Altruism: Servility and Humanity as Sacrificial Animals

Thank you, Ron Fournier.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for what could not be a more vivid portrait of altruism in America and exactly what is wrong with it.
In case you didn't see his commentary on the nobility of sacrifice as an American tradition, here's the link so you can see for yourselves.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24366817/

What disgusts me about this the most are the assumptions that he makes about good and evil and what is noble or ignoble. He places selflessness as an ethical ideal, sacrifice as its expression, and a state of servitude as the blessed pinnacle of human endeavor.

How horribly backward this all seems to me.

"Sacrifice," writes Fournier, "is a word that Americans like to associate with their heritage, their ideals and themselves." I don't. And I know quite a few other Americans who don't. What is it about sacrifice that makes it an ideal? Even if it has been in our heritage, it does not necessarily make it so. Rather it would seem better treated as a regret, a misfortune forced on us to deal with governments and movements of masses which demand our sacrifices and offer little in return. When sacrifices are forced upon people, when their property is stolen under the guise of social works, when their lives are chained and mandated by the asphyxiating legislation of special interests, then they are made sacrificial offerings on the altar of Society rather than choosing to make sacrifices. I fail to see what is noble in being made a victim. Victims of any form of brutality deserve the same respect as any other human being and some compassion or pity. But suffering is not a virtue in itself any more than sacrifice is.

"No Mother Teresas there" quips Fournier about Romney and Huckabee. Well, none here either. I recommend Christopher Hitchens' book The Missionary Position for a detailed presentation of exactly how "virtuous" she was. If we were to call virtuous those who would work unwaveringly towards foisting Catholic law on an entire nation of people as she did in Ireland we would be turning the very notion of virtue on its head so that tyranny most foul would become the goal of our aspirations and submission (or "service") to such tyranny would be the honorable role of the enlightened citizen.

But Fournier is just getting started. He moves on to berate our "materialistic" nature which as he puts it is "consumed by consuming, a materialistic culture that encourages people to pursue happiness via shopping sprees and save sacrifice for tithing on Sundays and distant do-gooders."

He lumps together ideas like it's a fire sale. Everything must go! First of all, materialism does not necessarily mean that one will think of shopping malls as Nirvana, or seek absolution on Ebay. According to Wikipedia, "The philosophy of materialism holds that the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is matter, and is considered a form of physicalism."

And here's the entry from Merriam-Webster online:

1 a: a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter
b: a doctrine that the only or the highest values or objectives lie in material well-being and in the furtherance of material progress
c: a doctrine that economic or social change is materially caused — compare historical materialism

2: a preoccupation with or stress upon material rather than intellectual or spiritual things

So, what we have here is a pathetically cloaked attempt to get us to swallow the idea that we should feel guilty for our material success, because what we should be doing, according to Fournier, is to be stressing over spiritual matters. This is an assumption to which any athiest should take offense.

But he cannot be satisfied with these offenses against reason, he has to rub salt in the wound.

He writes:
"But it would be a mistake to assume there is no stomach for sacrifice — or its sister virtue, service — in our society and in our politics. The desire to serve is part of human nature, and a particularly American virtue. History tells us that our selfless instincts flower in troubled times like these, and can be tapped by leaders looking for ways to motivate an anxious people."

He simply has to keep stressing his assumption that sacrifice is a virtue, as though saying it enough times would be sufficient proof. Of course he doesn't feel like he needs to justify this, as he is obviously writing for a spiritual audience, one that accepts the Judeo-Christian ethics at face value. Unfortunately far too many athiests do as well, a symptom of their misguided attraction to collectivist ideologies such as socialism and communism which share the same ethical base. Placing sacrifice and selflessness as virtues in the place of accomplishment and pride wreaks havoc on the moral compass of humanity, turning all our ideals against the mandates of the reality of our survival. It demands that we all become sinners and robs us of our self-esteem because of the impossibility of the demands on our conscience. Rather than feeling pride for what good we have done through the virtue of our work, we must feel shame for every empty mouth, and every shattered soul. Rather than feel the shining glory of purposeful action, we must become cynical and bitter at the impossibility of ever there being an action with purpose. THIS is what it means to place sacrifice, servility, and altruism as ideals. For a more detailed argument on the horrors of altruistic belief systems, I would refer the author to the works of Ayn Rand, most notably The Virtue of Selflessness.

