The Future of Sin

I recently read an article entitled "Once and Future Sins" in Aeon Magazine.

The link is here:

 http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/what-will-morality-look-like-100-years-hence/

Don't worry, the article is not religious, and one of the authors points out that he is a physicist, so therefore, presumably qualified to speak about the evolving nature of sin.  Rather, the authors point out how they anticipate human morality will evolve in 100 years.

This causes me to pause, and consider how I anticipate human morality will evolve in 100 years.  Don't worry, I won't get all religious on you, I will look at the question empirically and anthropologically, assuming no faith beyond common sense and respect for empirical science.

But the purpose of this exercise is that I view the Aeon article as paradigmatic of what I would call bovine progressive liberal secularism.  It embodies all the diagnostic criteria of this syndrome.

To start, empirically, historically, we have to assume that the future will, in large part, resemble the past.  That is to say, we have to start by discounting the possibility of a miracle altogether.  Please don't get me wrong, if we have a miracle, say the Second Coming of Christ, then I would imagine a drastic change in the moral condition of the human race.  But to play the prediction game, I have to presume a continuity in time between the past, the present and the future.

What can we say, in general, about the past and the present?  The first principle is that all of human history (and by inference, all human pre-history) consists in the struggle between groups over control of territory and resources.  In as much as groups are ordered under a sovereign power, we can conceive of these groups as factions, or parties, or alliances, involved in politics.  In so much as we conceive of struggle between sovereign powers, these struggles consist in wars and diplomacy, and also may include factions, parties and alliances.  I have specifically said group, and not something more specific, because there are different types of groups, social classes, ethnic groups, religious groups, economic interest groups, families, etc. 

If we desire to speak of the ethical life, we could start by understanding ethics as transcending politics, war, and the struggle between sovereign powers.  That is to say, ethics is the practical suppression of all politics, struggle and war, resulting in a kind of social stasis.  If we made this move however, we have to conclude that ethics is absent from human history, as social stasis is the great and temporary exception within history, which proves the rule.  That is, whatever our concepts of ethics or morality are, received from and embedded in cultural influences, they cannot transcend history and memory.  Under a sovereign power, and toward all those under the protection of the Sovereign, there can be a full ethical life.  In the conduct of diplomacy and warfare, between nations, there can also be ethical conduct, but in many ways more circumscribed than an ethics backed directly by the force of law.  There can be ethical considerations in warfare, for example, in the treatment of prisoners, restrictions on interrogation techniques, selection of weapons, etc.  But ethics can only occur within a territory subject to either political power or geopolitical power.  In a state of true and protracted anarchy, there can only be the wretched struggle for survival at all cost, at least beyond a narrow set of kinsmen.

With this preamble, we can consider our article, which postulates the first prediction for moral advance will be acknowledgment of the so-called "rights for future generations."  We must, I believe, consider the logical presuppositions of this statement.  First, the authors equate the invention of abstract systems of rights with human morality.  In contrast, we can consider the text of Leviticus, which everyone will acknowledge is a moral code, whether we agree with it or not.  Leviticus consists primarily of behavioral prescriptions and prohibitions.  "Do this"  or "Don't do this", as well as outlining the steps a community (or an individual) should take in the event of a transgression.  Moreover, these behavioral injunctions are primarily concerned with maintaining the purity of the group.  For example, if we look at the story of Sodom and Gemorrah, God promises to spare the city if only 10 good men remain.  If there are a sufficient number of good people to be found, the remainder will be spared, notwithstanding their wickedness.  Likewise, if God discovers only 9 good men in the city, these men are toast, notwithstanding their virtue.  The group rises and falls as a group, and there is no question of anyone simply "doing their own thing".  There are no individual rights, there are only individual duties, in the first instance to God, and in the second instance, to one's fellow creatures.  This is the paradigm of morality 1.0.

The author notes:

Currently, only people alive now can claim rights.  But just as we have extended our circle of moral concern among the living, so it can be extended in time.  The problem is clear:  we often make decisions that will have impacts on people far into the future --such as producing nuclear waste that will remain toxic for millions of years -- yet those future people are not here to stand up for themselves.

