and gratuitous as human culture, only the latter could have normative failings: our indulgence in a smorgasbord of cultural delusions reflects our variety of vices for which were at least partly responsible. Often, we choose to escape precisely from rationally-obtained knowledge, by distracting ourselves with cultural nonsense. In centuries past, the flow of such nonsense was severely limited by the available communications technologies. Today, of course, postmodern folk are victims of a tsunami of lies, submerged in a noosphere of myths and fantasies, because our vices that cause useful misconceptions are now empowered by the internet and those cultural byproducts are spread by a host of dazzling high-tech gadgets. Everyone can publish their own ravings, the present author included. And so the philosophical way of life becomes more anachronistic. In Platos day, a philosopher could resist the relative handful of cultural temptations to stroke his ego, pursuing the truth even at the cost of his comfort or sanity. But in the so-called postmodern world, philosophy itself is the laughingstock and humility is a rare commodity.

Social Engineering and Dehumanization

I want to consider now one such vice that gives rise to an antiphilosophical character, which Ill call that of The Social Engineer or Technocrat. The vice in question is just commonplace greed, coupled with the resulting corruption from the power gained by means of that motivation. An especially greedy and corrupted person may regard

571 language not as a system of symbols that relates to an external world, but as a tool to accomplish some work. When a technocrat or social engineer speaks, she may not lie so much as transmit what she regards as a meaningless sequence of noises that somehow has the desired effect of influencing her listener. Whereas the philosopher wants a map of reality, the social engineer wants a lever for moving society in some favoured direction. The philosopher asks everyone to humble themselves before the prospect of discovering the ideal relationship between rational minds and the rest of the universe. The social engineer proceeds beyond the call for humility, cynically dehumanizing language users as so many pawns to be pushed around by skillfullydeployed rhetoric. In short, the philosopher is interested in semantics (the study of the meaning of symbols) while the technocrat thinks only of a pragmatic form of syntax, of underlying rules for using what suckers call symbols as instruments for physically manipulating people. Indeed, the elevation of social engineering above philosophy in postmodern societies is apparent from the memetic sophistry that some philosophical issue is just semantics. Pragmatists love to belittle philosophy with this refrain, as though the question of a symbols relation to something else were unimportant and all that matters were the effect of language use. Just as engineers use technology to manipulate natural processes, social engineers use language to transform society. While the philosophers metaphorical key or map is also a form of technology and knowledge tends to be useful, the philosopher is more a mystic than an instrumentalist, pursuing knowledge as an end in itself. The social engineer is interested in knowledge only for its applications. The point I want to stress here is that philosophy and social engineering represent opposite ways of thinking. True philosophers in modern societies are as rare as authentic Christians. If you want to know whether someones a true philosopher, first confirm that that person prefers to discuss ideas rather than events or people; then check whether she displays signs of ego in those discussions. If shes more interested in dominating than in collaborating, she lacks the humility that follows from selfknowledge and from the dispelling of the initial, self-imposed delusions.

572

Much more prevalent is the vacuous but highly potent chatter of technocrats and of the drones who dwell in their matrix. The art of dominating people by mesmerizing them with signals is likely only reinforced in elite institutions like Harvard Business School; such institutions tend to attract or reward those who are already pragmatists with technocratic skills. The technocrat is bound to have at best an atrophied conscience, if not a sociopaths absence of empathic feelings, since those feelings call to mind other peoples humanity and thus one of our distinguishing features, which is our sophisticated use of symbols. As I say, most professions in postmodern societies reward those with a social engineers rather than a philosophers mindset, despite the sometimes-heard warning that the problems such societies face call for those with liberal arts training and not for mere systems managers. To be sure, the proliferation of a philosophical mindset looks like a necessary condition of preventing our selfdestruction, but this hardly entails that those with institutional power have the wisdom to nurture, say, philosophical humility or a disdain for ego-driven opinion. The most obvious example of a social engineer is the politician. Theres hardly even any hyperbole in speculating that neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama spoke truthfully in any of their public statements while serving as President of the United States. What Im proposing, though, isnt that politicians lie, since lying requires both misdirection and a belief held to be true: the liar simply pretends to believe X whereas she actually believes Y. No, my point is that politicians and other professionals exhibit a deeper form of antiphilosophy, which is the pragmatists preoccupation with work rather than with knowledge. The pragmatist wants to get jobs done and that requires physical work: tools must be used to effect the desired change. So when a politician spins, skillfully diverting a question at a press conference to recite a predigested list of talking points, we disparage the extravagance of her vices when we label her a mere liar. Lying is for petty malefactors; world-corrupting evil is perpetrated by those who disdain the sphere of semantic interpretation in its totality, who view people as machines and thus who think or speak never to humbly uncover and live by the truth but solely to manipulate, to physically impact others and so dominate them.

573 Karl Rove, who boasted to the author Ron Suskind that the neoconservatives are Nietzschean overlords who create a series of worldviews solely to enslave the masses in the reality-based community, revealed something of this technocratic mindset. (See Suskinds 2004 NY Times article, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.) Thus, listening to political figures as though they have any regard for knowledge or respect for their peoples intelligence is foolish. Instead of fact-checking them, we should study the impact of their clich-ridden signals on masses of antiphilosophical minds. Treating a political speech as fiction, too, misses the mark, since fiction, like lying, works only when the listener or speaker, respectively, appreciates the difference between reality and a counterfactual world. In their public roles, politicians as well as pundits, lobbyists, lawyers, consumers, and increasingly doctors, college professors, and many others are better compared to automatons, mechanically managing flows of information along with people as so many quantifiable units of a social system. Indeed, Id go as far as to speculate that with this descent into postmodern technocracy, we have a prerequisite for what the transhumanist calls our more complete merging with technology. Before the posthuman can rise from our ashes, combining biological functions and artificial conventions more fully even than social animals like us, we must learn to think like machines so that we wont resist living more closely with them. That is, our minds must be reduced to computer programs, and so we must forgo our dalliance with semantics, with our interests in meaning and truth; instead, we must compute, calculate, and scheme or implement the calculations of others as partisan functionaries. We must dehumanize ourselves to become the scaffolding for the evolution of posthumans. This raises the question of whether social engineering is just another arbitrary and thus foolish cultural game or a natural process of our extinction. I wont attempt here to settle this question, except to say that the answer depends on whether people choose to think like social engineers or whether the relevant vices naturally drive them to do so. If the

574 former, the technocrats fear of semantics will one day appear as quaint, nave, and transparently wrongheaded as any other cultural expression, from the benefit of a foreign vantage point. If the latter, a natural process may be afoot, one which isnt ridiculous so much as eerie.

A Dialogue
To clarify my distinction between the two modes of thought, heres how I imagine a dialogue proceeding between the two characters. Philosopher (speaking to a politician): Ive noticed that when you speak to journalists, you seem to read from an invisible script and seldom actually answer the question put to you. Have you calculated that your personal beliefs are unpopular and so youd rather not risk fallout with the public for airing those beliefs? Technocratic Politician: My personal beliefs are private and irrelevant to my ability to carry out my political duties. P: Irrelevant? Who is it then who makes your political decisions? Do your inner convictions have no bearing on how you face your challenges while in office? That seems dubious, but Im willing to be persuaded otherwise. T: A leader whos responsible for the welfare of millions of people cant afford the luxury of coming to settled opinions after much private reflection. Thats the dubious business of philosophers with too much leisure time. Im a busy man with no time to waste on frivolous speculations. P: So first your personal views are irrelevant and now you say you dont even have any such views? But surely you do have political principles and youre just reluctant to expose them for fear of being picked apart by the pundits and your political opponents.

575 T: No, if you must know, principles and philosophical beliefs are for followers, not for leaders. Leaders devise these memes and myths for public consumption to maintain a social order, but the leaders themselves are too busy and savvy to pay much attention to those tricks of the trade. You have no idea how much work I have to accomplish. Like I said: not enough leisure time. P: But werent you photographed last week playing golf? And didnt you go on vacation last month? T: Those were working breaks from my superhuman schedule of meetings and briefings! You have no idea the stress Im under. P: More stress than a person can bear, I imagine. T: Indeed. P: Does that mean that someone with your workload cant afford to be a person while working? T: Im not sure what you mean. Of course Im still a person. P: Are you sure? Cant a person shut down her faculties? When we watch TV, we vegetate and relax our higher cognitive processes. When we fight, adrenalin floods our system and overcomes our fear and our sensitivity to pain, while a soldier may choose to set aside his conscience and follow immoral orders. When making tough decisions on the job, an employee may have to follow a script, like an actor, playing a role as a functionary to get ahead in the rat race. Moreover, sociopaths are born without consciences, while others may inherently lack other cognitive faculties. All of this is possible because of the modular nature of the human mind. So are you sure you havent dehumanized yourself?

576 T: I leave it to your ilk to waste time speculating on the essence of human nature. Im much too busy. P: Well, if youre so busy, you must be highly skilled to perform your Herculean labours. I wonder what particular skill you employ when you choose never to give a straight answer to a journalists question. T: Journalists thrive on sensationalism and on trapping politicians with gotcha questions. They say theyre after news, but news reporting is only incidental to their primary concern which is to maximize their ratings. A press conference is a business transaction in which the public figure has the upper hand. Im not interested in boosting the ratings of some bottom feeding news agency for the masses transitory infotainment. Instead, I use the media to broadcast my canned messages to help shape public opinion and get me reelected. The whole things practically automated, by this point. I rarely even listen to journalists in my interviews. I merely scan their nonsense for key words which are associated with my talking points, and when I hear the former I regurgitate the latter-- always with a smile on my face, to keep the mood upbeat. P: Youve never, then, sat down and had an actual conversation for the public record while in office, one human to another. T: Certainly not. Politics isnt war, its business, and businessmen dont chitchat. Even my private conversations with fellow members of state are all about strategy, saber rattling, and other kinds of posturing. I send signals to position myself in a Machiavellian power struggle and I calculate how to exploit circumstances to my benefit. P: It seems like a computer could do the bulk of your work and a lot faster and more efficiently too.

577 T: Technically, perhaps, but practically no, since in a democracy, at least, people have to feel comfortable with their political representatives and theyd never vote for a coldhearted, nihilistic machine. Thats why I always smile in public. P: But you dont actually have any fellow-feeling for your constituents; your smiles are fake and you dont behave as a fully-functional person while in office. So you might as well be an automaton, a robot that looks like a human with a supercomputer for a brain. T: As soon as they build one of those, you let me know and Ill find another line of work. But whats with this interrogation, anyway? What do you think youre proving? P: Im trying to understand why I could never be myself with someone like you while youre at work. Normally, I constructively criticize and exchange ideas, cooperating with fellow knowledge-lovers to discover the truth of some matter. But your way of thinking is entirely opposed to that philosophical practice. Youre really an antiphilosopher, a machine dedicated solely to the ignoble purpose of your self-enrichment. You dont question the ugly, parasitic values implicit in your political business. I just didnt appreciate that corruption can take the form of such dehumanization. T: Look at you, the high and mighty philosopher, flinging your value judgments my way like they mean a damn, like anybody cares! I thought youve been paying attention to the scientists whove discovered all the truth we can handle. Youre after knowledge for its own sake, you say. What do you think knowledge is? Do you suppose that when you indulge in your lofty meditations, your brain states reach out and grasp immaterial structures of logic, like the philosopher Frege pontificated? That even though youre just an animal with a highly complex brain, you understand the real world by positioning your mental symbols in some configuration that agrees somehow with the facts? Theres no such agreement. Our thoughts store information obtained by our sense organs and they cause us to move about the world in a more or less useful fashion. Youre a machine and thus a businessman too, a social engineer like any animal negotiating a natural life;

578 youre just a much less successful one whos jealous of his superior. Now if you dont mind, Ive got to get back to work.

579

Existential Cosmicism and Technology ____________________________________________________

The existential philosopher Heidegger distinguished between traditional and modern, or roughly between low and high, technologies. The former, such as windmills or handsewn clothing, work with nature and have aesthetic appeal as quasi-artworks, whereas the latter, such as computers or nuclear power plants, challenge the sovereignty of external forces, by storing energy to be used at our discretion. Scientific modes of thinking prepare the way for modern technology by abstracting from the individuality of everything in nature, from what Heidegger called their thinghood, objectifying and dissecting (analyzing) natural phenomena and thus encouraging us to adopt an instrumental, Machiavellian attitude towards them. When we appreciate somethings uniqueness, were more likely to personalize it, since people tend to be especially different from each other: our brains have different experiences over time and there are practically endless ways for our neurons to store that information, by forming unique interconnections. Thus, early forms of religion are animistic, anthropomorphizing the natural world on the basis of the perceived uniqueness shared by the likes of rivers, trees, or mountains, on the one hand, and humans on the other. Modernists would say that the ancients thereby lacked our depth of understanding of nature. The metaphor of standing under something is actually less apt than that of standing apart from it. Modern scientists gain perspective by emotionally

580 detaching from what they studied, thus withholding their sympathy. They employ mathematics and other abstract modes of thinking to engage in extreme forms of generalization, or unification, treating rivers, trees, and mountains, for example, all as masses in motion. When things appear to lose their individuality, our sympathetic reflexes are no longer triggered, because we dont feel compelled to personify them and thus we dont extend to them anything like human rights. We thereby take up a nihilistic stance towards the objectified phenomena, using technology to overpower nature instead of incorporating nature's organic rhythms into our lifestyle.

Technology Humanizes Nature

This Heideggerian criticism of technology is compelling but it doesnt go far enough, in my view. Theres a deeper process at work in the use of all technologies, motivated by a more general way of thinking than just scientific objectification. Our tendency to personify is rooted simply in our inevitable resort to metaphors. When we categorize, we group things and think of them as instances of a type, thus comparing them to each other, perhaps anchoring the comparison to a simplified mental representation (a stereotype or exemplar). Our most fundamental analogies extend our common and familiar experiences--seeing, walking, eating, learning, dying, and so on--to less wellknown phenomena. That extension of human experience in our confrontation with the nonhuman is the primary act of anthropomorphism, which means that virtually all of our thoughts are fundamentally anthropomorphic. If you look at the historical basis of most of our concepts, youll find a generalization based on an analogy between some quaint human experience and something less familiar and thus apparently nonhuman, that is, some broader natural phenomenon like a rainstorm or a stellar configuration. Our great felicity with categories goes together with our use of even the humblest technologies, including those that Heidegger would praise for working with rather than against nature. All technologies import aspects of us to nonhuman phenomena, just as even our most primitive cognitive act, our use of metaphors, tames the unfamiliar by comparing it with everyday human experience. When we build even the simplest device,

581 like an axe or a hut, we transform the nonhuman world and render it less forbidding and alien. As the biologist Richard Dawkins or the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan would say, we extend our phenotypes, meaning our bodies. But this isnt just because we supply a car, for example, with a front that looks like a human face or because a gun or a camera improves on a particular body part such as the fist or the eye. The extension common to all technologies is that of our brains innate body plan, as pictured in the so-called cortical homunculus, with which we map out and instinctively identify most strongly with our body parts, regarding anything not so mapped as foreign, hostile, or disgusting. Thus, we dont retreat even from our foulest body odours--or from those of people with whom we form strong emotional bonds--as reflexively as we do from those of strangers. We render the wilderness less terrifyingly strange just by leaving our footprint in it, as it were, reshaping nature somehow according to our designs so that, like proud children just released from arts and crafts class, we can hold up our pet project and say, Look what I made! At least if we have a hand in making something, were faced with the devil we know.

Existential Cosmicism and our Masks and Mirrors

And so all technology indicates the truth of the philosophy Im calling existential cosmicism. Existentialism emphasizes the need for a nonrational choice of how we respond to the chilling facts of our natural position, and cosmicism tracks the cultural implications of modern science in a Nietzschean fashion. Most animal species use either no technology at all, besides that fashioned by their genes in response to their environment, which is to say the physiological traits that each species evolves, or else a handful of tricks to make life easier. Chimpanzees use sticks to pull ants from their colonies, while certain octopi use coconut shells for shelter. With so little of themselves in their environment, you might think most animals would be horrified and incapacitated by the strange otherness of what lies so obviously at nearly their every turn, just on the other side of their sense organs. But, of course, most species lack the self-destructive curiosity or intelligence to recognize that otherness for what it is, since most species lack the self-awareness to distinguish themselves definitively from everything else.

582

By contrast, we create our human identity at an early age when we learn to draw that Cartesian distinction between mind and material world. We appreciate that were born into a pre-existing, nonhuman world thats often hostile and peculiarly indifferent to our plight, and we cope by humanizing that world, populating it with ghosts, goblins, and gods from our imagination, shamelessly projecting images of us onto natural forces as though we were in any sense central to the cosmos. The cosmicist insists that our horrifying and tragic absurdity consists in our peripheral metaphysical status, in the abyss between our self-image as VIPs and our natural identity as practically trapped and cursed parasites, feasting on our monstrous host which is the undead god, the mindlessly evolving and thus creative plenum that scientists call nature. Our explosion of technology is the outward manifestation of that inner, cognitive revolution: our minds explode with concepts, analogies, and projections, as we mentally dress the world in human clothes, as it were, to mask its dreadful inhumaneness and revolting monstrosity, and our busy hands put that frantic mental activity to work, turning our mere ghostlike ideas into tangible transformations of the environment. Horrified by the complement of our vainglorious sentience, of our original sin of playing up the difference between us and the rest of the world, we rush to rectify our resulting alienation. We reduce natures strangeness by those inner technologies, if you like, by our mental representations which depend on anthropomorphic metaphors, but also by outer, body-built technologies which physically humanize the bizarre outgrowths on natures decaying corpse. For example, we dont just let waterfalls fall, but need to get the last word in, turning them into power sources or tourist attractions; nor do we passively watch the suns rays sustain organic processes in the fulfillment of no purpose whatsoever, but we wear hats to protect ourselves from the spill-over effects of temporary blindness or skin cancer, we use deodorant to avoid sweating in our sophisticated cultures, and we harness solar energy to power a variety of contraptions; nor do we content ourselves with the childish mental projections of astrology, when we look up at the inhuman heavens, but we hurl telescopes into space and land robots on Mars; and so on and so forth. We make the cosmos our home by extending our minds

583 and bodies into the outer reaches of the unknown: we give the nooks and crannies of the undead god silly names that elevate us, since our experience of what its like to be human anchors the metaphors, and we manually reshape our environment, physically erasing natures monstrous visage with reminders of our more comprehensible creativity, so that when we traverse any of our villages or cities, we walk through a House of Mirrors. We look at a hut or a skyscraper instead of a cave or a mountain, and we replace our fear of the cosmic creation of patterns from quantum chaos, with the homeliness of intelligent design, of a persons mind-controlled body which purposefully tames and beautifies its surroundings. We preserve our self-esteem by pretending that technology has merely the practical function of efficiently achieving our goals, whereas the existential significance of technology betrays that lofty pragmatism. Before we can be gods who magically recreate the world in our image, we ought to be panic-stricken, all-too-clever critters that have opened Pandoras Box just by opening our eyes and beholding the alien landscape. Technology, then, is a source of what existentialists call bad faith, but a source that ironically has the potential to undercut the delusions that restrict us to an aesthetically inferior way of life. We fuel our pride when we revel in the technoscientific proof of our supernatural creativity, but when we reflect on technologys primordial role as a mirror that permits us to look out onto anything and see so many traces of humanity instead of wild natures bloodcurdling monstrosity, that is, its undead complexification, were steered away from pragmatic secular humanism, not to mention anachronistic theism, and towards existential cosmicism.

584

Games, Sports, and Mixed Martial Arts ____________________________________________________

In species of social animals, rules emerge to govern the animals behaviour, complicating biological and other, more general natural laws. The more a species is preoccupied with its social conventions, the more it develops a culture that makes no sense from a foreigners perspective, the more the members tend to detach themselves from natural reality, especially if theyre not informed by the link to nature provided by an objective empirical investigation. Without that link, or when citizens favour antiscientific sources of information, which marginalize science in decadent, self-centered and xenophobic societies, the citizens can fiddle while Rome burns. In the latter years of the ancient Roman Empire, gladiators engaged in mock combats and other brutal games to distract the citizens from the signs of Romes collapse. Had the citizens then a crystal ball in which they could have foreseen the horrors of the Dark Age that would follow the collapse, they might have regarded the games as absurdly, even shamefully divorced from reality. While the barbarians pounded at the gates, the uninformed or deluded masses preferred the spectacle of more controlled warfare which maintained the illusion of Roman hegemony. Just as the emperor dictated whatever happened on the mock battlefield in the microcosm which was the Coliseum, with a mere raising or lowering of his thumb, so too his military crushed foreign uprisings.

585 Today, there are numerous mainstream sports, including tennis, golf, baseball, soccer, football, hockey, basketball, curling, and cricket, which are relatively harmless diversions, although their players are often injured. Then there are more brutal sports, such as hunting, boxing, mixed martial arts (MMA), sumo wrestling, and dog or cock fighting. What's the relationship between these kinds of sport, and what does that relationship teach us about ourselves?

Games and Sports as Models of Nature

A game is a form of play or amusement, while a sport is a type of game that requires bodily exertion. So chess, for example, is a game but not a sport. Chess is played between minds, not bodies, and thus evolutionary history and the laws of biochemistry, which determine a bodys aptitudes, are irrelevant to how that game is played. True, psychological factors, such as memory capacity, account for differences in players skill level, but these are incidental since chess is an artificial world, governed by arbitrary rules and stipulations of meaning, and played on a game board thats symbolically detached from natural (non-human-made) reality. What distinguishes chess from a mental patients insane fantasy is that chess is based on a metaphor that simplifies a natural phenomenon, in this case warfare. A game, then, is like a scientific model in that the game abstracts from some natural phenomenon, as a much-simplified analogy that represents only a few key features of whats modeled and filling in the rest of the picture with stipulations. (In science, a stipulation of this kind is called a ceteris paribus condition, which means that while a scientific model of DNA, for example, may not perfectly replicate every actual feature of the DNA molecule, the model is adequate for practical purposes as long as any significant factor left out of the model is assumed not to impinge when the model is applied in a particular situation. Thus, everything in the world outside of the models simplified picture is stipulated as being--somewhat euphemistically--equal, which is to say, practically irrelevant for the purpose of scientific understanding.)

