Morality

     I’ll make this as brief as possible. Morality is a large subject. And yes, it’s one whose discussion tends to make a lot of people uncomfortable. Part of that arises from the desire to believe oneself to be of sound character. Another part arises when the discussion addresses the moral gulfs between various identifiable groups. The latter aspect has come to matter to Americans a great deal more than it did a century ago.

     When the people of our nation were overwhelmingly Christian, peppered here and there by a few Jews and the occasional Oriental or agnostic, an American could proceed through his affairs in the assumption that his moral code was that of everyone around him. It was expressed in the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. C.S. Lewis called them, in sum, the Law of General Benevolence. Because we were united on that code, we felt safe among strangers. I’ve talked about this before, most notably in this piece.

     It’s not the case any longer. We’ve imported a great many people to whom the Law of General Benevolence is irrelevant, if not an actual impediment to the satisfaction of their wants. Some of them are scoping you as a potential victim right BLEEP!ing now.

     You can name a few such groups. There are probably a few whose names are unknown to you. But they know you, you trusting Euro-American fool.

     This is the best argument for the reversal of the tides of immigration that have polluted our nation. To be viable, a republic such as ours demands a high-trust society. We are too many to be kept peaceable and sane by policing us. America would need so many police, and so ubiquitous, that the worst totalitarianisms known to history would pale in comparison – and even that many would leave some of us unwatched and unguarded.

     Back from sheer necessity, review Clay Christensen’s striking observation:

     The issue is particularly acute with regard to Indians and Muslims. Members of those demographics are highly unlikely to share Christian moral standards. Therefore, you must not trust them. If you do so, you put yourself in peril.

     Six years ago, I posted briefly about something I’d encountered in a humorous book, a “politically correct” dictionary of sorts. Though my focus this morning isn’t the same as it was then, the observation is nevertheless pertinent. I’ll repeat it here, with emphasis:

“Morally different”
Is a synonym
For EVIL.

     You may not be a practicing Christian, but if you’re of European descent, you’re likely to abide by the Christian moral code. Don’t assume that those of other heritages share that code with you. It could be worth your life.

     I have spoken.

“The Winning Side”

     I’ve been having some exchanges with a brilliant fellow, Armond Boudreaux, about the different mindsets of materialists and theists. My contention is, in essence, that it’s about premises and ontological boundaries. The materialist bounds his ideas and his questions in the material realm; the theist goes beyond that. In neither case can anyone argue about the choice. Premises are like that.

     Boudreaux observed that there are villains whom material forces and social mechanisms don’t punish. Inarguable! Moreover, there always have been and always will be. Such persons choose to do evil. Those that escape their just deserts in this life are emulated by others.

     That’s the Siren song of evil: “You’re clever! You can get away with it!” It appeals to persons of malformed conscience and excessive self-regard. And yes: some of them do “get away with it.” Temporal mechanisms for correcting and deterring evil conduct are imperfect, as is everything else about Mankind.

     The great danger lies in the perception that the villains are “on the winning side.”

     We joke about that, sometimes: Come to the dark side! We have cookies! But it only stays funny so long as that perception fails to attain a critical mass. That ignites a positive-feedback cycle. Should the successes of the villains become irresistibly attractive to too many people, that society is doomed.

     Once again, I’m in mind of a passage from C.S. Lewis:

     “Hang it all—the preservation of the human race—it’s a pretty rock-bottom obligation.”
     “Well, personally,” said Feverstone, “I’m not indulging in any Busbyisms about that. It’s a little fantastic to base one’s actions on a supposed concern for what’s going to happen millions of years hence; and you must remember that the other side would claim to be preserving humanity, too. Both can be explained psychoanalytically if they take that line. The practical point is that you and I don’t like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting—specially on the winning side.”

     Discerning the “winning side” involves a limited view of things – a choice of premises and ontological boundaries. Lewis tried to expand that from the purely material to the eldila, a quasi-angelic race of spirits, one of whom functions as evil’s chief agent on Earth. The materialist won’t go that far. But even theists make some assumptions about “the winning side.” James Blish demonstrated this in his novel Black Easter:

     ‘Impossible!’ Father Domenico cried, though choking with the dust of the exploded crucifix. ‘It is written that in that war you will at last be conquered and chained!’
     OF COURSE, BUT WHAT DOES THAT PROVE? EACH OF THE OPPOSING SIDES IN ANY WAR ALWAYS PREDICTS VICTORY. THEY CANNOT BOTH BE RIGHT. IT IS THE FINAL BATTLE THAT COUNTS, NOT THE PROPAGANDA. YOU MADE A MISTAKE – AND AH, HOW YOU WILL PAY!

     The speaker in capitals above is a Prince of Hell, the demon Put Satanachia, after the workings of a black magician have brought about Armageddon.

     Good and evil both make promises. Evil has an advantage: its promises can be fulfilled in this life. Good must work overtime to counter that lure.

     Should the villains ever seem to get the upper hand – think of that as “Cthulhu’s Return” – we’ll be in mortal trouble.

* * *

     Concerning that “limited view of things,” the C.S.O. and I saw an excellent movie just recently: The Witch, which stars the young Anya Taylor-Joy. The scripting and performances were both impressive, but the capper for me was the demonstration of how that limited view of things can function to corrupt a previously innocent soul. The central character, Thomasin, is the eldest child of a 17th Century New England family that has chosen to live apart from other society. That family is beset by a series of tragedies, which Thomasin’s mother and siblings put down to witchcraft. I won’t go any further than that, except to say that the movie demonstrates the ways in which seemingly unmerited suffering can make one see evil as “the winning side.”

     It is part of the moral duty of the good man to counter those influences that make evil, whatever form it may take, appear to be “the winning side.” Too many subconsciously equate might with right, and victory with moral or ideological superiority. When we speak of “the still, small voice” that tells us to avoid evil and to remain aligned with good, we are appealing to a standard that doesn’t always offer temporal rewards. It’s why we must be faithful to that standard. Unless admirable men, men of honor who are satisfied to live honorable lives, outnumber the villains, the perceptions of persons of weak, poorly formed conscience will be swayed.

     You wouldn’t want to hang around after that.

Enforcers

     A great many people, most of them good and decent people, have fallen for the notion that if something is generally deemed “bad” by some widely held standard, then it “should” be illegal. Beneath that conviction lie two others:

1. Not to outlaw it is somehow to condone it;
2. Outlawing it will have net positive results.

     The second of those beliefs can be tested. The first is more difficult to cope with. That having been said, in combination they explain the great majority of all the laws that have been fastened on suffering Mankind throughout recorded history.

     Yet there is evidence that in the great majority of cases, outlawing some variety of conduct either has no measurable effect on its frequency, or correlates with an increase in it. Now, correlations are interesting, but we must not immediately conclude that they reveal causes. Still, they’re evidence that we should not assume a proposed law will have only the effects we expect from it.

     Take the matter of violence in defense of one’s home or other property. Until fairly recently, he who could honestly claim to be defending what is rightfully his was granted the presumption of legal and moral justification for what he does for that purpose. Under that presumption, the aggressor bore the responsibility for what flowed from his aggression. That is no longer the case in much of the United States.

     The change brought unintended consequences. Street assaults and home invasions increased in frequency and in the violence they occasioned. No one wanted those consequences, of course. But we’re not guaranteed to get what we want.

     Nonviolent conduct presents an even more perverse picture. Outlawing alcoholic beverages – i.e., the Prohibition era – caused an increase in drinking, moonshining, and bootlegging. Outlawing private gambling produced state-run and state-licensed gambling that rakes in many billions of dollars per year. Outlawing recreational use of drugs has brought about an explosion in organized crime and police corruption. Yet the laws involved were passed by well-meaning people, with malice toward none.

     In commenting on laws intended to reduce prostitution, H.L. Mencken delivered the verdict on well-meant legislation many years ago:

     There is no half-baked ecclesiastic, bawling in his galvanized-iron temple on a suburban lot, who doesn’t know precisely how it ought to be dealt with. There is no fantoddish old suffragette, sworn to get her revenge on man, who hasn’t a sovereign remedy for it. There is not a shyster of a district attorney, ambitious for higher office, who doesn’t offer to dispose of it in a few weeks, given only enough help from the city editors. And yet, by the same token, there is not a man who has honestly studied it and pondered it, bringing sound information to the business, and understanding of its inner difficulties and a clean and analytical mind, who doesn’t believe and hasn’t stated publicly that it is intrinsically and eternally insoluble. For example, Havelock Ellis. His remedy is simply a denial of all remedies. He admits that the disease is bad, but he shows that the medicine is infinitely worse, and so he proposes going back to the plain disease, and advocates bearing it with philosophy, as we bear colds in the head, marriage, the noises of the city, bad cooking and the certainty of death. Man is inherently vile—but he is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness. No prostitute was ever so costly to a community as a prowling and obscene vice crusader, or as the dubious legislator or prosecuting officer who jumps at such swine pipe.