I could go on. Fournier definitely does. I've written this much and only covered the first half page of his editorial. He fills up 2 full pages with this tripe. But I won't bother. The reason is that pulling the ideologies from his work is just that simple. He assumes that everyone feels the same way about these things, and so he makes absolutely no pretense about covering them up. It isn't enough that we simply do what we can, when we encounter misfortune in this world, we must give our whole lives to it to merit consideration in Fournier's analysis.

Dying in war counts as a worthwhile sacrifice in Fournier's analysis, but surprisingly in that he so readily takes on the mantle of a determiner of virtue, he cannot discriminate between the virtue of the abolitionists or the confederates, nor between the struggle for Manifest Destiny or the struggle against fascism and communism. Clearly all these endeavors are rendered equally virtuous in that the people who fought for them died. And there we have it at its heart. As long as you die for something, then you're virtuous. I would rather live and place life as the ultimate value. There are far too many Jihadists that would be rushing to agree with Fournier at this point.

As for me, I can't stomach to read through his raving scribbles for one second longer. So, go check it out for yourselves, and try to think about this one thing if nothing else--If it is virtuous to sacrifice the most you can to the most "deserving", what would utopia look like?

(And no cheating. We're talking about real sacrifice here. That means that you don't get equal or greater values in return.)

A Defense of Ayn Rand in Her Own Words

I do have to note that I don't agree with Hitchens' views on Ayn Rand. I hold all her novels in great esteem and I think her analysis of ethics goes straight to the heart of many of the broader problems extant in society today. In the interest of spreading an informed opinion, I offer these videos so you can get a taste of her ideas in her own words. As always, don't take anybody's words for it. THINK. And reach your own conclusions.

A Brilliant Speech by Christopher Hitchens

Nothing I can say about this can match what he says for himself. So, just watch it and let it open your mind.

The Real War

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8307333/

I present for your perusal the above link in the hopes that it will bring to your attention the nature of the real war against terrorism and what it implies for our future. It is evident that as terrorism becomes increasingly decentralized, that it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible to stamp out. More than military action, more than headhunting the leaders of these organizations, we need to consider what it is that is driving this seemingly endless supply of suicidal mass murderers.

I think Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have been particularly eloquent on this issue and I highly recommend their books. Despite what flaws I see in their arguments when it comes around to supposing what ethics should replace those offered by religion, or in stating that ethics are evolutionarily determined (as though we didn't ultimately choose what we believe), I think it is undeniable that religious thought is and has been the fundamental cause of the greater share of all the war, atrocity, suppression and misery in this world.

We need to cut away the institutionalized harbors of religious zealotry. We need to get religion out of schools, off our money, out of the pledge to allegiance. We need to elect atheist politicians, who will select atheist judges, who will uphold people's rights to not participate in this organized hysteria. We need to criticize the very fundamental roots of these misguided philosophies. And as Dawkins as said many times, we need to take off the kid gloves when we're talking about religion.

Religion does not deserve respect. It deserves ridicule. And those who would blindly march to undo scientific learning and replace it with fatwahs and Hallelujahs need to be exposed for what they are. Purely and objectively evil. We tend to give religious people the benefit of the doubt as to their motivations, but in light of the scientific achievements of the last hundred years, there is simply very little doubt to be left to them. There is no God. There never was. Objections to the teaching of scientific thought based on superstitious lullabies should be laughed out of every school board in the nation rather than worryingly coddled and nurtured. Religious themed schools should receive absolutely no money from public sources, let them earn it themselves from the zealots who support them. Why encourage its proliferation?

What does this have to do with terrorism? Well, the way I see it, Islamic fundamentalism is not that far removed from Christian fundamentalism. It just so happens that a brilliant man by the name of Thomas Jefferson thought it was a good idea to keep religion out of politics. That combined with the massive success of the American experiment, helped to influence Western culture so as to follow suit for the most part in practice if not in theory. Unfortunately we have, as of late, been quick to regret our declarations of human rights, the fundamentals which made America strong in the first place. No, we would much rather have security at home, while we get medieval abroad. We would much rather convince ourselves that while religion breeds fanatics, that religion is not in itself fanatical. We would much rather partition our brains to insulate ourselves from a constant stream of contradicting and irrational conflicts in our hypotheses rather than admit the lie and remove the contradictions. In Islamic nations religion IS politics and politics is religion. There is no separation and brutal dictatorships, death worship, and terrorism is what this has bred.

We will never win the war on terror as long as we submit to religion ourselves. As long as we allow the followers of Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism to convince themselves that this belief is compatible with life in the modern world, then we are feeding the very sickness which threatens to wipe us all out. We will never be able to secure rights for all human beings until we recognize that our society is merely the sum of all the contributions of the individuals in that society.