586 At the opposite end of the spectrum from chess, there are natural competitions played out with a minimum of artificial rules and thus with greater dependence on natural forces. Somewhere near this end are found certain combat sports, such as boxing or MMA. These sports are still games rather than purely natural fights, because theyre limited by an arbitrary number of rounds, theyre refereed, and they prohibit certain moves such as strikes to the groin. Further towards the extreme end on this side of the spectrum, in which natural laws take precedence over social conventions, would be the ancient gladiatorial games, in which combatants fought to the death with fewer rules than in more recent combat sports. (Again, perhaps the main arbitrary rule was that the emperor alone decided who lived or died.) At the most extreme end, there are (mostly illegal) dog or cock fights in which there are almost no artificial rules and natural laws or biological probabilities dictate the outcome. Perhaps the only concessions to artificiality in one of these games are the border of the pit in which the animals fight and presumably the stipulation that the playing field is even, that the animals are released simultaneously by their handlers at opposite ends. These human interventions and inevitable abuses of the animals suffice, however, to render these fights unnatural, which is to say aesthetically and ethically appalling.

The Meanings of Game-like Sports

More conventional and popular sports, like baseball or soccer (better known as football), fall more towards the chess end of this spectrum. On the one hand, these games require bodily exertion, which introduces natural law into the proceedings, but these sports are highly regulated, meaning that the play is governed by many arbitrary rules. Moreover, each of these sports models some more natural phenomenon, employing a metaphor that lends meaning to the sport even if this meaning can fade as the metaphor becomes stale over time. Thus, as the Al Capone character explains in the famous scene of the film, The Untouchables, baseball is founded on a political metaphor that celebrates the balance of individualism with socialism: the players stand alone when at bat, but operate as a team when in the field. When Americans might have felt more united, after the Great Depression or during honourable and necessary

587 wars, baseballs social metaphor might still have been poignant. In the current Manichean United States, the metaphor is stale and so baseballs no longer uplifting; instead, the sport degenerates into a business that entertains with what most inured players and spectators alike surely feel are meaningless rituals. (Perhaps the current popularity of baseball in Japan indicates that its social metaphor still holds sway over more unified Japanese society.) In fact, apart from American football and what North Americans call soccer, most sports in western societies have lost any deep meaning they may once have had. Granted, each sport has its rabid fans, but the downside of any game-like sport, meaning any sport governed more by artificial than natural laws, is that the sport depends on--at best-a loose analogy which is its sole meaningful connection to some natural process, and metaphors inevitably lose their potency over time. Thus, the older the sport, the less meaningful its vicissitudes to current players or spectators. Indeed, the metaphor that originally motivates play (consciously or otherwise) according to some set of conventions may be forgotten entirely so that the sport's later participants have no idea what the sport is supposed to mean. Currently, golf is viewed as a rich persons sport. Partly this is because golf clubs and regular access to golf courses are expensive, but this stereotype is also due to the sports underlying presupposition of social class. The caddie represents a member of the lower class who performs the grunt work, toiling in mills, mines, or factories and providing a sort of launching pad for the oligarch, or godlike upper class member, to jet from one part of the globe to another and at his leisure perhaps perform the miracle of a hole-in-one. The golf course thus signifies the wilderness or the third world slum over which the oligarchs spirit sails with the golf ball towards its destiny in the relatively miniscule hole, which is thus mostly removed from that tainted world. That is, the disproportion between the puniness of the golf ball and of its resting place in the hole, on the one hand, and the vast undulating course, on the other, symbolizes a dualistic class ideology. Golf is thus about avoiding or exploiting circumstances for the solo players exclusive benefit, ideally on the backs of lesser mortals. Regardless of whether

588 golf was invented with this elitist ideology in mind, its popularity today especially with successful businesspeople seems to indicate some such underlying meaning. Basketball, hockey, and American football are formally, if not historically, variations on what North Americans call soccer. In each case, teams guard their home territory and earn points by invading their opponents home. The metaphor is that of warfare, with the court, rink, or field representing the neutral battle zone, and the hoop, net, or goal posts representing the civilian territory which economically empowers the soldiers, or the players of each team. This metaphor is clear enough, but the popularity of each sport in different countries reveals cultural differences between them. American football is idolized within the US, which surely indicates the height of American martial values, that is, that countrys romantic view of the glory of war, as well as its fetish for industrial efficiency. As long as an American soldier is fully operational and outfitted with the worlds supreme military hardware, the soldier is held sacred as a flawless instrument of American hegemony, but as soon as the soldier returns from war with a limb missing or in a casket, the spell is broken, the myth of Americas manifest destiny is reduced to so much empty rhetoric, and so the soldier is generally shunned or hidden from view. While African-Americans excel at most American sports, their dominance is most complete in basketball. Id venture to speculate, then, that to the extent that basketball still resonates as a model of warfare, the war in question is presupposed to be that which might be fought in the future between genetically-altered super soldiers. AfricanAmericans were originally brought to the US as slaves and were artificially bred, in part, for manual labour. The most popular level of American basketball, in the NBA, features mostly African-American giants who stun spectators by symbolically invading the opponents home territory and leaping and dunking the ball in virtually superhuman fashion. Again, to the extent that basketball has any emotional force as a game that idealizes some aspect of real life, the sport is more a promissory note prophesying future warfare in which superhuman soldiers will penetrate the foes civilian territory and annihilate its people like angels of death descending from the clouds. A monstrous

589 speculation, to be sure, but such are the predilections of social animals that even this speculation is plausible. As for hockey, which is naturally most popular in cold countries such as Canada or Russia, the reasons for the shared popularity nevertheless differ, depending on the country. Hockey is popular in Russia, because the sport models warfare and Russians have a highly militaristic, imperial history. This is not so with respect to Canada, so in Canada hockeys popularity is explainable in terms of the sports substituting for war as opposed to its modeling much in the way of actual Canadian war-waging. In this case, Canadians are currently so pacific that the relatively tame violence in a hockey game can satisfy whatever animalistic interest in bloodshed they nevertheless harbour. This is surely also why fist-fighting in North American hockey is tolerated despite its superficial absurdity, that is, its glaring irrelevance to the official game, and the politically correct calls for its abolition. (Players arent ejected for fighting in the NHL, and although this includes American teams, Canadian culture historically has had a larger impact on the sport.) And as for the sport which North Americans call soccer, the paradoxical overwhelming popularity of this martial sport in Europe, Brazil, and in other, currently peaceful societies is explainable if we attend to the curious persistence of a cowardly form of cheating in that sport, which is the players pretending to be injured after a challenge by another player, and his melodramatic flailing and collapse to garner the referees sympathy and thus a penalty against the opposing team. Youd think no red-blooded man could willingly emasculate himself in such a fashion, especially when in closelywatched matches cameras tend to capture every detail with almost microscopic clarity, revealing the ruse in exquisite slow motion. However, not only does such cowardice succeed, unless the referee happens to have seen firsthand what transpired, but the allegedly injured player typically limps off of the field or is even carried off in a stretcher only to reemerge moments later, quite unharmed. And this whole practice persists, game after game, year after year. Why?

590 Because while this sport is fundamentally about mock warfare, peaceful populations celebrate their ironic use of the sport to symbolize the subversion of the martial instinct by the ruse of UN diplomacy. Without the unmanly cheating, a soccer/football game would proceed as a straightforward (if hideous) model of war (since war itself is always hideous). But when the tide of a game can turn with an opportune case of literally falling down on the job, by an apparent clown dressed as a symbolic soldier, the subtext becomes clear: the weakness of international law, backed as it is by no global military power, can yet counteract our bloodlust. Just as liberals wish that the sophistry of a UN speech against a nation that's on the precipice of war can prevent the war from occurring, so too weak nations put their spin on the ancient form of soccer/football, by introducing an element of chicanery into the play. And after a match, the players ritualistically don each others shirts, signifying the oneness of humanity and further circumventing the martial symbolism. No wonder more truculent countries like the US find soccer distasteful!

The Superiority of Natural to Artificial Sports

To sum up, then, sports either lose their meaning entirely over time, as in US baseball; retain their original meaning, as in US football; or gain new meaning as the metaphor is tweaked to suit current circumstances, as in soccer in relatively peaceful societies. Even when game-like sports currently excite their fans, however, the fans are more likely reacting instinctively to the action than appreciating the sports deeper meaning. Moreover, sports metaphors and rituals arent easily idolized in the postmodern climate in which all metanarratives are distrusted. Still, game-like sports are formally the same as religions and they serve for many so-called secularists as substitutes for traditional forms of worship. Indeed, current mainstream sports, like baseball, basketball, and hockey, are comparable to ancient Romes stale jingoistic, familial cults that only formally unified the Romans without addressing their angst. As Rome declined, Roman citizens naturally became more worried, but instead of offering wisdom in that time of turmoil, their native myths were so many pieces of transparent political propaganda, as in the imperial cults which deified Roman emperors. Seemingly to fill the vacuum, the

591 more mystical Eastern religions, such as Gnosticism, swept across the West, attracting many devotees. Simultaneously, between the first century BCE to the second century CE, Romans flocked to the gladiatorial games. Likewise, there are currently signs of Western decline and of discontent with the Wests unofficial state religions. These religions include secular humanism, secularized and emasculated Christianity, a sort of Stoic or pragmatic head-in-the-sand consumerism, but also sports fanaticism. As I said, game-like sports offer dualistic myths and rituals due to their artificiality and thus their detachment from natural reality. Fans enjoy the illusion of escaping the tyranny of natural law, to a level of cultural complexity in which humans rule literally by dictating laws that govern the course of events. At its best, a game-like sport might function like a scientific model, presenting an idealization of some natural phenomenon that directs our efforts to exploit the metaphors insight and improve on the world. For example, in the case of a pure mind game, chess might inspire sympathy for the grunts who perform the dirty work in wars, given the starkness of the games contrast between pawns and the more powerful game pieces. More often, though, game-like sports degenerate into empty, trivial formalities. Even when the outcome of a match cant be predicted, the mainstream sport fails to enchant for long because its foundational metaphor loses touch with the realities of the fast-changing postmodern world. Moreover, just as the ancient Romans turned to Eastern mysticism for relief from their angst-ridden doubts, Westerners now turn to New Age pseudoscience or to internet conspiracy theories. And just as the Romans seemed distracted by the gladiatorial games, MMA is currently the fastest growing Western sport. Partly, this surge of interest is due, first, to an increase in male bloodlust in reaction to feminism, as speculated by the novel and movie, Fight Club, and to the impossibility of successfully competing with machines for labour-intensive jobs; and second, in the US, to the increasing cultural impact of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. There are plenty of meatheads who enjoy watching mixed martial arts purely for the action. These are the fans who would always root for the overdog, because they want to see a human body physically

592 destroyed, and theyre likely also fans of torture porn, a despicable subgenre of the horror movie. Still, mixed martial arts also have their well-known spiritual side, originating as they did from the need for Shaolin monks to defend themselves against bandits. MMA encourages the pursuit of numerous secular virtues such as courage, honour, discipline, humility, and solidarity through camaraderie. More to the point, MMA falls on the opposite side of pure games in the spectrum of mind games, sports, and natural competitions. Recall that on the side of games like chess, natural forces have relatively minimal impact on the playing field and natural laws are less relevant than conventions that split the game off from nature. Games are thus dualistic and otherworldly, which allow them to serve as substitutes for traditional religions. At the other end there are natural conflicts like hunting and fighting with only minimal regulation or artificiality. These conflicts are comparatively monistic and naturalistic, meaning that they encourage the celebration of divinity within the natural world. That is to say, in so far as naturalistic sports have religious potential, their underlying myths are pantheistic. In the case of MMA, the combats significance is that its action proceeds without politically correct censorship or other regulatory illusions. Again, the thrill of worshipping our godlike power of creating cultural worlds, including the worlds that play out in game space, is alluring from a Nietzschean perspective, and aesthetically or ethically uplifting cultural products should be admired. But when a culture as a whole rots from the inside and its idols fail to enchant or inspire, the pursuit of transcendence through dualistic myths and rituals only furthers the social degeneration, and game-like sports become escapist fantasies, idle hobbies, or corrupting businesses. Set against the tedious formalities of baseball, the pitiful substitute for war in the case of Canadian hockey, the underhanded apology for diplomacy in soccer (outside the US), the shameless celebration of oligarchic privilege in golf, and the brutish glorification of war in basketball and American football, the rise of MMA potentially advances what Ive called an unembarrassing, viable postmodern religion.

593 In more game-like sports, athletes demonstrate awesome skills, but their victories are rendered absurd or tragic because of the lack of any compelling myth to elevate their competitions. In MMA, by contrast, the fighters succeed or fail more as beasts than pseudogods; the fighters train hard, but their contests are much more natural than artificial. A fight is essentially a series of violent physical collisions between body parts until one of the bodies is unable to continue. MMA is still a sport rather than a purely natural or wild conflict, because in the UFC and other MMA organizations, the fights are regulated by referees, judges, doctors, rounds, time limits, and so on. But the creative and destructive powers of nature shine through an MMA match, and an ideal religion should prescribe reverence for that power, without muddying the waters with delusions.

594

The Emptiness of Postmodern Art (and of its Consumers) ____________________________________________________

The social critic Camille Paglia has lamented in an Oct 2012 On Point radio interview that theres currently a dearth of great, nourishing art in the West (see onpoint.wbur.org). After their predecessors killed God, she says, postmodern secular humanists have failed to replace theistic religion with a high culture featuring worthwhile art. On the contrary, modern rationalism, with its paeans to technoscientific progress towards utopia, gave way to postmodern cynicism, irony, and sneering at all ideals, myths and faiths, including the longing for atheistic spirituality. Current Western art tends to be trash, Paglia says, because postmodernists have no conviction that any work can be a testament for all times. The plot thickens with Scott Timbergs Salon articles on the hard economic times for culture producers in the creative industries, including the fine arts and publishing. (See The Creative Class is a Lie and No Sympathy for the Creative Class.) In the United States, most painters, musicians, dancers, novelists, and actors barely scrape by, working multiple jobs or freelancing if they can find any work at all in their fields. The internet was supposed to be a gift to the creative class, giving artists direct access to their audience; indeed, there are some success stories, but theyre in a tiny minority and the oddity is that the artists plight is virtually a secret in the culture at large. Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen, Timberg says, write anthems about the travails of the working

595 man; we line up for the revival of Death of a Salesman. John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson hold festivals and fundraisers when farmers suffer. Taxpayers bail out the auto industry and Wall Street and the banks. Theres a sense that manufacturing, or the agrarian economy, is what this country is really about. But culture was, for a while, what America did best: We produce and export creativity around the world. So why arent we lamenting the plight of its practitioners? Timberg points to numerous causes in the US. Pragmatists and puritans object to arts uselessness or idolatry; the public worships celebrities and so has a distorted view of the creative class; theres a culture war fought between liberals and so-called antielitists, and artists are on the losing side with the intellectuals; the technological revolution has democratized the production of culture, leading people to err in inferring that theres likewise a democratization of talent, which in turn leads to resentment towards successful artists since we assume that anyone can produce great art. Finally, theres socially Darwinian economics and the scientistic assumption that only what can be measured is real and worthwhile; hence, many assume that if art cant pay its own way in the so-called free market, the artists ought to starve. There are a number of fascinating questions here. First, is there such a thing as great art, and if so, what is it? Second, is there currently any such art in the West, and if so does that art matter? Third, is there a deeper cause of the creative classs hardship, one thats tied to the function of art?

The Irrelevance of Great Postmodern Art

Regarding the first question, theres little academic agreement about arts function. Surely, at a minimum, though, great art should be the result of some skill or talent. Modernists valued originality as a sign of individual genius unrestrained by dogmatic institutions. At best, though, newness is a necessary condition of great art, since there are scribbles, noises, and hackworks that have never before been seen, heard, or read. Also, the cult of originality takes for granted a teleological, progressivist view of history

596 according to which whats in the past is necessarily inferior to what will come. I prefer Spenglers more naturalistic, cyclical theory of culture, according to which all civilizations come and go, passing through stages of vivacity and decline. Art should also hold up a mirror to the society in which its produced and to the spirit of its time. But this too doesnt suffice for great art, since anything can be interpreted as indicating the state of current culture or of human nature. Perhaps art should also point the way to a solution to social ills. According to Paglia, for example, secular art should fulfill a spiritual need that can no longer be fulfilled by theistic religion. Even if artists have no clue about how to improve their culture, Paglia implies that viewing great art will advance culture by improving the quality of its citizens. This isnt a complete theory of art, by any means, but we can take the combination of those criteria as a rough guide and ask whether any current, postmodern art is great in those respects. Much postmodern art seems arbitrary and indeed fraudulent as opposed to demonstrating much skill. Some such art, however, in the attempt to push the envelope, is perpetrated on a vast scale, incorporating tons of steel or gallons of paint, showing off the artists skill, at least, in socializing or in otherwise raising the funds to pursue such large-scale projects. And much postmodern art does indeed prove that originality doesnt suffice for greatness, since many postmodern paintings, for example, consist of just such novel forms of scribbling. The pointlessness or pretentiousness of this art does reflect the apathy and jadedness of postmodern society, but this raises the further question of whether a corrupt society can produce objectively, universally great art. If a culture is rotten and its art reflects that degenerateness by being equally rotten, the art must surely be as poor, in a sense, as the culture that spawns it. But perhaps art can be so rotten, as in the case of any Michael Bay movie, that the depths to which the work sinks are as awesome as the heights of the most elevated art. Perhaps art can be so disposable that it stands as an odious warning of the end of human vice. In that respect, even the worst of postmodern art can be permanently useful, albeit only ironically and paradoxically since the greatness of this art would consist in the works encouragement to do much better. As

597 for cultivating the viewers character, much postmodern art seems rather to reinforce the conventional cynicism and relativism; certainly, most postmodern artists would merely parrot obsolete liberal memes by way of recommending how Western societies might be salvaged. However, the technological revolution complicates the evaluation of current Western art. The fact is that virtually every conceivable genre of art is now being produced and indeed made freely available on the internet. If you go to the Last.fm radio website, for example, youll find lists of musicians occupying micro niches within niches. Theres electronic music, of course, but then theres ambient music and then drone and then dark ambient and drone doom and then drone metal; then theres funeral doom, drone doom metal, sludge, post-metal, stoner metal, sludgecore, sludge doom, and so on and so forth for all other music genres. Something similar is so with respect to painting, creative writing, and even acting. The internet has indeed allowed anyone to publish his or her own art. There are, for example, an astonishing number of blogs on every conceivable topic, including something as outlandish as existential cosmicism and the undead god. Theres more art created now than anyone can imagine and so as a matter of sheer probability youd think that at least a fraction of this outpouring of art must be great. Even were there now such hidden gems, though, the new ways in which this art is distributed raise the further question: Is all great art necessarily recognized as such? The works of many great painters, for example, became famous only after the painters died, having languished for years in obscurity, ignored or belittled by the art establishment--and that was before the advent of the internet and the information glut that afflicts consumers. There can be too much of a good thing; indeed, you can turn what was once a boon--when it was hard to come by or consumed in moderation--into a poison by consuming too much of it. An apple a day may be healthy, but twenty apples every day is not. Perhaps, then, technology has made art so abundant that weve become bored with it: not only have we peeked at the man behind the curtain, but we know everything there is to know about him; we have his cell phone number and hes at

598 our beck and call. When you can find not just free music, but any conceivable kind of music--and just by tapping a few keys--music may lose its charm. They say that the more you pay for something the more value you ascribe to what you buy, to justify the price, and thus the better you feel about paying so much for it. The corollary is that what can be so easily attained will seem all the more disposable and thus not worth having. (The stereotype of the loose woman works in the same way: when a woman is easily seduced, the man loses respect for her since he assumes shes worthless as a trophy and likely wont be faithful to him.) This follows the pattern of Murphys Law: the harder something is to achieve, the more its worth having and the fewer the people who achieve it, whereas the fewer the troubles encountered in pursuing something, the less worthy the thing is and thus the more the suckers who settle on something so unimportant. The point is that prior to the democratization of art distribution by the printing press, television, and the internet, when art was truly a delicacy for the elite, art was prized if only as a status symbol, like a flat belly in the midst of so many MacDonalds restaurants. Art in a postmodern society has no such high status, because its consumed along with the air we breathe. Thus, a democracy is usually the opposite of a meritocracy. Two heads are better than one only if one of the heads isnt a dunderhead that will spoil things for the pair. The more heads you put into the mix, the more dunderheads you introduce and thus the lower the standard that must be suffered for group cohesion. Youd think that the dunderheads would be outweighed by the geniuses whose input would also be increased, but this assumes that the dunderheads equal the geniuses in number and influence. In those societies that are beset by poor public education systems and by waves and waves of media misinformation emanating from the likes of Fox News and talk radio, the dunderheads might well drown out the elites, which will shift the average and lower the standards of art, consumer products, politics, and everything else that depends on public demand. To sum up, I suspect that there is great art now being produced in the West. This art is the product of great skill and originality and it deals with important topics. The problem

599 with postmodern art may lie not with the artists, then, but with the consumers: we postmodernists are spoiled and we take our godlike knowledge and power for granted. The internet is the fabled horn of plenty, and just as the spirits in the Christian heaven would be insufferable, condescending pantywaists, so too our vices are exacerbated by the environment we help create. We steal much of what we find on the internet because we want the best deal possible, and that in turn is because we dont make enough money to be carefree with our purchases; we dont earn a living wage, because we settle for politicians who protect societys naturally oligarchic structure, and we settle because the candidates technocratic handlers exploit our biological biases and so easily manipulate us. Then we enter a self-loathing phase as we realize were abusing a doomed business model in which content creators offer the fruits of their labours for free on the internet just on the off-chance that their work will go viral. Moreover, like decadent aristocrats were surrounded by such opulence that we become corrupted. We lose sight of the value of whats in front of us because we equate its value with the ease with which we can obtain it (just by clicking away at the mouse for a few seconds); thus, we commit a form of the genetic fallacy. And so both the artists and the consumers suffer: the latter impoverish the former, and the former punish the latter with haystacks of mediocre art in which are buried perhaps some pins of great artworks. The upshot, then, is that the quality of art is no longer decisive. Postmodernists are jaded because weve seen too much: too much art, too many religions, too many political scandals, too many celebrities, too many scientific discoveries, and on and on and on. The problem isnt that we obviously have more history behind us than any previous generation; rather, we have much more information about that history, thanks to technological advances which have democratized the flow of information in general and not just the distribution of art. Our greater access to information has empowered and thus corrupted us. (Just imagine what a debauched tyrant God would be.) Wikipedia all by itself fulfills the adage that a little learning is dangerous: anyone on the internet now can learn a little about anything under the sun, and so were boastful and rude in our electronic mockeries of social interactions. Moreover, were inundated with media-generated images, news stories, jingles, and sales pitches, and so were glutted;

600 were sick of our cultural follies. Weve become desensitized to both the best and the worst of what we can accomplish. Somewhere in the cultural maelstrom may likely be found artworks that nourish the soul, but who has the patience to sift the swarms of inferior works or even the incentive to believe that nourishing anything is worthwhile or that theres such a thing as a soul in the first place? The problem isnt so much that art is dead, but that the postmodern art consumer is dead inside.