     With regard to the general improvement of public morals, what has proved effective is the disapproval of others, and the consequences that follow. The evidence suggests that morals and ethics are best imposed through social mechanisms: customs, education, denunciation, ostracism, etc. Many a practice of times past was dedicated to exactly that sort of improvement. If the community has behavioral standards that its members are willing to uphold through public disapproval and ostracism, those things usually suffice to curb disapproved behavior – to hold it to an irreducible or “threshold” level.

     From a strictly practical standpoint, the social-improvement crusader “should” be persuaded by that argument. All too often, he reverts to the “But leaving it legal would condone it” position. That’s a tougher nut to crack. At present I have no suggestions for cracking it.

     Perhaps we might consider bringing back dueling under the Toth Convention:

• The challenged party gets the choice of weapons.
• The duel must be refereed by an impartial individual.
• It must take place in the pre-dawn hours, when there’s little light.
• Challenger and challenged must both bring seconds to act as witnesses.
• The deciding rule of the contest must be agreed upon: first blood or incapacity?

     Under that convention, the infliction of death, even if unintentional, is considered shameful and subjects the offender to ostracism.

     I know the idea will horrify many. After all, we’re civilized now. We abhor violence, especially when we’re its target. But the prospect of being challenged and compelled to stake one’s blood, if not his life, on his words or deeds would inhibit quite a lot of bad behavior. The question is whether we could tolerate that manner of enforcement.

     That question is troublesome. At present we don’t even tolerate police violence very well. But the correlation between the end of the “nightstick era” and the explosion of street violence suggests that that might have been a wrong turning. Upon which note I believe I shall leave the field to my Gentle Readers.

The Helpless Who Are Not Human

     If you’re a regular reader of Liberty’s Torch, you’re surely aware that we here at the Fortress of Crankitude are animal lovers. Not in the “PETA sense,” mind you; just as persons who cherish innocent lives. We’ve had pets of several kinds: dogs, cats, rabbits, turtles, hamsters, a white rat, a raccoon, and briefly an opossum who’d “tied one on” and couldn’t make it home after his bender. It always hurts when we lose one.

     Wherefore, upon reading about an egregious case of animal abuse, I did some research and discovered that aggravated animal abuse is a felony in all 50 states of the Union. However, it seems that prosecutors are as reluctant to try animal abusers as felons as judges are to put black felons in prison. Why? If the law is clear, why not enforce the law? Are our “enforcers” afraid of something, or are they just lazy?

     I suppose that’s a subject that needs further research. But this one doesn’t:

Abuse of the helpless is vile.
Including those helpless that aren’t human.

     Western civilization is distinct from all others in several ways, but this one is particularly notable: We condemn all abuse of the helpless. We don’t tolerate it in any form or under any rationale. When we see it, the decent among us – and that’s very nearly all of us – move against it.

     Wait, what did I just write? All abuse? All of us? Hm. That might demand a bit more thought.

     We permit Muslims abusive practices in the preparation of “halal food.” We permit them cruelty in their treatment of wives and children that no other Americans would be permitted. We permit black fathers to abandon their children, and black mothers to neglect them. We permit Hispanics their cockfights, as long as they “keep it to themselves.”

     Fury against the abuse of the helpless is a White thing. If you aren’t White, you might not understand.

     Even Whites make an exception, of course: abortion. Third-trimester and partial-birth abortions are demonstrably abusive, even barbaric, yet they don’t receive uniform condemnation. We’ve been told that that would be “judgmental.” God apparently forgot to include that sin in the Decalogue. Funny that we’re allowed to be “judgmental” about so many other things.

     There’s a continuum here. Abuses of humans don’t stand isolated in the realm of moral evaluation. The abuse of helpless subhumans touches them at the low end. Tolerating those abuses makes it easier to tolerate the abuse of humans. But the reverse is also true: tolerating the abuse of humans makes it far easier to turn aside from the abuse of subhumans.

     If I may inject a bit of black humor here, we’ve had a declaration on the subject from a voice of years past:

     If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. – Thomas de Quincey

     That’s quite enough humor.

     Wasn’t the nasty little boy who pulls the wings off flies once held up as the prototype of the abuser-to-be? Have we forgotten how “great oaks from little acorns grow?”

     Man is at the top of the Terrestrial food chain by virtue of his intellect, his adaptability, his skills at fabrication, and his moral sense. Animals may kill and eat one another, but with vanishingly rare exceptions they don’t abuse the helpless members of the animal kingdom. Are we really superior to our animal brethren? Shouldn’t we be?

     I’d like to see our awareness of the abuse of the helpless – human and subhuman – restored to full horror. I’d like to see our censoriousness, our judgmentalism, directed unflinchingly at it. It seems to have slipped a bit. And should some judgmental type go a bit overboard and cripple an abuser he caught in the act, I’ll vote to acquit him. Maybe strike him a medal, too. A few examples would help to keep our less civilized fractions in line.

The Viciousness Of The Righteous

     Don’t take the title too literally, Gentle Reader. There’s a dollop of sarcasm in it.

     I’ve ranted many times about how the Left’s assumption of moral and intellectual superiority seems to license it to do all manner of vicious, amoral things. History offers us many examples of its big crimes. Its lesser sins against honesty and decency tend to go unnoticed, except by those who are the targets thereof.

     This vignette by Jim Trageser provides us a look at one such “lesser sin:”

     In the early 1990s, I was the opinion pages editor of the Oceanside Blade-Citizen in San Diego County. We were a 30,000 circulation daily serving Oceanside, Carlsbad, Vista and Encinitas. At that time, California and a few other states were pioneering new laws that required financial institutions to share with customers the files they kept on us - and to provide a process for challenging inaccurate information.
     The editorial board - publisher Tom Missett, managing editor Rusty Harris, and myself - were in favor of this development, and wrote a series of editorials in support of it. Then we went a step further, and in another editorial argued that political and activist organizations that keep files on American citizens should also have to disclose those files on request, and have a process whereby inaccurate information could be challenged.

     Please read the rest.

     There’s a curious tension in there. The notoriously brutal tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center were already well known, at least among conservatives. Yet that organization clearly felt that it had to maintain the secrecy of its operations. From Trageser’s tale, the SPLC’s masters regarded anything that might breach that secrecy to be a threat to it. Yet there could be no question about the magnitude or the direction of the SPLC’s activism; it made its accusations quite publicly.

     Would the exposure of the SPLC’s files have done it harm? Probably, though I can’t see that harm being mortal or near-mortal. Its orientation and agenda were too plain. But as Trageser tells us, it was willing to use its methods to bludgeon a relatively small and local newspaper, rather than allow even the suggestion that activist groups of its kind should be transparent about their recordkeeping.

     I must conclude that the SPLC’s masters were aware that what they were doing was wrong, despite their belief in themselves as morally superior to those they were targeting. That awareness didn’t seem to have any effect on their behavior. They went on righteously denouncing anyone to their right as purveyors of “hate.” The recent revelation of their funding of public demonstrations of “hate” and “racism” surprised few conservatives.

     Cognitive dissonance doesn’t quite cover this. I don’t know what would.

     This is one of those “How can they possibly sleep at night?” questions that arise repeatedly about left-wing organizations and activists. It’s not far from the usual run of such things, apart from its blatancy. Still, add it to the catalogue. Keep it handy for the next time some leftist blathers about the Trump Administration’s “lack of transparency.”

Consciousness And Conscience

     An old story came to mind a little earlier, as I was doing my morning tarantella (i.e., brushing my teeth, feeding the dogs and cats, making and drinking coffee, and cleaning up the detritus of the previous evening): “The Cage,” by A. Bertram Chandler. It involved a group of human spacefarers captured and caged by an alien race. At first that other race isn’t aware that humans are intelligent, purposeful creatures. What clues them in is when one of the humans captures a vermin creature and builds a cage for it. The final line of the story: Only intelligent beings put other beings in cages.

     Striking, isn’t it? Communication alone isn’t guaranteed to be possible with the completely alien. Actions must fill the gap. If the Other can deduce one’s intelligence from one’s actions, that can unlock the cage door. But that opens another door as well: the nature of purposive consciousness.

* * *

     Consciousness is the beginning; purposive consciousness – what I’ll henceforth call sentience — is the end. Sentience is born from simple consciousness when the conscious one turns his awareness on himself:

I am something specific, distinct from all other things.

     In facing that realization and the questions it compels upon him, the individual’s capacity for abstraction is unleashed. It has broached the threshold to reasoning. In particular, it becomes capable of categorization: the assembly of real things into abstract groups, according to the properties they possess.

