I FEEL LIKE I HAVE gotten someplace with the idea that the scientism of modern thought following the merely clerical choice to exclude questions of moral responsibility as the equal if not the absolute prerequisite for wisdom and "rights" to assume the character of goodness and virtue instead of the characteristics of evil and harm, is one of the most serious of ways in which things have gone to hell.
The scientific exclusion of moral responsibility is something that works well when you're talking about unconscious objects in space* which exhibit no understanding of moral responsibility or the value of consequences or even an ability to choose a different outcome, using that merely clerical exclusion and making up laws to describe their movements and combinations with other objects, laws which work very well, but an exclusion which doesn't work at all when you're trying to make laws to produce a decent, sustainable life among human beings which are far more complex and likely not ever susceptible to the successful making of similar laws.
The elision of moral responsibility in science when it was taken as an ideological framing of reality has dangerously distorted modernism into something which cannot sustain a decent life and, in its worst manifestation, never had that intention to start with. And many if not most of those who framed the American Constitution, at least in principle, did adopt that 18th century materialistic superstition.
I have been opposing that with the assertion that the formula of The Golden Rule is actually a sounder framing for creating a governing egalitarian democracy and a far more decent society, it seems to me that idea has a lot more potential for doing that than any of the approved theories of modern, academically authorized, pseudo-scientific political "science" or economic theories. It should certainly not be an objectionable idea to those who profess one of the Abrahamic religions, as it is central to the moral holdings of all of their Scriptures and, since it is one of the long-standing and totally irrational barroom style atheists' refutation of Christianity that something similar has far more universal presence in different religio-philosophical traditions,** should be acceptable to the human population far beyond those of the Abrahamic faiths.
The extent to which "white evangelicals" hold with "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," in all aspects of politics and the law is the extent to which they are not Mammonist hypocrites, servants of the anti-Christ.
It should certainly not be objectionable to anyone who wants others to do to them as those others would want them to do to them, which is, of course, anyone who is not pathologically masochistic. What most people don't like is the reciprocal obligation that they do the same.
While no one who tries to do that to others can be responsible for making more than their end of it happen, civil law can be written to require it of those who are reluctant or unwilling to or, in the end, refuse to do so. Of course when those enlightenment 18th century figures. all white-men of property, most of whom were financiers or slave-holders, who wrote the Constitution and adopted the bill of rights were making the Constitution, they had absolutely no intention of holding up their end of the bargain, so they limited who they were required to do unto in that way and excluded all of those they certainly didn't intend to do right to. That is absolutely clear in the language of the Constitution, the anti-democratic corruptions baked into it and still present, the permissions for courts and, especially Supreme Courts to go hog-wild in extending inequality. I think the history of the "enlightenment" and pretty much the entire modern period could be written in the rejection of the Golden Rule on the basis of science and instrumental reasoning. Of course, you could write the history of the entire medieval period on a similar theme, a theme that goes back in Western history to the treatment of the Children of Israel under the genocidal oppression of Pharaoh. The "historical" books and the books of Prophesy contemplate the problems that come from refusing to do so and the refusal of those who rule the egalitarian reciprocation of that as a legal obligation.
The campaign to discredit Christianity and, to some extent, Judaism and religion in general in the modern period is an attack on egalitarian democracy because that has been the foremost source of an effective assertion of that moral basis for egalitarian democracy. The source which has had the greatest part in producing whatever success there has been in making something in that direction the law of the United States and other countries. And I think that the source of that discrediting in either the economic elites and their scribes in academia and, even more so, entertainment writing is quite likely to have been motivated, in no small part, by a rejection of their obligations to do to others what they would have done unto them. The material, Mammonist rewards for shafting other people certainly makes that rejection very seductive to those who love money. It is matched in the overtly racist white-supremacist strain of American indigenous fascism with the same desire to exploit, rob and oppress People of Color for economic advantage - not a little of the common received racism of the American white underclass was at the encouragement of those who exploited them as well, taking advantage of their cowardice in opposing those who were really robbing and exploiting them. I have come to believe cowardice of that kind is of far more explanatory power than other psychological theories of lower-class racism. But I think there is always a motive of not wanting to treat people as you would want to be treated is at the bottom of it. Though, in the corrosive effects of long-term racism, resentment of those oppressed and the reaction to that is another component of why things have gotten so bad.