Art and the Culture War

Finally, Id like to address the third question I raised, about the deeper cause. Timberg says, suggestively, that Serious art novels, what you have in the galleries brings you back to reality and makes you look at your life. Serious art makes people uncomfortable and during these times, we dont need more discomfort. Again, he says, the tale of our times, ONeill wrote in his piece on the silence of the new depression, is mostly being told by our unwillingness to tell it. I think Timberg here points to a major cause of the contemporary Western artists struggle. In a degenerate society, great art will reflect that abysmal condition and so present a message that the majority is unwilling to hear. Likewise, in a corrupt political system, the politician who gaffes by telling the politically incorrect truth will be despised and ridiculed as insane or as otherwise not Serious, not to mention voted out of office. So the environment and the conventions that spellbind us set up a vicious feedback loop, worsening trends that begin with our innate weaknesses and sealing our minds within self-reinforcing delusions. After all, the postmodern know-it-all, lost in pretentious irony and feigning the weariness that would come with godhood is a mere poseur (see How to Live without Irony, by Christy Wampole, at the NY Times). The universe outside our cultural playgrounds is thoroughly inhuman and to appreciate that fact is to sink to your knees in horror, to despair that your cherished ideals are farcically irrelevant, not to play idle games with cultural dross. Were the killers of postmodern art as well as the victims of a paradoxically artless culture. We have access to so much art that we might as well have access to

601 none; we take it all for granted, losing the ability to assign things their proper value. We dont deserve timeless, transcendent art, because we wouldnt appreciate it even if it fell into our laps. We are smug, soulless, contemptible creatures; our modern ancestors bet on Reason to replace religious Faith, and so weve inherited godlike technoscientific power, but not the wisdom to apply that power well. Paglia is right when she says that we lack but desperately need great art; however, the problem isnt so much that this art doesnt exist, but that we havent the eyes to see it or the character to normatively distinguish the great from the inferior. She blames postmodern art critics for their pompous, juvenile and self-refuting relativism, but I suspect that academic postmodernism is only a symptom of the disease. The ultimate problem of postmodernity was prophesied over a century ago by Nietzsche, who was an early postmodernist: when God dies, so does the basis of theistic values, and without new myths--expressed by great art--to sustain atheistic replacement ideals, functional atheists will revert to nihilism. Postmodern art consumers are nihilistic: we dont care about art in the first place, because our culture is deluged with information of all kinds, and so were unwilling to take up a quest to find the art that might save us or to pay much if anything for that art were we to encounter it. We are philistines posing as connoisseurs, pragmatic system-managers pretending to be high-cultured heralds of posthumanity. Our vaunted high culture is the seepage, the flatulent discharge, the stink from the decay of our paltry portion of the undead god. We are the frogs in the boiling pot, mesmerized by our melting flesh and mistaking our decadence for good taste. But more to the point, were some noble artists to sublimate the forces of that corruption and to produce inspiring artworks, art that might catalyze a social process of rejuvenation, and were that art so powerful as to be able to stir us even within the depths of our personal cocoon of delusions, theres yet another cocoon that would first have to be cracked open: the collective version of the self-reinforcing delusion. There is a largely automated social system that prevents subversive messages from reaching a wide audience, and this filtering happens even on the internet with its democratic

602 powers of liberating information. Contrary to conspiracy theorists, there is no cabal of elites that controls this system of managing public opinion, although there is a minority that surely benefits from the natural sorting process. What happens is just that most social groups ultimately succumb to the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and one aspect of this assignment of status in the pecking order is the differential flow of information. The elites in charge have their top secret access to the truth, while the masses are fed a diet of nonsense; more precisely, though, the masses flock to gobble up their gruel, because they lack the skills and the social connections to occupy a higher position in the power hierarchy. Even the movers and shakers can watch Fox News or the dreck of the most-watched YouTube videos, but only those who arent educated to think critically or who have nothing else to do because theyre stuck with low-level jobs will mistake those disposable infotainments for revelations worthy of the time to consume them. The social system runs according to natural laws that spell out the patterns that result from complexification and evolution (synchronic and diachronic processes). One such pattern is the emergence of oligarchy which distributes power to stabilize a group of social animals. Democratic or libertarian social structures merely free individuals to assume their natural positions in the power hierarchy. And my point here is that postmodern societies in decline or at least in denial about their deficiencies will make great art all the harder to find, to reinforce the delusions that sustain the currently-unfashionable oligarchic structure. The bad art of infotainment distracts the masses while the elite are free to buy and sell masterpieces of yesteryear. Artists suffer, then, for the sake of social stability. After all, artists tend to be omega men and women, alienated outsiders, outcasts and introverts whose detachment from society allows them to see what the insiders and mainstream masses can miss. Secular artists tend to be subversive because their art is the product of their mentally disturbed personality, which prevents them from adapting to social conventions. Antisocial outsiders have less at stake in protecting politically correct delusions, and so these artists--painters, novelists, bloggers, poets, singers, independent film-makers, unconventional architects--use their art as weapons against the social order that

603 ostracizes them. In modern or postmodern societies, at least, in which theres a sharp divide between religious and secular forces, theres typically a cold war between artists and defenders of mainstream, nakedly or covertly oligarchic conventions. If Timberg is right and most Western artists are in dire financial straits, this signifies that the mainstream forces currently have the upper hand or at least that few people appreciate subversive messages enough to pay much for them. Alternatively, the significance might be that the masses crave an alternative to their cultural status quo, but that Western art isnt sufficiently subversive to meet that demand. Again, though, I think theres so much art out there now that any artistic taste can be satisfied. But taste requires an appetite, a sign of inner life thats rarer than you might think.

604

Male-Bashing in Advertising: A Sordid Business ____________________________________________________

For twenty years now, one of the highlights of North American advertising, especially on television, is what many call its male-bashing. Invariably, when TV ads show men and women together, the ads belittle men as ignorant, incompetent, loutish, or juvenile while heralding women as wise, mature, long-suffering adults. (For examples, see the Top Ten list from AskMen.com and for background see the 2005 NY Times article, Men are Becoming the Ad Target of the Gender Sneer). Men are always the butt of the jokes while women represent the smart consumers who are bound to follow the advertisers advice and buy the product sold by the ad. Critics often remark that were these stereotypes reversed, there would be a feminist uproar and the advertisers would be lynched in the streets. Of course, in the ads of the 1950s and 40s, the stereotypes were indeed exactly reversed, with women depicted as know-nothing children and men as the responsible, all-knowing guardians. Those ads persisted because women had little power then to affect the mass media. Then came the later feminist wave in the 1960s, and women entered the workplace in droves. Over the last couple of decades, North American women have started earning as much as men even in some white collar fields and those women now outnumber men with college or university degrees. Women currently have some sway over the culture industry, although theyve hardly unseated men from their positions of ultimate political and economic power. Why, then, are the male-bashing ads still perpetrated and tolerated?

605

Three reasons for their creation come to mind. First, taking into account what I just said, that the current crop of grotesque sexist caricatures precisely reverses an earlier one, the advertisers may be lazy, choosing a formula they know worked in the past, but flipping the variables to accommodate recent social developments. This is surely part of the truth, but it points to a second cause which is the advertisers interest in reflecting reality. After all, feminism, competition with machines for traditionally male-dominated jobs, and postmodern cynicism and resistance to patriarchal metanarratives have emasculated and feminized men in wealthy, decadent societies. Advertisers are hardly like scientists who are after knowledge for its own sake, but selling products requires at least a modicum of concern to represent reality--although surely no more than the minimum needed to avoid being branded as a bold-faced liar. Theres much talk recently of mens identity crisis, so ads may reflect that crisis, as advertisers burrow into the consumers preconscious or unconscious and spin narratives that associate overproduced products with the fulfillment of manufactured or uncontrolled urges, respectively. Still, the fact that the commercials are clearly exaggerations, at best, if not shameless distortions, suggests a third cause which is that advertisers know that male-bashing ads are somehow currently effective at selling the products. Now, assuming the ads work, they mustnt exclude any large, targeted mass of consumers such as adult men or women. So perhaps surprisingly, men and women must approve of these ads. The reasons why, though, arent so hard to discern. Although superficially, men should be appalled by their caricatures throughout the mass media, and some men even speak out against them (such as the radio personality Tom Leykis), the majority likely chalk up their embarrassing cultural image as just another round of lies that women need to hear to accommodate mens actual vices, including men's higher sex drive (see Sex Drive: How do Men and Women Compare? at webmd.com). Meanwhile, women are especially susceptible to flattery; indeed, mens lies to women are so obligatory, due to the fact that the evolutionary (sexual) interests of men and women are at loggerheads, that the stream of lies amounts to a ritual mating dance to pacify women by overriding

606 their defense mechanisms, including their bullshit detector. The boldness of the lies may indicate stoutness of heart, courage on the battlefield, or some other evolutionarily significant virtue. To sum up, male-bashing and women-glorification work now in advertising, because those business tactics arent radical departures from the trusty methods of earlier, misogynistic decades; the ads reflect the postmodern reality in which women are on a comparative economic and cultural upswing while men are lost in limbo, although the overall trend is one of dehumanization; and men are used to lying to please women, while women are readily flattered as long as the lies are sufficiently creative and distracting for women to subconsciously register the subtext that men still dominate. The trouble with this analysis, though, is that it doesnt touch on the advertisers depravity. The underlying fact is that advertising is a sordid business, fit for treacherous, parasitic worms. When I punish myself by imagining a day in the life of an advertiser, heres what I picture. The advertisers pit sinks deep into the earth as a volcanic entrance to hells inferno. A demon collects his infernal files of esoteric data and other apocalyptic devices to tempt the human masses and ensure their eventual downfall. Slinking through a crack in the outcroppings wall, the demon narrowly misses the lashing tails and claws of fellow demons scampering to their orgiastic fight to the death. Through flames and clouds of sulfur, the demon catches sight of children being sacrificed to Mammon and chuckles as their blood boils on the rocks. The demon gets to work and takes hold of one captive human after another, flogging them senseless with his cruelly-fashioned whips. Then the demon lashes himself until he collapses and requires a break, his howls of self-loathing adding to the cacophonous cries of the damned. No, I dont care much for advertising.

607

Sheldon Cooper: The Nerds Paradox ____________________________________________________

The Big Bang Theory is a very highly rated comedy in Canada and the US, largely because of the break-out character of Dr. Sheldon Cooper, played by Jim Parsons, whos won two Emmys and a Golden Globe for his performance. On the surface, the show is about a group of nerdy friends in their late twenties, who are scientific geniuses but with childish preoccupations that socially handicap them. Why are such a TV show and the character of Sheldon Cooper, in particular, so popular?

Evading Angst and Subduing Technoscience

In the show, Sheldon has the most freakishly high intelligence in his group of friends, but has also regressed most to a childhood state. Hes thus the shows most paradoxical character. He was a child prodigy with an IQ of 187, earning various graduate degrees, including a Ph.D., while still a teenager. He became a professional theoretical physicist, perhaps the most intellectually-challenging job, requiring a mastery of cutting-edge mathematics and a grasp of the most exotic, inhuman concepts, which are at the center of modern physics. He has an eidetic memory, which enables him to know virtually everything about what he regards as nontrivial subjects, namely all subjects that dont involve adult social relationships.

608 If knowledge is power, then, Sheldon should intimidate the rest of humanity with his fearsome intelligence. But the opposite is true: Sheldon is routinely both pitied and mocked by everyone, especially by his friends who know him best. The reason is that Sheldons godlike intelligence is complemented by the fact that his emotions are those of a childs, making him psychologically a boy in a mans body. Hes obsessed with comic books, sci fi, video games, and trains; he likes to be sung to sleep and otherwise mothered; hes unable to drive a car so he has to be driven by his friends. Despite his near-omniscience, which theoretically enables him to overcome any obstacle, his lack of emotional development renders him unable to comprehend let alone succeed in the field which adults care about most, the field of social interaction. Sheldon may suffer from Asperger Syndrome or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, since he lacks empathy, engages in restrictive and repetitive behaviours, and is socially awkward. Moreover, he suffers from phobias of germs and of being touched, among others. Sheldon is therefore effectively asexual, an alien or a god among human beings who, instead of terrifying his intellectual inferiors, is routinely mocked by them. When his friend Penny, who has lackluster intelligence, attempts to navigate his own scientific areas of expertise, tackling basic questions about how the universe works, she fails dismally but shes neither pitied nor ridiculed for those failures, because she wields power in social relationships, being an attractive young woman with much sexual experience. The show thus presupposes the higher value of social relationships than of technoscience, so that neither mastery of nor failure in the latter is assumed to matter. Whereas in reality advances in science and technology radically reshape human life, Sheldons scientific progress is never applauded or shown to be consequential. The key to Sheldons character, I think, is that hes born with his superhuman intelligence. Instead of choosing to acquire knowledge, to eat the proverbial apple due to the sin of wanting to exercise godlike self-control, Sheldons forced to endure nearomniscience, due to his high IQ, his prodigious memory, and his mental illnesses which alienate him, cloistering him in the Ivory Tower. This means that Sheldons social failures cant be interpreted as punishments for a sin of choosing to transcend a pre-

609 established divine plan. The only responses to him that are left to us are pity and ridicule: pity, for Sheldon who will never know the pleasures of sex and love, and ridicule in playful retaliation for his childish selfishness, his temper tantrums, and his social awkwardness. Sheldons essentially a victim: hes cursed by reason and while hes blessed with compensatory characteristics that protect him from angst, those characteristics also ostracize him. That is, the curse of reason is knowledge of our existential predicament of being animals tantalized by the possibility of our godhood. This knowledge causes angst, which we attempt to escape by distracting ourselves with fantasies and other delusions, most commonly with theistic projections of our vanities. Sheldon has an overabundance of the requisite knowledge, but hes spared the emotional devastation from the existential implications, because hes insulated not by theistic fantasies but by childlike ones. Those fantasies of superheroes, chivalry, and toy collections, however, tragically deprive him of the fruits of adulthood. For Sheldons part, hes aware that society disapproves of his means of coping with a gods soul-crushing near-omniscience, but he in turn looks down on normal folks for their petty or bestial pastimes. However, Sheldons condescension is undermined by his own inchoate desire for normality. He has a childs pride in his intellectual greatness and is offended when hes not properly rewarded. Indeed, the notion that knowledge is rewarding is itself a childish one, often upheld as part of a pragmatic whitewash of the Scientific Revolution. Knowledge, freedom, and consciousness are curses, not blessings, because theyre necessarily embodied in animals which have only limited means of fulfilling their potential. Although our high degree of those three powers elevates us from the humdrum task of mere survival, empowering us with the leisure to artificially manage our evolution, we poison our cultures with the delusions that derive from our base origin. We lack the virtues to live with no illusions as intelligent, free, conscious beings, because our animalistic fight or flight instinct and other primitive neural mechanisms still establish upper bounds on our mental development. Primates that evolved to fear insects and darkness interpret the alien outer vistas, opened up to us by our talents for consciousness and intelligence, that is, the world beyond the one we narrowly inhabit as hosts for genes, as rife with potential dangers. Just as our

610 biological limits betray our godlike aspirations to control our lives and to create our own sustainable worlds, Sheldons childlike baggage and escapist fantasies prevent his complete transformation into a posthuman. Sheldons character of the paradoxical nerd seems to have social utility, which would explain his wild popularity. The TV show deconstructs the modern pretension of progress through technoscience, by presenting a stunted version of the rationalists hero. More specifically, the show posits that the genius needed for something like the raising of the global living standards would have to be offset by some such compensatory strategies as those employed by Sheldon and his scientific friends, who have their own childish obsessions together with their tragic results (inability to talk to women and over-dependence on mother). By laughing at the nerds on The Big Bang Theory, postmodern sophisticates can pretend that technoscience poses no danger and that their incredulity towards all metanarratives frees them from such pathetic traps. Of course, neither reason for laughing is justified; indeed, the cartoonish comedy of The Big Bang Theory is itself a distraction from the angst which awaits the use of even subgenius human intelligence. In any case, while the shows nerds are harmless and even emasculated by their means of coping with scientific knowledge, in reality science and technology are hazardous both to the existence of life and to the maintenance of our sanity. Moreover, while cynicism and apathy may enable the postmodernist to brush off traditional myths as sociopolitical propaganda, she likely buys into the scientistic religion of secular humanism, which includes faith in capitalism, democracy, and liberal social values. This religion has its own pathetic rituals, such as subservience to somnolent rules of political correctness.

611

Pity and the Nerd: A Dialogue

Heres how I imagine a dialogue going between roommates Sheldon and Leonard, regarding romantic love. The setting is their apartment. ***** Sheldon Cooper: Where are you going? Tonights Comic Book Night. Leonard Hofstadter: I have a date, Sheldon. SC: Youd rather be out with a woman than rummaging the comic book store? Hiding what precious little intellect you have to avoid intimidating her on the off-chance that your short stature will trigger the womans mothering instinct, which you can then exploit in some twisted fashion to have coitus with her? LH: Thats disgusting! You have no idea what youre talking about. For a so-called genius, its amazing how dumb you are about whats most important. SC: That being...? LH: Like the song says, love is all you need. Romantic love, sexual intimacy. Youre just a child with no comprehension of emotionally mature, adult life. SC: Mmm, yes, a child with detailed knowledge of the physical processes that create the chemicals that use love and sex to preserve the genes, a child whos innocent of the petty and beastly thought routines that you call emotional adulthood. LH: Regardless of sexs biological role, youve got no standing to criticize what youve never personally experienced.

612 SC: My my, Leonard, your anticipation of coitus this evening must be dulling your cerebral cortex. Do I have to murder someone to know that murder is wrong? My alienation from the hoi polloi allows me to study their behaviour objectively and see it for what it really is, unclouded by politically correct sentimentality. LH: Who are you kidding? You dont socially interact on an adult level, because youve got a thousand irrational fears, not to mention OCD which chains you to arbitrary rules like your commandment to read comics on Comic Book Night. Youre a broken man and most people feel sorry for you. SC: Well now, is the inability to belittle oneself a weakness? I may rigidly adhere to the rules I set for myself, but were all imprisoned by the laws of nature and I understand that prison better than the blissfully-ignorant slaves of hormones. You may pity what you call my brokenness, but thats like a sinner criticizing Gods majesty. God pities lesser beings and so do I. LH: Get over yourself! Youre no god. Youre a mentally ill Texan and an arrogant child who thinks he ought to rule the world because hes really smart. But even if you were omniscient, you wouldnt have any wisdom. SC: Ill thank you to take that back, Leonard. You can call me a broken child, a sick, unwise, Satanic pretender to Gods throne, but a Texan?! Thats going too far. Lets keep this conversation civil, if you please. LH: I apologize. Youre not a Texan. But you are a pitiful child whos never going to experience love. SC: Dear Leonard, the sentimental nonsense you emit when your hindbrain is preoccupied with thoughts of sex! Why would I want to experience love? Instead, I can perceive the universes grandeur, the beauty of the mathematical patterns that entail your repeating of stale memes about the glory of an emotion needed for primitive pair-

613 bonding. I can see the code that runs the Matrix and youre mesmerized by hormonal illusions that control your every move, including your going out on a date on Comic Book Night! LH: Which Im now going to be late for, thanks to you. Im glad we cleared this up. Youre a keen observer of the human condition and when youve amassed all of your knowledge, maybe youll have won a Nobel Prize and furthered scientific progress for all humankind. But youll have floated around like a ghost or banged on the window of a toy store like a child, unable to play because you dont even know how to open the door. SC: Well, when you put it that way, it sounds kind of sad. But Id take a Nobel or a wellcrafted comic book over the sexual rigmarole any day. Enjoy your date, Leonard, and Ill return to my childish pursuit of unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity.