     Let’s pause here to simplify the rest of the discussion. The individual under discussion shall henceforward be called Smith. Smith is not alone in the world. There are others like him. As he encounters them, he becomes aware of the commonalities and distinctions among them.

     One property Smith quickly perceives is his own purposiveness. Some of the things he does are automatic, but not all. Those other actions are taken to fulfill a purpose. That purpose may not last long, but while it does, it determines his non-automatic thoughts and deeds.

     From his purposiveness Smith infers that property in others like him. This is the germ of another property soon to impinge upon his consciousness: his conscience.

* * *

     The above is semi-fanciful. We don’t know very much about the development of the intellectual primitives. What we do know is that sentience precedes conscience. Only the sentient can have a sense of what Clarence Carson called “the moral order of the universe.” We believe nonhuman animals to lack sentience – i.e., that their actions are guided by commands embedded in their flesh, which we call instincts.

     Now and then a departure from our assumptions will arise to trouble us. We deem ourselves superior to “the lower orders” by dint of our sentience and our consciences. Animals, we tell ourselves, have no concepts; therefore they can make no distinctions between right and wrong. But then we hear of a dog sacrificing himself to protect his human, and we wonder. We learn of a brute torturing or killing a parent, sibling, or child, and we wonder further.

     My surmise is that some animals can be “ennobled” (C. S. Lewis) by the affection that springs from a long association with and care by a human. It’s more difficult to explain why some humans behave as if they lack consciences. Suffice it to say that our understanding is less than perfect.

     For conscience, in a purely secular and spatiotemporal view, arises from the perception of humans as a category: conscious animals with reasoning powers and purposes. That evokes species-kinship, sometimes expressed by the phrase “We are all brothers.” Adam Smith called it “fellow-feeling.” Today we call it compassion or empathy.

     Conscience – the product of self-awareness and our common possession thereof – underpins all the rest.

* * *

     Hillel’s dictum “What is hateful to you, do not do to another” is the foundation layer of conscience. There’s more, of course. Conscience doesn’t just restrain us; it also impels us to help one another, to do good and charitable works. Christ’s decree “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” embeds Hillel’s rule and extends it. Yet our consciences get many of us there long before we encounter either Hillel or Christ.

     But there are still those questions: Why don’t all humans respond to their consciences? Why do some animals act as if they have consciences of their own? No one has a watertight explanation for psychopathy or sociopathy. No one has a convincing explanation for a dog’s protectiveness over his master. We can’t communicate reliably with sociopaths or dogs, though we can, and often do, put them in cages.

     We need those questions answered.

NOW I’m Angry

     At this stage of my life there aren’t many things that can catapult me into a full-blown fury. I’ve seen enough, and endured enough, to have developed fairly thick calluses over my rage nerves. A good thing, too: with my blood pressure, the consequences could be maximally serious. So I mostly stay fairly calm, with occasional bouts of profanity – Dad was a Navy man, you know – to let off occasional accumulations of steam.

     But every now and then...

     I’m sure the “literati” would dismiss me as an unlettered Philistine for this, but in my opinion, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is the greatest literary achievement in the English language. It doesn’t just tell a memorable adventure story; it delineates human (and Elven, and Dwarven, and Hobbitish, and Entish) challenges and difficulties of many kinds and depicts various characters striving to surmount them. It embeds those challenges within a mythopoetic setting of a grandeur that no other novel – or novelist – has ever approached. And it does all this without descending to irrelevancies or artifices of style that would detract from the underlying tale of ultimate moral crisis.

     Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy could not capture all of that, even in nearly twelve hours of film. He tried his best, but as the late Joseph Sobran noted, he failed to capture Tolkien’s moral vision. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, structured The Lord of the Rings around the Scriptural tale of the Fall of Man and the Christian moral framework. His extraordinarily rich “backstory,” the essence of which he related in The Silmarillion, makes that abundantly clear. That’s tough stuff to get onto the silver screen.

     But now we have this:

     Amazon Prime’s “Lord of the Rings” series set to release in 2021 has been eagerly anticipated by devoted LOTR fans around the world. The $1 billion series will be set in the Second Age of Middle Earth, which spans 3441 years, before the events of the LOTR movies.

     Unfortunately, it looks like the creators of the series, which they claim is based on J.R.R Tolkien’s original work, may be trying to imitate “Game of Thrones”-type nudity and “rapey” storylines. This, no doubt, will delight the left, who have long detested Tolkien’s writing and distinctive Christian influence on popular culture.

     According to TheOneRing.net, the casting agency for the series put out an open call for actors who “must be comfortable with nudity.” In addition, Amazon Studios has hired an “intimacy coordinator,” and the writer and producer from “Game of Thrones,” Bryan Cogman, has officially been hired as a consulting producer.

     “Game of Thrones,” made by Amazon for Amazon, could not be more different from Tolkien’s beloved, classic books about Middle Earth, so of course, LOTR fans are worried.

     Please read the whole article. “Worried” doesn’t nearly cover it. I’m outraged by the mere possibility.

     Their moral clarity is one of the main reasons for the immense popularity of Tolkien’s works. They pit good against evil, freedom against enslavement, and heroes against villains, vacillators, compromisers, and the “let me think it over” types whose sole concern is to be on the winning side. Those who insist that “there’s no black or white, only shades of gray” can never be comfortable with such a premise.

     Please don’t confuse moral clarity with prudishness. No, there are no sex scenes in Tolkien’s stories, but that’s irrelevant to the larger issue. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, best known by the title of its first volume, A Game of Thrones, is founded on a completely different moral perspective: one in which essentially everything goes and who was in the right is determined, after the dust has settled, by the victors. It’s not founded on a clash between good and evil, but on what the movers and shakers are willing to do to triumph.

     A simple touchstone – “Would you prefer to associate with Tolkien’s heroes or Martin’s?” – dramatizes the differences between the two conceptions, and the reason for the far greater (and more enduring) appeal of Tolkien’s oeuvre.

     Amazon’s project managers had better think hard and deeply before they make any irrevocable moves toward “Westerosizing” Middle Earth. That fall from grace could destroy them.

Defining And Defeating The Morally Different

     About a month ago, I made a point that in my estimation “should” be “obvious.” However, I forgot that what’s “obvious” to me isn’t always clear to others who’ve left their thinking caps at home. “Obvious,” after all, does mean overlooked. At least, that’s the way the word is most frequently used.

     Since I posted that piece, I’ve received a number of requests for clarification. “Obvious” notions “shouldn’t” require clarification. Either they arise from the simple implications of openly available evidence – i.e., they’re the nearest thing to self-evident – or they’re not as “obvious” as all that. And with that, I’ll declare a moratorium on the ironic use of quote marks and proceed normally. Well, normally for the Curmudgeon Emeritus to the World Wide Web, anyway.

     If you’re one of the Gentle Readers who’ve hoped for a clarification, please read what follows slowly and with your best attention.

---

1. Defining the Morally Different.

     If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. – Thomas de Quincey

     I routinely use the term moral as shorthand for morals and ethics: paired codes of constraint to which an individual adheres. However, moral and ethical codes are technically distinct from one another. One’s morals concern what one must and must not do when no one else is likely to be adversely affected by one’s decisions and actions. Typical subjects under the heading of morality include sexual conduct, the use of intoxicants, and cheating at solitaire. Ethics concern decisions and actions that are likely to involve harm to others. That covers the mala in se of the criminal law such as murder, kidnapping, rape, theft, and vandalism, as well as unprosecuted deeds such as refusing to go to the aid of a drowning man or deceiving one’s spouse about the source of the red marks on one’s shirt collar. And having made that linguistic distinction, I shall use moral and morality to refer to both moral and ethical decisions and actions henceforward.

     If Smith and Jones differ morally, they feel themselves to be constrained by different rules. A fair and commonplace example occurs in many white-collar workplaces. Smith would never dream of raiding the company supply cabinet for materials to be used at home; he considers it stealing. In contrast, Jones helps himself to whatever he might find useful and takes it home for his personal use; he considers it a perquisite of his employment, regardless of what company policy might say. In that regard and perhaps in others, Smith and Jones are morally different.

     That example might elicit shrugs from some Gentle Readers. “So what?” they might say. “Jones takes some pens and paper home from the office? Big deal. Everybody does it.” I shan’t argue the point, except to note that he who says “everybody does it” is really saying “In his situation, I would do it.”

     My central point is that it constitutes a moral difference between Smith and Jones. Davis, who employs them both, can rely on Smith in ways he can’t rely on Jones. Were he to become aware of their moral difference, it would probably result in a difference in the way he treats them – and that could have serious effects on Jones’s career.

