— Note from the editor: I’m sorry I haven’t posted in around two weeks. I’m especially sorry to paying subscribers. I’ve been out with a ghastly just infernal head-cold. Not that I haven’t been writing, I’ve been working on a couple things. Here is one. Read this is as more of a continuation of my last blog post on Ayan’s conversion to Christianity, and the trendy idea, moreover, that we should ideologically retreat into Christianity to save Western civilization from the miasmas of Wokeness and radical Islam. I would advise returning to that earlier post if you have no idea what I’m talking about; also read Ayan’s Unherd op-ed. Though my unbelief prejudices my analysis without a doubt, I hope to illuminate why the idea is wrong on the merits. Thanks for your patience. In general, I try to write at least one high-quality essay a week. But I consider myself to be doing my job, at any rate, if I’m pumping out shorter commentary every two or three days. I’ve gone longer than a week before without posting. But this is the longest I’ve gone yet. I’m very sorry. You’re not paying for your pundit to go AWOL. I didn’t just forget to write. I hope you will enjoy my thoughts lately here and over the next few days: on Christianity; why we must regard the Palestinians as no more important than any casualty of war, how Milei’s victory in Argentina was a victory for neoliberalism, and there’s a longer piece I have in the works on the fairly shitty outlook on the global economy that it seems like I’m never going to finish. But I can’t remember when I last wrote a word on anything related to macroeconomics since at least as far back as the Gaza war. Thus, though it’s an interesting subject by itself, I feel the more obligated to check in on the economic situation— higher-for-longer interest rates, inflation, supply shocks, recession indicators, corporate debt and corporate default, student loan payments, the treasury market, bond yields, insane deficits, the uncertain future of the dollar and American credit, all that heartening stuff. So back to sparring with you, my neoliberals, in the comments.
— Jay
“But among the forces cultivated by morality was truthfulness: this eventually turned against morality, discovered its teleology, its partial perspective—and now the recognition of this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of shedding becomes a stimulant. Now we discover in ourselves needs implanted by centuries of moral interpretation— needs that now appear to us as needs for untruth; on the other hand, the value for which we endure life seems to hinge on these needs. This antagonism—not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed any longer to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves—results in a process of dissolution.” — Friedrich Nietzsche from The Will to Power in the chapter on “European Nihilism.”
Playing devil’s advocate, someone on Substack asked me with what would I replace the Christian belief system I judged to have failed?
I confessed I couldn’t give him a straight answer. The reason is, since I abominate belief systems—indeed that’s partially why I abhor Christianity—I would not “replace” any failed system no matter what its contents were. Any system of thought or doctrine that problematizes the fundamental chaos of human existence, and willfully, crudely reduces life to a simplistic reductive prescription that is a negation of reality to affirm one’s blind, incurious desperate faith in a “beyond” or a “God” is unworthy of us; or it’s unworthy of me at least. I can’t speak for all humanity, not least my interlocutor who harbors a deterministic view that people are biologically programmed to nurture religious faith in a divinity of some kind.
In hindsight though, what I would say is ideally, I would like people to renounce absurdities—or what I consider absurdities: Christianity and religion in general, also statism, as in socialism and fascism, communism, etc.— that is to say, all religion, traditional (Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism and Taoism) and secular (wokeness, Monday Night Football, and Donald Trump). Because goddamn it, they each and all amount to the same stupid thing. For good measure, you might throw quasireligious philosophical movements in there too—mysticism, romanticism, existentialism, humanitarianism, stoicism, idealism, astrology, etc. etc.
Ideally I would like to cast every goddamn ism— every cultish political ideology and mindless religion—onto the ash heap of history.
But the world is not ideal.
And I understand my challenge to renounce absurdities is a tall order. It is hard enough for me to resist my own decadence in the form of a romantic, one might say, maximalist proneness to grandiosity, the product of a character riven as it is with irreconcilable dualities. To be completely honest, I am afraid our absurdities, prejudices, faiths, and superstitions, are ineradicable features of our inherently frail—and weakness does not make blessed—humanity that cannot resist postulating metaphysical systems, dialectics, and teleologies, religious or secular, whatever. And no matter how ridiculous abhorrent, tyrannical, slavish, petty and contemptible it is, I concede, not unlike many Christians and nonreligious students of the human condition in general, that maybe there is, terrible though I for one consider it that I can’t overstate—a perennial awful human hunger to sacrifice oneself and/or others to a toxic value alleged greater than oneself. The difference between Christians and myself, though, is that I don’t consider that a good thing.