614

The Abuse of Light in the Films of Spielberg and Michael Bay ____________________________________________________

Much can be learned about American culture by comparing the abuses of light in the cinematography of Spielberg and Michael Bay films. In most of his movies, Spielberg works with the cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, who favours an overabundance of natural, white light. His shots are often overexposed so that the milky white light washes out all of the surfaces in the scene. Given the attributes of Spielbergs movies, including the sentimental nostalgia for childhood, the touchy-feely morality of secularized Judaism, and the over-reliance on storyboarding, this prevalence of white light represents Gods immanence and the religious imperative to make Earth resemble Heaven. Meanwhile, Bays movies are conspicuous for their aversion to natural lighting, especially in indoor scenes: theres almost always a fully-saturated, candy-like blue or yellowish-orange light source somewhere offstage, casting an artificial glaze over everything. Given the features of his movies, including the militarism, the jingoism, the crass subservience to macho stereotypes, the predominance of production values and the lack of artistic vision, this artificial light represents hollow, amoral materialism and the secular imperative to make all places resemble Las Vegas.

615

Spielbergs Compromised Judaism

With these two iconographic uses of light, you have the worst of American religious and secular cultures. American Judaism and Christianity are so cut off from their mystical origins, so drained of their spiritual purposes, and so compromised in their integration with the secular forces of science, democracy, and capitalism, that their myths and moral messages are hideous, grating imitations of healthier versions. It goes without saying that a secularized Jew or Christian has no legs to stand on: they can chant their creeds incessantly only because theyve mastered the art of compartmentalizing their thoughts and feelings, having now adapted to an environment consisting largely of computers, which have readily-inspected separate directories to store their information. These moderate religious folks dont share the theistic mindset needed to breathe life into their creeds, because theyve at least unconsciously absorbed the scientific, secular worldview. Accordingly, they save their myths only by interpreting them in literary rather than in theological terms. Morality and families are sacred, the moderates will say, because God carved his commandments into stone and handed them to Moses--except which of these moderates can explain why that religious metaphor should be regarded as any more special than the metaphors that are a dime a dozen in the thousands of novels published each year? Does the old age of a tradition sanctify its content? Obviously not, since the moderate religionist freely cherry-picks which religious tradition to observe and which to discard as the obsolete labour of ancient, uninformed yokels. The problem with moderate, secularized religions is simply one of awkwardness. Its not a question of having to face up to an honourable challenge to the secular lifestyle; rather, the presence of wishy-washy, hypocritical, having-it-both-ways charlatans is just aesthetically intolerable. Imagine youre at a party, everyone is enjoying themselves, and then a self-righteous hypocrite takes his face out of the punchbowl and his arms off of a pair of half-naked ladies, and lectures the crowd about its sins, spouting the wisdom and stale metaphors of cultures long departed, the alcoholic beverage still dripping down his chin and his cheeks still flush with the anticipation of his imminent orgy. Again, the trouble in this case has nothing to do with taking seriously the transparent nonsense

616 emanating from that self-deluded fellows mouth; the difficulty is just in extricating yourself from his vicinity so that his bad taste doesnt somehow rub off on you. Something similar can be said about democratic western politicians, who represent the bottom of the barrel, ethically and intellectually speaking, given that ultimate political and economic power resides--in this time of globalization--in the oligarchs corridors which interpenetrate government and the private sector. For example, an American liberals chief difficulty today becomes not one of having to devise a plan to beat Romney, Cain, Perry, or any of the other potential Republican presidential nominees; the problem, rather, is in expending the energy needed to hold back your own embarrassment for the Republicans. Of course, Republicans are in exactly the same situation with regard to Obama. Obamas high intelligence only makes his betrayal of his initial liberal campaign more awkward and the bankruptcy of liberal rationalism more conspicuous. But to return to Spielbergs movies, my point is that his light symbolism is mawkish and sanctimonious, because his symbols depend on secularized Judaism, which has nothing to teach either religious or nonreligious people, given the extent of its compromises. Mind you, the shame of secularized Jews is likely indirect, since they tend to see themselves in Straussian, elitist terms, purveying noble lies for the unwashed masses and for social stability. Their cognitive dissonance lies, then, not in any tension between their religious and nonreligious beliefs, since they have virtually no religious beliefs to speak of, but in their pretense that theyre wiser than the rabble to which they regularly lie as soon as they talk about religion or morality. (Note that because Im culturally a reformed Jew, Im entitled, by the power conferred to me by the Laws of Political Correctness, to slander Jews as freely as I like, just as Herman Cain was the only one in polite society to be able to speak the N-word in the name of Perrys hunting camp. I, for one, dare not type the full N-word, lest the PC gods smite me for failing to observe the superstition of idolatry. We must, after all, bow to preposterously-misplaced fear of symptoms rather than of diseases. We must especially

617 avoid speaking ill of Jews whose people suffered so much in their confrontation with pure evil--unless you happen to be a Jew, and then you can say whatever you like about them. Theres nothing like a naked double standard. In any case, Im all for being politically correct, by worshipping images and signs rather than what they represent. How else will we remain clueless and incapable of preventing our downfall? The conventions of political correctness must be respected as a means by which well extinguish ourselves and clear the path for a species to replace us.)

Bays Uncontrollable Misanthropy

As for Michael Bays abuse of light, this should be seen as just a hint of the depth of the mans loathing for his viewers. As far as I can tell, the subtext of each of his movies is Bays feeling that the secular lifestyle of infinite consumption degrades us all and that were all, in effect, currently writhing in hell. He therefore aims for his movies to be execrable, to be the very worst form of art that anyone can currently perpetrate--and this is no easy trick, since a movie that successfully translates a filmmakers boundless misanthropy must have not a single redeeming quality, so that when the movies over and the viewer leaves the theater, not a trace of anything of value can be left in the viewers mind: not a memory of a funny, scary, sexy, or cool scene, not a resonance with ideas dramatized by the movie--nothing. In this way, the lasting relationship between Bay and his audience is strictly one-way: his audience members transfer their money to the bank accounts that fund his nihilistic enterprise and he leaves them with a representation of the void at the heart of American secular culture. The key to the production of the worst of all possible art is shallowness, which is the equivalent of religious moderation and which thus makes for the comparison with Spielbergs morality plays. There need be nothing wrong with a movie that criticizes libertine or materialistic culture, if the movie commits to the criticism and carries it out with good faith. Even were the criticism unmerited, such a movie would have the redeeming feature of posing the challenge of discovering the movies weakness. But a movie that commits to nothing, that rehearses tired action formulas purely for cheap,

618 ephemeral thrills, appealing to the very lowest standards with regard to plot and character, isnt art so much as highway robbery. Bay evidently got a taste for this shallowness from Bruckheimers seeming instruction to his composers to abuse their musical instruments. Listen, for example, to the scores of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which feature repetitive blasts of a full-throated orchestra (duh-duh-duh-duh-duh, dum-dum-dum-dum, duh-duh-duh-duh, duh-duh, dum-dum-dum-dum!). This anti-music doesnt discriminate by picking a horn or an oboe or a violin to prevail for a moment, creating a shifting sonic pattern that humans call music. Instead, his movies scores bang away at all of the instruments in the orchestra simultaneously, committing to none of them and thus creating a vacuum that celebrates the farce of parasitic consumerism. Michael Bay, then, hates Americans for gobbling up his movies; at least, that's the most plausible explanation of why he keeps punishing his audience, according to this satirical rant. But again, were he to openly reveal that contempt, his movies would no longer be the very worst possible, which is what they need to be to hold a mirror up to the American black hole. His genius is in revealing nothing, saying nothing, showing nothing; his movies are cotton candies that disintegrate when consumed. Still, perhaps no one can perfectly hold such hatred in check, and so for what at first seems no discernable reason, he paints most of his indoor scenes with melancholic blue and queasy yellowish-orange artificial lights. These lights are artificial not just because theyre electric, but because theyre unrealistic: the light sources themselves are rarely shown and their hues are always fully saturated, meaning that their hues are furthest from white so that the lights are like vampires hiding from the sun. Bay calls attention to the fact that these lights are props, that he and his cinematographers--he uses different ones from one movie to the next, so he seems to be the common denominator--choose to reuse the same bizarre lighting, scene after scene and movie after movie. He often pairs orange and blue lights in the same shot, hiding their sources like Easter Eggs.

619

The depressing cyans and nauseating yellowish-oranges indicate, then, not a subliminal criticism of the scenes he puts together, but Bays seething, barely-controlled disgust with the depraved world that holds him in such high esteem, with the audience thats entertained by nihilistic twaddle and is so numbed to the emptiness of their secular culture that theyre even fleetingly thrilled by Bays chaotic action sequences and stirred by his ham-handed reinforcement of sociopolitical conventions. What the lights seem to mean for Bay is that his movies are supposed to depress or nauseate the viewer, but that because the viewer instead flocks to see his movies, its the viewers emptiness and taste that are so appalling. The sickly lights symbolize the viewers shallowness for preferring such shallow movies.

620

Woody Allens Curious Intellectualism ____________________________________________________

Woody Allen films are famous for their existential comedy. On the one hand, these films tend to feature the Woody Allen character, a hyper-rational, neurotic atheist and existentialist who fears death and regards life as absurdly unfair. On the other hand, this character is highly sexual and instead of ascetically retreating from life, he finds humour in tragic situations, expressing that humour in wry one-liners. Most of his films mine this paradox, but Whatever Works, starring Larry David as the Woody Allen character, called Boris, neatly summarizes what seems Allens personal philosophy. No familiarity with this particular movies plot is needed to understand Boris concluding speech, since this speech could have been inserted into nearly any of his movies. Boris says, I totally lucked out. It just shows what meaningless blind chance the universe is. Everybody schemes and dreams to meet the right person, and I jump out a window and land on her [his soul mate]. And a psychic yet! I mean, come on, talk about the irrational heart [Boris is a hyper-rationalist physicist who loves her in spite of himself]...I happen to hate New year's celebrations. Everybody desperate to have fun. Trying to celebrate in some pathetic little way. Celebrate what? A step closer to the grave? That's why I can't say enough times, whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. And don't kid yourself, it's by no means all up to your own human

621 ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck than you'd like to admit. Christ, you know the odds of your father's one sperm from the billions, finding the single egg that made you? Don't think about it, you'll have a panic attack. This speech refers both to dark existentialism (the inevitability of death) and to the need for happiness and sexuality, to lifes unfairness (success dependence on luck) and to the possibility of grace. Evidently, the films title, Whatever Works, is meant to call to mind a pragmatic amoralists libertinism, the license to exploit natures inhumanity, not for evil but for good--which Allen assumes to be mainly the pursuit of personal pleasure with a life partner. As evidenced by his cerebral, philosophical humour and his scandalous love life, Woody Allens movies seem vehicles for preaching his personal wisdom, if not autobiographies.

Woody Allens Philosophy

A philosophical evaluation of Woody Allens viewpoint should be distinguished from a comedic one. The paradox set up by his films works comedically, I think, because a sexually preoccupied hyper-rationalist is bound to stumble into one absurd situation after another. Moreover, this character is only a caricature of Everyman, of the typical person, since everyone is pulled in opposite directions by the evolved modules of our brains, such as by our capacities for dispassionate logic and for blind subservience to the genes prerogative to preserve themselves by our sexual reproduction. For example, as a hyper-rationalist, the Allen character is neurotically fearful of germs, diseases, and of the body in general as triggers of existential horror: the body decays and nature allows this to happen because each person means nothing; natural forces bless mindless genetic code with immortality, not sentient creatures, which means were all alienated strangers whose high comfort level is predicated on fantasy and delusion. The hyper-rationalist is cursed with the inability to be fully enchanted by reassuring, egocentric myths and so incurs a measure of insanity from staring too long into the abyss. Thus the Allen characters multiple neuroses. However, this character is also

622 highly sexually active, longing for love. This inner conflict leads to hypocrisy and to all manner of schemes to balance his reason with his instinct, what Plato calls our higher and lower natures. Thus, the spectacle of the effeminate intellectual, who is all brains and no brawn, nevertheless gearing up to serve his genes in the battle for sex; to perform his bestial duties while recognizing the absurdity of the whole human enterprise; to succumb to the banal glorification of romantic love while ridiculing all other social conventions, including religious and moral ones--all of this can be quite amusing. But what of the philosophical merit of Woody Allens convictions? Should existentialists, cosmicists, and skeptics prefer a life of hedonism or at least of romantic love, to one of honour-bound renunciation of the more blatant natural processes? If we reduce Boris speech to its implicit argument, we find something like this: (1) Nature is far from heaven and is in fact absurdly unfair to us due to its mindlessness. (2) Assuming we want to be happy and to do good, therefore, we need to take that piece of dark wisdom into account, go with the flow and be pragmatic in our quest for love, which is the greatest cause of happiness. This argument raises the question, though, of whether the first assumption in (2) ought to be granted, that is, of whether the antecedent clause of the hypothetical imperative, If you still want to be happy under our dire circumstances, you ought to be desperate and pragmatic in finding love, is justified. Should a hyperskeptics ultimate goal be happiness? Ive argued in the Introduction that the answer is No, and in Curse of Reason I argue that the objective, decentralized perspective afforded by the use of reason tends to produce feelings of alienation rather than of contentment. In any case, I want to point out that affirming the fact that most people do desire romantic love and happiness in general is different from positively evaluating those desires in light of an ethical or aesthetic ideal. Moreover, while someone who has those desires may find the implicit instrumental imperative in Woody Allen movies useful, this leaves unanswered the deeper question of whether those desires ought to be prioritized. Certainly, theres the naturalistic fallacy in inferring that just because we feel

623 strongly about something, as a matter of fact, therefore those feelings are right or otherwise normatively justified. Now, a hyper-rationalist like the Allen character should be expected to criticize any ethical or aesthetic standard, including one thats brought up against the pursuit of happiness. For example, were a Gnostic hermit to argue that sex is bad because it entangles the participants in nature which itself is a bad place, Woody Allen would mock that religious perspective with a classic one-liner. However, the Allen character is no postmodern nihilist. Far from rejecting all normative principles, he affirms the values of romantic love and of happiness in general. So the question Im raising is whether Woody Allens normative principle is superior, say, to a more ascetic one that favours a less traditional lifestyle. Indeed, the question can be reframed in comedic terms, since comedy is at least partly an aesthetic matter. Aesthetically and comedically, then, the question is which lifestyle is the ugliest/most ridiculous, that of the Allen character (the hyper-rational neurotic who struggles to find love and contentment) or that of, say, a detached Buddhist, omega man, or ascetic cosmicist? And on just this point, Woody Allens body of work counts against the philosophical validity of his thesis, since in film after film he exhibits the incoherence/ridiculousness of his protagonists values. Even as the Allen character trashes a host of opposing viewpoints, that character is himself shown to be foolish, over and over again. The very nerdish physical appearance of Woody Allen, juxtaposed with his struggles to be manly, provokes laughter. The question, then, is whether, say, an ascetics renunciation of natural urges is as ridiculous as the Woody Allen character. To be sure, the prospect of an existentialist rebelling against a mindless cosmos that must fail to be impressed or ashamed of generating tortured souls, has comedic potential. But suppose the existentialist rebels in good faith, in accordance only with his own aesthetic sensibility and not with any hope of striking a blow against what he believes is a nonexistent deity. In that case, is the artificial rejection of the most natural course as laughable as the thought of the Allen character having sex? This raises a side question, since the attempt to retain sanity and social functionality, by placing faith in politically correct myths, may itself be construed as an artificial reaction

624 to the natural impulse to sexually reproduce. That is, a blatant natural impulse is the one shared by all mammals to have sex and to raise offspring. Humans have that biological impulse but also reason, and the discrepancy between them produces culture, which is a rarer, artificial world emerging from more common processes. Most of culture is dominated by social conventions, including religious and moral ones, which conventions tend to be delusions requiring irrational leaps of faith. The antisocial skeptic or existential outsider, who rejects mainstream goals in favour of some less popular ideal, can be compared, then, not just with the Allen character but with the hero of mainstream society who maintains her social functionality by antiphilosophical means. Which strategy for coping with the horror of our biological function is aesthetically most pleasing or ethically most laudatory, the reliance on delusions to fulfill that function more efficiently, given its indignity from a hyper-rational perspective, or the refusal to perform that function and a withdrawal from faith-based social enterprises?

Melancholia and the Noble Lie

Instead of trying to settle these questions here, I just want to clarify the problem by contrasting the Woody Allen movie with a more cosmicist one, called Melancholia, written and directed by Lars von Trier. Its worth summarizing this movies plot, so if you havent seen the movie, you might want to stop reading at this point. The movies about two ways of coping with the worlds apocalyptic end due to a planets colliding with Earth, those of a normal, happy person and of a melancholic depressive. The two main characters are sisters, one of whom tries to be normal in the movies first half, by getting married but who fails and ruins her wedding by her carelessness, while the other tries to be normal in the second half in spite of the imminent apocalypse but whose poise is lost as she gains more respect for her sisters cosmic perspective. According to that perspective, natural life is altogether wrong and so the social conventions she cant follow due to her mental illness are guilty by association. Indeed, this perspective is shown to be a mystical insight. The depressed sister, Justine, somehow knows the number of beans in a glass at her wedding, a point she reveals to lend credence to her condemnation of terrestrial life. Moreover, Justine has a psychic connection with the

625 incoming planet, which is actually named Melancholia. She knows it will strike the Earth, whereas the scientific community is in optimistic denial. The two planets symbolize the two sisters, who in turn symbolize abnormality and normality, or soul-destroying cosmic insight and delusional bliss. Earth is filled with normal, relatively happy people who are rudely awakened by the surprise arrival of the planet Melancholia, which does destroy them. The upshot, I take it, is that the melancholy misfit is actually more in touch with cosmic reality, but that this loftier affinity isnt apparent when the rules of normal human interactions are in force, creating a fantasy world for human happiness in the face of the abyss of existential truth. Only when natural forces stir themselves, mocking our vain illusions and pitiful defense mechanisms, mindlessly dooming us, is the mystics misanthropy fully vindicated. But the point isnt that the mystic would be entitled to say I told you so, during the apocalypse; that is, the deeper point isnt about having an arcane theory of nature which allows the doomsayer to predict horrible events. Instead, the movie poses the question of how we should live, given the plausibility of a natural apocalypse. Even when most people are relatively comfortable and functional, when our planet isnt actually threatened with destruction, the movie posits that nothing but chance prevents natural forces from aligning themselves to our detriment. Acknowledging that cosmicism, the question is the one I raised earlier, about which lifestyle is more appropriate to our existential situation. Whose character and life choices are more appealing in light of the fact that a natural apocalypse is much more likely than divine salvation, those of a miserable, socially dysfunctional mystic or of a happy, well-adjusted and upstanding citizen? So whereas Woody Allen exploits rationalism, naturalism, and existential cosmicism to undermine all follies except his treasured one of romantic love, von Trier follows those philosophical assumptions to their logical conclusions. Both filmmakers affirm sciencecentered, atheistic philosophical naturalism, a position that calls for a Lovecraftian dread of our cosmic insignificance and for something like a Nietzschean shift from morality polluted by theism to a more viable, aesthetic basis of values. But Allen stops short, and

626 the fact that a consistent upholding of existential cosmicism wouldnt lend itself to the creation of mainstream comedy only raises the question of why Woody Allen is interested in that genre in the first place. His earliest films are farces that are actually more consistent with the philosophy thats implicit in all of his movies. And some of his more serious movies, such as Crimes and Misdemeanors, are likewise free of sentimental attachment to Jewish or to other rationalizations of our biological role. Generally, though, Allen regards quirky romantic love as our saving grace. In Melancholia, by contrast, theres no such salvation for the tragic hero whos condemned to anxiety and alienation due to her attunement to cosmic reality rather than to the politically correct dream world. In his defense, I suppose Allen would point to what Boris above calls the irrational heart. Allens rationalism leads him only to affirm the natural fact that we have a divided nature, that were logical and pragmatic free agents but also beastly captives of biological processes. Rationalism leads Allen to dispense with many delusions, but he arbitrarily sides with the irrational heart when he defends conventional happiness. The reason this is arbitrary is that the Allen character is a hyper-rationalist, which accounts for his neuroses. A hyper-rationalist analyzes obsessively and so attains terrifying esoteric knowledge which isolates him from society. Thus, the Allen character seems to recoil from the prospect of complete estrangement from those with mere exoteric understanding of their natural situation. Perhaps this character merely feigns wholehearted commitment to what little normality he can muster, like the sociopathic serial killer, Dexter, in the series of novels and the HBO show. Perhaps, that is, Allen indulges in romantic games to appear less threatening to those who depend on myths that burst like balloons upon rational scrutiny. As the political philosopher Leo Strauss points out, philosophers and theologians have historically hidden their antisocial conclusions, reserving them for the brave, enlightened minority who need the majority to accept noble lies for the sake of social stability which benefits both groups. Of course, the Allen characters deference to the irrational heart is meant to excuse the film-makers scandalous affair effectively with his stepdaughter, Soon-Yi. But perhaps Allens peculiar love life indicates that hes

627 ambivalent about the conventional ideal, that hes not just ill-equipped--as a hyperrational nerd--to succeed in that field, but that his hearts not in maintaining that front for existential angst, after all. In that case, the Woody Allen stereotype of the neurotic intellectual who nevertheless commits himself to certain conventional ideals would be a noble lie, a way of humanizing the transhuman cosmicist or the subhuman neurotic, of reassuring the masses that these products of postmodernism arent monsters in their midst, monsters that, as Melancholia shows, more nearly mirror the alien face of Mother Nature.