     Plainly, some moral differences are graver than others. Yet it is observably the case that such seemingly small differences often blossom into graver ones over time.

     Jones may steal from “the company” with a clear conscience on the grounds that “the company can afford it.” But he might come to view Smith in the same light: as one who has possessions that “he can afford” to lose, while acquiring them would benefit Jones greatly. The retardant here would be the impersonality Jones probably attributes to “the company” versus the plain and obvious personhood of Smith, a working stiff much like Jones himself though perhaps better compensated. Still, one once has accepted pilferage as a means of improving one’s own circumstances, what dividing line is guaranteed to hold forever?

     Now consider the moral difference between Smiths whose moral codes are never broken and Joneses whose “morals” are completely expressed by one consideration: “Can I get away with it?” There cannot be any sort of trustworthy interaction between those two groups. Indeed, the Joneses will see the Smiths as sheep to be shorn, and will shear them at every opportunity...unless and until the Smiths put an end to the threat the Joneses represent.

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     Even more dramatic moral differences are possible between men. We confront one today: the moral difference between normal, decent Americans and the scum that call themselves “AntiFa.”

     Smith, a decent American, adheres to a moral code that forbids doing harm to an innocent, under which term he subsumes all non-aggressors. Smith might occasionally be provoked beyond his ability to resist – a sufficiently grave insult, for example, might be answered with a punch in the nose – but if asked about his attitude toward interpersonal violence, he would condemn it. He might qualify that for particular, well-defined contexts – “I won’t start a fight, but I will finish one” – but he will insist that normal interactions with peaceable others must be violence-free.

     Jones, a member of AntiFa, holds to a completely different code. His code says violence is a legitimate – possibly even mandatory – way to get the political results he seeks. Moreover, he regards any attempt, whether verbal or physical, to prevent him from doing such violence as violence directed against him and his fellows — which he considers immoral. Consider the following, which I believe was posted at Twitter:

     The anonymous complainant has expressed his moral code:

• He gets to perform various acts of violence and vandalism;
• But legal consequences for those acts are “not fucking fair...”
• ...because “we’re the good guys!”

     Would Smith regard Jones as a “good guy?” Or would he consider that the legal system was doing its assigned and proper job: protecting peaceable persons and property against violence and vandalism?

     Imagine how Jones would regard an “informal,” on-the-spot forceful response to his violence and vandalism. Imagine what he would think of an equal or superior number of Smiths, ready and willing to meet the Joneses with force: fisticuffs, melee weapons, or guns. If being arrested and tried for his crimes offends Jones's sense of “fairness,” imagine what he would think of being on the receiving end of a beatdown.

     The moral difference between Smith and Jones is sociopolitically significant. Compare it to the rise to power of the Nazis in Weimar Germany, or Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy of the same period. In those places and times, the violence unleashed by the Nazis and Fascists was not met by a forceful response, whether legal or “informal.” The consequences should be well known by anyone over the age of ten.

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2. Defeating the Morally Different.

     When force is made the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. -- Ayn Rand

     To defeat the morally different, it is first required of us that we recognize the moral difference between us and them. That can be a hard thing for a Smith, who tends to assume that Jones, however “misguided” he may be, holds to the same moral code as Smith. But this is not the case. Worse, the belief that it is the case paralyzes Smith. He finds himself unable to do anything but talk – and talk will not defeat the morally different! They have placed themselves outside our moral code. They are, quite literally, outlaws, and therefore properly subject to whatever degree of forceful response is needed to bring them down.

     Mind you, there is still much difficulty involved. The forces of order must be mobilized and must act. The Joneses must be rounded up and incarcerated at the very least. A great part of our present problem arises from the lack of forceful counter-action: first on the part of the police, second on the part of the military. For there is this to ponder and absorb:

A group that has rejected the moral code on which our laws are based is in a state of insurrection against the nation.

     If the police cannot subdue the Joneses and subject them to the weight of the law, the military must treat them as a rebel army, to be defeated in the field. Whatever degree of bloodshed results must be regarded as the price of defending the nation, upholding its laws, and restoring its public order.

     To this point, very little of this has occurred. America’s largest cities are beset by violence and vandalism, under a banner that reads “Black Lives Matter.” No small number of lives have been affected. Some have died. We need not dwell on the ironies involved. We merely need to recognize the moral difference between decent Americans and the rioters, and meet the miscreants head on with whatever force is required to subdue them. Failure to do so will be punished by the loss of our nation.

     All that having been said, I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.

What Does Not Change: A Slightly Early Rumination

     Before I get started on the meat of this piece: My sincerest thanks to those Gentle Readers who wrote me with helpful suggestions for dealing with the problem I mentioned here. For the present I’ve decided to use Microsoft’s OneNote, which is included in Office and offers many conveniences I didn’t know about until I started fooling with it. We shall see whether it meets my needs.

     Having said that...

---

     Sarah Hoyt has an essay up about the rate and ever broadening sweep of technological change in our time, especially as regards the pervasion of our ways by the Internet, and the visible implications for our patterns of life. It’s a good piece, but it focuses, as we who live under the veil of Time are prone to doing, on practicalities: what the rate and breadth of tech change will mean for our livelihoods and related life patterns.

     There’s a lot to think about here. For some time my concerns have focused on social atomization: the ever widening separation between each individual and all those who once would have mattered to him intimately. We can already see aspects of this in the “device addiction” plague that’s taken hold of American society. Go to any restaurant – yes, there are still places outside the home where one can sit and eat food prepared by others – and survey the faces of other diners. Quite a percentage of them will be bathed in the glow from a backlit screen, regardless of who else might be sitting at the table.

     Yes, it’s a bad thing. But I’m not going to harp on it today. I’ve done that before. Besides, I prefer to flog live horses.

     What I have in mind this morning is the divergence between the realm of “can and can’t” and that of “may and mustn’t.” Quite a lot of good people believe, although perhaps unconsciously and inarticulately, that the former can alter the rules that govern the latter. This, to be maximally gentle about it, is not the case. And it has dawned upon me that that argument is in dire need of refreshment.

---

     One of the reasons I write fiction, most recently near-future science fiction, is that the genre allows me to explore challenges to our assumptions about right and wrong. Most of our “thinking” about moral choices is nothing of the sort. We make such choices from deeply inculcated premises about moral and ethical behavior, not from a rational analysis of implied consequences. Mostly, that’s for the best; most people lack the intellectual horsepower to work out the “may and mustn’t” aspects of a situation on the spot. But sometimes, thinking about consequences is absolutely vital.

     As an example of what I have in mind, have a snippet from one of my recent novels:

     “Forget it, Jules,” Celia said. “This is as close to can’t-happen as genetics gets. The sequencer assays were correct. Unless the gods of random chance are playing with our heads, Miss Mecking’s been cloned. But how?”
     “Either one of Anna’s cell nuclei and a bunch of her mitochondria were transplanted into a viable zygote,” Amanda said, “or a cell taken from her was somehow goosed into mitosis.”
     “Doesn’t matter,” Sokoloff said.
     “It doesn’t?” Trish said.
     “Nope,” he said. “Because the bastards who did it aren’t going to tell us.”
     Trish smirked. “Going to give them a chance, Lar?”
     He leveled a flat look at her. “Ask me again when we’ve got them in our sights.”
     Trish smiled tightly and nodded.
     He’s really going to go after them.
     This is for the big chips.
     She fished up her own resolve and scrutinized it.
     I’m going with him. No matter what he has to say about it.
     “It would be the technological miracle of the century, you know,” Amanda said.
     The flat look swerved to settle on Amanda Hallstrom.
     “To be used for what?” Sokoloff said.
     The dean of Athene Academy opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Sokoloff’s gaze weighed upon her.
     That’s his don’t-mess-with-me face.
     Sokoloff nodded.
     “I’ve been turning it over in my head,” he murmured after a moment, “and I can’t think of one morally acceptable reason to clone someone. Living or dead doesn’t matter.” He swept his gaze around the group. “Can anyone else?”
     No one spoke.
     “The people who did this,” he said, “did it to turn out a sex slave. Probably by request and to specification, and I’d bet my house that if they haven’t done it before, they’re trying to do it again right now. For that I’m going to send them all to hell. But think about it. Let’s say they were to clone me—produce a baby version of me. That baby would have no parents or other relatives. The people who produced him would have no reason to care for him, or about him, and only they would know he existed. He would be a product for sale. Why would anyone make that product? Why would anyone want that product? Apart from pure altruism?”
     “Altruism?” Trish said.
     “Yeah,” he said. “The kind that makes people take in stray dogs and cats. Think that’s likely?”
     Well, you did it.
     “The only reason to clone someone, other than the motives Fountain’s creators had, would be to replace him,” he said. “Or parts of him. And that means either murder, or enslavement, or cannibalism by surgeon. It’s evil no matter how you slice it.”
     “That’s if clones were granted the status and rights of people born the...regular way,” Juliette said. “What if they weren’t?”
     Sokoloff gestured at Fountain. Six pairs of eyes swung toward her. She remained still and silent.
     “That’s worse, isn’t it?” he said.
     Trish slid over next to Fountain and took her hand.
     “A lot worse,” she said.
     “Yeah,” Juliette said.
     “So what now?” Amanda said.
     Sokoloff remained as solemn as a man at prayer. Trish fought not to shudder.
     “Now,” he said, “I follow their backtrail, find their lab, and burn it to the ground.”
     “Lar?” Trish said. He looked questioningly at her. “With them in it, right?”
     He seemed to consider the idea for a moment, then grinned faintly. “Well, yeah.”