Once again, let's unpack the assumptions.  Morality consists in some unspecified "we" extending its "circle of moral concern" and acknowledging the unclaimed claims of ungenerated generations.   Now lets consider the historical and cultural context of rights, that is to say, legal rights.  What is a legal right?  A legal right is a claim made on behalf of a person, generally in the context of a legal dispute, although claims of rights can also be bandied about in the process of crafting legislation or interpreting statutes toward the creation of executive regulations.  Here we can discern a parallel to the story of Sodom found at Genesis, Chapter 18.  In this chapter, God reveals his intention to destroy Sodom on account of its wickedness to Abraham, which perhaps parallels humanities current disregard for the well-being of future generations.  Abraham's response consists in a question to God, whether God is willing to destroy both the righteous and the wicked.  Abraham asks God whether God is willing to destroy the city if 50 righteous citizens can be found in the city.  In some sense, Abraham makes a claim of rights on behalf of the righteous before God, asking whether God ought to destroy them.

At the same time, there is a dis-analogy between our modern futurist and Abraham.  Abraham makes a claim of right on behalf of the right-eous, that is, those human beings who have distinguished themselves from their fellows on account of their moral virtue.  Rights belong only to those who deserve them in this view, not to all, the wicked deserve what they get.  They can only be spared by living in relation to the virtuous.  The circle of concern can never be extended directly to the wicked, only indirectly.  Yet we should note that our futurist authors make a similar claim about the future generations, comparing their lot to that of animals and small children.  Surely these future generations will be righteous, or at least, have the opportunity to be righteous?  But there is another, more important, dis-analogy between Abraham and our futurist authors.  God is God over all.  Any historically constituted human sovereign is not sovereign over all, and any claim of right can only be relative to a particular and historically embedded system of law.  Likewise, Abraham asks God to spare the City of Sodom.  The futurists authors ask "we" ("us"?) to acknowledge the rights of future generations.  The "we" can only be a historically constituted power (or powers), and the "rights" can only be expressed in positive laws promulgated by States.  Rather than propose a radical new morality, the author seems to be giving sanction to the creation of a whole new system of bureaucracy.  Moreover, since the holders of these rights have no means of speaking for themselves, the Sovereign will by necessity be forced to put words in their mouth.  Thus, bureaucracy grounded in an indefinite system of laws and rules for the living interpreted by an autonomous system of power in the purported interest of an indefinite and unformed collection of people.  A blank check for totalitarianism if you will.  God spare us!

We should add that God is not ultimately moral, at least as depicted in the Old Testament.  We say God is omnibenevolent, but this is tantamount to saying that by definition, what God does is good.  In contrast, human behavior, at least traditionally understood, can be moral, in that morality consists in living in conformity with the Will of God.  God may manifest mercy toward Sodom, in the sense that he ultimately bargains with Abraham not to destroy Sodom if ten good people remain, but this does not make God good, it manifests God's goodness.  If God had refused to bargain with Abraham, or if he had set the bar to 5 people, or one person, he would still be good--by definition.  Moreover, God could have done any of these things, as he had the power to do these things--by definition.  God is good, and so God does not become good by undertaking some action, or refusing to take some action.  Although I am talking a lot about God, the point connects to the rights of future generations.  If a sovereign power adopts some bureaucratic procedures that artificially include the interests of future generations, it is hard to conceive of how this can be a good act.  If one believes in God, then one can judge the sovereign in terms of its conformity to God's will.  But if one does not believe in God, then clearly whatever law the state enacts, it is by definition good.  For this reason, the legitimacy of modern governments is generally proposed on the basis of procedural (e.g. democratic), not substantive grounds.  This legitimation invariably gets fudged a bit, with considerations of the "spirit" of the people (the Constitution) and the notion that the letter may be overcome by the "spirit" of the law.  But the modern theorist must be very careful here, because such thinking teeters on the brink of acknowledging an order beyond simply the fact of the given (or that the given, by virtue of the gift, presupposes a giver).  The bottom line, if we adopt the naturalist game, is that the substantive result of any political body, provided it follows the procedural rules, is good, regardless of whether it enhances or shrinks the circle of "moral concern".  (We could examine the legitimacy of proceduralist theories of legitimacy, but that is beyond our scope.)