Of course, those individuals must be free to believe what they wish and say what they wish and do what they wish (within limits obviously). But that does not give them license to speak without rebuttal or to act without consequence. They must be debated and defeated in debate, over and over and over again. They must be challenged in the newspapers, on TV, in the movie theaters, in books, in blogs, on the street, in your neighborhood...anywhere and everywhere they are. Whenever they make a decision based on some mouldy tome of ancient myth. The Real war is a war of ideas. And if we do not confront them, or grant too much benefit for too little doubt, or defer to a false sense of mutual respect, then we may find that confrontation comes too late, that there is no more doubt and that that sense of respect was used against us and to the advantage of those too barbaric to ever countenance such a thing as rights.

Could you imagine a Muslim tolerating your right to free speech? Ridiculous, they have riots over cartoons....CARTOONS!!?? You've gotta be kidding me! Well, go take a look at the list of books your local church group wants to ban, and give up the lie that there's all that much keeping Christians from raising swords steeped in the blood of infidels.

The real war is in our heads and in our hearts. We have to win it there or we'll never have a hope of winning the military one. We need to undo God as a concept worthy of respect and awe. We need to place humanity in it's rightful place at the fount of all creation.

Get busy living or get busy dying. It really is that simple.

And this is what you can do about it...

These are the views on torture of the main presidential candidates for the 2008 election. You be the judge.

Clinton

Obama

McCain

Vote your conscience, don't vote the odds.

Unfortunately they all profess religious beliefs as is required by the unashamed bigotry of religious voters in our nation. Ah well, beggars can't be choosers. As much as I dislike the religious affiliations of ALL of the candidates, I would rather vote for a Christian who supports my freedom to denounce his religion then I would for an atheist who supports torture.

Of course the best of all worlds would be a candidate who was an atheist, has an understanding of human rights, and was intellectually honest enough to fight evil where there's evil and defend good where there's good. We need political leaders who can reason and be honest about where their reasoning leads them. Unfortunately, in politics we often get what we ask for. If the majority of voters are irrationally dedicated to the superstition of gods directly, or irrationally worshipful of society as a god, then in either case what we will get will be either religious zealotry or socialist propaganda. Either way, human rights of the individual end up taking a back seat to the "good of the many" without anybody stopping to think how "the many" can have rights if "the one" does not.

That's why I usually vote Libertarian, depending on the candidate of course. The bottom line, don't vote the odds, vote your conscience, but at the very least get out there and vote. If enough people do the same then no matter how forsaken you may feel your political views may be, then at least there's the chance for change. If everyone just votes what they think has the best odds to win, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and your ideals always get sold short.

And this is what happens when thugs get moral license...

Yes, I'm sure we're all familiar with the justifications for claiming that this or that is justified within the contexts of "purely" academic discourse. But unfortunately, ethical arguments do influence political discourse and here we have the result:

CIA tactics given legal cover, newspaper says

Justice Department letters say interrogation rules may not bind U.S.

Sam Harris and the Fallacies of Torture

Some principles can be applied to all situations, some can't. I suppose it's very much like the laws of physics. Newtonian laws are principles that are very effective at predicting the behavior of a certain class of object in a certain frame of reference. Once you start playing with the frame of reference, then you find that you need to ask Einstein so to speak.

Ethical principles can be said to work in the same way. Within a certain frame of reference, those ethics have to work at 100% otherwise there is room to call them into question. Most ethical trickery involves covertly shifting the frame of reference between propositions and trying to curve back to your choice of alternatives when meeting challenges. This is how many creationist fanatics try to create their so-called "paradoxes" that supposedly expose the "contradictions" of science.

The ethical frame of reference requires certain axiomatic assumptions about the nature of existence, just as a physical frame of reference requires axiomatic assumptions about the nature of physical reality. When we reach a contradiction it is a sign that either our perception is wrong, our reasoning is, or maybe it's one of those pesky axioms.

I think that if you make the ethical assumption that human life is the ultimate value and that that which is most important in preserving and sustaining it in a status suitable for the existence of human beings is what we should call good, then a valid chain of reasoning will lead you eventually to the conclusion that torture is universally bad.

The keystone is in the notion of human rights and the role they play in society. Rights cannot be applied to a group of people and then ignored in individual cases. They only function when applied universally.

Of course nobody should expect that a fully guilty man should have full rights. That is one of the reasons why we have tried to develop systems of justice that try to remove doubt from the process of assigning guilt. Because with the assignation of guilt for the violation of a human's rights comes a demand for the stripping of a certain degree of rights from the guilty party.