     Larry Sokoloff, one of the two protagonists of Innocents, is my conception of a “workingman’s hero.” He works for a private security firm. You could say, in some sense, that his trade is “protective violence,” whether express or implied. Yet he’s no thug. He has a profound sense for right and wrong, as demonstrated above – emphasis on the word profound.

     That sense is endangered by too much attention to the technological runaway in which Americans are currently ensnared.

---

     One review of Innocents included the following, seemingly unexceptionable line:

     [I]n the face of truly new situations, new morality must emerge.

     The statement piqued me. It seemed vaguely off-center. I didn’t take issue with it – I never take issue with the writer of a complimentary review, for reasons I trust I need not elaborate on – but it’s stayed with me, germinating ideas, ever since I first encountered it. This morning, those ideas have flowered. Yea verily, at 3:30 AM Eastern Standard Time.

     The technology of cloning, as postulated in Innocents, was an example of an enlargement of our “can and can’t” realm. That realm impinged on the lives of my protagonists, Larry Sokoloff and Trish McAvoy. It had a dramatic effect on them, with consequences you’ll have to read the novel and its sequels Experiences and The Wise and the Mad to explore. But it did not change the moral laws of the universe. Rather, it compelled Sokoloff to recur to the underlying ethical principle that governs all human interaction.

     Jesus of Nazareth once articulated that principle for the benefit of some less-than-benevolently-minded questioners:

     But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
     Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.
     And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
     On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

     [Matthew 22:34-40]

     I’m not going to boldface it or italicize it for you. Find it for yourself.

---

     The underlying moral laws of the universe are constant. That’s because human nature itself is constant. The characteristics that differentiate us from the lesser species:

• Our nature and consciousness of ourselves as limited, time-bound creatures;
• Our individual desires;
• Our individual abilities and priorities;

     ...are integral to the understanding of those moral laws, because they give rise to the laws themselves. This is something that should be part of the moral education of every child...but isn’t. It wasn’t part of mine; I had to work it out for myself.

     John Brunner expressed that moral fundamental in his novel The Shockwave Rider: It is fundamentally wrong to regard another person as a thing to be used for one’s own purposes. Brunner’s protagonist Nicky Haflinger applied the word wicked to such an attitude. In this he was impeccably correct.

     In this lies the moral import of the Second Great Commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” You have your abilities, desires, and priorities, and he has his. You may collaborate with him, trade with him, argue with him, or snort and tell him he’s an ignoramus, but you may not force him to subordinate his desires and priorities to yours. Neither may you deceive him into doing so.

     And not all the technological change we’ve experienced, nor whatever further changes lie before us, can alter that law.

---

     In closing, it would be a fatal mistake ever to imagine that the “cans and can’ts” of our time can alter the moral laws. It will always be wrong to treat another person as no more than a thing to be used for one’s own purposes. It will always be wrong to tolerate it when others do so. That is the underlying moral law on which Commandments Four through Ten of the Decalogue are founded.

     This is not “new” morality. Indeed, it’s the oldest morality of all: the one written into our natures by our Creator. No matter how our technology advances and ramifies, it will never, ever change.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Moral Fundamentals Part 3: The Most Debated Concept

     I hope those Gentle Readers who’ve been waiting for this essay have not lost patience with me. It’s been simmering for a while now. I didn’t want to serve it before it was cooked all the way through.

     The previous two segments in this little series have laid groundwork upon which I intend to build a case for the most debated proposition in all of human thought: specifically, that there are laws of morality / ethics built into the very fabric of reality. This, at a time when the premise of the existence of an objective reality is itself under attack! From Part 1:

     The gospel of our era is relativism in all things: cultural, moral, logical, even scientific. Claims of absolute truth are sneered aside as conclusively refuted without trial. Feminist author Sandra Harding referred to Isaac Newton's three laws of mechanics as "Newton's Rape Manual," nor is there any reason to believe she was being facetious. Physicist Alan Sokal revealed the extent to which relativists will descend with a facetious article our cultural glitterati took quite literally.

     So those of us who, with Samuel Johnson, kick a stone and proclaim "I refute it thus" are in a distinct minority. In consequence, a debate that requires that one's interlocutor accept the existence of evil, a concept relativists categorically reject, is problematic from the start.

     But I intend to immunize my contentions against the frequent objection that “it’s all just about cultural customs.” From Part 2:

     The root of moral is the Latin word mores, which means customs. When Cicero exclaimed “O tempora, o mores!” he was bemoaning what he saw as a deterioration in the customs of the Roman people, not their moral choices as we English speakers might have imagined. To English speakers, moral pertains to the rightness or wrongness of a given decision.

     To compound the damage, the societies from which America was germinated often confused matters of right and wrong with considerations of what “simply isn’t done.” The notion of behavior that’s morally neutral but “simply isn’t done” conjures up images of Victorian England and the straitlaced customs to which the upper classes were expected – and “compelled” by the prospect of social disapprobation – to conform. But here context matters; Victorian customs about what “simply isn’t done” involved the setting and the persons who would witness the deed in question. Many a thing about which the Victorians would say “That simply isn’t done” most certainly was done, by many persons and quite often, in other circumstances and with other participants.

     As you can imagine, I have my work cut out for me. But then, I don’t do the easy stuff.

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1. The Nature Of The Beast We Hunt.

     As I stated in Part 1, a moral fundamental – i.e., a principle of right versus wrong in human action – must perforce be a premise. Therefore it cannot be reached by deduction, for all deduction proceeds by implication from previously agreed premises. While we do need certain premises to attain our goal, deduction isn’t the mechanism by which we employ them.

     A useful premise must be tightly tied to observable facts. If observable facts contradict the premise, it’s flatly false. This is the uber-premise of an objective, metaphysically given reality, which cannot be changed merely by the exercise of opinion or willful disbelief. The Berkelian idealist, whose metaphysics is indistinguishable from solipsism de facto, must therefore be excluded from this investigation, no matter how furiously he pounds on the door.

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2. The Danger Of “Why?”

     Many years ago, a professor of philosophy assigned as in-class reading material the Biblical story of Cain’s murder of Abel. When the students had had a few minutes to read the tale, he asked them, “Why was it wrong for Cain to kill Abel?”

     Let’s leave aside the virtually guaranteed allegorical nature of the Old Testament Book of Genesis. It was intended from the first to teach certain moral lessons, rather than as factual history. What was the moral lesson in that story about the murder of one brother by the other?

     The professor fielded several answers from his students, and showed the fault in each one. At last, an exasperated student said, “Well why, then?” The professor smiled and said “Because it was.”

     “Why,” when applied to a moral premise, is an attempt to justify it through its consequences. That’s not entirely invalid, but it’s open to counterfire. For example, the consequence of Cain’s act was exile. He didn’t suffer a penalty comparable to his crime. Indeed, many present-day murderers are never caught or punished. Therefore, we cannot soundly “argue” that one “shouldn’t” commit a murder because of the inevitable negative consequences to oneself. A moral premise must have a firmer foundation than that.

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3. Rejections.

     It’s always possible to reject a premise, if one is willing to accept the consequences. The Berkelian, the relativist, the social-constructionist, and the solipsist cannot be “compelled” in any sense to accept moral premises that clash with their metaphysics. However, such persons almost all live as if they accept the moral premises on which Christian-Enlightenment society is founded. The consequences of doing otherwise are repugnant to them, regardless of the philosophical problem that causes them. Occasional exceptions, such as were once found among the Oneidans and the Doukhobors, have generally suffered for their willfulness...but not always.

     It’s permissible to draw conclusions from this...but only for one’s personal use!

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4. Useful Data.

     One implication of an objective reality is the availability of useful data that can be gleaned from observation and accumulated over time. This, of course, is essential to the sciences, which operate on a combination of observation, inductive inference, hypothecation, deduction, and experimentation. While it’s also useful in probing for the existence of moral fundamentals, it has a weakness best illustrated by the tale of Plato and the “plucked chicken.”