To summarize, the concept of a "right" is fundamentally an amoral concept.  In our system of law, the righteous and the wicked are both entitled to the same legal rights.  For example, a righteous person and a wicked person are both entitled to the same rights if they file a claim for disability benefits, or if they are accused of a crime.  If a democratically elected Government confiscates 10% of the real estate holdings of all estates over 1,000 acres in the name of the rights of future generations, and conserves them for the benefit of future generations, this cannot be a moral act.   It could only be moral with respect to a legitimate standard of morality, and what standard could exist independently of the State itself?  Certainly not the subjects, as they form the body of the State.

In contrast to the right, there is the concept of duty, which is distinct from a right.  First, right derives its meaning specifically from a legal context.  To speak of a right that transcends positive law is to conceive of righteousness before an absolute sovereign.  This kind of righteousness is precisely the kind of thing that we can't legislate, if it exists at all, it must be revealed from God.  On the other hand, a duty is just something we owe another person.  There can be legal duties, and the violation of legal duties can give rise to legal remedies, but a duty can exist independent of positive law and a positive sovereign, and therefore, in the abstract, independent of anthropomorphic theological presupposition.  On the other hand, the concept of duty cannot be divorced from the concept of customs or tradition, that is, historically received norms of behavior.  People all over the world act out of a sense of duty, but the concrete obligations are determined by particular circumstances and customs.  Is the groom's family or the bride's family expected to pay the dowry, for example?  If we understand the origins of duties, we can say that the the primary duty is to carry on those customs and traditions we have inherited from our ancestors.  Without tradition, we have no way of concretely manifesting the felt sense of obligation we feel as living, thinking, and breathing human beings.   Our lives, our language, our culture, are all given to us, without asking, and, out of gratitude, it falls on us to obey and transmit these forms of life to future generations.  Duty in this sense operates outside or alongside the state.  This is not to suggest that reform or modification of customs should never take place, but that while there can be evolution in customs, there can never be revolution.  One can be colonized or enslaved by another group (witness the African slaves), and have one's customs wiped out and destroyed, and replaced by other customs, but this is not evolution, it is cultural genocide.

From the standpoint of duty, it is self-evident that we owe both a duty to past generations, and a duty to future generations, and that our role here on Earth is stewardship, and conservation, not extraction and consumption.  If there is going to be a moral transformation, it will consist in a return of our attention to our duties as human beings, and a rejection of a rights-based framework, which is rooted in the rights of extraction and the rights of consumption.

Our futurist authors' second "moral advance" consists of expanding our circle of concern to include the "rights" of animals.  As the authors note:

. . . It is no longer in doubt that non-human animals feel pain and indeed many more complex emotions too. . . To take account of the interests only of humans and not other animals is therefore increasingly regarded as speciesism--an unjustified discrimination akin to racism or sexism.

As I noted previously, the notion of rights can only be relative to a positive, constituted system of power.  Second, from the standpoint of right (or righteousness), what the positive, constituted system of power does is by definition right (at least if it accords with our positive, democratic procedures for doing so).  Embedded in the authors vision of morality is a vision of moral purity that can be distinguished from that of the ancient Israelites, namely, purity through inclusiveness.  The ancient Israelites' ethos was based primarily on exclusiveness, and mingling with foreigners invariably led to mingling with foreign gods and abandonment of the God of Israel and his Covenant.  In contrast, a subsequent sect, the Christians, proclaimed a Gospel of inclusiveness, whereby all the Nations of the world could be united under the God of Israel.  Naturally, there developed a historical tension between an inclusive Christianity and the Jews of the Diaspora, who clung to their exclusive claims.  In the age of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment, formerly Christian Europe discovered that even Christianity was too exclusive, and insisted on a new, natural religion that incorporated all of mankind, which ultimately became humankind, and now extends perhaps to vertebrates.  Just as Christian inclusiveness gave Christians a causa belli against the Jewish people, today, post-Modern humanism gives Humanists a causa belli against all races, nationalities, creeds, and religions who seek to preserve their own distinct cultural identities.  Just as Christianity took a diverse lot of pagan peoples, eradicated or absorbed most of their distinct ethnic customs, and homogenized them into Christendom, today humanism seeks to take the diverse peoples from around the globe, wipe out all distinction, and order them all beneath the Golden Arches of McDonalds.  Men must become women, and women must become men.  Jews must become Christians, and Christians must become Jews.  Muslims must become Buddhists, and Buddhists must become Muslims.  Man must become an animal, and an animal must become man.  Human beings must become interchangeable parts, like a collection of widgets that have been painted different colors, but any one of which can make the machine run.  In this order, the human being is reduced from the unique condition of personhood to become a fungible and utilitarian product.  One can gaze at any annual report from a Fortune 500 Company, and view the happy smiling pictures of people of diverse backgrounds, who on the surface look different, but on the inside are all the same, as inside the hearts of each and every person is a smiling avatar of Ronald McDonald, sitting cross-legged, at peace, reciting positive motivational slogans.  Ronald has been reading the latest book of Sam Harris on meditation it seems!  It is in this second prediction that I agree with our futurist authors, the authors present a possible alternative for the future of the human species, a Brave New World, without history, without memory, without difference, no longer able to distinguish itself from the beasts of the Earth.  Yet, when this post-modern animal farm is complete, will it signal the end of slaughter?  Can we expect greater mercy from the pigs than we do from the farmers?   