The problem with torture is it seems to go right to the heart of what we consider "justice", how it is best to determine guilt, and what extent that guilt necessitates a stripping of rights (i.e. how far do we strip someone's rights in response to a given crime).

I think one of the reasons that we have decided as a civilized culture not to strip all rights from the guilty is that the assignation of guilt is never as certain as we would necessarily like. And this is why Harris shifts the frame of reference in his argument to 100% certainty of 100% guilt, so as eliminate any room for sympathy. With this 100% certainty, he argues that it is 100% acceptable to torture a man under such conditions.

Initially in End of Faith he also posited that that certainty need not be 100% and that the fear of torturing people in error is equivalent to what our remorse should be in the tragic loss of life encompassed in the term "collateral damage." This would be a radical shift in frame of reference from the stance that guilt was unquestionable. However it appears that he has somewhat retreated from that rationale in his "Response to Controversy" posted on his site.

The challenge, as he puts it is this:

"unless one can produce an ethical argument against torturing Osama bin Laden, one does not have an argument against the use of torture in principle."

The demand for evidence is as crucial to ethics as the demand for evidence is crucial to the battle against the ignorance of creationism. We are innocent until proven guilty. This is a standard principle upon which most of secular legal theory is based. But it is not an axiom. Supporting it is a probabilistic assumption about the nature of crime and punishment which stands in direct opposition to the use of torture.

The assumption is that it is better to let a guilty man go free than to subject an innocent man to punishment. This is an assumption which acknowledges the reality of the process of discerning guilt from innocence, something which the rush to claims of perfect certainty tries to scuttle around. But what it also claims is that the preservation of certain key rights even for guilty men is more precious than concerns for security or retribution. If a murderer is acquitted, he may kill again. But it is better that he kill again than that an innocent man be executed.

A rational ethics must be based on a rational appreciation of the way the world really is. Unfortunately, the case that Harris builds up in his attack on religion, he undermines by his rush to create artificially contrived circumstances to justify what are very clearly actions that he thinks should be morally permissible.

Harris clearly assumes that the lives of many are somehow worth more than an individual life. What he fails to explain is that if it is ethical that an individual life can be sacrificed in the pursuit of war or justice or what have you, then what is there to prevent a greater group of people being sacrificed under the same conditions? Who makes the judgment as to which parties are 100% guilty? He claims that collateral damage is as ethical as torture, but is collateral damage ethical? Or is it more simply an unfortunate accident, something which an ethical party tries to minimize or avoid as much as possible?

I despise moral relativism just as Harris does. Al Qaeda is clearly guilty of horrible crimes. Bin Laden is clearly guilty of horrible crimes. But what quality is it that enables us to stand in judgment of them? It is the quality that we know that their behavior is atrocious, that they violate human rights, that they have no concept of justice themselves, and that they assault the values of life which are fundamental to a rational peace-loving society. It is because they have actively rejected civilization that they are uncivilized. But the only thing which allows us to look down on them is because we do respect life, we do have a concept of justice and we do honor human rights. But if that were to change, and were we to adopt the policies of our enemies, then we would relinquish that moral superiority. And, in a large way, they would have won.

Bin Laden is an evil man. But to torture him would be wrong, for the very reasons that it would be wrong to torture a murder convict. Rights must apply to all human beings equally. Rights are important because they must be defended for all people unilaterally else they have no meaning at all. As soon as we start deciding who gets rights and who doesn't we sacrifice the decision making procedure that makes us able to talk about rights in the first place.

In Abu Ghraib, I'm sure that the torture victims were all believed to be 100% guilty by their captors. But what we're learning is that they weren't necessarily so. In the real world, certainty is never 100%. We could pretend that it is, and adopt the code Napoleon as our new rational standard. But I think that the very concept of human rights would desolve in that atmosphere, just as it did at Abu Ghraib.

Of course once we accept that the focus of human rights is the individual in society and that all human beings possess those rights then we cannot justify torture even in just one case. If we need to make ethical provisions for every case, then what we are talking about is not a principle at all and it would of course be impossible to disprove something in principle which is purely situational.

I acknowledge that Harris has said that he perceives Abu Ghraib to be unethical. But I find it curious that he has not explained on what grounds he can hold that belief at the same time as the belief that torture is permissible.

In order to read Harris' beliefs on the subject first-hand I recommend that you check out his book "The End of Faith" and his website here: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/