     In Plato’s effort to define the human being, at one point he proposed that Man is best defined as “the featherless biped.” According to the accounts available today, that spurred Diogenes the Cynic, who considered himself a Socratic, to present Plato with a plucked chicken and exclaim “Here is the Platonic man!” We may take it that Plato resumed his quest for a workable definition immediately afterward.

     Plato’s error was a focus on nonessential aspects of Mankind. Diogenes could have presented him with a kangaroo to the same effect, were any to hand in classical Greece. Despite that, he was engaged in a worthwhile effort: an attempt to summarize human nature in a useful fashion. Reality does provide enough data to distinguish Man from other creatures, though “featherless biped” fails to capture our essence.

     My point here is simple: As it is Man who inquires into such things, then if there are moral fundamentals, they would apply to Man, but not to any lesser order of creature. Thus to settle on moral fundamentals, we must know ourselves – Man as a species of creature – rather than the entire order of Nature.

---

5. Essence, Accident, And Exceptions.

     Definitions apply to categories: groups of real items that share:

• A genus, or base category of which they are all members, and:
• A differentia, a characteristic that applies only to members of the newly defined category and not to other members of the genus.

     This presents a problem to those who seek an intensive definition of Man, for there are exceptional members of the human species that challenge any definition that has yet been proposed. In some ways the problem is a lot stiffer than posed by Diogenes’s chicken.

     Consider Ayn Rand’s attempt to define Man as “the rational animal.” Rand had an agenda, into which her proposed definition fits nicely. However, it omits persons of defective mind, including imbeciles and small children. That leads to unpleasant possibilities, for example that the omitted persons’ lives may be sacrificed without moral weight. We recoil from this notion from visceral repugnance, even though Rand’s thrust comes closer to capturing human nature than most others that have been proposed.

     It is the essence of Man that matters to moral fundamentals. This must include the presumed destiny of his children as moral agents. Neither should it exclude those whom accidents of genetics, gestation, or post-natal experience have deprived of one or more qualifications for inclusion.

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6. Today’s Breakpoint.

     Whether human nature is “real” is indeed “the most debated concept.” We must settle on a widely applicable concept of human nature as it pertains to human behavior before we can sensibly discuss moral fundamentals. To be of any importance, moral precepts would apply to human action, though not necessarily to all human action. We would be willing to judge the actions of a man “in his right mind,” but would shy back from similarly judging the actions of a man who was deeply asleep, or who was in the grip of a hallucinogen. (We might question the moral validity of his decision to take such a hallucinogen, but that’s an exploration for another time.)

     Thus, we cannot avoid considerations of perception, volition, and context. However, these things don’t muddy the picture. Rather, they compel us to be precise in the application of any moral standard we might propose.

     More anon.

Moral Fundamentals Part 2: Lexical And Contextual Considerations

     As I write in English (surprise, surprise), I frequently find myself grappling with one or more ambiguities built into that language. The English language is the largest currently spoken. According to various authorities, its vocabulary is larger than that of any other language known to linguistic history. That means an English speaker has many different ways of expressing a particular idea – and worse, many different ways of trying to express it, but missing his mark.

     (There’s the seed of an idea in there: “linguistic entropy,” the process by which a language’s lexical growth renders it ever more difficult to achieve precision in one’s statements. But that’s for another day.)

     English has two words, morality and ethics, that are commonly used to address the moral weight of the choices we make. The former is usually used to subsume the latter, which is how I intend to use it in this essay and subsequent pieces on this topic. However, strictly speaking they don’t mean the same thing. Moreover, the etymology of the words moral and morality casts a shadow over attempts to use them in a precise way.

     The root of moral is the Latin word mores, which means customs. When Cicero exclaimed “O tempora, o mores!” he was bemoaning what he saw as a deterioration in the customs of the Roman people, not their moral choices as we English speakers might have imagined. To English speakers, moral pertains to the rightness or wrongness of a given decision.

     To compound the damage, the societies from which America was germinated often confused matters of right and wrong with considerations of what “simply isn’t done.” The notion of behavior that’s morally neutral but “simply isn’t done” conjures up images of Victorian England and the straitlaced customs to which the upper classes were expected – and “compelled” by the prospect of social disapprobation – to conform. But here context matters; Victorian customs about what “simply isn’t done” involved the setting and the persons who would witness the deed in question. Many a thing about which the Victorians would say “That simply isn’t done” most certainly was done, by many persons and quite often, in other circumstances and with other participants.

     Many a writer of fiction has had some fun with this dichotomy. Have an illustrative snippet from one of the late Jack Vance’s wonderful novels, Araminta Station:

     “Why did you run from me as if I had a loathsome disease?”
     The question took Glawen by surprise, He stammered, “It seemed like a good time to be leaving.”
     Wayness shook her head. “Not quite. You left because you were furious with me. Why? I’ve been staring into the dark it seems forever, and I’m tired of being mystified.”
     Glawen groped for an answer which would leave him a few shreds of dignity. He muttered, “I was more furious with myself than with anyone else.”
     “I’m still baffled,” said Wayness. “Why should you be angry with either one of us?”
     “Because I did what I did not want to do! I had planned to be suave and polished, to charm everyone with my tact, and to avoid all controversy. Instead I blurted out all my opinions, caused a grand uproar, and confirmed your mother’s worst apprehensions.”
     “Come, now,” said Wayness. “It wasn’t all that bad; in fact, not bad at all. You could have done far worse.”
     “No doubt, if I’d put my mind to it. I could have become drunk and punched Julian in the nose, and called Dame Etrune a silly old blatherskite, and on my way out stopped to urinate in one of the potted plants.”
     “Everyone would have thought it simple Clattuc high spirits.”

     The behavior for which Glawen Clattuc, a youth of perhaps seventeen or eighteen, is berating himself, occurred at a dinner party held by the family of Wayness, his intended. He was invited by the host to express an opinion on a political subject – and he did so, to the discomfiture of two of the attendees. The host family was of a higher station in Araminta society than was Glawen, as were the attendees he upset. Yet the host approved of what Glawen said. Glawen is angry with himself for reasons of custom: for one of his station, an Araminta worker, to emit a contentious opinion as he did in the presence of “his betters” was “simply not done.” (Worse, it might have set Wayness’s mother against him.)

     I mention the above for two reasons. First, because there’s a great cleavage between what’s “not done” and what’s wrong on principle. By illustrating something that’s “not done,” I hoped to make the difference plain. Second, because context matters to what’s “not done” and what’s wrong on principle. Another useful illustration:

FWP: I saw something unusual earlier today. An old woman was tottering down the street when a young man tackled her to the ground, rolled her over a couple of times, and slapped her all over.
CSO: Horrible! Was he arrested?
FWP: No, not at all. The old woman’s clothes were on fire.

     That bit of extra context made all the difference, didn’t it?

---

     It might seem that this exploration is off to a slow start. Sorry about that; I felt a need to clear away some potential obstacles before plunging into the thickets. Language is often one of the problems, as people have a distressing tendency to distort the meanings of words in support of their own contentions. Context is another, as no decision nor action takes place in isolation from all else. Robinson Crusoe could do as he pleased without concerning himself with questions of right and wrong (or what’s “simply not done”)...that is, until Friday appeared. The rest of us aren’t that isolated.

     Yes, there’s more to come. For the present, be well.

Moral Fundamentals Part 1

     It has become ever more frequent an experience for me to start on an essay, get a few hundred words into it, and back away, muttering to myself that “I’ve said that before.” And, after some shuffling through my archives (which are quite voluminous after twenty-plus years of this lunacy), I usually find the piece that was knocking at the back of my memory, demanding to be acknowledged. Often, after I’ve read it, I discard the “new” essay I’d been writing and cast about for some topic I haven’t yet addressed. But on occasion I realize that what I wanted to prattle about remains true and important. Indeed, it might have grown in importance since I first wrote about it.

     I’ve just had exactly that experience. I’d imagine the title of this piece is an adequate indicator of the subject I have in mind. And so I present what follows: the first part of a five-essay series on evil, which first appeared at Eternity Road on September 20, 2010.

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The Nature Of Evil Part 1: Beginning At The End

     Possibly the most provocative thing one can say in this age of Man is that there exists an absolute standard of any sort, independent of the preferences, perceptions, and aspirations of any particular observer.

     The gospel of our era is relativism in all things: cultural, moral, logical, even scientific. Claims of absolute truth are sneered aside as conclusively refuted without trial. Feminist author Sandra Harding referred to Isaac Newton's three laws of mechanics as "Newton's Rape Manual," nor is there any reason to believe she was being facetious. Physicist Alan Sokal revealed the extent to which relativists will descend with a facetious article our cultural glitterati took quite literally.

