We Should Live - Ben Bateman

A major folly of our age is a belief in buffet morality, that is, the belief that people can (and even should) choose their moral positions on a subject-by-subject basis. It makes people feel sophisticated and in control of their lives to believe that they can choose a set of moral beliefs to suit their personal tastes.

But buffet morality is an illusion, because our moral views are interconnected. Our minds are deeply wired to find patterns and order in the world, and that includes morality. What appears to be moral sophistication is usually just moral self-contradiction. You may start out with your own eclectic mix of moral beliefs, but over time and through experience you will come to see the contradictions among those beliefs. Some you’ll keep, some you’ll discard, and some you’ll modify. Over time, and probably without knowing it, you will move steadily towards one of the dozen or so stable moral belief systems.

The old religions, such as Christianity, were not built on a buffet approach. Some old guy in a robe and a beard didn’t just pick a set of moral positions that happened to tickle his fancy. The old religions were built like machines, with all the little parts working together in harmony. Those religions were not built for the entertainment of their adherents; they were built to survive.

A major moral question of our age is whether we can adopt all the good parts of Christianity, but without all that icky God stuff. Many say that we can believe in peace and love and the golden rule without believing in some big bearded man in the sky who threatens to punish us if we misbehave. Some even say that this is the morally superior position, because it’s better to be good as a free choice rather than out of fear of punishment.

But none of that sophistry can escape the deep logic of morality. None of it can escape the deep question of where moral rules come from. Did we make the rules, or did somebody else? Is God out there somewhere, or are we God? It’s important because if we’re God, then we always have the option of changing the rules.

Directly intersecting that question is the issue of the value of human life. One of Christianity’s deep tenets is that each person is a child of God, carrying infinite moral worth. It’s a direct rejection of the human instinct for tribalism, which only values the members of one’s social group. This aspect of Christianity has been immeasurably valuable to Western Civilization. Had that belief not existed, then the West would be nothing like what it is today.

I like to imagine that most Americans still understand at some level how crucial that belief is. Certainly no one in public discourse is willing to advocate a principled alternative. But they are happy to weaken it with unprincipled exceptions, abortion and euthanasia being the most obvious. This is one of our time’s biggest moral contradictions: Is human life sacred, or merely valuable? Because if it’s merely valuable, then perhaps we can toss it aside when it becomes inconvenient or less valuable.

Of course, we tell ourselves that we won’t. We’re good people with good intentions. But once God is dead and we’ve decided to take over his job, then we cannot stop the consequences of that decision. We can try to control the details, but we’re guaranteed to fail. Over and over throughout history men have declared themselves to be gods, and the results have always been similar. As the Romans put it: Homo homini lupus.

Theology and Current Events

In the previous post, I quoted a paragraph from a Jonah Goldberg article in the dead-tree National Review. Today he writes along similar lines at Jewish World Review:

Barack Obama says preventing genocide isn’t a good enough reason to stay in Iraq.

“By that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” he told the Associated Press. “We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.”

It’s worth pointing out a key difference between the potential genocide in Iraq and the heart-wrenching slaughters in Congo and Sudan: The latter aren’t our fault. But if genocide unfolds in Iraq after American troops depart, it would be hard to argue that we weren’t at least partly to blame. Yes, the mass murder would have more immediate authors than the United States of America, but we would undeniably be responsible, at least in part, for giving a green light to genocide. Obama offers precisely that green light in his proposed Iraq War De-escalation Act. (more…)

This weekend I watched the first two parts of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight: Prelude to War and The Nazis Strike. These movies produced by the US Army explain the government’s view of World War II: How it happened, why the United States was fighting it, and what was at stake.

Prelude to War presents the struggle as being between the free and slave worlds, and then explains two of the events that led up to it: The 1931 invasion of Manchuria by Japan, and the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia by Italy. Both invasions were acts of naked aggression that violated various treaties and statements of international law. The League of Nations, predecessor to the United Nations, condemned these actions, but otherwise did nothing.

The Nazis Strike presents tells a similar story about Germany. Emboldened by the West’s apathy toward Italian and Japanese ambitions, Hitler began a series of provocations in Europe. He sent troops in the Rhineland and built fortifications there, violating the Treaty of Versailles. He annexed Austria without a shot being fired.

Then he annexed the eastern portion of Czechoslovakia, called the Sudentenland, which included most of that country’s defensible terrain and fortifications. This sparked an international crisis, with much hand-wringing by pacifistic British and French leaders, whose countries had signed defense treaties with Czechoslovakia. The resulting Munich agreement between Germany, Italy, Britain, and France amounted to a betrayal of those promises. Britain and France delivered Czechoslovakia to Hitler, and Hitler promised not to take over any more of Europe. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously declared on returning to Britain that the Munich agreement was “peace for our time.” And lest you think that Chamberlain has been unfairly maligned for his fanatical pacifism, that same month he declared in a radio broadcast:

How horrible, fantastic it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing. I am myself a man of peace from the depths of my soul.

Hitler conquered the rest of Czechoslovakia six months later. Then he signed a non-aggression pact with Russia, and prepared to invade Poland. Only then did the war start.

It is pleasant and appropriate to note how much shorter and less costly the war might have been but for the murderous foolishness of Chamberlain and his fellow British pacifists. But we Americans were just as foolish, if not more so. Our pacifists killed even more people than Chamberlain. (more…)

Among conservative commentators, I rank Vox Day next to John Derbyshire.  Both are often obnoxious and occasionally dead wrong, but they’re good writers who mean what they say, and occasionally what they say is truly insightful.  Today Vox gets it just right on evolution:

One seldom sees an economist frothing at the mouth at yet another attempt to deny the iron Law of Supply and Demand. We will see fish-squirrels breeding humans out of monkeys in the lab before we see prices rise with an increasing supply and static demand, and yet economists are capable of listening to morons advocating health care nationalization and other nonsense doomed to failure with equanimity. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists are wetting themselves at the thought that evolution might not be taught as Holy Scripture in schools that can’t manage to teach math or basic reading.

Read a Christian theologian and then read a site like Pharyngula. Which one strikes you as more insecure, more terrified that at any moment, they will be revealed to be intellectually naked? Religion has not only survived its “inevitable” demise at the hands of the Enlightenment for 200 years, it is growing explosively throughout the world.

When you know you’re right, you don’t have to scream and call names and file a lawsuit when you fail to persuade your fellow citizens.  When you know you’re right, you’re calm.  When you claim to be right but aren’t sure, you’re nervous.  With practice, you can usually tell in minutes which side of a debate is stronger, simply by judging each side’s emotional tone.