The third prediction calls, unsurprisingly, for world government.  Not a federation of diverse states, or an alliance of world powers to work together to solve global issues.  Our futurists authors put it this way:

. . . everyone should have the same rights to healthcare, welfare, etc., not just regardless of where they come from, but also regardless of where they are.

There will be no allowances for cultural differences, historical differences, local customs, but rather, a total complete and uniform homogenization of everyone in the world under one system of law.  A Borg World Nation.  As the author notes:

Effective action will require nations to give  up more of their sovereignty to supranational unions.  This too will face fierce resistance.  But eventually our descendants will regard themselves as global citizens--and will be appalled that we let 19,000 children every day die from preventable, poverty-related causes.

To our authors, nothing short of realizing the apocalyptic vision of International Communism will suffice.  Note that I presume that the authors would not hold up Stalinist Russia as the particularized version of their ideal for the International Promised Land.  But as a historical fact, Stalinist Russia did guarantee the same rights to healthcare, welfare, etc., that the authors support.  Moreover, as far as the means of achieving the Communist vision for the world, Stalinist Russia cannot be faulted for taking half measures, or blanching in the face of "fierce resistance".  The fact is that the end of equality was the motivation driving the Communist system, and Communism had no restraint with respect to the choice of means with which it pursued its goal.  Having both a clear end, and virtually unlimited means, if Communism can ever be done, Stalin did it.  It is unclear how our authors envision this utopian project resulting in anything other than another iteration of the Soviet Union.

This moral vision of the authors, in its utopian quality, hides the real goal of this line of thinking:  the subjugation of all under a totalizing and centralizing power:  "One ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the Darkness Bind them."  We can study Communist morality, and the Communist end game, in works such as the Gulag Archipelego by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and we can ask ourselves, does the Gulag represent our liberation or our slavery?  But the lesson is clear: man's purpose here on Earth is to serve, and the one who does not serve God must fashion for himself a God.  We can see clearly the connection between the faith in progress, and atheism.  Because we refuse to acknowledge Heaven, we must have faith in our on-going capacity to create a Heaven on Earth.  Without this faith in the future coming, we would surely die.  Yet we fail to note the recurring fact that every god assembled by human hands eventually comes to demand blood, preferably the blood of the first born, innocent and without blemish.

Yet there will be no world government, as we know very clearly from Genesis 11.  God has divided humanity by giving each nation its own tongue.  The nations of humanity speak different languages, have different religions, different customs, different world-views, and different and incommensurable value systems.  They can only be made one through brutality and slavery, and the scope and depth of brutality necessary to create conditions of world servitude would ultimately rip the world into two.  Universal government and universal rights may be a banner which can justify a world war, but the result will not be global hegemony for any world power.