The Golden Rule has certainly never been the basis of despotic, dictatorial governance any more than that it has been the law that governs organized crime gangs. Such despots, dictators and gangsters have often been very smart, very knowledgeable, very rational and logical, they have sometimes made great use of science and other tools of might and wealth. None of them could operate as they do if they suddenly adopted an intention of equality and insisting that all of the gangsters do to others what they would have done to them. Religious establishments, sects, denominations, "most Christian kings" who don't hold to that law of reciprocal justice are little better than crime gangs, themselves.
The motivations behind the invention of science are intimately tied up with the "triad of control and pride" the Prophet Jeremiah came up with of might, wisdom and wealth, wisdom to more effectively exploit physical resources and power to enhance might and wealth. Especially in the context of science as a social, political and legal entity, I don't think you can ever really cut it out of that triad. And while power and wealth could be distributed in a way that would produce material equality, that requires a morality that the method of science excludes from consideration. The moral responsibility that is necessary for producing and sustaining decent human life is an insoluble hard problem when you start by cutting that out and insisting that it is irrelevant. When you pretend that science has all the answers, something that is not, itself, answerable through science, then you guarantee that inequality and an indecent, unsustainable hell will be the result. Knowledge that doesn't make you free is incomplete knowledge. Modernism insists on keeping it that way. I stand by what I said about the vulnerability of the idea of rights to be as wrongly used as wisdom in that context.
* Though the idea does have problems even for science as the factor of consciousness impinges on the activity of science. A product of the fact that science exists only in human minds and, therefore, the conditions of human thought are inevitably relevant to the results, especially the more subtle the objects of physical science get. I have an enormous skepticism for the retreat of some of the, actually, somewhat more honest atheist-materialist philosophers into panpsychism, which tries to skirt the "hard problem" of consciousness, what it is, where it comes from, how something which materialism cannot account for or deal with arose as an aspect of life arising and evolving, the inevitable discrediting of minds by an assertion of materialist determinism of our minds. What they're doing is just kicking the can down the road so they can pretend they've solved the problem. I think the problem is that consciousness is quite a different thing from material objects and, so, it has qualities and abilities and conditions that physical science - developed under a set of assumptions about unconscious objects moving and combining - was never designed to address. I think Roger Penrose's assertion that consciousness is an entirely different realm than physicalism just as mathematics is a different realm form matter makes more sense, though I doubt he'd agree with a lot of what I think. I think eventually, even in the unlikely event that panpsychism is adopted as the hegemonic framing of science and, so materialistic scientism in the broader culture, problems like those panpsychism is resorted to to address will arise despite of that nifty idea that temporarily distracts clever people from that. No human framing is going to avoid those problems, that's a real hard problem for scientism as it is for all of human culture.
** That line of thinking, that the assertion that "the Golden Rule" is some kind of humanly noticed universal moral truth discredits those religions which have made it the overt summation of "the Law and the Prophets," is far more rationally seen as discrediting the pop and elite atheism that makes such an assertion. It is remarkable how the universal noticing of that central moral holding of Jewish and Christian Scripture is held to discredit the truth of Judaism or Christianity is such a central pillar of modern, scientistic anti-religion. I'd like to see what other universally held truths are used to discredit those entities which hold with them.
That Christans, for example, have had such a hard time following the Law and the Prophets in practice being used to discredit the truth of Christianity makes about as much sense to me as discrediting mathematics on the basis of how few people really master long division or basic algebra. I've known many materialists who were lousy at math, probably even more now in the calculator dependent generations. [See discussion above of the differences between physical law created to describe unconscious objects and that which is invented to regulate human choices acted on without a single result.]
I would say that if you are going to claim logic and reason as the basis of your ideological framing that failure to practice those to the extent to which you want to claim that Confucianism or ancient Babylonian legal codes noticed the same moral principles as the Mosaic Law and the Gospel of Jesus is to fatally discredit Christianity is a far more important and definitive discrediting of modern popular or would-be elite atheism. I would cite such claims of ancient, universal, non-Abrahamic noticing of that principle of the governance of human life as support for my claim that it is a sounder basis of a Constitutional order than "enlightenment" scientistic, allegedly impartial and "even handed" amorality.
In the end I really don't find there is much of a difference in quality between elite and cheap and dirty pop atheism. That of the Churchlands or that of The Amazing Randi.
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