However, leaving aside the question whether we can ever reverse this instinct—it is my conviction that all man’s social discontents and political ills, besides the West’s crisis, stems from an inability or unwillingness for the individual to acknowledge oneself as the ultimate arbiter of value, the beginning and the end of all her anthropocentric frameworks and understandings for conceptualizing, knowing and judging the world. But, by recognizing the hard and fast limits to human knowledge—for example, if only we could stop speculating and conjecturing and accept (1.) that life does not have an objective meaning or value, and (2.) that, for all intents and purposes, life is meaningless, and (3.) accept that there is no higher law neither of God or nature, or science (or, “the science”), none outside the realm of human determination, which is condemned, in all events, to falsify reality, making coincidentally all our knowledge and discoveries falsifications—then I think we might have our best chance, in principle, of humanely ordering our affairs with the minimum of tribal identitarian maliciousness and inter-ethnic bloodshed.
Frankly although I am not a Randian, I think Ayn Rand is much more ethically instructive than Jesus or the Buddha or Confucius or Muhammad, by way of analogy. Rather I consider art, literature and philosophy—knowledge and beauty, I guess, that is to say, aesthetic as opposed to moral values, to be the most, if not the only, life-affirming things of all man’s diversions; though the nonmoral implications of that way of thinking assuredly offends the religious sensibility. That being said, because out of my 99 subscribers I suppose at least some of them are bound to be religious, let me say again I mean no offense with this essay and for, what it’s worth, to be sure, I am not one of those evangelists for atheism, like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, who makes it his life’s mission to shatter your faith.
And as a conservative and a pluralist, I have the deepest respect for the principle of religious liberty. Actually my consideration for religious freedom runs so deep and goes so far that I think it should be expanded in America such that the Supreme Court should overturn Obergefell, not least because it has no basis in the original intent of the constitution, giving red-state legislatures the constitutional liberty to put gay marriage to a vote. But if my card-carrying unbelief on this blog nonetheless can’t help but wring out your Christian tears of pity and worry over the state of my soul, you may say a prayer for me if you like.
For me Rachmaninoff, for example, offers plenty reason to live without either God existing or life having an objective purpose
Defending the social utility of Christianity, my interlocutor on Substack insinuated that my moral egoism equated to moral nihilism, which by implication is the logical “precursor” of Nazism, he added. This is the charge—I think hilariously—to which those of us who both reject God and, in the same gesture, oppose any replacement values system, frequently open ourselves up.
Not that his logic is wrong— not when you consider that the Nazis were godless atheists and nihilists who rejected the Christian ethics of compassion to boot. For good reason, the Nazis remain a powerful symbol in the Western imagination of the idea that, unless one believes in some higher ethical value, then everything morally is permitted. To me technically this is an absurd fallacy, but I do not think it is not altogether a weak argument that historical precedent obligates us to give this idea its due: We consider atrocity and mayhem somehow an inevitable law of nature as soon as we fail to hold things sacred. I’m just about positive this is the logic in a nutshell of Ayan’s conversion.
In the wake of the Pro-Hamas protests, which represent a resurgence of antisemitism not actually seen in the West since the Nazi regime, I have seen people concurrently quoting Ivan Karamazov from The Brothers Karmazov. Ivan’s rigorous unbelief and his pessimism is so deep that it leads him to morally condemn belief in God because Christianity, the hope for redemption, would justify and sanction the cruelties of God’s creation that he thinks it is one’s moral duty to implore. In his incredible dialogue a hundred or two hundred pages into the novel, he tells his brother Alyosha, an aspiring monk, that he cannot accept the world, not if it permits the tears of a single child. No Christian heaven could possibly be worth the death-sentence, the misdeed, of our lives. And he expresses a feeling that he would have preferred never to have been born, saying specifically that he would like to return to God “the ticket.”
As Ivan underscores the horrors of a disordered world of senseless cruelty, insofar as he emphasizes God’s complicity in the tragedy of our lives, it’s ironic to me that people on the internet are quoting Ivan to justify a turn to Christianity out of ontological despair, but nominally from fear of the supposedly morally inferior religion of Islam, to say nothing of Jihadi wokeism/ cultural Marxism, so to speak. What I don’t understand, and obviously neither would Ivan, is if everything is permitted, how does it follow that Christianity is off the hook then from the dreadful calculus of man’s self-deluding chimeras? People have been quoting GK Chesterton too, to the effect that failing to believe in one thing inexorably results in the license to believe in anything.