628

Sacrificial Offering to Our Lord, The Dentist ____________________________________________________

Undergoing a dental cleaning is well-known as being a painful experience, but assuming the hygienist doesnt mishandle her instruments and accidentally cut your lip, no ones to blame for the pain caused by the scraping of plaque from your teeth with blunt metal tools. On the contrary, this pain serves the greater good of keeping your teeth and gums healthy. However, theres a subtler but more profound form of suffering inflicted on these occasions--and by the dentist himself rather than by the hygienist. (All the hygienists Ive ever seen have been women, while all the dentists have been men, but this is neither here nor there.) Assuming your teeth are healthy, the dentist nevertheless perpetrates the scam of his Examination and Diagnosis, as its called on the bill. What happens is the following. You lie back in the dentists chair for about an hour while the hygienist uses various instruments to remove the plaque buildup and then to polish your teeth. So far no swindle, but just pain for the greater good. Then the dentist drops in, looks inside your mouth for about twenty seconds, absentmindedly touching your teeth a few times with one of his metal instruments, and he pronounces your teeth healthy and walks out. Those twenty seconds of his work cost you $30 CAD on top of the fee for the teeth cleaning. You can protest at the outset that you dont need to see the dentist himself, since you know your teeth have always been fine and theres been no recent change.

629 But from my experience, dentists will insist that you undergo their personal examinations at least every once in awhile or else the office will refuse to accept you as a patient even for a cleaning. So a hidden cost of having your teeth professionally cleaned is that youve got to let the dentist perform a cursory look-see; hence I speak of the extortion, which is to say, of the wresting of money by an abuse of authority. Unlike the removal of plaque, the dentists examination serves no greater good unless, of course, you have a history of problems with your teeth, such as cavities, which requires expert monitoring. Just recently I was humiliated by an appalling case of this extortion. Typically, you see, the dentist employs certain tactics to mitigate the psychological trauma he inflicts by stealing your money while holding you essentially helpless. Hell distract your attention by making chitchat and affecting an upbeat mood. Ideally, hell make you laugh a few times with his witty remarks. Next, hell give you the impression that youre getting your moneys worth from him, by spitting out a few actual observations and technical recommendations, perhaps peppered with scientific jargon. Again, if your teeth have always been perfectly healthy, as mine have, everything the dentist says at this point will be strictly useless. But a talented dentist can still charm you by pointing out some trivia about your physiology, such as where your saliva glands are located. This way, you wont feel so bad about whats essentially a robbery thats enabled by collusion among dentists. The other day, though, my dentist decided to make use of no such techniques for my benefit. On the contrary, to begin with, he was nowhere to be found for ten or so minutes after the cleaning. Thus began the humiliation. Just think of it: the dentist cant even be bothered to show up on time to receive the gift youre about to hand him of $30 (or to be precise, $28); your money means so little to him, because his medical training has evidently entitled him to profit from this sort of scam so many times, that one such gift is a mere pittance. Worse, he knows that you know that hes about to take your money and give you absolutely nothing in return, and that your only recourse is to go without professional cleaning of your teeth, which can cause serious health problems for

630 you as you age, or so they say. Anyone smart enough to earn a medical degree will be smart enough to anticipate the psychological effect on the patient, first, of scamming you out of $30, but also of forcing you to sit in the dentists chair and wait for his Highness to manifest from the ethereal plane on which he resides so that he can receive your sacrificial offering. Thus, Id have expected him on this occasion to resort to an overabundance of compensatory techniques, beginning with an effusive apology for being late. I was treated with no such apology. Did the dentist maintain an upbeat mood to distract me while he practically reached into my wallet and extracted his shakedown money? My humiliation was mitigated by no such artificial lightening of the atmosphere. He merely swooped in, asked how my teeth are doing, and informed me that he was now going to look them over. Did he tell any joke or engage in other chitchat? None at all. Any jargon-ridden observations about my bone structure or whatnot? Nope. The hygienist even told him shed taken two radiographs of my teeth (which cost an additional $30!) and he replied simply that he looked at them, declining to take that opportunity to expound on how this bone is connected to that bone. Did he offer any encouraging statements of the obvious such as, Keep doing what youre doing, keep flossing? No, all he ended up saying was, They look fine, meaning my teeth. He said this and then he hurried out of the room, presumably to avoid any awkwardness of having to look his victim in the eye, but possibly also because he was late for his afternoon bath in wine. What of the examination itself? Its duration was exactly sixteen seconds, which I mentally counted, during which time he peered at my teeth while uselessly tapping at them a handful of times with a metal instrument. That tapping was his sole deference to decorum, since by thus feigning to effect some physical treatment, a dentist can give you the impression that your gift of $30 is at least going to a man who works for a living. Naturally, after this humiliation I felt drained like Id just been leeched by a vampire. Before entering the dentists cave Id been hungry for lunch. Without the usual sugarcoating, though, the bitter pill not just of offering up tribute to a false god, but of enduring the trauma of sitting through the transparent charade stripped even of its

631 customary pretenses, deprived me also of my appetite. I felt sick to my stomach, and this had nothing to do with the teeth cleaning. But to quote the Sam Roberts song, End of the Empire, You can take what you want from me, but you better believe that I can see you.

Clarifications
I assure you, every word of my sad narrative is true. That's exactly what happened, and I wrote it as soon as I got home in lieu of burning that dental office to the ground. The dental hygienist has since referred me to a gum specialist who gets to charge even more money for the exact same cleaning, because there are grades of divinity after all: the number of years spent in training amount to years of angelic hibernation, so that when a gum specialist emerges, his wings aglow with swirling supernatural energies, the tribute he's due must surpass that offered up to a lesser angel. Even when the dentist doesn't favour you with his presence, his splendour has coattails, as it were, and so the work of his familiars, the hygienists, is more precious. I've had my teeth cleaned dozens of times, so I can compare the dental examinations and judge the extent to which they're cursory. It's not just the time taken, but whether the dentist makes relevant comments as he goes along with his inspection, calling out what he sees or doesn't see (thus at least making the effort to prove he's not a fraud). This dentist, who doesn't know me and who's replaced the retiree, did absolutely none of that. If it's possible to give a halfhearted, worthless dental examination and still charge full price for it, I assure you that's just what he did. Obviously, dentists are busy fleecing some of their customers, so they can't be at my beck and call. On the contrary, the patients are mere human sacrifices who suffer so that the dentist may seem more divine by comparison. But again, I've had dozens of dental examinations over the years. I've never had to wait that long, and were you to analyze the injustice, breaking it down into parts, youd miss the forest for the trees. You have to add the longest waiting period to the shortest, most cursory examination. And,

632 of course, you have to add the full price paid. Then you get the overwhelming sense that the dentist was effectively stealing from me: he knew I didn't need an examination, he knew in five seconds that there was nothing there to see, and he knew that he overcharges for these short visits. He was disgusted with himself, which is why he left without looking his victim in the eye. I just hope he enjoys his life of luxury which is paid for in part, at least, by his dishonest work. Is a dental cleaning needed? Well, I know that I get plaque buildup over time even though I floss and brush every day. And if you let the plaque build up, you can lose your teeth from gum decay. So I think the cleanings have helped me, which is why I have no problem paying for them. The amount of work done by the hygienist compared to that done by the dentist in his "examinations" puts the dentist to shame. Again, obviously if someone has teeth problems, a dentist is the one to fix them and then his expertise is invaluable. I'm talking about those who have healthy teeth but who are forced to have those expensive exams along with the cleanings. I've asked dentists in the past if I could have just the cleanings, since my teeth (as opposed to my gums) have always been healthy (no cavities, etc). They've always refused.

633

Mental Disorder as Monstrosity ____________________________________________________

The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) defines mental disorder as a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress...or disability...or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom. In addition, this syndrome or pattern must not be merely an expectable and culturally sanctioned response to a particular event, for example, the death of a loved one...Neither deviant behavior (e.g. political, religious, or sexual) nor conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict is a symptom of a dysfunction in the individual, as described above (xxxi, my emphases). The American Psychiatric Association currently proposes to change this definition in DSM-V to a behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual, that is based in a decrement or problem in one or more aspects of mental functioning, including but not limited to global functioning (e.g., consciousness, orientation, intellect, or temperament) or specific functioning (e.g., attention, memory, emotion, psychomotor, perception, thought); that is not merely an expectable response to common stressors and losses (for example, the loss of a loved one) or a culturally sanctioned response to a particular event (for example, trance states in religious

634 rituals); and that is not primarily a consequence of social deviance or conflict with society (my emphases and semicolons). The APA explains that the proposed changes in the definition are meant mainly to shift the focus to the underlying cause and symptoms of a mental condition, leaving the conditions consequences to the treatment-planning rather than to the diagnostic stage. But as Ive emphasized, both definitions (1) use quasi-normative language of disability, dysfunction, loss, decrement (that is, loss from diminution or decrease), or problem, and (2) specifically rule out socially deviant behaviour as mentally disordered unless that behaviour is caused by a dysfunction. These two parts of the definitions conflict with each other.

The Incoherence of the DSM Definitions

As Ive pointed out elsewhere, there are no normative implications of strictly biological statements. Hence, no normative distinction between mental health and disorder follows, for example, from an evolutionary explanation of a traits origin. Any normative connotation, when speaking of a so-called biological or physiological function, is the result either of a useful shortcut for informal communication or of confusion from the lingering pre-Darwinian, theistic paradigm. For example, biologists can speak informally of the hearts function of circulating blood, in which case a dysfunctional heart is one that fails to circulate blood. The more precise, formal way of speaking, however, eliminates any such trace of normativity. Thus, the biologist says that statistically normal, as opposed to in any way correct, hearts are those descending from certain naturally selected genes. In short, modern biology reduces the normative to the normal, and explains the appearance of design in prevalent biological patterns in terms of an environmental-genetic sorting process that naturally eliminates certain species and preserves others, depending on which have the adaptations necessary to survive under prevailing conditions. The biological notion of normality is entirely quantitative rather than qualitative, meaning that no normative evaluation follows from the biological theory

635 itself, although people are free to interpret the theory according to their independent moral or aesthetic standards. (Note that naturally selected effects may be abnormal or rare as long as theyre caused by genetically determined traits that characterize the members of a species. For example, a cheetah sprints but doesnt always thereby catch its prey; still, catching prey may be the naturally selected result of a cheetahs sprint, or the sprints so-called function, assuming that some ancestral catching of prey by that means helps explain the present cheetahs capacity to sprint, in terms of natural selection. The underlying notion of normality is statistical rather than normative, because whats relevant to biology is the causal relationship between environment, genes, and body types, and the behavioural effects that are selected for must be caused by traits possessed by most members of a species. This is because natural selection is a mechanism meant to explain how the differences between species originate, and a species is defined by whats shared by its members.) The relevance of this talk of biological function is just that the psychiatrist cant cash her notion of mental disorder in biological terms (without falling back on a theological interpretation which is no part of scientific theory or practice). Why not? Because a mental disorder is the opposite of mental health, and these concepts are normative, the one being bad and the other good, whereas the biological notion of function is replaceable by a non-normative, statistical concept that has to do with the environments selection of genes that produce body types. Now, there are only two other sources of the normative: an individuals or a societys subjective evaluation of something. The definition of mental disorder must inherit its normativity, then, from one of these sources. Suppose the difference between mental health and disorder were to depend on the individuals evaluation. In this case, one persons interpretation could differ from anothers, with the result that there would be as many standards of mental health as there are beholders of the good. For example, one person might regard empathy as healthy while someone else might admire the

636 sociopaths freedom from altruistic emotions. Assuming the goodness of mental health were to lie just in the values possessed by the individual who evaluates something, and the empathic and sociopathic individuals were to retain their opposing values, there would be absolutely nothing to resolve their conflict, no way to prove that one evaluation is more correct than the other. Such would be the effect of locating the subjective nature of normative evaluation in the mere individual. Assuming that that chaos would be unpalatable to the psychiatrist, the source of the definitions normativity must be the social convention that can overrule an individuals evaluation as deviant or otherwise wrong. In this case, though, we run smack into the definitions stipulation that behaviour caused by a mental disorder is precisely not the same as that which merely runs afoul of society (i.e. thats culturally prohibited or deviant or that results from a conflict between an individual and society). The psychiatrist would seem, therefore, to face a dilemma: either give up all pretense of normativity in the (pseudo)scientific concepts of mental health and disorder or else identify mental disorder as an abnormal pattern thats rejected by mere social convention. Taking the dilemmas first horn, there would be no reason to medically treat someone with a mental disorder, no standard of which the disordered person falls short. A retreat to pragmatism here would be fruitless since an appeal to whats useful, such as protection of people from the dangers posed by a disorder, would have to presuppose the rightness of that goal; otherwise, there would be no prescription to motivate the medical treatment. At most, the psychiatrist could say, quite hypothetically, that if society wants to protect itself or the disordered individual, the individual should be turned over to psychiatrists for treatment. If society wants to accomplish that goal and so forces the individual to undergo treatment, wed have here only a causal explanation of the treatment, not a justification of it. This is because there would as yet be no evaluation of the societal goal. Assuming the goal were conventionally rather than personally justified, the concept of a mental disorder would once again be normative and wed find ourselves back in a conflict with the DSM distinction between mental

637 disorder and social deviance. The pragmatic justification for treating a mental condition would still call upon a normative interpretation of that condition as bad in so far as the condition endangers certain people, and this interpretation would be sanctioned by society at large. Thus, a mental disorder would be a mental condition that works against a social objective, in which case the disorder would depend on a conflict between an individual and society, contrary to the DSM definitions. Taking the dilemmas second horn, according to which mental disorders are bad and the badness is solely a matter of a cultural standard, were a culture to regard, say, homosexuality as an unhealthy mental condition, the homosexual would need to be diagnosed as having a mental disorder. This is, of course, how psychiatry used to operate: the Western psychiatric condemnation of homosexuality used to follow from the religiously conservative cultures in Europe and the US, the pseudoscientific rationalizations offered by the psychiatrist for that enforcement of a social prejudice notwithstanding. As Western cultures became more secular and scientistic (democratic, capitalistic, politically correct), Western psychiatrists withdrew homosexuality from their list of mental disorders, contenting themselves in their DSM with an implicit labeling of homosexuality as socially deviant but not disordered. However, precisely that distinction must go if the psychiatrist means to affirm the normative aspect of mental disorders or at least presupposes a justification of medical treatment for certain mental conditions.

Mental Disorder as Monstrosity

As a matter of fact, people do generally believe that average mental states are healthy and good while abnormal ones are unhealthy and bad. Indeed, thats an understatement. In Western societies, mental health is associated with the allconsuming goal of materialistic happiness (pun intended), and most mental illnesses are regarded not merely as bad but as horrible. The mentally ill are feared and shunned as freaks or monsters. The common reason for trying to eliminate mental illness, despite the mere cultural basis of the value judgment and thus the variation between

638 cultural (as well as individual) standards of health, is that we loathe monsters, which causes us to demonize frightening or revolting abnormalities. Regardless of which patterns are culturally sanctioned, what mental disorders have in common is their freakishness, and this is the politically incorrect reality that underlies the psychiatric enterprise. Instead of destroying monsters, we enlightened modern folk treat them as suffering from an illness, because we understand that their harmful behaviour has physiological causes that can be re-engineered with drugs or therapy. So-called healthy behaviours have physiological causes too, some of which are likewise engineered by drugs (culturally sanctioned stimulants like nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine) or by religious or commercial propaganda. Mental disorder is hardly just a matter of physiological causes that overwhelm the will; instead, those mental conditions are targeted for medical treatment which terrify or sicken a society, and that social condemnation is indispensable to psychiatry. Without the horror felt for certain psychological abnormalities, there would be no list of mental disorders and thus nothing for the psychiatrist to do; rather, there would be merely unusual mental conditions with no impetus to eliminate them. Why are certain mental abnormalities terrifying or revolting? Superficially, the reason is just that they threaten people with harm and we naturally prefer to be safe. But some mental disorders are much less dangerous than others. What they all have in common is their relative strangeness, which threatens to upset the familiar world in which were most comfortable. Whether its a bizarre phobia, a split personality, or the lack of certain emotions, a mental disorder represents an encroachment on human nature by alien, inhumane forces. Our physiology sometimes breaks down or mutates because theres no one at the helm of our evolution; our presence on the planet and our flourishing are accidental and subject to change. The natural forces that build us arent committed to maintaining us as we are in the most trustworthy way, by having feelings for us, since those forces are impersonal. Whats terrifying or repulsive about mental disorders, then, is the impersonality of their causes, which reminds us of what I call our grim existential situation. The rarity of mental disorders surprises us and so wakens us from our stupor

639 in a world of the familiar, and threatens to remind us of the fragility even of mental health and of the arbitrariness of our social standards. In addition, theres the ambiguity of strange abnormalities, since they can be interpreted as inferior or as superior to normal human attributes. A fictional monster can be subhuman or divine, a degraded human form or a superhuman god. This is why disgust for monsters should be distinguished from fear of them. Those movie monsters, for example, which disgust us, such as the fly monster shown above, are often insectile and so remind us of cognitively inferior creatures. Those monsters which terrify us, such as the Thing shown above, are often clearly superior to normal humans in some capacity, such as brute strength or intelligence. So mental abnormalities may cause revulsion or fear, depending on whether theyre interpreted as regressive or as more neutrally transgressive or even progressive. Of course, the official psychiatric view is that all mental disorders are disabilities rather than superior abilities, but just because an abnormality endangers people or deviates from social standards, doesnt mean the condition represents a teleological step backward. The most striking example of a potentially godlike mental abnormality is the psychopaths lack of a conscience which often enables that disordered individual to rise to a position of great wealth and power, lording it over whole populations with his shameless expertise in manipulating peoples emotions. (See, for example, Babiaks and Hares book, Snakes in Suits.) Its not so farfetched to assume that a disproportionate number of powerful persons throughout history have been psychopaths or sociopaths of one type or another. From cult leaders to monarchs to politicians to corporate titans, these mentally disabled persons still manage to perform historically decisive, if amoral, feats. We fear the power of such emotionless predators, just as wed fear a god or an extraterrestrial intelligence that lacks human sentiments. This ambiguity of monsters is another reason society condemns mental abnormalities: we worry about the mutability of our social norms, when natural forces contravene them by producing the abnormalities, but we also fear that our standards are inferior to those of a potentially higher form of life.

640

While their intentions are surely to cure their patients, to prevent them from harming themselves or others, and to make them happier, one effect of psychiatric treatment of abnormal people is to maintain the illusion that the mentally average masses are on friendly terms with natural forces. The mentally ill are segregated and hidden in asylums or treated with drugs that stupefy them, so that average people neednt be alarmed by witnessing strange behaviour and so that the conventions of what it means to be a healthy person can appear unchallenged. Only when youre familiar with the breadth of possible mental arrangements can you appreciate the groundlessness of psychological norms. Just as a mental abnormality can be ameliorated by therapy or drugs, so too can a mentally normal person become radicalized by those means. Curiously, there are at least two trends that bring mental disorder to the fore, despite the psychiatrists efforts to hide the monsters and to whitewash the existential implications of mental strangeness with a pseudoscientific, cryptonormative understanding of it. First, as Adam Curtis shows in his BBC documentary, The Trap: Parts One and Two, the rise of materialistic individualism, by the power of commercial propaganda, had the unintended consequence that the psychiatrist came to defer to the patients concerns about her own mental health, instead of imposing a top-down ideal. Just as corporations sold products that no one needs, by tenuously associating them with unconscious cravings, Western psychiatrists replaced their authoritative criteria for mental illness, which were shown by David Rosenhan's experiments to be pseudoscientific, with objective, behaviouristic criteria that catered to the individuals personal model of normality. Thus, the normative interpretations of mental capacities were relativized to the self-policing individual consumer, not just to society. This was a boon for the business of psychiatry since it greatly multiplied the cases of mental disorders which had to be treated. Second, as medical science advances and pharmaceutical companies become more powerful, psychiatrists find themselves serving the suppliers need to sell an everincreasing store of drugs. Thus, medical conditions are invented to provide an incentive

641 for purchasing the available treatments. Although the advertisements for these drugs are invariably sanitized, with no depiction of strange behaviour caused by mental abnormality, a barrage of such ads over the last two decades in wealthy countries nevertheless refers to physiological or mood disorders, such as attention deficit disorder or depression. Whether its an increase in demand for medical treatment or in the supply of that treatment, then, each development renders the standard of mental health more dubious. In summary, the DSM definitions of mental disorder are revealingly incoherent. They indicate that psychiatrists harbour quasi-normative assumptions about mental conditions which are incompatible with their scientific pretensions. Moreover, they inherit those assumptions not from evolutionary theory, despite that theorys reference to biological functions, but from social values which are the main sources of normative judgments of goodness and badness. Again, admitting that the distinction between mental health and disorder derives from something as subjective and questionable as social convention would threaten psychiatrys status as a science. After all, the cultural norms in question are propped up by horror from the existential impact of strange abnormalities on average peoples delusions of their security and superiority. Thus, psychiatrists stipulate that mental disorders arent due merely to a conflict between individual and society. But the psychiatrist cant have it both ways.

