Why Materialism and Atheism Are Compatible With The Interests of the 1% And Entirely Incompatible With Liberalism
The universal acid of
atheism that Steve Weinberg poured on the entire literature of atheist
as well as religious assertion of morality is best observed by listening
to the entire discussion at
Sean Carroll's atheist confab.
Here is my imperfect attempt to transcribe what I think is the
most telling part of the "bad religion" guy's destruction of even the
most general of moral principles, as he is, in the atheists' own terms,
destroying their materialistic explanations of why that is right.
... There are competing things which are all good like happiness
and truth. For example, we sacrifice some happiness when we accept the
truth that we're not going to have life after death. Should we tell
other people that they're not going to live after they die? It
probably will reduce their happiness on the other hand truth has a value
of its own how do you balance truth and happiness there isn't any
algorithm for balancing that. I think you just have to accept that
there is no postulate that allows you to judge how much happiness
you're willing to give up for how much truth.
Even people who accept all this will say, all right we're not
going to agree on what is the good but at least we can agree on the
fundamental principle of morality that something like Rawls original
condition [I think he meant "
Original Position"]
that we should not treat other people worse than we treat ourselves. Rebecca [Goldstein]
was
saying something like this that everyone equally deserves whatever is
good, happiness or whatever it is. That's not the way I feel either.
And I think it's probably not the way most of you feel if you think
about it because. I could probably increase the total amount of
happiness by making my family live on rice and beans and live in a one
room apartment and just barely keep enough money to keep us alive and
healthy and send all of the rest of the money to poor parts of the world
where it would do to me. I'm not going to do that I'm not going to
.... and I well, I'm not confessing immorality. I'm saying that my
moral feelings tell me I should be loyal to my family.
Similarly when my university tries to recruit a bright young star
in physics I suppose I could calculate, well, he could do more good
for some other university and the greater good would imply we shouldn't
go after him let some other university go after him. I don't care, I
care about my university I'm loyal to my university similarly. So there
loyalty is a value it's not an absolute value I wouldn't cause, like
Edward the Third, I wouldn't cause the hundred years war to advance the
interests of my family. But it is one of these things where we have no
algorithm for balancing loyalty against distributive justice.
And I think we have to live with that. I think we have to live
with the fact that although we can reason and try to uncover what our
moral feelings are. And if we get into that I think a very good
example would be arguing about abortion ... maybe I'll come back to
that in the discussion.
We can reason, the reasoning uncovers how we feel morally and
perhaps allows us to identify areas of agreement so we can cooperate
with each other and bring about what we want.
I think in the end we have to live with not having a moral
philosophy that really works in a decisive way. I think we have to live
the unexamined life. I think this is part of the tragedy of the human
condition just like we have no absolute way of determining that Mozart
is better than Led Zeppelin we feel it but it's not something that we
can argue, we can rationally show. We have to live with the fact
that... this came up yesterday.... when we discover the fundamental
laws of physics from which all in some sense follows, that all other
principles follow, we won't know why they're true. This is something
that we have to accept, that the position of human beings is tragic and
part of the tragedy, that there is no way of deciding moral issues on
the basis of - well there is no way of deciding moral postulates which
should govern our actions. And in fact we don't have moral postulates
that govern our actions when we behave morally.
I'll start by pointing out that it is the moral deficiency of Weinberg's
ideology, materialistic atheism, that is at the base of his program of
destruction. It is, as Rebecca Goldstein points out later, unrealistic
and rather useless in dealing with the problem of how people behave,
though I think her natural selection based attempt is totally
unsuccessful, as well. It doesn't stand up to Weinberg's attack based
on their shared framing. When Weinberg said, "
we have to live with not having a moral philosophy that really works in a decisive way," he
was, I believe unwittingly, pointing out why we can't possibly live
with his intellectual pose in real life, because it will never work to
produce moral behavior and prevent the horrible disasters that his
preferred framing of familial and professional loyalty bring about,
continually.
As in my update in my post the other day, you should compare
Weinberg's statements to those of Jesus and think seriously as to which
ones would produce the worst of family based plutocracies, oligarchies,
crime families, and other aristocracies, corrupt institutions, unequal
distribution of goods, material inequality and the political, legal and
societal inequalities that are necessary for that. And you should ask
which is actually compatible and incompatible with politically
effective liberalism.
Weinberg's substitute for morality is far more supportive of the
worst of Republican policy than anything Jesus said on the subject*, it
is a secularized formulation of what Jesus said which Weinberg is
arguing against, using the pose of a lack of absolute postulates for
those things he throws his acid on while refusing to do the same with
those he favors, physics, even as he grants they also lack the same
thing he calls absolute knowledge. His "competing goods" of loyalty,
truth, etc. are no more founded in his ideological framing than do unto
others as you would have them do unto you.
That universal acid of insisting on the artificial creation of
algorithms and postulates such as those in mathematics and physics
before you won't tell lies beneficial to yourself or to betray even
those closest to you works on those quite nicely. I have not noted that
scientists are especially loyal to their spouses and children of first
marriages, such as Carl Sagan, though I suspect that if you could do a
quantitative analysis, professional self-interest to your university
department makes that stand up a bit better.
That Weinberg reassures us that his refusal to accept any kind of
moral absolutes wouldn't lead him to start a Hundred-Years-War only
shows that he's a conventional senior faculty member at an American
university. They are mostly rather a contented lot who don't aspire to
make war, except when their meal ticket is threatened. Though, again
considering the role that the often asserted atheist-majority of
physicists played in producing nuclear, atomic and massively destructive
"conventional" armaments during his lifetime, you don't want to rely
too heavily on them being uniformly otiose and even mostly harmless.
That there is nothing in what's left of his program of destruction of
morality to keep a more ambitious, modern day Macbeth in science from
killing hundreds of millions is certainly more relevant than his
personal lack of desire to do so. Sam Harris, as I'll remind you, has
called for that as a rational consideration and in a similar kind of
calculation as something that might substitute for "the good", which
would last a day and not a hundred years.
A liberal who thinks hard about this won't find anything in
materialism to support their liberalism, if their liberalism is a matter
of the moral obligation to do justice in the world, real equality,
material, social, political and legal, and the preservation and
advancement of rights. When someone chooses the ideological position
of atheism, materialism, scientism, there isn't even anything that could
make the entire destruction of the biosphere and the eventual
extinction of human and all other life on the planet an absolute act of
immorality if an atheist, so able, choose temporary self-interest over
the continuation of life, itself. You need to exit the framework that
is materialist atheism to assert why they shouldn't.
* For example, from Matthew, the continual insistence of Jesus that you
had a moral obligation to act morally outside of your family and inner
circle, that even the gentiles and tax collectors and such were nice to
their family and friends. The elite 1% are the relevant modern day
equivalent. Weinberg is saying there is no reason for people such as
those at Carroll's discussion group to act any better than they do and
he, from an atheist, materialist and scientistic viewpoint, successfully
destroys all of their attempts to make natural selection come up with a
reason for him to not do just what he wants to. And he's considered
something of an expert on such things among pop atheists, frequently
presented as such, one who is constantly being thrown in other peoples'
faces on these issues.
