The Amoral and the Immoral

One night recently, I was watching “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and was introduced to a writer named Sam Harris who was plugging his new book, The Moral Landscape. The discussion indicated that the topic of the book is Mr. Harris’ claim that science can be used to produce or discover moral facts or principles, and should replace or supersede religion as a source of moral understanding.

My immediate response was, “Bunkum!” or some less nice words to that effect.

I haven’t read the book, nor have I read any of Mr. Harris’ previous works, though I have learned by visiting his website that he is one of those people who believe religion is bad, science is good, and the two are opposed, and that he has received praise from, among others, Richard Dawkins.

From what I read on Mr. Harris’ site, it appears that he agrees with Dr. Dawkins that religion is an unnecessary excresence on human history and we would all be much better off if it would just go away. (Dawkins, of course, has expressed the opinion (in The God Delusion) that religious belief only persists because of bad parenting, and if “we” could just stop people from propagating these erroneous beliefs, religion would indeed just go away, and we could all go forward with an ideal life in a science-ruled world. More about that later.)

I also learned from a column that Mr. Harris wrote for the Huffington Post that he is dismayed by his observation that many scientists agree with many religious believers (including me) in concluding that science simply is not equipped to deal with moral principles: It can study what people say and do about morality, but it can’t say what is or is not truly moral.

This is in fact the most serious roadblock that the pro-science crowd has found to its agenda of eliminating religious belief and basing all social, political and personal life on scientific principles. My impression – and I must reiterate that it’s based on the one interview and a fairly speedy reading of the online sources – is that Mr. Harris has written his new book precisely in order to try to knock down this obstacle and clear the way for the Golden Age of Scientific Rule.

I don’t plan to read the book itself because I think I have better things to do with my time than waste it reading something I already know is an exercise in futility. That may sound narrow-minded, but in fact it’s based on a thoroughly rational appraisal of the prospects. As it happens, there’s an airtight and surprisingly simple argument:

1. “Nature,” by which I mean the aggregate of physical data that modern science restricts itself to studying, is inherently amoral. There is no moral good or bad in the physical cause-and-effect processes that materialist scientists insist are the sum total of what the universe is. Ultimately, it’s all random.

2. “Rationality,” by which I mean in this instance the use of more-or-less-formal logic, is also inherently amoral. Logical analysis says nothing about whether a conclusion is morally good or bad, only whether that conclusion is based on a valid argument.

3. “Science,” then, if defined as the application of rationality to natural phenomena, is inherently amoral: Its objects of study and its manner of study offer neither moral content nor moral analysis  (AIAO: Amorality In, Amorality Out).

Thus, if a scientist is proposing moral principles or advocating a course of action as morally positive, he or she must be basing this proposition or advocacy on something other than science. In practice, of course, the moral principle generally is inserted into the discourse at the beginning as an assumption. (Harris seems to be assuming that a scientific morality would somehow be “more moral” than one based on religion, because science is better than religion as an understanding of reality.)

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has addressed these issues in considerable detail in Sources of the Self and has shown that the adherents of the atheistic/materialistic/secular-humanistic worldview(s) are unable to account, using their own logic, for the moral principles they espouse. Their moral imperatives exist as part of our Western cultural legacy, having entered the cultural stream from religious sources, but are treated as “self-evident” because the proponents of this view can't allow themselves to acknowledge the original religious source.

In general, what the atheist/secularist crowd espouses are the “Enlightenment” values of individual liberty and humanitarianism. And certainly there’s nothing wrong with them as values. But based on their own materialist-rationalist principles, the atheists-secularists can’t explain why these things are worth valuing.

Absent such an explanation, it becomes easy for some people to conclude that they aren’t truly worth valuing. This then allows them to proceed to behave with disregard for others’ liberty or well-being, as in Social Darwinism, Objectivism, Straussianism, etc.

Harris’ approach apparently relies at least in part on “human flourishing” as a yardstick of value, but Taylor has already shown the inadequacy — indeed, the danger — of that standard.

Obviously, how one defines “flourishing” has a major effect on what one wants to propose as a moral good. If “flourishing” means mere physical well-being, for instance, the argument must tend toward the kind of hedonistic, consumeristic society we already live in, and which so many of us find objectionable on various levels, including the environmental and the spiritual.

Which raises another objection: Obviously, if one automatically rejects religion as a moral source, one is rejecting spirituality as a moral value. So any moral system one constructs on that basis will offer no satisfaction for anyone who believes in the reality of spiritual rewards. And it will automatically denigrate any system or society that does accord value to spirituality, while overrating a system or society that ignores spiritual value or meaning and looks instead at physical well-being as a standard.