642

The Question of Antinatalism ____________________________________________________

Picture a barren winter landscape with not a person in sight. You might find it hard not to mitigate the desolation by imagining, perhaps on the outskirts of that expanse of snow and bare trees, a cabin with smoke emanating from its chimney, thus indicating that this hypothetical absence of humanity is only partial, that all is not lost for us. We recoil from the thought of a universe with absolutely no human beings in it; more precisely, what bothers us is the thought that there might be a time after humankind. This is to say that we can tolerate reflecting on the time before human history and even on the age of Earth before the rise of mammals, since we know in the back of our minds that those ancient periods laid out the conditions for our emergence; moreover, we can even ponder the lifeless void, the billions upon billions of star systems that currently have no inhabited planets, because we know that simultaneously theres this one planet that we call home. But try imagining our universe as it would have been had humans never evolved or else picture our planet after the apocalyptic end of our species. No cabin on the outskirts and no potential for our reemergence; no hope for our eventual triumph, but just the final end, the last breath and the last heartbeat before the universe soldiers on without us and the tree still falls with no one to hear it. Theres a group of people who, for moral reasons, would actually prefer a world with no people in it. They even have a strategy for bringing that world about: we should cease

643 procreating so that we intentionally die out as a species. These grim folks are called antinatalists, antinatalism meaning the opposition to human birth. There are roughly two kinds of antinatalism (AN), what Ill call the misanthropic and the compassionate kinds. Both kinds prescribe the termination of human life by stopping the procreative replenishment of our species. But while the misanthropic antinatalist is motivated by contempt for human nature, the compassionate sort is opposed to suffering and thus takes the suicide of our species to be only a dire means towards the elimination of that mental state. (Compassionate antinatalists are often called philanthropic, but this is a confusing name, since although the Greek roots of that word mean love of people, the English word implies a concern for human advancement, whereas an antinatalists compassion is perfectly tragic.) Moreover, both kinds of AN have a moral defense: the misanthrope wants to extinguish humans because of our wickedness or our morally significant deficiencies, while the lover of people wants to eliminate, once and for all, the evil of human suffering.

An Arch-Villains Doomsday Scheme

Youre likely already familiar with the outlook of misanthropic AN, from comic books and pulp science fiction: the cartoon super-villain is a classic misanthrope, or hater of humans, often building a doomsday weapon to destroy humankind, leaving himself as the planets sole possessor. But the cartoon villain typically allows his plan to be foiled, whether by hiring buffoons for henchmen or by giving away the details of his plan to the hero in a gratuitous monologue, to fulfill the subtextual logic of sadomasochism: the dominator needs victims to satisfy his sadistic impulses, so to finally kill off all weaklings and rivals, by way of a sadistic frenzy, is to err on sadistic grounds. Sadism is a form of parasitism. But the misanthropic antinatalist isnt sadistic; instead, shes opposed to human nature and thus to all people including herself. Thus, the misanthrope would participate in her scheme by not sexually reproducing, as opposed to hiding her children in the last generation so that they could inherit the world. Mind you, the sadist too, after cleansing the planet of everyone else, would likely commit suicide for having foolishly failed to maintain the parasitic ideal of sadism. Indeed, the misanthrope and the cartoon

644 villain have much else in common, especially if the super-villain justifies his actions by regarding himself as superhuman: both have contempt for humans in general, both have a plan for our extinction, and although the misanthropic antinatalists plan isnt particularly invasive, the misanthrope neednt be merely an antinatalist. That is, if you think all human beings are depraved and worthy of death, you neednt tiptoe around the issue by, say, writing pamphlets to convince people to hate themselves, to doubt the chance of human progress, and thus to refrain from procreating; instead, you might take the bull by the horns and devise a coercive doomsday scenario. After all, if people are evil or so myopic that we lack the right to propagate our species, our freedom and rationality neednt be respected. Is there any rational justification, though, of misanthropic AN? Calling everyone evil or weak seems just to empty these words of meaning, rendering them weasel words, since theres sufficient variety of human behaviour to warrant distinctions between evil and good, weak and strong people; of course Ghandi wasnt as bad as Hitler, for example. Perhaps humans are all evil compared to a race of angels, and weak compared to a species of super-powerful aliens, but even so we would all fall short to different degrees. Now, weakness isnt necessarily a moral failing, and so pity for us might be more appropriate than contempt. Here, then, misanthropy has something in common with the Christian notion of original sin. The Christian says we have morally relevant innate weaknesses, such as our finitude and our animal instincts, since these inevitably cause suffering. When we blame suffering on physical or biological processes, though, we tend to childishly personify the latter. If were not responsible for the type of bodies that are bioengineered for us, theres no sense in condemning that body type as the cause of all the evil of which were capable. We can understand cause and effect without moralizing them. Moreover, once you reduce the badness of some event to some cause of the event other than the choice of the person whos morally responsible, you once again empty the word bad of meaning, since theres no principle for halting the reduction. For example, the Christian is forced to condemn God for creating our body type or for putting the serpent in Eden along with Adam and Eve; in this case, Christianity leads to self-contradiction, since now the morally perfect person

645 must be responsible for original sin--except that this contradiction lies only on the surface, since the words used in the formulation are emptied of content. In any event, what of the misanthropic antinatalists reasoning? There doesnt seem any sense in preferring a world without people, since such a world would be morally neutral; only people, our actions, and the results of those actions are subject to a conventional normative evaluation. If youre struck by natures general undeadness, and so you think in pantheistic terms, you can anthropomorphize the natural development of forms, but still its hard to see how a humanless world would be better than the alternative; pantheism should replace conventional moral categories with such standards as awe and horror. The mindless creativity of pantheistic nature is terrible, with or without people, and if humans arent sufficiently noble, nature is nevertheless bound to evolve worse people elsewhere. Exterminating some of natures handiwork would hardly tip the moral balance against the monstrous creativity of the cosmos; even were humans the only sentient, language-using creatures ever to evolve, ending our life cycle wouldnt punish natural forces, just as beating up a zombie would perform no retaliatory function. Instead, the misanthropes point would seem to be just that we should eliminate whats wrong as much as possible, just as you might wash away a stain from a shirt. But this analogy raises a problem, which is that we clean a stained shirt for the purpose of looking presentable in public, whereas the termination of our species could serve no purpose at all, since no one would survive to take advantage of the cleansing. Perhaps the misanthropist reasons that natural forces would remain, and our extermination would make space for the emergence of a superior species. But this would be preposterous overkill, since neither space nor time is limited in the universe. There are trillions of star systems and of years in which natural forces can conduct their experiments, and theres no reason to think Earth or this relatively puny age in which we live is cosmically special. Nature will dispose of us at her leisure or well do so unintentionally, at any rate, so there doesnt seem any need to rush matters or to make a concerted effort and ban human birth. The misanthropic antinatalist seems to think that every moment in which humans draw breath is one in which our abominable

646 activities are suffered to continue, but theres no one keeping score or suffering our vices besides us, and with our demise would be lost as well the only known source of thanksgiving for the last of our follies. The misanthropist here would fail to live up to the grandeur of her apparent role model, the cartoonish super-villain, since shed think like a bean-counting bureaucrat, pretending shes tallied up natures resources and the degree of our worthlessness, and so can prescribe our extinction only to make natural creativity more efficient. Note that in Star Wars, for example, the technocrats are only the henchmen, not the evil geniuses themselves (Darth Vader and the Emperor). Hatred of humanity would seem to require a more sinister and demented vision than just that of a balanced equation. Although the Architect in the Matrix trilogy is indeed such a bloodless bureaucrat, the arch villain shown at the end of the third movie, who represents the will of the AI machines, loses its temper, shouting that the machines need nothing, thus demonstrating the requisite insanity for an evil genius. The villain Davros in Doctor Who has a truly hideous agenda of annihilating not just all life but every particle in existence, thus abolishing all of Creation. In one of Brian Lumleys Necroscope novels, the villains plot to destroy the world as a means of forcing God to reveal himself. These schemes have at least an instrumental logic, since they use destruction in the service of a twisted ideal. The misanthropic antinatalist would need some such ideal for the extinction of our species to be somehow worthwhile. Assuming one of our contemptible features is our theism, the misanthrope cant appeal to God as the benefactor of our demise, and natural forces wouldnt thank the antinatalist nor would they need her help in their grand cycle of creation and destruction. As far as I can tell, then, misanthropic antinatalism isnt so much a rational viewpoint as it is an emotional venting of a melancholy character or mood.

Killing with Kindness

The second kind of AN might be more compelling since its based on the standard moral disapproval of unnecessary pain. The idea is that this suffering is wrong, and people

647 suffer so much that out of compassion for the sufferers the unborn would become, we should decline to have children even though this would mean the end of humanity and possibly even of all highly intelligent life in the universe. All that matters in the hedonic calculus is the maximization of happiness and the minimization of harm, and so if human suffering is unavoidable and overwhelming, the argument runs, we should take radical measures to prevent the misery wed otherwise inflict on our descendants. Theres an obvious objection to this argument, which is that, as long as were morally concerned with happiness and harm, we might as well check whether harm really is so overwhelming that all human life is effectively hell on Earth and ought to come to an end. It turns out, of course, that unnecessary pain overwhelms joy and other positive or neutral mental states only for a small minority of people. Even poor people living in huts and eating grubs tend not to be miserable, and indeed studies show that they can be happier than the wealthy whose lives are more stressful (see Why Rich People Really arent Happier at fool.com). Almost everyone experiences a mix of pleasure, pain, and neutral sensations; extreme pleasures and pains are relatively rare, and so if anything, agony, despondence, and other excruciating pains are experienced less than tolerable and preferable mental states. In fact, compassionate AN presupposes that this is so, since compassion is shown only to creatures who can appreciate the favour, which means creatures who have the intelligence to recognize and benefit from the gesture and thus also to extricate themselves from dangerous situations, thus sparing themselves many unnecessary pains. Indeed, there must be much in our life that makes it worth living; otherwise, we wouldnt deserve the antinatalists compassion. This provides us with the likeliest reason why most people dont kill themselves. Only those who really do experience more pain than anything else are motivated to struggle with their instinctive will to live and to see the continuation of our species. The rest of us are content to be preoccupied by our daily routines in which we pass the time feeling nothing like joy or anguish. Thus, the compassionate antinatalists premise seems false: human life is not generally so bad that were morally obligated to spare our descendants the torture of living.

648 In his book, Better Never to Have Been, the philosopher David Benatar makes the most rigorous case available for compassionate AN. Benatar argues that merely coming into existence is always a great harm and that procreating is therefore immoral. To support this radical point of view, he anticipates the above response and argues in Chapter Two that pleasure and pain are asymmetric: while there would be neither unnecessary pain nor pleasure in the world wed leave behind were we to take the antinatalists advice, stop having children, and thus extinguish our species, the absence of the pain would be good while the absence of pleasure would not be so bad. In other words, he argues, eliminating harm is more important than promoting pleasure. Were this so, compassionate antinatalism might indeed nullify the above objection, since then even were the experience of harm rare, the pains we do tend to feel might suffice to make the act of procreation immoral. But as DeGrazia argues in his scholarly reply to Benatars book, Is it Wrong to Impose the Harms of Human Life? Benatars arguments in favour of his asymmetry premise are not compelling. For example, Benatar says that the absence of harm when theres no person around in the first place would be counterfactually preferred, meaning preferred by anyone who would have been put in the position that would have caused the harm. But the exact same reasoning applies to pleasure: given the standard moral ideal which the compassionate antinatalist assumes, anyone would prefer to promote pleasure just as much as shed prefer to eliminate harm. So theres no significant asymmetry here. In the possible world with no people in it, the absence of pleasure would be as bad as the absence of harm would be good; in other words, our positive mental states are as morally important as our negative ones. And without the asymmetry, Benatars argument is refuted by the commonsense objection given above, about the fact that pain tends not to be the principal part of human experience and so a general ban on human birth would be grotesquely disproportionate to the threats scope.

649

Happiness is Unbecoming
Id add that the standard moral preference for happiness should be replaced by the existential standard that puts a premium on such harms as angst, dread, and horror, since these are prerequisites of personal authenticity. So even were we to concede that human life is first and foremost harm, it doesnt follow that having children is immoral. On the contrary, just as we have an existential obligation to remind people of the harsh facts of natural life, so that they can deal authentically with those facts instead of ignoring them, we might be obligated to have children even knowing that this increases the total level of suffering, since the suffering has a positive existential role. From an aesthetic perspective, our suffering is tragically heroic and thus redeemed. Anxiety and alienation are made inevitable by the curses of reason and of consciousness, and we dont deserve a heaven free from harm, because were pitiful and often despicable creatures. Thus, from an existentialists moral perspective, suffering stoically and enhancing our tragedy by helping to repopulate our kind are better than fleeing from that responsibility and depriving the universe of our magnificent ordeal. In fact, the recommendation that we commit to the extinction of our species is the very stuff of existential inauthenticity. Just as the flight to cognitive delusions makes for an inauthentic individual, so too a species that kills itself off by renouncing its ability to reproduce is collectively inauthentic. Inauthentic here means a failure to live up to the existentialists moral standard, by grappling with the philosophical problem of our existence. The reasons for our horror are inexhaustible and so we need to grapple continually with lifes meaninglessness, which requires more and more generations. My point is that the existentialist effectively grants the compassionate antinatalists premise, about the magnitude of our suffering, but denies her conclusion, since the existentialist rejects the moral principle that happiness ought to be our highest goal. Thus, the compassionate antinatalists argument is logically invalid. Given precisely the inevitability of severe harms in human life, such as the fears of death and of our aloneness, we ought not to pretend that happiness is our highest purpose. On the contrary, happiness is the aim only of existentially inauthentic people. And so let the

650 newborns descend into our torture chamber! We will have all the more opportunities to live up to the aesthetic ideal and bravely turn our lives into dramatic works of art. Harm, in the sense of unnecessary, unjust pain, is mitigated if its redeemed by artistic use. We shouldnt give up the chance to endure hardship, but should adopt the existential standard of authenticity and so psychologically overcome the harms. Note that just because harm has a positive existential role doesnt turn the harm into a benefit or the suffering into pleasure. Suffering from our awareness of our existential predicament gives us the opportunity to be authentic, but this isnt exactly an advantage; an authentic persons life remains a tragedy even if we can tolerate to look upon it because of the grace with which the person faces her plight head-on.

A Slippery Slope to the Evil Genius

Theres another problem with compassionate AN. The argument is supposed to be that we have a duty not to inflict harm on anyone, including our children, and since harm is of paramount importance, we shouldnt procreate even if this entails something as monumental as the end of humanity. The compassionate antinatalists reasoning here is utopian in the sense that shes willing to accept a necessary evil (the extinction of our species) for the sake of a greater good (the absence of harm). This reasoning can be parodied: if the antinatalist is so compassionate and cant bear to see anyone suffer, why prevent only the unborn from suffering by not allowing them to come into existence in the first place, when she can stop those who are already living from suffering by, say, killing them in their sleep? Why not suffocate infants to spare them future misery, when the antinatalist believes that babies would have been better off had they never been born? Granted, killing isnt the same as not procreating, but the antinatalist seems to stand on a slippery slope here, since her willingness to allow our species to die out betrays the representation, at least, of such extreme compassion for sufferers and hatred for suffering, that killing as a necessary evil would be adding a mere drop to the sea of necessary evil in which the antinatalist already swims. The antinatalist tolerates the effect of our collective death as a species, so why not tolerate our individual deaths? And if we wont take matters into our own hands and commit suicide, why should the

651 antinatalist care were someone else to do the dirty work? In her ideal scenario, in which human beings are no more, there would be no judges, juries, or prisons, and nothing for social laws to regulate. The compassionate antinatalist certainly wont want to cause anyone harm, but killing can be done painlessly and even if killing causes a moment of pain, that moment would be a necessary evil to prevent the much greater pain in the persons future. Killing one person would harm the dead persons friends and relatives, but this widening harm could be cut short by killing those friends and relatives in turn. In short, compassionate AN seems in danger of reducing to a functional, if not to a psychological, equivalent of misanthropic AN. Whereas the compassionate antinatalist would prefer not to kill, whereas the misanthrope should leap at the chance of launching a doomsday weapon, compassion can be so extreme that it drives the antinatalist to adopt the misanthropes method as a necessary evil. All that stops the compassionate antinatalist, I think, are the practical concerns: she knows there arent enough antinatalists to make our current generation the last one, and so shell be concerned about harming herself and her friends and relatives, by getting caught and sent to prison as a murderer. This explains why compassionate antinatalists tend not to be murderers, and yet my point is about the highly instrumental logic of compassionate AN. This version of AN seems unstable, in that it tolerates the worst means imaginable, namely the end of our species, to achieve an alleged greater good. Again, then, the arguments in favour of compassionate AN notwithstanding, what distinguishes the two varieties of AN seem to be matters of character or mood. The misanthrope hates people while the compassionate person loves people and hates the harm that comes to them. But the latter kind of antinatalist should act as though she stands with the misanthrope in hating people, because shes willing to talk seriously about our planned extinction, which is, after all, also the cartoon super-villains goal.

The Horror of Parenting

However, I dont think AN should be dismissed in its entirety. At least, theres a limited form of AN that follows from the existential and cosmicist ideas in which Ive been

652 trafficking in these philosophical rants. My argument for this limited form is just that existentialists, cosmicists, mystics, ascetics, philosophers, omega men and women, mentally disturbed introverts, and other enlightened folks and outsiders would likely make for poor parents and thus shouldnt procreate, for their sake and for that of their potential children (unless they give their children up for adoption). Instead of supporting this argument with more abstract, blanket assertions, allow me to testify from personal experience. I have a nephew whos one and half, with whom I visit on a weekly basis so that Ive had a snapshot view of his development. Hes an adorable, bright little guy with an infectious laugh. He loves cheesy macaroni, which he eats by holding all of his fingers in his mouth at once, and setting his bare feet on the table when hes eating to get a rise out of his mother. He has many toys and if you blow soap bubbles for him hell cry before letting you stop, and hell need you to succeed, because he hasnt the knack for blowing slowly and steadily through the small plastic hoop; instead, he invariably blows slightly at the wrong angle, still smiling afterward and crying out bubbie! which is his word for bubbles, even when his efforts produce no bubbles. If you time it right, though, you can blow bubbles at the same time and he wont know the difference; he just wants to see the bubbles and doesnt have any interest yet in taking credit for the skill required to make them happen. My nephew has a Wheaten Terrier who looks like Falkor from the movie, The Neverending Story, and who likes to snatch food from my nephews hand, which makes him cry. In short, my nephew has a normal, Western middleclass upbringing, and whenever I see him he brings a smile to my face. But I cant help but also feel sickened by the juxtaposition of such flagrant innocence and the undeadness of the world that throws up such children, rudely betrays the memory of their innocence by toying with them as they grow up, and eventually receives their corpses to nourish other creatures--perhaps centuries from now--in their similarly foolish endeavours. I recall when my nephew was enjoying a bubble bath before going to bed. He had tired himself out playing with his large Lego blocks, pushing around his toy truck, and banging away at his xylophone. He mostly babbled, as he still does, but he knew some

653 words and when he sat in the tub, playing with his plastic water toys with a guileless grin on his face, he exclaimed that he was happy; that is, in between his babbling, he actually said Im happy! My heart sank even as I kept up a fake smile. Imagine the naivety required, first of all, to be overjoyed as a result of having a bubble bath, but also to reassure the smiling onlookers who encouraged him, with such an unambiguous indication of how great he was feeling. He was wonderfully happy and why wouldnt he be? But he gave me flashbacks of when I was much younger and happier in my ignorance. I recalled that I also loved blowing soap bubbles in the backyard, watching them float away in the breeze. And now Im compelled to write about the horror of human life. My nephew was delirious sitting in his bathtub, but how foolish such glee seems from a philosophical perspective! What disappointments and miseries will my nephew suffer as an adult so that if he retains a memory of that brief moment of bliss, hell be forced to yearn nostalgically for a return to innocence? How perfectly absurd is human childhood! A childs life is a microcosm of an adults, except that instead of being manipulated by the childs parents and by their carefullycontrolled environment, an adult is duped by natural forces and by mass culture. A child is comically selfish and helpless just as an adult is in the wider world. A child is pitifully nave, just as most people are about where they stand in nature. Children are distracted by toys just as are adults. Recently my nephew needed an early diaper change and afterward his father brought him down to the main floor. My nephew was wailing all the way, tears flowing down his chubby cheeks. The biblical Job couldnt have cried any harder over the shambles of his life. What had happened was just that my nephews routine had been broken and he thought he was being taken away from his toys and forced to go to sleep, to face the darkness of his room alone, without his parents to watch over him. His father put a pacifier in his mouth and he immediately quieted. He waddled over to his toys where I was sitting, the tear tracks staining his cheeks, his eyes red, and the pacifier still in his mouth, and he picked toys out of his toy drawers and handed them to me one by one, as though he hadnt yet gotten over the trauma of having his diaper changed and of facing an early bedtime, and needed more time to collect his thoughts but could use my help warming up his toys for him.

654

Whats my point? Just that I dont have the strength to raise a child, to stomach being nauseated by pity every moment Id be forced to confront such transparent horror in my childs ridiculous naivety and then in his loss of innocence, in his being barred from Eden to wander and toil as a godforsaken adult. And while Im pretty philosophical Im hardly enlightened, so it seems the more philosophical you are, the less you should be a parent. Years ago I played a computer game called Black and White, which allows the player to run a simulated city through an avatar animal which you train as might a parent train her child. The avatar might defecate in a bush, and youd have to choose whether to spoil the creature or beat it; the creature develops differently depending on the choices you make in its formative period, growing into either a virtuous hero or a monstrous villain. I remember thinking that that game must simulate some aspects of being a parent, and that real parenthood must take all the greater toll on the parents stamina. Im not talking about the physical endurance needed to stay up at all hours to accommodate a crying baby or to work hard to earn enough to pay for the childs food and toys. No, Im referring to the mental walls that must collapse when youre forced to recognize the existential analogy between child and adult, and thus to be disheartened by your childs every foolish act, realizing that adult games, be their political, religious, or sexual, are no less silly and futile. In fact, my nephews parents do seem continually exhausted, although theyre not particularly philosophical. So how much more emotionally unbearable must be childrearing for the sensitive introvert, the melancholy atheist, or the detached mystic? My argument for AN, then, is that the more enlightened people, who lack the upbeat attitude sustained by delusions, should not have children--for their good and for that of their potential offspring. Theyve made their bed by waking up to reality and they should lie in it by forgoing the perverse privilege of conjuring fresh versions of themselves to be tortured as adults in their parents stead. The enlightened are fit to renounce natural processes, not to partake in them as though they were existentially clueless animals. But this is only a limited justification of AN. For one thing, as I say elsewhere, the existential cosmicist is rewarded when less philosophical people procreate and keep

655 society going, since the antics of the deluded masses provide the material for grim comedy which cheers up the more philosophical minority. Thus, we need that steady stream of babies.

