Approval and Condemnation: Must they be based on Morality?

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Tue May 15 18:13:38 PDT 2001


Carrol Cox:
> > This is simply not true, either as a general statement or as an
> > empirical summary of human experience. Most humans (including most of
> > those who claim, if asked, to believe in god) get along very well
> > without any god.
>
Gordon:
> If that were true, then they wouldn't be so busy making them.

Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca:
> What are you talking about here Gordon? The fact that for millennia humans
> have found gods, spirits, and devils because of their imagination and
> ignorance, or the tendency for (at least some) humans to magnify another
> human being into a "god?"

How do you know they're ignorant? I don't see that kind of thinking as ignorant, just different. Human beings had to survive and evolve for several hundred millennia without the benefits of science, logic, and college educations, and while it's _possible_ that all that weird stuff in primitive heads was some kind of aberration, I believe that serious mental errors would have caused early extinction of those who made them along with their genetic configurations. Now, in modern man the funny stuff is probably sadly atrophied and deformed through disuse, just as unused muscles would be, so it doesn't work very well. But that's a different issue. The _need_ for gods is still there, in any case. And Modern Man is not without gods: the aforesaid science, logic, and college educations; the technologies; the political institutions and movements; stars of stage and screen; Man's narcissistic concern with himself: gods one and all, to say nothing of the explicit spooks hawked about the literal religions. We probably have more spooks today than ever before. One longs for the simple, honest shamans of yesteryear with their snakes and potions.

Carrol Cox:
> > _You_ seem to need some sort of god. Most humans don't in fact. God is
> > no more absent than are three-headed field mice, one-ton blue frogs with
> > three eyes, etc. You seem to argue that we need some metaphysical
> > absolute in order to ground our approval and disapproval of this or that.
> > But none exists, so we'd better learn how to get along without one. But
> > as it happens, we never really needed such a support and don't now. We
> > are better off without it, since in fact all such supports (as Ollman
> > suggests) turn out to be disguised arguments for capitalism.

Gordon:
> I don't see any fixed connection between religious beliefs
> in general and capitalism in particular. It seems to be
> instead that capitalist processes influence people to select
> some religious beliefs and reject others; but the godmaking
> (or godfinding) urge goes on, capitalism or not, and so we
> find gods before and after and in between capitalism, as
> well as with it and of it.

Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca:
> I think what Carrol and Ollman are getting at is the fact that humans don't
> absolutely need something held over their heads reminding them that humans
> are imperfect and therefore requiring a "boss" to hold them in check (e.g. a
> god or an exploitative system) (Ollman on Marx:"The criticism of religion
> ends,"he says, "with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It
> ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those
> conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible
> being.")

I think the idea of man being the supreme being for man is terribly depressing. The fact is, we're just one more organism crawling around on a dirty ball away out in space, mostly getting it dirtier. What kind of supreme being is that? It's ridiculous. And now Marx wants to crush out of this poor worm its spooky fantasies -- to be replaced, I guess, by spooky fantasies he approves of, since that's what we seem to be stuck with.

Gordon said:
> It's a fallacy to attribute evil to an idea merely because
> it has been used by evil persons or in an evil way.

Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca:
> But an idea is generated by people, living in conditions generated (at least
> partially) by other people. The idea does not exist in itself; it exists
> only so long as there are people around to keep ii in their heads and act on
> it.

And so? Carroll was complaining, I think, about Aristotle -- it certainly sounded like Aristotle, someone using a spook like The Good to oppress people. But bad as Aristotle may be, and it's hard to think worse of Aristotle than I do, some of his ideas may have some value, and the fact that he used one to justify slavery doesn't mean someone else couldn't put it or others to good (== what I approve of) use.

Gordon said:
> Analytic geometry and its sisters and cousins can come into
> being only because some people have a fixed, even obsessive
> principle of being concerned with -- that is, valuing -- its
> content. The people who do this generally attribute great
> ontological status to their concerns and findings -- that is,
> they regard them as _truth_, something always available to
> everyone. Yet they don't drop out of the sky by any means --
> they must be _made_ -- so it's a curious kind of eternal being.
> However, most people can't summon the will to deal with analytic
> geometry without this notion of permanence. No one who cares
> about gemoetry believes the theorems will all be different
> tomorrow; they believe in the fixed principles of their
> form and its validity. We might as well recognize this belief.

Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca:
> Those who invented geometry discovered only that certain observations stay
> the same no matter who comes upon them, and these geometrical/mathematical
> observations stayed the same because the observations stayed the same (e.g.
> putting two pebbles together gets you two pebbles, not necessarily the
> Platonic Ideal "TWO"). People have yet to make a good case for the
> existence of any sort of Ideal or deity.

And "good case" is the third spook.

Gordon:
> Then you're not trying very hard. In longer form: we create
> (perhaps illusory) eternal principles so we will know who we
> are -- so we will recognize ourselves in the past and the
> future, in the distance as well as at home. We demand social
> and cultural coherence and insist that it's grounded in
> something external to ourselves -- this is probably a biological
> necessity. It's silly to pretend otherwise.

Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca:
> Right, humans look for meaning. I figure it has something to do with
> consciousness, but that doesn't necessarily mean there are Platonic Ideals
> or Gods floating around somewhere.

Gordon:
> I have to point out again that denying that there can be any
> fixed principle (like non-violence) as a basis for values is
> itself a fixed principle, indeed, a fixed _metaphysical_
> principle. The most that rigorous skeptics and nihilists can
> say is "I don't see any fixed principle here" and not "there's
> no such thing." (That is, if we apply the more or less fixed
> principle of demanding consistency and meaningfulness from
> our skeptics and nihilists.)

Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca:
> Denying the validity of fixed principles denies only the "fact" of their
> independent Ideal existence; people who deny fixed principles are concerned
> only with earthly experiences, not the Timeless Ideal.

No, sir. If you say "not X" you enter the realm of X in order to forbid it.

Gordon:
> An atheist who values atheism (believes it is truth) is
> already hopelessly entangled with a moral order -- the idea of
> truth is the idea of a moral order. As for you an Ollman and
> Marx, you all seem to believe there is some kind of enduring,
> valuable relationship between phenomena and your theories,
> indeed, with some _Ding_an_sich_ behind the phenomena. Real
> nihilists just laugh all this stuff off, if they pay any
> attention to it at all.

Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca:
> A thinking atheist doubts strongly (or even denies) the existence of any
> deity unless it can be proven by accepted experiential data that gods/a god
> exists; it is not necessarily the same thing as morals. Please show me
> where Ollman believes in an enduring relationship similar to a Platonic
> Ideal. Science (and Scientific Socialism) is concerned with observation
> and, when proven sufficiently incorrect, revising previous observations when
> new data becomes available (contingent no Ideal).

"Proven" -- as I said before, it's a spook. If one proves something it's supposed to acquire some sort of ghostly aura which subjugates the mind of all who come upon it. What's more, it's usually given that what's proven yesterday will be similarly proven tomorrow, so already the dark miasma is beginning to blow out of the Eternal. At least, this is what appears to be the case. Ollman thinks his work is _valid_, doesn't he? Hmm? What about Marx scratching away in the British Museum day after day? Was he writing throw- away lines for provincial music halls?



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