We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Free Amateur Breast Exams

Blogger Alessandra relates a discussion on another blog about this story in which a con man went door to door, pretending to be a doctor offering free breast exams. Some (probably most) of the commenters viciously ridiculed the victims. Alessandra fought back:

What is “stupid?” Are you suggesting they had mental retardation? Have you not heard of the tens of thousands different scams that humans have successfully invented as they pass off as someone or other ? Many work based on psychological manipulation.People’s minds go far beyond their intellectual abilities and this is where psychology comes in, and quite often completely overrides rationality.

People aren’t born with knowledge or the capacity to know everything and to suspect correctly everything, you must be completely snotty to think if someone somewhere hasn’t acquired the same knowledge you have, it is because of a low IQ.

Three cheers for Alessandra.

The Cop Who Shot Himself

I had a similarly disturbing experience on La Shawn Barber’s blog in a discussion of a police officer who accidentally shot himself while lecturing some schoolchildren on gun safety. Most of the commenters had the same attitude that Alessandra found: They viciously ridiculed the man who got hurt. I said that I felt sorry for the guy. He was obviously a very tough cop who was trying to do a public service, and got distracted while in the unfamiliar role of public speaker.
La Shawn replied: “Nervousness, lack of public speaking experience, and unfamiliar surroundings certainly don’t excuse his carelessness.” She didn’t see a distinction between pitying someone in an unfortunate situation and excusing them from the consequences of their actions.”

The cop was careless. For his carelessness he got shot, and his error was immortalized and distributed all over the internet. Isn’t that enough punishment? If not, then how much more does he deserve? If a million people worldwide laugh at him and call him stupid, then will that be enough punishment? Or does it need to be a billion people?

Law School

These discussions remind me of Contracts class in my first year of law school. The professor decided to postpone until the second semester the lectures on the relatively simple law of how contracts are formed and breached. The first semester we spent exclusively on the subject of damages: Assume that there was a contract, and assume that it was breached. How much should the breaching party pay?

That’s a far more difficult question than it first appears to the non-lawyer, and it was very difficult for us first-year law students. We all wanted to figure out who was the bad guy and who was the good guy. If the good guy had breached the contract, then we invented various reasons why he shouldn’t pay much. But if the bad guy had breached the contract, then we wanted him not only to pay damages, but to be punished somehow. In my view, the major goal of the first year of law school should be to beat those impulses out of the students, to grind into their heads the idea that whether someone is a good guy or a bad guy should not determine the extent to which he receives punishment or compensation from the legal system.

But most people don’t go to law school, so most people don’t understand that. Most people, like La Shawn, think in terms of good guys and bad guys, rather than recognizing that the distinction is continuous rather than discrete, and we’re all somewhere in the middle.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

It’s sobering to realize that few people on the Right agree with, or even understand, the basics of Christian morality. I’m no theologian, but at least one basic idea seems awfully simple: Each person is a child of God, meaning that each person is special, morally important, to be treated as an end rather than a means, or however you want to put it. Either people have moral worth simply because they’re human, or people have moral worth only because they have specific traits. I don’t see much middle ground between those two. Either every person counts, or only some people count.

And if only some people count, then we must divide humanity into those who count and those who don’t, as in: the smart vs the stupid, the attractive vs the ugly, the strong vs the weak, our race vs the other races, our country vs the other countries, speakers of our language vs non-speakers, or the noble-born vs the commoners. From a wide perspective, it doesn’t matter how you draw the line. As soon as you accept the idea of distinguishing the morally worthwhile people from the morally worthless people, then your ultimate moral destination will be the same, regardless of the criteria that you adopt. And that moral destination will not be a pretty one.

The big problem with dividing humanity into the good people and the bad people is that it quickly leads to the endless and merciless punishment of the bad people. The connection is not a matter of logic, exactly, but more a matter of human instinct. We are genetically designed to form tribes. That what we do in the wild; it’s what we did for thousands of years before agriculture and recorded history. An essential part of our tribal instinct is to view the people in our tribe as morally important, and the people outside the tribe as morally worthless.An important thread of history is our slow conquest of that tribal instinct. Tribes grew into cities, cities grew into nations, empires, or groups of cities joined by languages. Then the modern religions spanned nations, and bound up large chunks of the globe into gigantic tribes.

The practical effect of these expanding tribe designations was a dramatic reduction in violence. Our tribal instinct allows us to kill anyone outside the tribe, and probably encourages us to do so. But we avoid killing the people in our tribe, and instead compete against them in various non-violent ways. The larger the tribe, the fewer people there are to enslave, torture, or kill, which suppresses natural human cruelty.

It was a huge step forward in the advance of civilization when the modern religions (Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam) declared some form of tribal universality, in the sense that anyone could join the religion. You didn’t need to belong to particular race, live in a particular region, or be a citizen of a particular nation. Each religion was open to everyone.

It didn’t work perfectly. There was plenty of fighting within each religion, and between the religions. The believers didn’t always adhere to their ideals, which is to be expected. The moral status of those outside the religion was always a difficult point. But these religions did a better job than anything that came before of keeping humanity’s darkest instincts under control.

Where the Monsters Come From

This is why the 20th century’s many radical experiments in building non-religious societies failed so miserably. Why was Stalin willing to starve 7 million Ukranians in 1932-1933? Why did Mao starve millions more in the Great Leap Forward? Why did Hitler kill millions of Jews? Why is Mugabe starving millions of Zimbabweans right now?

In each case, I think that it’s because the killers don’t recognize the humanity of their victims. They viewed the victims as slaughtered cattle, just some meat that was in the way of progress. And it’s perfectly human of them to do so. For thousands upon thousands of years people have killed, tortured, raped, enslaved, etc. people from other tribes. The question is not why the Communists and Nazis acted on their instincts and killed so many people; the question is why so many other leaders don’t act on the same instincts. The only possible answer is religion.

I know that that statement makes the atheists squirm, and I sympathize with their discomfort. I’m not advocating religion for its own sake, but for its consequences. You can believe or refuse to believe in God if you like, but I don’t see how any reasonable person can fail to see, as a matter of historical fact, the beneficial consequences of other people’s belief in the modern religions. Maybe there’s a non-religious way to achieve the same results on a large scale, but no one has yet found it.

Of course, mass murder is very different from teasing women who fall for a con man, or from mocking a cop who shoots himself in the leg, or from trying to reduce the law to good guys and bad guys. But that difference is one of degree, not kind. It’s the same instinct, and we all have it. One of the eternal burdens of civilization is perpetual vigilance against expressing the tribal instinct. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it in The Gulag Archipelago:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.