656

Revenge of the Omega Men ____________________________________________________

Human societies tend to develop the same underlying structure as that of most other social species. Differences in physical strength and in social connections between many animals solidify at the emergent social level, forming a dominance hierarchy, or pecking order, in which the strongest members or the possessors of the most powerful alliances in the group are given privileged access to food and sex, thus ensuring the proliferation of the most useful genetic lineages. Ethologists speak of alpha, beta, and omega males, as well as others, to denote the different positions in such a power hierarchy. This classification has filtered down to popular culture, where its now prevalent on websites exploring dating, the so-called Game of seducing women, and mens issues. By way of evolutionary pop psychology, in which quasi-scientific just-so-stories from biology are concocted to explain the nuances of human behaviour, men and women rank men in those ethological terms and speculate on the psychological ramifications of being, say, an alpha man.

Alpha, Beta, and Omega Men

Here, for example, is what Ive gleaned from perusing some of those websites about how alpha, beta, and omega men understand each other and themselves. (See, for example, Roissys blog, Chateau Heurtiste, and the AskMen.com and Slate.com

657 articles, 5 Signs You Are an Omega Male and Omega Males and the Women Who Hate Them.) Ethologically, an alpha male is at the top of his dominance hierarchy, leading the group, eating first when food is obtained, and given exclusive or otherwise special access to the females. In the Game sub-culture, scientistic men contend that successful sexual hookups and even marriages can be literally engineered with insights from evolutionary psychology, reducing human interactions to moves in a game and concomitantly objectifying the players. Alpha men are often lauded as the winners of this game, because theyve mastered the trick of wresting sex from the greatest quantity of the highest quality of women. Arguably, though, an alphas victory is naturally delusory, since his superficial pleasures mask his slavery to his self-imposed, often fallacious imperative to serve in the process of spreading his genes, at the cost of losing out on the richer pleasures from a long-term sexual relationship, which the alpha male is ill-equipped to earn. Thus, alpha males or wannabe ones define alpha man in praiseworthy terms, as a supremely confident and independent man who leads other men in business or battle and attracts the most beautiful women. Sometimes, the alpha man is given a Nietzschean gloss, in which case this superhero creates his own values rather than succumbing to conventions for weaker people. The adventurous, conquering alpha knows whats right and true, and pursues those ends regardless of the collateral damage. In sexual matters, the alpha ideal is that of the libertine or hedonist, of experiencing the greatest variety and quantity of sexual pleasures, which necessitates breaking the hearts of many jealous women. In business, the alpha ideal is the oligarchic one of amassing the greatest personal fortune, substituting Machiavellian tricks for those of Casanova and typically backstabbing competitors, exploiting slave labourers, defrauding the consuming masses, and ravaging the natural environment. Again, ethologically, the beta male is second-in-charge of a group, a backup leader and the alphas wingman or sidekick, and is given only secondary access to the resources of food and wombs. In pop culture, beta men often view themselves as superior to alphas, since the beta understands the superficiality of the alphas successes and has the

658 character strengths to pursue long-term romantic relationships. The beta lacks flash, macho charisma, or sexual virtuosity, but is a womans safer choice as a mate, providing a more stable environment for her to raise a family. A beta plays tortoise to the alphas hare, persevering rather than dominating. Admirers of alphas, however, regard betas as feminized traitors to masculinity, belittling themselves in the process of catering to womens demand for stable monogamous relationships; moreover, the beta eventually fails his woman as well, since shell tire of her reliable but boring beta man, longing for the excitement that only an alpha generates. According to alphas, women want men who are opposed to women, whose domineering, authoritarian tendencies are antidotes to womens weakness for chaotic emotionalism. Women are supposed to prefer their opposites, namely masculine men, not effeminate listeners or feministic Yes men who surrender all their power to please women who are naturally incapable of leading. Finally, ethologically speaking, omega males are last in line to survive in the group, eating last and given little if any access to the females. Omegas are physically the weakest and also the most inept at forming social bonds, thus demonstrating the inferiority of their genes, from a narrow genes-eye-view; that is, the omegas phenotype is least able to serve its genotype as a vehicle for the genes proliferation, since the omega cant solve the puzzle of prospering in a society and thus attracting mates. As a purveyor of so much propaganda for the rat race, pop culture has a more once-sided definition of omega man. Admirers of alphas and of betas alike hold the omega in contempt for opting out of the social Game merely to conceal his character defects which render him incapable of succeeding in conventional terms. The omega has no ambition, courage, wealth, power, or sex appeal. The omega is mentally ill or weakwilled, a complete failure, a loser, the dud at the bottom of the pile, the dregs at the bottom of the glass, an albatross around a welfare states neck.

659

Fallacious Social Conservatism

There is, then, a split between alphas and betas, and a separate opposition between alphas and betas, on the one hand, and omegas on the other. Alphas and betas disagree about how best to succeed in society and especially with women. Sharing the assumption, however, that men ought to accept conventions and either attempt to earn a decent living and raise a family (for betas) or amass a fortune and a harem (for alphas), alphas and betas, as well as the women who partner with them, recoil from the omegas hostility to society itself. For unlike betas, omegas arent subservient to alphas, but are loners and outsiders who nevertheless find themselves within a group. Alphas, betas, and their women, which is to say most members of society, are conservative in conforming to the realities of the social hierarchy and thus of their animal nature. Because that reality wounds our pride, though, we surround ourselves with myths to preoccupy us, and so these heroic alphas and stable betas pretend that their victories are meaningful, that their successes are worthwhile according to loftier ideals they imagine to rationalize the baseness of their life missions. Naked, sexist conservatism is heard especially in the odes sung to alphas, in the anachronistic laments of womens helplessness, of their flightiness and need for strong men. The confluence of social conservatism and evolutionary pop psychology is no accident. After all, the difference between the ethologists classification of the members of power hierarchies, and the popular adoption of those categories is that the latter adds a usually fallacious normative judgment of the value of such a dominance hierarchy. The ethologist merely describes what tends to happen in social groups, whereas pop culture commits the naturalistic fallacy in assuming that alpha or beta men are more or less good, but are certainly better than omega men, because the goals pursued by the former and rejected by the latter are worthy. Note that the point isnt just that dominance hierarchies are naturally necessary for most animal species, including ours, since the existence of omegas even in nonhumans proves that this isnt so, as does our much greater flexibility and originality, compared to

660 other mammals. No, to generate the praise for alphas or betas and the loathing of omegas, you need a value judgment that doesnt follow from any scientific theory whatsoever. When this appraisal of mens lives is merely tacked on to the ethologists classification scheme, and when this appraisal inherits its legitimacy from its weak association with the biological science, without independent justification of its social ideal, the pop psychologist fallaciously infers a prescription from a description. Just because animals do tend to form a society with a certain structure, dividing into subgroups, doesnt mean this structure or the subgroups ought to be praised or condemned. But as Ive explained elsewhere, the political conservative likewise worships the most primitive state of social affairs, which is the dominance hierarchy, her noble lies to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus, there's a happy marriage between the dating cultures latent social conservatism and its abuse of evolutionary psychology. To be sure, the popular normative ranking of alphas, betas, and omegas neednt be fallacious. You could justify the normative judgments with a narrative that glorifies the adventures of seducing women and of conquering lesser men. Only were such a narrative to reduce to a statement of the mere fact that most men instinctively do engage in those behaviours, without an additional normative principle informing the narrative, would the narrative commit the naturalistic fallacy. Any such principle seems seldom defended by participants in the dominance hierarchy.

Modern Omegas as Secular Mystical Ascetics

More to the point, such a principle would have to contend with the omegas longstanding and indeed nominally venerated case against social norms. After all, what doesnt seem much appreciated in Western societies is that so-called omega men are secular counterparts of the mystical ascetics whove been revered especially in Eastern societies. Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain ascetics, as well as Gnostics, ancient Jewish hermits and Christian monks renounced worldly pleasures as degrading or illusory, often with elaborate theological rationales. I say nominally venerated, because Western societies are all strongly influenced by Christianity, which happens to be a

661 paradoxical religion that prescribes asceticism, celibacy, pacifism, socialism, and effective anarchy, but that became politically successful when its leaders compromised on all of these fronts with antithetical secular powers. Thus, Western alphas and betas often have to pretend to worship Jesus, whose character was obviously that of an omega man, even as they sneer at contemporary omegas. (Recall Jesus declaration that--as I paraphrase it--in the Kingdom of God the first, the alphas, will be last and the last, the omegas, will be first.) Ascetics have no place in secular postmodern societies, although the American beat generation and hippies, as well as the communists of the last century expressed similar anti-natural or transhuman sentiments. Still, introverts or men with few if any advantages in the social Game, who thus have little incentive to compete in it, seem to reach conclusions similar to the religious mystics, about the indignities of the popular social condition and the delusions needed to sustain the secular pursuit of happiness. This is to say that intentional dropouts and losers are normatively superior to alpha and beta men, according to some religious, mystical, ethical, or aesthetic ideals. Recall that the difference between betas and omegas has to do with their motivation, not with their behaviour, since betas may fail just as badly as omegas in finding a mate or earning a living. But betas accept the natural social system, whereas omegas reject it. This makes for an analogy between omega men and traditional ascetic mystics, in which case omegas can at least avail themselves of some secular or other version of the traditional normative principles justifying the renunciation of worldly pleasures. Conformist runners of the rat race who are repulsed by omega men typically have only the naturalistic fallacy to give that condemnation a semblance of respectability. Perhaps the most prevalent criticism of whats effectively the omegas secular asceticism is that his so-called principles or higher ideals are just rationalizations, disguises that allow the omega to save face and even feel superior to more powerful people. First and foremost, runs this response, the omega is a physically and socially inferior male specimen, which facts cause the omega to fail to live up to social expectations. This lowly man will be physically unattractive and single, perhaps even

662 involuntarily celibate, as well as poor and unemployed or underemployed. Any mystical, ethical, or aesthetic justification of that wretched state of affairs is beside the point for non-omegas; indeed, the attempt to save face by such underhanded means, instead of admitting to personal inadequacy and leaving more successful members of society alone is just one more pitiful, time-wasting exercise that sinks the omega man deeper and deeper into his own fantasy world. As put by the AskMen article, cited above, An omega male likes to think hes marching to the beat of his own drum, but the reality is he just cant keep time with everybody else. While we dont want to advocate conformity, we do think there are certain facts of life that every guy has to recognize. Being a man means engaging with the world as it really is. The description of omega men as unattractive, single, and poor is surely accurate. Indeed, its accuracy should be stipulated since in a free society, some men will fail to compete well, due to their inadequacies or poor choices, and will suffer the consequences; these men can be called betas or omegas, depending on whether they give up on meeting conventional expectations. But there are two fallacies in the foregoing response to the omegas rejection of social norms. First, when you speak of the mystical, ethical, or aesthetic reasons for that rejection as rationalizations, youre assuming that the character defects cause the ideology. Just as likely, though, an omegas character may develop in response to a confrontation with the absurdities and tragedies which have for millennia inspired the omegas ascetic worldview. Even the omegas physical ugliness may be exacerbated by harsh experience, in that the omega will lack both the interest and the funds to look his best, and that disinterest and poverty may result from experience of our existential predicament. Second, when you say that the omegas world-weary ideals are worthless because of their association with the omegas personal defects, youre committing the genetic fallacy of reducing the ideals epistemic merit to the quality of its presumed source. Thus, even were the mystical, cosmicist, or existential worldview caused by the omegas failures and personal weaknesses, that causal connection wouldnt by itself

663 entail the worthlessness of that worldview. On the contrary, supposing that social conventions were somehow bankrupt, we should surely expect that those who would discover that surprising and unpleasant fact wouldnt be the conformists who strive to live up to those norms, by raising a family and earning enough money to live comfortably; those folks would sooner take such norms at face value than question them. No, those who would discover fundamental problems with a society would more likely be the alienated individuals who wouldnt reflexively defend the popular lifestyle on a partisan basis. Of course, if you do accept the validity of social norms, you can pragmatically dismiss the omegas worldview as a likely contributor to social failure, but that would beg the question at issue, which is whether those norms ought to be followed. Returning to the above quotation, the classic reply to the realists insistence that, in this case, Being a man means engaging with the world as it really is, is voiced by the idealist Eleanor Arroway in the film Contact, the reply being that the world is what we make of it. More apt, though, the omega will maintain that even when were not responsible for social roles, because those roles are put upon us by natural forces, were responsible for our choice of how we deal with those realities, such as our sexuality and our ego-driven quest for personal pleasure. Alphas and betas dont engage with reality, in the sense of battling with those forces as our enemies, since their goal of personal happiness requires that they bless their inner nature. Only the omega man engages with reality in that sense, by denouncing the natural causes of our suffering as horrible outrages, and by withstanding the social pressures to betray that existential realization and to lower his guard. The omega is always at war with his animal nature and thus always engaged with natural reality itself, not with the politically correct delusions and mass hallucinations that distract the alpha and beta men. As for the insinuation that the omega isnt a real man, unlike the alpha or beta man, if real man means the one defined by scientific theories, then were assuming that a human is a naturally selected mammal; a vehicle for transmitting genes in the furtherance of a mindless, morally neutral biochemical process; a mortal cursed with the

664 intelligence to understand all too well the likelihood of our species doom, the ultimate fruitlessness of our individual efforts, and the inevitability of our bodys decay. In that case, surely the omega man should take that emasculating insult as an unintentional compliment. Perhaps the omega is an inchoate transhuman, whose stubborn renunciation of natural reality is a precondition of a radical alteration of that reality which requires an inner transformation of hitherto real men and women. Only an alienated outsider could be motivated to combat all the evils of the natural dominance hierarchy, and thus to preclude the need for distinctions between alpha, beta, and omega men.

Conclusion
To clarify, Im not so foolish as to recommend that all men be omegas. What I maintain is that the popular dismissal of omega men as weak-willed losers is complicated by the comparison of these losers with the perennial class of mystical ascetics. The problem with modern omega men is that the traditional defense of asceticism has few roots in Western societies, and so these drop-outs are doubly alienated--from natural forces and from non-omegas. More than anyone else, omega men (and women too!) need a version of mysticism thats compatible with modern science and with philosophical naturalism. Certain forms of Buddhism are popular options, as are New Age bastardizations of Gnostic and Eastern religious traditions. Elsewhere, I point to some common elements of such a synthesis, highlighting existentialism and Lovecrafts cosmicism. With or without a philosophy of secular asceticism, secular society will inevitably produce losers along with its winners. But with such a philosophy, the losers may be buoyed and the winners may be compelled at least to relinquish their feelings of complacency.

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Defending Existential Cosmicism ____________________________________________________

In my writings Ive sought to carve up some sacred cows, including happiness and sex, theism and New Atheism, liberalism and conservatism. In their place I recommend a pretty dark worldview, although not a wholly dark one. This worldview is informed by existentialism and by cosmicism as well as philosophical naturalism. The gist of existentialism is that we choose how we confront harsh truths about ourselves and our place in the universe, and that the mainstream choice is to retreat to self-serving delusions. Cosmicism is H.P. Lovecrafts name for the science-inspired suspicion that our values, hopes, and dreams are all pathetic in the grand scheme, that our knowledge of the ultimate truth of how the universe works would deprive us of our sanity. Probably the most common objection to my sort of hostility to Western culture takes the form of a stream of personal attacks: existential cosmicists are romantic idealists, often stuck in a juvenile stage of personal development, substituting a suitably dark fantasy for the tauntingly pleasant reality; moreover, the criticism goes, these idealists merely devise an elaborate philosophical rationalization for their personal failures in life, which is to say that existential cosmicists tend to be either losers (poor, unattractive sufferers) or else spoiled whiners, complaining about their anomie instead of seizing their opportunities, participating in society, and not over-thinking everything.

666 There are several criticisms here of existential cosmicism (EC), which can be conflated, so Ill tease them apart and explain them more fully before responding to them.

Opposing Existential Cosmicism

Romanticism: Romanticism was the aesthetic movement that began as a recoiling from such cultural impacts of the Scientific Revolution as utilitarianism, pragmatism, and secular humanism. Instead of thinking of nature purely as quantifiable bits of matter that can be exploited, romantics deified the cosmos, portraying natural forces as worthy of awe, horror, and thus respect. Indeed, the pragmatist who deifies humans--especially for our scientific and engineering capabilities--borrows a theistic conceit which modern science itself has embarrassed, namely the notion that were similar to the First Cause, to the Creator of the universe. For the pragmatist whose ultimate value is usefulness, nature is a machine that can be reengineered to suit our purposes, and the more we control natural forces, the more godlike we become. Ironically, the romantic takes more seriously the upshot of modern science, holding up as more sacred the sea of natural forces than the hapless creatures who come and go as waves in that sea. The criticism of my view, though, would be that EC is an hysterical overreaction to the success of technoscience, a sort of misplaced pity for the ecosystem we might destroy in our effort to transform it, and a nostalgic preference for mystery. The romantic denigrates our rational powers to preserve a terror of nature that's supposed to follow from our presumed inability to fully explain the universe. We fear most what we dont understand, and if we cant understand everything, such as consciousness or why theres something rather than nothing, we must always be humble. This humility has social and political consequences; in particular, the romantic tends to oppose the arrogance of unbridled capitalism. And so the criticism is ultimately a personal attack: romanticism is a rationalization of failure, whereas scientistic culture celebrates our success, or at least our bold plan of carrying on as gods now that weve deposed the false god, thanks to modern science. Thus, if EC is romantic, so much the worse for EC.

667 Now, cosmicism is romantic in the historical sense Ive outlined. In these rants, Ive criticized the arrogance of scientistic culture, speaking of the curse of reason, the delusions of hyper-rationalism, and so on. But romanticism isnt a pejorative term, which is to say that applying the label doesnt amount to a criticism. Just because cosmicism can be traced to a reaction to the Scientific Revolution doesnt mean cosmicism is wrong. On the contrary, as Ive suggested, the cosmicist may be closer to modern science than is the scientistic humanist. As suggested, the criticism thats implicit in any accusation that cosmicism is romantic lies on other, personal grounds to which I now turn. Childish Naivety: I think the root of the foregoing objection to EC is a disagreement about what to make of the power of technoscience. Secular humanists are immensely proud of that power and they have contempt for traditional superstitions and for the prospect of any other retrograde brake on technoscientific progress. Their scorn for religion isnt due so much to an intellectual difference of opinion on technical questions of theology and cosmology, but on awe felt for human secular achievements and on a revolutionarys adventurous impulse to follow the technoscientific enterprise to its ultimate end, which may be our apotheosis or our self-destruction. Modern Western rationalists were revolutionary in wresting power from the Catholic Church, replacing that unsustainable medieval oligarchy with a stealth variety thats more compatible with modern knowledge. Secular humanists want to be on the winning team, and they regard the power of technoscience as a sure sign that a science-centered ideology is best. By contrast, for example, religious fundamentalism isnt just dangerous to the modern social order, but wildly impractical and thus contrary to the all-consuming desire for technoscientific progress. Likewise, one of the existential cosmicists sins is supposed to be naivety: EC would undermine peoples confidence in their secular pursuits and thus slow social progress, hampering the humanists effort to adapt us to the demands of ever-advancing science and technology. For the secular humanist, progress requires trust that the gains of that advance will outweigh the costs, that godlike knowledge and power in the hands of

668 clever mammals will be worth the sacrifices of modern oligarchy, wild (free) economic competition, and the lowering of aesthetic standards due to democracy and the rise of the corporate monoculture (or anticulture). If well need to sacrifice in modern societies, says the secular humanist, at least we can be placated with the addictive joys of consuming material goods and of having sex with abandon, cheering on our liberal or conservative politicians as partisan team-players who submerge our individuality in the hive mind. In my philosophical rants Ive cast aspersions on some of the ideals that motivate this secular faith, and so the objection is that Im incredibly nave, as though anything human-made could alter our modern course. Why waste time on impractical and indeed counterproductive musings, instead of struggling more single-mindedly to succeed like most other people, to reap the material rewards? Cowardly Escapism: The critics answer is that EC is a cowardly attempt to escape from adult responsibilities. Modern civilization is supposedly more mature than more ignorant, ancient ones, and thus those who follow the received wisdom of modernity demonstrate their greater maturity. Outsiders, drop-outs, and other omega losers who gainsay secular culture, may lack the self-confidence needed to succeed in the adult businesses of earning a living and raising a family, let alone of making our collective way in the natural universe. Bitter Rationalization: The diagnosis may be, then, that EC is a rationalization for character defects and for personal failures. The existential cosmicist may seek to drag secular society down to his level, since misery loves company. Instead of blaming his personal weaknesses, the antisocial outsider may seek a scapegoat or attempt to save face by waging a holy war of iconoclasm. Instead of admitting to being a mere pathetic loser who bitterly and jealously seeks to rob people of their peace of mind, the existential cosmicist puffs himself up, deeming himself a crusader on a mission to enlighten everyone, to show them that the secular activities he fails at (material success, raising a family, being a productive member of society by accepting certain conventions) are degrading compared to allegedly nobler ones.