     So those of us who, with Samuel Johnson, kick a stone and proclaim "I refute it thus" are in a distinct minority. In consequence, a debate that requires that one's interlocutor accept the existence of evil, a concept relativists categorically reject, is problematic from the start.

     Which doesn't mean there's no such thing as evil.

***

     Regard well the following: a snippet of dialogue from a recent, great novel. Ryan Schell, an undercover operative in an anti-terrorism organization, is exchanging blows with Allison Garvin. Miss Garvin is a Marxist-Stalinist who managed to become a deputy chief of staff to the president and has been found complicit in the planning of a terrorist mass murder. She has just informed Ryan that her group can make use of Islamists as agents because "Islamic violence is a response to the decay of the bourgeois West," which her people can exploit to "get history moving again in accordance with the science of socialism."

     “Your certainty is impressive," Ryan said. "It allows you to justify your faith in mass murder."
"It's not murder," she said, "when the violence is justified by the revolution. The bourgeois regime being attacked is criminal and inhuman and all who are obedient to it are complicit in its interminable violence. In acts of revolutionary violence against the enemy anyone complicit with the enemy who is killed is guilty of the crime of the enemy. It is not murder."
     “So riding a subway train to work," Ryan said, "is a criminal act punishable by death?"
     “When seen in its true historical context, it certainly is," she said confidently.
     “Everyone on the subway is equally guilty," Ryan suggested.
     “No, not if you go person by person, a maid or janitor is not carrying the same level of guilt as a stockbroker or corporate executive, but revolutionary violence sweeps with an inclusive broom. The statement it makes is bold and absolute and is a warning to all...."
     “And what do you believe in, soldier boy? Gawd?"
     “In the individual and his liberty," Ryan said, rising to the bait."
     “Oh dear, an American. You people are so charming, so quaint," she said, "always the perpetual football players running onto the field to the roar of the crowd and the bouncing breasts of the cheerleaders."
     “You’re an American, aren't you, Ms. Garvin?" he asked.
     "Ah, no," she said. "I stopped thinking of myself as that, as an American when I was a teenager. That's what we call 'the normal maturation process' these days, soldier boy. Sorry you missed it."
     “So you're not an American," Ryan said. "What are you?"
     “I’m a citizen of the world," she said.
     “That’s a big concept," Ryan said.
     “It’s basic," she said. "You must have missed it while you were attending your ROTC meetings."
     “I guess I did," Ryan said. "That would explain why I'm still just an American with a silly belief in freedom."
     Garvin laughed.
     “Freedom? You think this America is free? You've got ninety percent of the people glued to their couches gazing like zombies into their televisions and eating non-stop. And then they jump off their couches for five minutes of history when a couple of tall buildings are knocked down in New York. That's the America I see. That's the America the revolution sees. This freedom thing you believe in, soldier boy, is a fairy tale, just like Gawd. History is unfolding right before your eyes and you're running in the opposite direction after the fairies of freedom and the goblins of terrorism. You should run in the direction of revolutionary violence, all of you should, get out in front of it, get off this America thing, because it is dead, a thing of the past. America no longer exists. You just haven't realized it. None of you have....
     “What you people refuse to understand," Garvin said, jumping into the silence that had fallen over the room, "is that this freedom of yours is no more than pitiful self-indulgence at the expense of others. What the revolution does is take the anger and frustration of those who hunger for justice in the world and shape that into purposeful violence. You try to deny that by calling it 'senseless violence' and "mass murder,' but I'm looking at your faces now and I can see those old defenses and the lies that support them draining out of you. You all look like children who have just been told that there is no Santa Claus, and you had really known that all along. You just needed an adult to make it official for you. Well, here I am, kids, giving it to you straight, what you already knew."

     [From Corpse In Armor, Copyright © 2010 by Martin McPhillips. Used by permission.]

     I dare anyone to come up with a proclamation more absolute than Allison Garvin's statement above -- and I dare anyone to come within arm's length of me and state that her notions are not evil. Yet there are many people who, rather than concede that Garvin's tirade is a defense of absolute evil, would attempt to justify her allegiances and intentions as "valid from her perspective," or some such. I've exchanged fire with a few myself -- and not always just in words.

***

     For reasons that would require a large history to delineate, Americans have been led away from the understanding of absolute truth. We've been treated to elaborate, amphigorical explanations of why "the cat sat on the mat" should not be taken as a statement of unchallengeable fact, even if we can see Kitty sitting on the damned thing with our own eyes. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and the rest of their tribe literally made careers out of the campaign to destroy even the possibility that language, our vehicle for thought and for interaction with one another, can express truth. But without a trustworthy, serviceable conception of truth, there can be no knowledge, including knowledge of Man's nature. Since the understanding of Man's nature is the key to reasoning about right and wrong, without truth we can make no approach to moral and ethical standards.

     Without truth, evil becomes not merely undefined, but undefinable.

     Yet we are required by our consciences and the densely woven texture of our society to make moral choices every day. Only a hermit in the midst of a vast desert, never approached by any other human being, could avoid such choices. If we must do so without standards of absolute right and wrong, absolute good and evil, by which to evaluate our choices, what chance have we? How likely is it that our society will continue and flourish?

     It's my intention in this series to explore evil all the way from its metaphysical roots to its manifestations in daily life. But this essay will begin at the end, with the depiction of what must follow if evil is permitted to take root in soil stripped of absolute truth and the standards of right and wrong truth makes possible:

     The door to the building opened and the General came in. He was by himself and he looked as if he had been watching the whole thing. I noticed that he was carrying a nine millimeter in his hand, hanging at his side, and I thought he was going to threaten Garvin with it, possibly because he'd found a problem with her statements about Beers and Spencer.
     His mouth was tight, and he shot only a quick glance Ryan's way, not looking at the rest of us. He walked straight to Garvin and she looked up at him.
     “You," she said, with shock in her eyes.
     “Yes, me," the General said. "let me shape some purposeful violence for you."
     He raised his nine millimeter about three feet from Garvin's head and pulled the trigger. The bullet entered above her left eye and exploded out the back of her head.

     [From Corpse In Armor.]

---

     The essay above is only a beginning, a “teaser,” if you will, for the wider subject of moral fundamentals. It is impossible to believe anything, or to reason about anything, without fundamental premises. Commonly, we maintain such premises in an unconscious state: i.e., without ever addressing them critically. We may acquire them early in life: “at our mothers’ knee,” as the old saying runs. The most important thing about them is our absolute reliance on them.

     As with any other subject, a discourse on the subject of morals and ethics – henceforward I’ll simply write “morals,” to save wear and tear on my fingers – proceeds from the premise that reasoning about them is possible. But it’s only possible if there are bedrock premises we can agree are beyond question. The elucidation of those premises has become so urgent as to be required for the continuation of a coherent human society. Yet today more effort is put to obscuring those premises, arguing in effect that a rational discussion of morals is impossible and pointless, than ever before in history.

     Over the centuries many others, some with doctorates in philosophy, have addressed the subject. Mostly they’ve spread confusion and discord. This cannot be permitted to continue.

     Please don’t think I’ve set myself above the many learned and articulate men who’ve addressed this subject. I know my littleness. Still, I feel a compulsion, in part due to some recent events, one of which I’ll now relate: A longtime reader recently asked me for my estimate of what percentage of us achieve God’s purpose for us. I replied in the affirmative, but with a caveat:

     I believe that every one of us achieves God's purpose for him. However, a great many of us don't do so consciously or willingly. We have to be cornered into it!

     It’s possible we’re not intended to know what purpose God has assigned us. I’ve never been sure of mine. I’ve been groping toward it for many years. This new journey is just one more stab in the dark.

     And yes, you guessed it: More anon.

Quickies: Do We Need Such Men?

     “We are the sin eaters. It means that we take the moral excrement we find in this equation and we bury it down deep inside of us, so that the rest of our cause can stay pure. That is the job. We are morally indefensible, and absolutely necessary.” – Colonel Eric Byer, played by Edward Norton in The Bourne Legacy

     The Bourne Legacy wasn’t well received critically, but it did well even so, in part because of the all-star cast. For me, the quote above is the keystone to the rest of the story. It was uttered after a “black op” reaped the lives of a number of innocents along with its intended target. Colonel Byer says it to Aaron Cross, a super-agent who’d been part of the operation and who’d only just learned of the unintended casualties.

     The underlying thesis is plain: the most morally stainless society will still need men willing to do things others would regard as morally indefensible, to protect the rest and to keep clean the hands of those overtly in power. Jim Butcher also uses this as a motif in his “Harry Dresden” novels. The notion is horrifying...yet a great many people would agree with it, albeit grudgingly.

