OH, NO I'm shameless on that point. I will tell you that I'm a lot more embarrassed that I didn't catch that I typed "ensure" when I meant "assure" the day before yesterday, in fact I assure you of that.
The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." Well, one of the things about there being a UNIverse is that there is one universe. The "moral universe" is the same universe that all of the rest of it fits into. I believe what MLK said, I choose to believe it just as nihilists choose to disbelieve that and with that disbelief they choose the nihilistic depravity that comes with that rejection. That is why I made the remark about Nietzsche that I did the other day, no one who chooses Nietzsche has any credibility in asserting any form of morality. I looked over a couple of lists of those who either admitted to being influenced by him or are credibly considered to have been influenced by him demonstrates that even their better natures were damaged by the kind of thing that Nietzsche asserted.
Anyone who repeats or pretends to believe that assertion by MLK is expressing the idea that the universe has purpose of a very specific kind and if you believe that about one aspect of it, you cannot deny that other, I would assert all, aspects of it are similarly moved in a particular direction. I could go into the problems that merely seems to be for the concept of freedom but that would take a hell of a long series of posts. I believe that the reality of morality requires that our minds be free and that freedom is one aspect of why we have importance within the framing of morality. I believe any life which demonstrates volition is contained within that framing, perhaps all of reality does.
If you choose to believe that the universe is meaningless, then you have disconnected the very concept of meaning from any claim to it being real or important. THAT seems to me to lie behind the horrific reality of the Trump phenomenon, FOX news, the refusal to accept realities such as that wearing a mask during a pandemic of air borne disease is moral and requiring them is a duty of legitimate governance AND LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE DENIAL OF REALITY. Such denials of reality are a result of the rejection morality as a real force in the universe, something real through the installation of morality as a feature of our one universe, one as real as subatomic particles, perhaps more certainly real than the Higgs particle so much beloved by those who foolishly think that such things can have a known reality separate from the minds and lives of those who "know" them.
Those lists of those people who were heavily influenced by Nietzsche are chock full of those whose lives and work, were, I believe, blighted through their choices of believing in materialism, in scientism, in atheism. Many of the writers, composers and scientists and even a few of the philosophers on those lists, the ones I'm familiar with, probably couldn't have come up with a deep explanation of why they made that choice, for a lot of them I don't think it went much farther, in the beginning, than wanting to fit into the respectable side of an academic-so-called intellectual milieu as a means of entering the middle or upper classes. A lot of them, I think, wanted to feel free to screw around with their students or other people, some of them wanted to feel free to do other things that morality would inhibit. It's clear that the neo-fascists want to debase the population in general because people without a sense of morality or reality are easier to cheat, gull and control.
I would be the first person to acknowledge that the effects of that are deeply embedded in many, perhaps most of the Christian Churches, in many Synagogues (especially, ironically, it would seem Orthodox ones) in many of the denominations of Islam (again those considered most Orthodox seemingly some of the worst). All of those are human institutions, all human institutions are liable to immorality and its near cousin, moral failing on account of ignorance, lazy thinking and the retention of bad habits, bad habits retained by a failure of moral self-criticism as often as not. I know from reading a lot more theology over the past decade that far from being uncritical, the best of theology practices what might be the most rigorous program of internal criticism in all of intellectual literature. If you want an example of that, I would point you to Hans Kung's Does God Exist which will both give you a rigorous criticism of a belief in God from the viewpoint of various opponents of religion, including Nietzsche, as well as point you to more of that than you're likely to ever get from your typical English language popular treatment of the topic. Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy is froth compared to it.
One of the unadmitted aspects of modern thought is that it is riddled with a dyspeptic and depressingly pathological negativity and a hostility to the humane and the life affirming.
That is what I think is given away by the academic attempts at coming up with a replacement for morality which seems to always lead to a list and schedule of who it's OK to kill being a part of every one of those I'm aware of. Peter Singer and the other academic utilitarians are a living demonstration of the tender mercies of the wicked being cruel. Is it any wonder the lack of morality among Republican governors is tied into the concept of "herd immunity" which is a superstition based in Darwinist materialism, thinking of human lives in terms of animal husbandry? The way Nazis though to the slaves they worked to death, the physics of how to keep crematoria burning on calculations of human fat so as to save money on coal?
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