Of course, the pro-science crowd delights in detailing the many abuses that have been committed in the name of religion, and there certainly is no denying that terrible abuses have occurred, and continue to occur. But the advocates of science as a standard are far less inclined to take note of the rather unencouraging track record of science and scientists on moral issues in the relatively short time they’ve had the upper hand.

Individuals pursuing an amorally conceived science have, notoriously, placed their work at the disposal of morally dubious governments such as those of Nazi Germany and the USSR. (And one might note that the USSR was ruled according to an atheistic-materialistic ideology, which didn’t prevent it from killing as many as 60 million people (Solzhenitsyn’s estimate) in programs of collectivization, forced migration and forced labor.)

Then there are the morally dubious projects of governments regarded in the West as more legitimate, such as the recently revealed deliberate infection of 696 men and women in Guatemala with syphilis by U.S. researchers in the 1940s. Add that one to the Tuskegee experiments, the eugenics projects in which women were sterilized based upon their race and class, the CIA experiments in mind control using LSD and God knows what else, and let us not forget the atomic bomb, poison gas and biological warfare.

None of these things could have proceeded without the willing participation of scientists. What it all ultimately demonstrates is the obvious fact that the amoral includes the immoral.

No doubt, the researchers in all these projects argued that their work helped save American lives, thus serving a “greater good.” This is precisely why utilitarianism is worthless as a moral source: In the pursuit of the “greatest good for the greatest number,” everything depends on who decides what the “greatest good” is and how they decide it, and how much evil they’re willing to inflict on the lesser number. A less "scientific" view of morality might propose that inflicting horrible suffering on even one person is wrong.

Scientists go where the funding is, of course. When the funding is provided by the government, they do the work the government wants, such as creating weapons of mass destruction. Today, of course, they mostly are placing their work at the disposal of profit-seeking corporations, sometimes because that’s where the government funding (i.e., yours and my tax dollars) is being funneled. That’s one reason why the pharmaceutical industry has grown so huge.

And here is an example of amorality serving amorality. The “science” of economics — according to some of its practitioners, generally those who are viewed most favorably by large corporations — informs us that one reason governments must not try to regulate business is because doing so injects moral considerations into markets that will “flourish” best by operating unimpededly according to “nature.”

As Taylor’s work shows, modern science and the worldviews it has most strongly influenced are geared toward the control and exploitation of Nature, including human nature. And there have been many people in the past couple of centuries who sincerely believed they were part of a movement toward the overall improvement of human life through that type of manipulation. And improvements obviously have been made by some measurements, though there also have been obvious losses.

But for every selfless philanthropist or courageous existentialist (a la Camus’ Dr. Rieux, admittedly a fictional character), there have been multitudes of social-Darwinist, para-Nietzschean scoundrels and bullies whose only interest in science is determining how it can help them increase their wealth and power.

Time and again, the resistance to such people and their bogus ideologies has come from people motivated by religious belief — because it’s only because of such belief that we can arrive at a point of view that sees something better or higher than the things of this physical world.

I don’t believe religion, or religious aspiration, can be eradicated. Unlike Dr. Dawkins, I don’t think it’s a purely cultural-educational phenomenon. I think it’s a basic constituent of human nature, because the divine is a basic formative and ordering principle of reality.

But it does worry me that there are people who believe it can and ought to be eradicated, people who are involved in creating drugs and machines that can do great harm to our minds and souls, and who have considerable clout with our lawmakers and sociocultural opinion-shapers.

In the latter days of the Soviet Union, the authorities found it expedient to classify dissidents as psychologically aberrant rather than politically unorthodox, and to confine them in mental hospitals instead of labor camps. It seems to me that the biggest difference between here and there, now and then, is that in the United States we’re letting ourselves be persuaded into self-medicating ourselves into irrelevance, into letting “the system” decide what’s best for everyone.

When we live in a world where resistance to abuse or stupidity can be “diagnosed” as “oppositional defiant disorder,” we really need to think carefully about what we value and how we can know what is truly good or evil.

2B1

I’ve written a lot in this blog about my belief in the fundamental connectedness of people, of living beings in general, of things in general. And I suspect it has been a waste of time. There are only two likely reactions anyone might have to this notion at this point in history: “Duh, who didn’t know that?” or “Are you insane?”

If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.

Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.

Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.

Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.

Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.

This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:

“Know Thyself” is said to those who, because of their selves’ multiplicity, have the business of counting themselves up and learning that they do not know all of the number and kind of things they are, or do not know any one of them, not what their ruling principle is or by what they are themselves. (Enneads VI.7.41. Trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press.)

The message remains fundamental right through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, as evidenced by a statement of the alchemist Gerhard Dorn (quoted several times by Jung): “Thou wilt never make from others the One that thou seekest, except there first be made one thing of thyself.”