     Myself? I don’t know. I do know that the current milieu, in which spree shooters and suicide bombers can reap countless lives before anyone knows what they’re about, is more challenging than any previous era in American history. Moreover, I expect matters to get worse before they get better. The advance of technology will bring us ever more effective methods of swiftly killing large numbers of unaware persons. With governments everywhere taking the lead in directing and funding all scientific research and technological development, you can bet your last dollar on it.

     Is the only imaginable counter to such threats a cadre of men willing to kill innocents if and when they must do so to eliminate their intended target? And what about this opinion of torture, from legendary NHL coach and broadcaster Don Cherry:

     “If hooking up one rag-head terrorist prisoner's testicles to a car battery to get the truth out of the lying little camel shagger will save just one Canadian life, then I have only three things to say: Red is positive, black is negative, and make sure his nuts are wet.”

     Are Byer and Cherry’s sentiments morally justifiable? I don’t want to say yes...but it’s getting harder, day by day and atrocity by atrocity, to say no with any degree of firmness.

Cashing In: An Offhand Reflection

     Human desires are individual. We can sometimes make decent guesses about why Mr. X wants thing Y, but the ultimate reasons are usually shrouded against others’ penetration. No one knows anyone else intimately enough to be perfectly sure of his inferences about the source of another person’s desires.

     This morning, I find myself intrigued afresh by a question that’s occupied my thoughts on several other occasions: Why would anyone pursue great wealth? It requires intense, lifelong dedication and comes with a long list of drawbacks. Moreover, money itself is not a fulfillment. It merely makes it possible to purchase other things that might serve as fulfillments...assuming those things are for sale.

     Robert A. Heinlein discoursed on the subject briefly in Stranger in a Strange Land:

     “Big money isn’t hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of devotion. But no ballerina ever works harder. Captain, that’s not your style; you don’t want to make money, you simply want to spend money.”
     “Correct, sir! So I can’t see why you would want to take Mike’s wealth away from him.”
     “Because great wealth is a curse—unless you enjoy money-making for its own sake. Even then it has serious drawbacks.”
     “Oh, piffle! Jubal, you talk like a harem guard trying to sell a whole man on the advantages of being a eunuch.”
     “Possibly,” agreed Jubal. “The mind’s ability to rationalize its own shortcomings is unlimited; I am no exception. Since I, like yourself, sir, have no interest in money other than to spend it, it is impossible for me to get rich. Conversely, there has never been any danger that I would fail to scrounge the modest amount needed to feed my vices, since anyone with the savvy not to draw to a small pair can do that. But great wealth?....Captain, you don’t know what an Old Man of the Sea great wealth is. Its owner is beset on every side, like beggars in Bombay, each demanding that he invest or give away part of his wealth. He becomes suspicious—honest friendship is rarely offered him; those who could have been friends are too fastidious to be jostled by beggars, too proud to risk being mistaken for one.
     “Worse yet, his family is always in danger. Captain, have your daughters ever been threatened with kidnapping?”
     “What? Good Lord, no!”
     “If you possessed the wealth Mike had thrust on him, you would have those girls guarded night and day—still you would not rest, because you would never be sure of the guards. Look at the last hundred or so kidnappings and note how many involved a trusted employee . . . and how few victims escaped alive. Is there anything money can buy which is worth having your daughters’ necks in a noose?”
     Van Tromp looked thoughtful. “I’ll keep my mortgaged house, Jubal.”
     “Amen. I want to live my own life, sleep in my own bed—and not be bothered!”

     Anyone sharp enough to accrue great wealth is easily perceptive enough to spot all the drawbacks Jubal Harshaw enumerates above. Yet there are many who pursue it even so...and if we define great wealth as $50 million or more in 2019 dollars, thousands who eventually acquire it. We must infer that their incentives, whether for the fortune itself or for what they could do with it when they eventually “cash in,” are stronger than the disincentives we know.

---

     A look at the late-stage careers of notably wealthy Americans doesn’t tell us anything coherent. A lot of them never stop working at the trades that made them wealthy. Perhaps those are the ones who view money as a success metric, or as a way of “keeping score” against their wealthy contemporaries. The others put themselves to a wide variety of other activities, whether commercial, political, charitable, or self-indulgent. The patterns among them, if any, are indistinct.

     Wealth makes a man important in the eyes of many. The reflection from those eyes can persuade the wealthy man that he really is important – that he has more to offer the world than mere purchasing power. From this we get persons such as Donald Trump and Tom Steyer. The former has proved his self-assessment to be correct; the latter...well, perhaps we shouldn’t go there.

     Wealth can also make a man feel an obligation to those with less...and of course, for every wealthy man there are many thousands who have less. That obligation can lead to immense eleemosynary projects. Some of them actually achieve some good. Some, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s huge donation to the public schools of Newark, New Jersey, do no good at all, or demonstrable harm.

     And for some, wealth is merely an avenue toward hedonistic self-indulgence. These might not strike all my Gentle Readers as pitiable, yet they are, for what is ultimately emptier than the endless gratification of “the belly and the phallus?”

     Taraka continued, "I feel that I will give you back your body one day soon. I grow tired of this sport, of this palace. I grow tired, and I think perhaps the day draws near when we should make war with Heaven. What say you to this. Binder? I told you I would keep my word."
     Siddhartha did not answer him.
     "My pleasures diminish by the day! Do you know why this is, Siddhartha? Can you tell me why strange feelings now come over me, dampening my strongest moments, weakening me and casting me down when I should be elated, when I should be filled with joy? Is this the curse of the Buddha?"
     "Yes," said Siddhartha.
     "Then lift your curse, Binder, and I will depart this very day. I will give you back this cloak of flesh. I long again for the cold, clean winds of the heights! Will you free me now?"
     "It is too late, oh chief of the Rakasha. You have brought this thing upon yourself."
     "What thing? How have you bound me this time?"
     "Do you recall how, when we strove upon the balcony, you mocked me? You told me that I, too, took pleasure in the ways of the pain which you work. You were correct, for all men have within them both that which is dark and that which is light. A man is a thing of many divisions, not a pure, clear flame such as you once were. His intellect often wars with his emotions, his will with his desires . . . his ideals are at odds with his environment, and if he follows them, he knows keenly the loss of that which was old—but if he does not follow them, he feels the pain of having forsaken a new and noble dream. Whatever he does represents both a gain and a loss, an arrival and a departure. Always he mourns that which is gone and fears some part of that which is new. Reason opposes tradition. Emotions oppose the restrictions his fellow men lay upon him. Always, from the friction of these things, there arises the thing you called the curse of man and mocked— guilt!
     "Know then, that as we existed together in the same body and I partook of your ways, not always unwillingly, the road we followed was not one upon which all the traffic moved in a single direction. As you twisted my will to your workings, so was your will twisted, in turn, by my revulsion at some of your deeds. You have learned the thing called guilt, and it will ever fall as a shadow across your meat and your drink. This is why your pleasure has been broken. This is why you seek now to flee. But it will do you no good. It will follow you across the world. It will rise with you into the realms of the cold, clean winds. It will pursue you wherever you go. This is the curse of the Buddha."
     Taraka covered his face with his hands. "So this is what it is like to weep," he said, after a time.
     Siddhartha did not reply.
     "Curse you, Siddhartha," he said. "You have bound me again, to an even more terrible prison than Hellwell."
     "You have bound yourself. It is you who broke our pact. I kept it."
     "Men suffer when they break pacts with demons," said Taraka, "but no Rakasha has ever suffered so before."
     Siddhartha did not reply.

---

     A very wealthy man is facing a terrible trial – a real one, in a court of law, for allegations of sex trafficking involving underage girls. That man has his own private jet airliner, a big one. He also owns a private island where most of the alleged offenses took place. He consorted for decades with other very wealthy, often very famous men. Some of them would accompany him on trips to his island; indeed, some went there many times. If it was as the allegations have represented it, it was a place dedicated to pure self-indulgence: in Zelazny’s phrase, “the belly and the phallus.”

     Why did he do it? Was the idea of such a place one of his incentives for pursuing great wealth? Once he had amassed his fortune, was it the only way he could imagine to go on? Or was it his way of thumbing his nose at the morals of the world, saying in effect that “I can do this despite your revulsion, and you can’t do anything about it?”

     Perhaps he’ll tell us. Perhaps we’ll learn something about the power of the darkness that can take hold of a man, even a man with everything to lose and very little, if anything, to gain. Or perhaps we’ll learn something about temptation and how it can have its way with one who has achieved his one and only aim, and having done so, has nothing else to pursue, and so is empty of purpose.

     It will be hard for him, no matter what his motives might have been or what conclusion his jury might reach. But the rest of us will likely learn something about great wealth and its perils. Let’s not let the lesson go to waste.