While it may be true that we’re susceptible to believing something no matter what, that hardly makes it correct to submit to God. My argument is, whether you’re an Islamist or a Christian or a wokeist, what’s the difference really? And if we’re somehow programmed to worship something (and I don’t even think that’s true), should we aspire to be no better than zombies then and pick our poison— I mean what in the hell are people, these fatalists suggesting? If we’re all religious creatures, what I don’t understand is why it is so comforting to people who think, through some Hobbesian logic, we should voluntarily commit intellectual suicide to defend civilization— should we not rather be distraught at how damn grim, besides preposterous, this conclusion is that to save our Enlightenment inheritance we should turn against the Enlightenment, against reason?
My interlocuter made the case that Christianity, if it wasn’t perfect, was at least less bad than Islam. Is it though? After the Spanish inquisition, after the 30 Years War, after the Salem Witch Trials, after the fact that Vladimir Putin uses Russian Orthodox Christianity to justify his authoritarian state-building and his genocide in Ukraine?
Perhaps you want to argue that in the West, Christianity is less excessive and more reformed. Well I would point you to the provisional IRA whose party Sinn Fein, led by Mary Lou Mcdougal, has rallied to the Palestinian cause against Israel. If there is anything, this certainly doesn’t bode well for the idea that Christianity is our defense against radical Islam when a Roman Catholic terror group uhhh… upholds the cause of radical Islamists.
When I highlight the depravities committed in the name of God or any religion for that matter, many religious people will rebut that extremists are misinterpreting the real tenets of the faith. But there are as many Islamists who will say that Islam is basically a peaceful religion as Christians will say the same of Christianity. People will say Vladimir Putin does not represent the Russian Orthodox faith. Islamists will say Hamas does not speak for Islam.
Well, the Protestants claimed the Catholic church misunderstood and perverted the word of God, Who every individual could access directly vis a viz the Bible—and you can’t overstate how the printing press at the time helped to spread this idea—then these same supposedly more reformed Christians, who sought a more original connection with God than the pope could offer, went on to indiscriminately execute random people considered “witches” practicing “witchcraft.” In addition to the woke movement whose Protestant roots I traced in my earlier post, I would argue this same strain of Protestant religious fanaticism animates the Qanon movement today, who believe the Democratic party is a giant cabal of pedophiles from whom Donald Trump, the contemporary version of the messiah, is the only one who can save us. Indeed Trump arguably panders to the Protestant belief in armageddon when he talks of 2024 being the “final battle.” It is no coincidence he first used that phrase at a rally in Waco Texas on the anniversary of the Waco siege, where a commune of radicalized Christians took up arms against the government.
In this sense, a Christianity neither mediated by Putin nor the Pope, led people directly to storm the Capitol. Indeed there is no such thing as an authentic way or a right way to interpret a religious text. When I hear someone say Islam is a peaceful religion and Hamas doesn’t speak for Muslims, I think: that’s what they all say. To be sure, even when religious people commit unspeakable acts of violence, they consider themselves to be peaceful virtuous people— I am sure that just as many Marxists would say they’re not Stalinists or Maoists, who think you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, as Qanon evangelical Christians would say no, they wouldn’t commit the same atrocities that were committed during the Thirty Years War or the Witch Trials. And Hamas is certainly convinced of their own basic goodness. As long as you do it for God or Allah, or Donald Trump, it doesn’t matter what you do then, does it? For people who like quoting Ivan Karamazov, if they have even read the novel, I would point them to the part where Ivan tells the story of the Grand Inquisitor, who considers it his humane duty to murder unbelievers to reward Christians for their faith. How about that for the moral rationale for religion?
I would laugh if I weren’t so anguished with the stupidity of people on Substack, let alone Ayan Hirsi Ali, who think more religion is the solution to the moral decay of modern society. Hell, our decay is religious in nature! For Christian converts like Ayan, they are responding to the fires of wokeism and radical Islam by recommending gasoline to put them out.
— Jay
Nice article! Whoever this interlocutor is, he or she sure sounds smart. 😉
How timely, too. I was going to respond to our latest discussion--apologies, life got busy--and comment on the nihilistic element I detected. But after reading this piece, I realize you aren’t exactly a nihilist.
I think, instead, you are a a realist (existence is meaningless) with over tones of unchecked optimism, which may verge on Utopianism (escaping our human limitations is a mere matter of choice). This, I believe, is an untenable tension in your worldview that hasn’t been ironed out yet.