669 The opponents hypothesis, then, has two parts. First, the expectation is that the existential cosmicist suffers from crippling personal weaknesses, such as physical ugliness, mental disability, or business, social, or sexual incapacities. Second, the opponent would explain this by saying that EC is a rationalization that effectively conceals those weaknesses or transforms them into twisted successes, and in this way the social outcast sustains a modicum of pride despite the dismal state of his affairs. These sorts of personal attacks, launched reflexively by defenders of modern secular societies against not just existential cosmicists but other radical critics, merely put into words the so-called realists disgust with anything thought to be idle and impractical. I assume these charges would spring to the minds of most people were they to read my writings (although those who actually locate and choose to read them might tend to agree with them, since those who spend time reading philosophical articles on the internet likely already share an outsiders mindset). The average secular humanist would be repulsed by a presumed stink of failure that wafts from my rants or from any diatribe against popular culture. After all, youd never hear a Casanova speaking ill of sexuality; nor a highly successful family man, who aims to be happy in the secular sense, rejecting the ideals of consumer society as delusions; nor Barack Obama or George W. Bush publicly abandoning their respective political principles. No, those who engage in radical criticism are naturally expected to be outsiders as opposed to the winners whose welfare depends on their constructive engagement with the very society in question. The outcasts hostility to modern ideals is foolish, on the politically correct view, since were the poisonous attitude of EC more common, it would spoil the only life we have. Worst of all, EC is counterproductive, running up against the ideology of humanistic progress. Thus, the existential cosmicist is a laughable Don Quixote figure, engaging in a nave, futile project instead of relishing the freedom and other boons made possible by modernity.

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Correlation and Causation

I think these personal attacks need to be critiqued, meaning that I agree with them up to a point, but that we should appreciate where they go wrong from their plausible assumptions. Again, it stands to reason that radical critics are outsiders who fail, more or less, in the terms set by the society they oppose. Nietzsche, the early existentialist, and Lovecraft, the cosmicist, certainly suffered from breakdowns or financial failures. It stands to reason that those who excel in certain enveavours will pursue them for as long as they retain their skills. But this is to speak only of correlations between success and a positive outlook on the grounds for that success, and between weakness and failure, on the one hand, and skepticism about the tasks you do poorly in, on the other. Those who are strong in certain areas will excel in them and be proud of their accomplishments, since theyll look favourably on the world that rewards their gifts or their choice to practice and so eventually to triumph. Meanwhile, those who are cursed with weaknesses, be they physical, mental, or social, and who shoulder the full blame for their predicament likely wont be long for this world; theyll succumb to shame from their self-imposed stigma and do themselves in. The losers who persist, therefore, must have some coping mechanism that keeps them alive and kicking, such as an EC ideology that finds more than enough blame to go around, as it were--indeed a whole cosmos to loathe. But correlation isnt causation. Where the opponent of EC errs, then, is in assuming that the reason for the correlation is that the existential cosmicist (or Gnostic, religious fundamentalist, ascetic, socialist, or any other radical critic of modern Western society) merely rationalizes those personal weaknesses, that the weaknesses not only cause the EC ideology, but that they are ECs only sources, that EC is nothing but a facesaving mechanism. There are, of course, other possibilities. For one thing, cause and effect here may be reversed: perhaps the ideology of EC comes first to some people at a young age, and that unrelenting skepticism then causes them to fail at business, social networking, and intimate relationships; that is, hostility to certain social norms should naturally take someone out of the running, causing her either consciously or

671 otherwise to withdraw from conventional walks of life. Then again, even if the personal weaknesses come first, they may be only partial causes of EC, which is to say that those weaknesses may also afford the outsider a detached perspective from which societys ills can more clearly be seen, so that EC has a philosophical as well as a psychological basis. Indeed, the opponent of EC has a curious double standard. Shed credit the success of insiders--in part at least--to their personal strengths (their attractiveness, ambition, talents, family connections, and so on), maintaining that those strengths collectively make possible the gloriously progressive modern civilization. This opponent would also blame the failures of outcasts on their personal weaknesses, as Ive explained, but shed be stingier with her assessment of the fruit of those weaknesses, as it were; that is, the so-called strengths of physical attractiveness, ambition, and so on bring about secular happiness, an enviable sex life, and the whole Age of Reason, but the opposite qualities, such as ugliness, mental dysfunction, cynicism, and antisocial tendencies are assumed to cause only the poverty and alienation of these few outcasts. No, if were speaking here of causality, of natural processes whereby certain types of people differentially alter their environments, the radically hostile mindset seems to produce or sustain not just a handful of peoples suffering, but a mental representation of an ideal way in which the world might be, based on an unflinching recognition of reality and an aesthetically sensitive reaction to that reality. Granted, the labours of healthy, productive people add up to the construction of an actual society, but insightful outsiders may have the vantage point to coldly calculate the difference between that society and the one that should replace it. EC may indeed serve as an elaborate mechanism for coping with bitter disappointments, at least for some outsiders and losers. But failure in life seems to have a silver lining, which is that bitterness, ugliness, introversion, and poverty may force the loser to adopt a detached, alienated position, to look upon society from an external vantage point and thus to be able to objectively catalogue our absurdities and tragedies. Just as an anthropologist gains unique insight when studying a foreign culture, insight

672 unavailable to members of the tribe who cant afford to be skeptical of their cultural conventions, the loser should have a unique perspective on the culture she neednt accept for her own good. The very personal weaknesses that disgust the successful, well-loved, upstanding member of a modern society may be the primary means of attaining the ultimate philosophical insight. Indeed, the greatest of these outsiders have usually been lauded and even worshipped for precisely that reason. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an outsider (due to his skin colour) when he said he dreamed of the day when freedom would ring for everyone regardless of their race, gender, or physical appearance. Gandhi was physically weak and frugal when he led the Indian nationalist movement against British colonialism in India. Likewise, the biblical character of Jesus was an impoverished Jew in Roman-occupied Judea when he contrasted that imperial society with what he called the kingdom of God. Again, the legendary character of the Buddha was a wandering spiritual teacher, detached from conventional concerns of family and wealth, when he contrasted the illusory world of individual things with the interconnected, ego-annihilating reality. And, lastly, to take a more recent example, the fictional character of Batman secretly renounces the ideals of corrupt Gotham City, leading a double life in which he pretends to honour those ideals as a preeminently upstanding citizen, while using his wealth mainly in a heroic war against social corruption. Notice that in each of these cases, the hero is born to relative wealth and luxury, only later to renounce it as a result of a higher, moral calling. King earned a doctoral degree from Boston University, Gandhi a law degree in London; Jesus was God in utopian Heaven, who degraded himself by becoming a man; the Buddha was a prince who gave up his palaces to live as an ascetic; and although Batman retains his inherited wealth and secular ambition, he employs them only as covers for his subversive agenda as a superhero. My point is obviously not that the average loser is as heroic or divine as any of these personages. Again, the most heroic outsiders seem to voluntarily withdraw from the game as opposed to having their outsider status forced on them by their failures. Still, the famous prophets, gurus, and heroes fulfill the same ascetic ideal that lifts up less

673 influential outsiders, and happen to be esteemed by losers and winners alike. Granted, many materialists only pretend to worship the colossal loser, Jesus, for example, or else worship him because they assume his resurrection and eventual triumph negate the resentful message he conveyed while he suffered as a hermit. But the fact that some of those who fail in the mainstream, materialistic, biologically-determined sense are nevertheless held as sacred by great multitudes surely indicates that opponents of inspired, radical social critiques might just want to suppress disheartening truths about the society theyve embraced. The insiders may fear that they live in corrupt Gotham after all, that theyve pledged themselves to delusions and that the outsider tends to understand the world at a deeper level. The personal attacks function, then, as distractions, having no logical force as they stand but only the practical goal of shaming the loser to put an end to the rants.

Teleological Maturity
Theres another questionable aspect of these attacks, besides their confusion of correlation with causation, which is the notion that idealists are less mature than pragmatists who tend to achieve more in materialistic terms because they (the pragmatists) dedicate themselves to that more realistic task. At root here is the naturalistic fallacy, the inference that because certain goals are normal, therefore theyre normative, that because were genetically predisposed to seeking a mate and earning enough money to raise a family, therefore were supposed to achieve those ends so that those who fail are malformed or stuck in some earlier stage of development. Now, all of this requires theism, a set of ideas which is laughably preposterous. Theism, youll recall, is the vainglorious delusion that human nature is fundamental to the universe, that there would be no cosmos without an almighty person who thinks and acts like us, who allegedly created everything around us. Were there such a creator god, his creation would have a function, just as we give our creations functions, which is to say jobs they ought to perform. But when Darwin showed that the intelligent design of organisms is illusory, he also discredited the normative

674 interpretation of biological phenomena. Thus it became fallacious to infer a value from a biological, naturally selected fact. And yet the upstanding citizen pities the ascetic and alienated outsider as immature, as failing not just to satisfy social expectations but to grow into a complete human being, leading a so-called rich, full life. In turn, the ascetic outsider, the omega person who is last in all mainstream estimations, is disgusted with the winners delusions of grandeur. Instead of trotting out an archaic teleological presupposition according to which we have a natural purpose even though our creators, namely natural forces, are thoroughly undead, the opponent of EC should appreciate that people are differently equipped. Some are beautiful, ambitious, and gullible, and thus well-disposed to succeed in the matrix sustained by politically correct delusions that prevent mass outbreaks of debilitating angst. Others are unattractive, socially awkward, inept at business, but philosophically curious. These others will likely not acquire much wealth nor attract many friends or mates, and if they nevertheless long to be happy, theyre just the sort who will foolishly kill themselves. Again, the losers who remain will develop in a different direction: rather than being immature in some cryptotheistic sense, theyll devalue mainstream expectations, preferring a more or less ascetic life of contemplating the comical results of our instinct to personalize the thoroughly impersonal natural order. If an outsider doesnt belong to the consumer culture, doesnt share the hedonistic desire for a rich, full life, the opponent of EC merely begs the question when she calls the existential cosmicist a loser or a failure. To be sure, relative to mainstream conventions, an ascetic with little income or social life fails miserably, but whether those conventions are best is just the question at issue. Finally, I want to consider the question of bitterness. Does the existential cosmicist opt out of a normal life due to bitterness, that is, to a begrudging admission that this person is ill-equipped to succeed in that respect, which causes her to lash out blindly at the word like a wounded animal? Blaming the world primarily for your personal disappointment is highly egoistic, as though you were central to the universe and nature owes you a favour. Still, bitterness is close to what Id call an ethically proper response

675 to suffering, namely disgust for whats distasteful. The difference is that the bitter person takes her suffering personally, whereas someone whose ego has been so overwhelmed by failure that she laughs at her own pathetic defense mechanisms holds the world in contempt with greater detachment. What revolts the existential cosmicist isnt that she lacks what many others possess or that the world wont hear her prayers for a greater fortune. No, she understands that her failures are brought about largely by her inherited inabilities and peculiar predilections (what closet teleologists call weaknesses and malfunctions), and by her eventual decision to renounce the mainstream way of life. Nevertheless, her aesthetic sense is assaulted by the hideous imbalance between natures inhumaneness and our human nature. That we sentient, intelligent beings should have been produced not by a loving god but by an entropically decaying yet mindlessly creative, buzzing chaos of quantum fluctuations isnt beautiful at all, but appalling for its tragic and absurd implications.

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Afterward:
Were the Squishy Monsters! ____________________________________________________

In myths, movies, and other forms of fiction, there are two prominent kinds of monsters: pointy and squishy ones. The pointy ones, with fangs, claws, or other sharp edges, represent the insect and the alien, the nonhuman that crawls out of its lair from elsewhere, creeps up your arm and bites you (werewolves, vampires, Giger's aliens, etc). Insects have the archetypal alien form, with their nonhuman body size, population, number of limbs, and exoskeleton that gives them sharp outer edges. The meaning of squishy monsters, like blobs of jelly, large and bulbous octopi bodies, or aliens with oversized heads and no sharp edges, is more complicated. Superficially, these monsters too scare us because of their inhumanity, but this depends on an identification of us with our seemingly immaterial consciousness. Ghosts and godlike intelligences of pure energy might then represent our own immaterial essence, our so-called spirit. To the extent that we think of ourselves as immaterial spirits, manifesting as consciousness, Platos hierarchy comes into play, in which the ideal Forms of imperfect, material copies reside in heaven while the copies swarm in the material plane, distracting intelligent beings and imprisoning them in the cave of ignorance. The squishy monster would thus be as alien to our true form as would the sharp-edged monster, since in the Gnostic scheme either would represent the Platonic baseness of materiality and either would be equally loathsome as a symbol of our jailer.

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After the Scientific Revolution and the waning of anthropocentric teleology, according to which all of nature is objectively subject to a plan that's laid out in a heaven of ideal models, were led to think of ourselves in more corporeal terms. Moreover, scientists confirmed that the brain is our control center and that our eyes are extensions of our brains. The brain and eyes are quintessentially squishy organs, and although the brain is protected by a hard skull, by itself the brain is a pitifully fragile vessel. One of our predominant postmodern fears, then, is of the evident mismatch between the godlike powers of our intelligence, freedom, and consciousness, and our incarnation in fragile bodies with delicate internal organs. That is, we fear that assuming we're identical with our physical bodies, these bodies must not be prisons, after all, since there would be no captive spirit, no ghost in the machine, no traveler from a heavenly dimension who's lost among the cages of incarnated forms. Instead, the spilling of our blood and the rotting of our organs would terminate our life, in which case our intelligence, freedom, and consciousness must have misled us to assume otherwise. The postmodern fear, then, is that were godlike only in our delusions of grandeur, that were actually absurd animals whose life is sustained by eminently vulnerable bodies, next to what natural forces can throw at us. True, we dominate the planet with our own exoskeletons of skyscrapers, vehicles, weapons, and other hard-edged technologies. But at the core of our planetary power, at the helm of our army of machines, were naked apes who need to mitigate the curse of reason with escapist fantasies. Reason empowers us to control natural forces to our benefit, but also potentially horrifies us by showing us what we really are: the very "science fictional" squishy monsters that terrify us! If we are essentially our flimsy, wrinkled, gelatinous brains with the tentacles of our nerve endings reaching down our brainstem to control our bodys extremities, a monster like the Dalek of Doctor Who (a slimy, puny alien encased in a powerful machine), the tentacled green alien in The Simpsons, or the mindless blob from classic science fiction surely revolts us because it reminds us so much of ourselves. Were the slimy, squishy, fragile creatures with tentacles that frantically push buttons on our machines to protect us but also to enslave whatever we encounter. Not

678 only are we those pitiful creatures, but were monstrous in our enthrallment to pragmatic reason, which coldly enforces our survival instinct--now with institutions like free markets and stealth oligarchic democracies--even if the end results are social dominance hierarchies, the extinction of all other species, and the ecosystems destruction. Moreover, were estranged from the rest of nature by our peculiar abilities and were alienated especially from ourselves, clinging to fantasies of immortality and transcendence even after science has pulled back the curtain and exposed our true nature. We humans are the squishy, monstrous aliens! When we confront images of such creatures in the media, our fear and revulsion are due to our unwillingness to look ourselves in the mirror; we prefer to avoid the angst thats our true birthright as animals cursed with godlike powers of intelligence, freedom, and consciousness. Were free to turn our rationality and our scientific methods of investigation on ourselves, to cut through fairytales, intuitive myths, and other feel-good narratives to discover what turns out to be the horrible truth, and were sentient so that that truth can fully register with us as its imprint is burned in our brain, mocking our preferred self-image. We escape angst by externalizing the cause of our dread; we pretend that instead of beholding our monstrous visage in the cultural mirror, were merely titillated by tales of fictitious monsters and aliens that lie under the bridge, in a place far, far away, underground, on another planet, in a spaceship, in another dimension, or anywhere else but under our own skin. In the tale of the beauty and the beast, this clash between our appearance and inner reality is reduced to the mundane conflicts between the sexes or social classes, as the beautiful woman/upper class learns to love the man/lower class in spite of his or its uncouth tendencies and primitive outbursts. In The Tempest, Prospero, who represents our godlike creative intellect, learns to accept the beastly Caliban as his own (This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine). According to Jungian psychology, we each have a shadow side of our character that undermines our persona, or public image, and

679 we need to confront and accept our shadow so that we can develop into authentic, whole individuals. There is, however, no wholesome union between our biological reality and our preferred status as beautiful children of God or as worthy lords of creation. On the contrary, the natural facts of what we are and how we act as a species are full-fledged horrors enabled by our escapist fantasies. Far from undermining socially-useful delusions, science and other forces of modernity have created the self-destructive postmodern society, lost in aimless pragmatism, stultifying relativism and decadence, its birth rate paltry, its leaders functionary technocrats or demagogues, and its culture a corresponding panoply of scientistic or more retrograde rationalizations of oligarchic excesses. Were we to accept our monstrous, alienated identity and abandon our soothing narratives, theres every indication that postmodern society would lose its collective sanity and implode. Premodern, theocratic societies in the Middle East are currently imploding in the so-called Arab Spring, but even if they manage to reform themselves like the compromising Church, pacifying their reactionary fundamentalists, their reformation would likely usher in the secular delusions of scientism to bolster the ensuing "enlightened" voters and stealth oligarchs. Transhumanists expect that technology will eventually enable us to radically merge with technology, such as by downloading our minds into new, powerful and immortal bodies. Even were this feasible, we might then escape the horror of our naturally selected form but pass on the preoccupations that cause our monstrous behaviour and our angst. Were the transformation sufficiently radical, the result would be the death of humans unless there were some continuity between the two species, such as a gradual development of humans into posthumans. Any such continuity, though, would permit regression, which is why postmodern humans still have primitive, prehuman tendencies due to the fact that our brain structures slowly evolved. A posthuman, then, would either still be outwardly, if not inwardly, monstrous and thus subject to angst from the disparity between its ideals and its practices, or else would bear witness to our execution rather than embodying our resurrection. At any rate, the transhumanist combines Gnostic

680 horror of cosmic imprisonment with scientistic assurance of social progress through technoscience. The horror is justified, the scientism less so. What should be done about this ultimate self-loathing? I know of no near-term or obvious methods for postmodern (relatively well-informed) folk to avoid horror from the knowledge of our existential predicament, other than methods that depend on delusions and thus violate ethical or inspiring aesthetic standards. The method actually practiced on a mass scale involves, as I said, the scapegoating of fictional monsters and aliens, that is, the pretense that there are no real ones, but only the harmless, entertaining fictions. Were we to admit that those imaginary freaks are merely pale imitations of living and breathing, walking and talking monstrous aliens, and that each one of us, beginning with our revolting biological essence and ending in our collective sociopathic abuse of the planet and of each other, is such a freak, our politically correct charades would come crushing down and a great time of reckoning would be at hand. For example, the elected politicians invoking of optimistic, civic mantras about our dignity and greatness would lose its power to stupefy. At a minimum, conscientious, courageous, and informed persons should foreswear the most egregious, degrading forms of self-deception. Being a squishy monster is bad enough, but a deluded coward who flees from self-awareness to a world of make-believe is even more nauseating.

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Dirge in the Undead God ____________________________________________________

The undead Creator writhes and lurches God of all but unsung in churches Entombed in vacuum its limbs decay Flesh the stuff of the Milky Way Commanded by moans the cosmos unfurls, Drooling worlds in Fibonacci swirls Unaware, its galactic muscles flex Black maws swallowing its Hydra-like necks Chambers of its sprawling heart, the stars Send life-blood to the gods avatars The pawns of Earth, proud and impious Deem themselves divine, ticks in Gods carcass Before their eyes the lifeless body moves Stars shine, wind blows, and rain falls, which proves That natures God, no spirit required The monstrous plenum from the first expired

682 The Creator evolved a head, the Earth Yet the minds therein are tasked not to birth Whole worlds but to behold the rotting face, Tattered wings, shattered carapace Could a noble soul be found confined To carrion or mustnt that soul be resigned To horror and folly, as a senile old man Dines on the dung in his foul bedpan? Or as a mad fish, loathing the sea, Flops on land comically free? Come meet the blessed mortal heroes Gallant in squaring off against their foes? Saintly with worry for anothers pain? More likely competing for private gain Not--as boasted--Lords of Nature But vicious beasts without the fur Fucking in secret, ashamed of their stripes Jealous plumbers groping for others pipes Traces of the Dragons alien form From ghostly flights of the quantum swarm-Arcana named only in wizards scrolls-To a map of dramatic social roles Enter alpha, beta, omega males And history hidden by fairy-tales Alphas lead by preying on the weak Feminized betas follow while the bleak Truth is glimpsed by omega drop-outs By anxious mystics brought low by doubts All concealed by elaborate dances White lies, puffery and PC trances

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See now stage left for their shared cameo As nebulas nursing newborn stars glow As worlds in the multiverse like flowers grow As those carrying Gods coffin know woe Libs and cons squabble for show Each bowing before the chief beasts Serving up the oligarchs grotesque feasts Libs trust in the quaint modern myth Of Reason, Freedom and our precious pith Reduced to bean counters and sad cuckolds As the postmodern wasteland unfolds They condescend with pragmatic nods; Cons con shamelessly with myths of old gods With tales of Yahweh counting your heads hairs Or Allah demanding you kneel on carpet squares While the truer gods rule from skyscrapers Wasting their wealth but praised for their capers Luxuriating on a golden toilet While hordes of dupes languish in debt Punished for the plutocrats insane bet Fun and games next to the existential threat Of worlds falling as beads of undead sweat Hear then the song of the truth-blasted seer No warning or call to action but a rave An ironic prayer to Gods decaying ear A rattling of chains binding cosmos and slave A peeling of soporific veneer Flames flicker dimly in our abode, the Cave But theyre beamed from the suns themselves I fear

684 And we poor witnesses live in our grave Flesh leaps and struts as a mobile bier But laugh at the honour of being lodged in Gods rear