01.24.11

Chronicle of higher ed article on morality/religion

Posted in General at 1:54 pm by nemo

http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Athe-ists-Nar-row/126027/: The New Athe­ists’ Nar­row Worldview

A useful critique of the New Atheists, marred by the confusion that Harris’ claims for science on morality are anything but half-backed.
The article notes that much religion doesn’t quite address the issue of morality. That’s true, but also misleading. Buddhism has a list of rules and moral injunctions a yard long. Beside that we see the latent nihilism in some forms of Buddhism also emerge, as also in the fringe gangster sufism of figures like Gurdjieff. Much ethical tradition is very poor, or even hyprocritical making people like Nietzsche suspicious.

My view here is simple: the attempts to formulate ethics from tradition were often failures because they were beyond the capacity of ancient religionists. Reread the Old Testament here and you can see that they never really addressed ethics, from our perspective. They could invent a myth which didn’t quite make sense, Sinai and the ten commandments.
It is right that we should move on from that. Here Kant is useful indeed, because it is as though he invented the subject for the first time, in a post-religion secular context. We see what the problem is: noone is smart enough to solve the problems he raise, and yet his basic framework is a great step. He did what scientists will forever try to undo and evade, as does Harris in his mediocre worst, which is to consider the issue of freedom and free agents in the light of Newton’s physics, then only to approach the subject of ethics. His formulation is brilliant but perhaps flawed.
What is surprising is that noone can build on that, perhaps because it simply too hard for us later dunces, content for the sugar-coated demonic pills handed by science perverts like Harris. I have a bad feeling it will get worse and worse as long as scientism reigns over the minds of the gullible public. Science in its current form cannot ever, By Definition, solve the ethics problem, because, as Harris states, it cannot deal with ‘free will’.
What I find unsettling is that scientists are so closed inside their system they won’t even read the history of ethics, or of Kant.

Thus we see tradition won’t help, and Biblical ethics is so confused that we need to start from scratch, as did Kant. On the other hand science can’t help, since, as with the alruism confusion, it can’t even deal with an ethical agent, playing up the altruism issue in a set of tricks arguments about kin/group selection.
We must suspect the aim of scientists/economists is to deethicize public discourse to maintain the right levels of viciousness to man capitalist economies.
That’s even worse than Old Testament infantile syndrome.
In any case, Kant unwittingly pointed to an important issue: observing ethics in action. He spoke of ‘common ordinary morality’, as coming first, before his theory, which could only assist in elucidating it.
But wait, who can elucidate ‘common ordinary morality’ as it is and as it evolved? Again, it is beyond us. Try to observe your own and others moral behavior. Kant has many insights, and leads, but the whole question, I fear, requires a level of philosophy and science that is beyond us.
In any case, the religions of antiquity, as this article points out, aren’t much of a much, and, ironically, it was ethical monotheism that took the decisive turn in this dircection, too primitive for us now.
As Kant would say, we ‘moralize’ spontaneously in a complex of unconscious action from our ethical inborn apparatus, highly obscure, and cultural conditioning. The result is hard to understand, and scientists and Nietzschean fans aren’t going to be of much help.
Meanwhile everyone’s natural conscience makes them suspicious of capitalist ‘greed is good’ psychology, until scientists, economists, and market agents exerting social influence pervert them to point they will parrot, ‘greed is good’.
As Marx warned, understanding morality won’t happen in this civilization. Hope for the next.

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