Here is where I noticed it:
“However, leaving aside the question whether we can ever reverse this instinct—it is my conviction that all man’s social discontents and political ills, besides the West’s crisis, stems from an inability or unwillingness for the individual to acknowledge oneself as the ultimate arbiter of value, the beginning and the end of all her anthropocentric frameworks and understandings for conceptualizing, knowing and judging the world.”
You essentially argue, as Sam Harris does, that each individual should use his or her reason to construct a completely bespoke ethical and moral system of belief. But what you (and Harris) miss is that this inevitably leads to conflict. When people are free to value whatever they want, most of the time they value themselves. (This is the moral of the Satan character in Christianity -- a figure who refuses to put God at the center of his life and instead worships himself.)
This poses a practical problem: If a person constructs a values (belief) system where his own desires take precedent over the desires of everyone else, and he can rationalize any means of achieving those desires, as people have proven capable of doing, AND everyone else is doing the exact same thing, then we descend into total war.
Everyone against everyone else.
When you consider that, it seems belief systems (Christianity, Islam, Communism, a cult, a business organization..) serve the function of reducing the number competing desires to a manageable amount.
Yes Christians are always at war with Muslims, but a war with two competing sides is better than a war with 8 billion competing sides.
You can even imagine that belief systems consolidating individuals into groups is an evolved strategy to conflict.
If it’s every man for himself, everyone is quite weak and vulnerable. But whoever has the ability to be pro-social and put the group’s interest above their own can form alliances and has a big numbers advantage over those individuals who are anti-social and preclude themselves from creating alliances by placing their desires above everyone else’s.
Basically, belief systems are an evolved mechanism for getting large groups of people pointed in the same direction.
Jonathan Haidt lays this out in greater detail in his bestseller, The Righteous Mind. (His academic work was the basis of my own thesis. Hence the heavy influence.)
I think he is right that there is a “Rationalists Delusion”. I’ll call it the Rationalist Paradox to be less inflammatory.
And the paradox is this: If Rationalists were truly rational, they would be forced to accept that human beings are inherently irrational creatures.
Presumably a rationalist would use empirical data to inform his or her rationale. All the empirical data suggests that human beings engage in irrational behavior quite regularly. (Why else would we need a movement dedicated to encouraging people to be rational if this were not the case?) Therefore, a true Rationalist, being purely rational, should accept that human beings are irrational creatures by nature.
But often, as you and others have, Rationalist simply resort to saying “Well people *should* be more rational” even though in reality people *are* not.
This is wishful--dare I say, irrational--thinking; not a pragmatic plan for getting people to act more rationally.
My point about belief systems is that, if one has made the rational choice to accept that human beings are irrational, and is considering practical methods for minimizing anti-social behavior, then one must also grapple with the fact that certain irrational belief systems produce better outcomes than others. (Harris also acknowledges this last point, but never addresses the contradiction it creates with his belief that humans can create bespoke belief systems.)
I’m going to write up something more comprehensive on the “Rationalist Paradox”. I hope you’ll offer your thoughts on it.
No, you’re misunderstanding my egoism if you see in it a morality. It’s more of a meta-ethic. And just because I think the world ends with us, doesn’t mean I think that gives us the right to do with it whatever we will. I’m not sure if that’s what you’re saying, but it sounds like it. In that case you’re misconstruing my ethics. As I said, I am not a Randian, we are not free to do what we want, accountable only to ourselves. I don’t count the “self” or one’s “freedom” any more or less a delusion than God or the “soul.” But I think within the bounds of reason and good taste, you are at liberty to and you should live as you please. This egoistic unChristian principle that denotes an ethics, which is less of a morality than an aesthetic attitude to morals, is the basis of my classical liberal politics. You called me a realist but technically, in philosophy I am what’s called an antirealist about value, I think; or a “moral antirealist.” You can look this up. An antirealist is one who doesn’t believe in an objective reality or that what we know of reality describes an objective or absolute truth. If nothing is objective, nothing is subjective either, because a subject implies an object and vice versa. Now this doesn’t mean I don’t think the human anthropocentric idea of “objective reality” serves no purpose. I esteem the idea of objectivity highly along with the empirical sciences. But what we discover we do not reveal, because there is an infinite amount of interpretations, none of them being morally equal of course-- That would be relativism and nihilism. No: if everything is interpretation, then everything has different and unequal values. And the art of life is to be a good judge of this diversity of unequal values.