Our last moral prediction, unsurprisingly, is "healing criminals".  As our futurists authors note:

. . . But in 100 years, no one will believe we have an absolutely free will and therefore that anyone chooses to be a criminal.  Indeed, there is evidence we lock up those who are least responsible for their decisions -- those with the least capacity for self-control, those who suffer from addictions, or who are mentally ill.

We can count on our liberal progressive secular to give us paradigmatic categorical errors and sloppy thinking.  We can consider a person who predicts the result of a future coin toss.  In as much as they are asked to predict the result of the coin flip, they can only predict heads, tails, or that the coin miraculously totters on its side.  Yet we would maintain that they are free to predict any result, and that their prediction is uninfluenced by coercion.  They choose heads, just as a criminal chooses crime.  (Just because we refuse to believe that people could choose evil, it does not negate the fact that many do.)  We live in an age of myopia, with one model of how things must be: a mechanism.  What does not fit into a mechanism becomes (or must be, a priori): random.  Thus, human behavior is either a mechanism, or a mechanism plus a random number generator, ergo, there is no free will.  Yet our language and our system of law and our systems of moralities all presuppose that the human being is a moral agent, a doer, and that the human body is a passivity, something that is acted upon (or manifests) the agent.  If there is no free will, then the jury, and the judge, and the executioner can no more help themselves from killing the poor, misguided youth than the youth can help committing act of mayhem.  Denying free will does not diminish the moral responsibility of criminals, it abolishes moral agency altogether.  For example, the organism called Hitler did not kill millions of Jews in Europe, the Big Bang, through a series of intermediate causes, killed millions of Jews in Europe.  Hitler and Martin Luther King, Jr. are just two apparent manifestations of the first cosmic cause rippling through the multiverse (with perhaps millions of intervening quantum mechanical coin flips).

If we are going to postulate moral agency, then it strikes me that those with the least capacity for its exercise should be subjected to the greatest possible penalty.  The weaker the will, the greater the threat needs to be to move the will.  (This principle also relates to the utility of the doctrine of hell.)  If we acknowledge that those that are possessed by an anti-social compulsion are by nature weak-willed (or something of the sort), then all the more important it is to threaten them with punishment, the better to get through to them.  On the other hand, if free will is an illusion as "science" (e.g. sloppy interpretations of empirical data) tells us, then you might as well go massacre school children, after all, the Big Bang made you do it.

But there is a greater point here, beyond a theory of punishment.  The point is about the transition from a system based on individual accountability for voluntary conduct, to a system of sorting human beings by type.  Criminal law punishes kinds of acts.  The mental health system "helps" or "treats" kinds of persons, not based on behaviors but on behavioral dispositions.  This is not to knock the mental health system, which continues to assemble a new and improved system of placebos which may ultimately begin to rival the skills of a good prehistoric witch doctor.  After all, a good witch doctor recognizes that the only thing that can overcome a moral agent is a more powerful moral agent.  Thus, healing consists in exorcizing the unwanted influences and purifying the person so that they may be more fully what they are.  What were these obstacles for the Dessert Fathers?  Powers such as gluttony, lust, wrath, sloth, greed, and the like.  In contrast, the modern mental health worker tries to conceive of a car without a driver, and fix the performance of the car by messing with the engine.  It assures us no driver can exist because there is a clear correlation between the performance of the engine and the performance of the car.  Moreover, what can the driver do as the direction and speed of the car is explained by the working of the mechanism?

So I have addressed the futurist authors predictions regarding the future of morality.  What are my predictions?

As I have discussed previously, there is a distinct difference between secular liberals and religious traditionalists, namely, secular liberals reproduce below national norms, while religious traditionalists have on average one child above national norms.  In one generation, these differences do not amount to any significance.  However, in the course of three or four generations, the demographic impact is enormous. If current conditions continue, experts expect that American society will evolve from a secular liberal order to a pluralistic society in which a variety of traditional religious groups predominate.  Best estimates suggest the inversion point will occur in 2050:

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/18824/demographic_projections_predict_fundamentalist_populations_surpassing_secular_counterparts.html

The demographic overtaking in 2050 will become a demographic rout by 2115.  So my best guess is that humanity's morality in 100 years of the future will more closely resemble human morality in 1615, than either contemporary morality, or what our futurists authors predict.  Progress at last?