And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)

The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:

Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?

Certainly.

But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom. (Plato, Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.)

In today’s world, in which we are barraged 24 hours a day by stimuli from our immediate environment and even more from our expansive electronic environment; in which we imagine ourselves constantly “connected” with our friends, family and business associates by our wireless devices and other kinds of electrical umbilical cords; in which we turn our attention incessantly from one outrage to another, from the latest missing child report to the latest natural disaster to the latest celebrity scandal to the latest political uproar to the latest phony “reality” show development to the most recent “friend” update on our favorite social networking site – each one of our “interests” is just one more fragment of our soul torn off and sucked into the diffuse cloud that constitutes what we imagine to be our identity.

Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.

All Outside

I pulled out C.G. Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (volume 12 of the collected works) last week for the first time in several years. It’s a large book, and a lot of it is aimed strictly at the practicing Jungian psychologist and is fairly unintelligible. However, the opening essay, “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” is a lot more interesting than it sounds. Anyone who’s read Jung’s “Modern Man in Search of a Soul” or “The Undiscovered Self” will recognize some of the same themes. Here are some points I consider exceptionally well-put:

“Western man is held in thrall by the ‘ten thousand things;’ he sees only particulars, he is ego-bound and thing-bound, and unaware of the deep root of all being. ... The Western attitude, with its emphasis on the object, tends to fix the ideal – Christ – in its outward aspect and thus to rob it of its mysterious relation to the inner man.”

“Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the world. But if the ideal is wholly outside, then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently he is more of a fragment than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables him, quite literally, to ‘cast his sins upon Christ’ and thus evade his deepest responsibilities – which is contrary to the spirit of Christianity. ... If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing.”

“It may easily happen ... that a Christian who believes in all the sacred figures is still undeveloped and unchanged in his inmost soul because he has ‘all God outside’ and does not experience him in the soul. His deciding motives, his ruling interests and impulses, do not spring from the sphere of Christianity but from the unconscious and undeveloped psyche, which is as pagan and archaic as ever. The great events of our world as planned and executed by man do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. ... Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside – in image and in word, in Church and Bible – but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old. ...”

“The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. Christianity must indeed begin again from the very beginning if it is to meet its high educative task. So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. The man who does not know this from his own experience may be a most learned theologian, but he has no idea of religion ....”

Put to the Test

A story that came out of the Vatican a couple of days ago has left me a bit shocked. I first noticed it in a CNN crawl that said something like, “Vatican approves psychological testing for priest candidates.” A thorough and sober story from the Catholic News Service is headlined Vatican recommends some use of psychological testing in seminaries.

As that story, written by John Thavis, explains, a document released by the Vatican on Oct. 30 says “seminary candidates should undergo psychological evaluations whenever there is a suspicion of personality disturbances or serious doubts about their ability to live a celibate life.” The document, “Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood,” doesn’t sanction routine psychological testing for all seminarians; rather, it says, “the use of psychological consultation and testing [is] appropriate in ‘exceptional cases that present particular difficulties’ in seminary admission and formation,” according to Thavis.

However, during a press conference announcing the policy document, Thavis writes, “Archbishop Jean-Louis Brugues, secretary of the congregation, said that, in fact, many dioceses currently have mandatory psychological evaluations for candidates to seminaries.”

Naturally, all of this is linked to the scandal of sexual abuse by priests that has been widely reported over the past several years, and much of the coverage of this week’s announcement has assumed that the new policy is meant to stop homosexuals from being ordained. (“Vatican: Screen for possible gay priests” was the headline on the Seattle Times online story.)

That’s not what I find perplexing. Here’s where I’m having problems:

The word “psychology” is of course Greek in origin and derives from “psyche,” meaning “soul” and “logos,” meaning “word” but also, as I’ve discussed previously, “description,” “explanation,” and so on. So the literal meaning can be taken as “study of the soul.”

As we all know, the Catholic Church has held itself out for almost two millennia as the authority par excellence on the soul and matters pertaining thereto. And it has a long-established “psychology,” largely adapted – through such church fathers as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose and Augustine, and pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – from Platonism.

But while the “psychological consultation and testing” now being proposed, and the “mandatory psychological evaluations” already being practiced aren’t specified, it does sound rather like the church is now conceding that the modern materialistic-mechanistic psychiatric/psychological establishment is a better evaluator than it is of men’s souls. (Not women’s, because of course the Vatican still refuses to countenance the ordination of women.)

The Catholic Church has, for about a century now, been relatively accommodating toward science, unlike the more fundamentalist sects that, for example, deny the reality of the evolution of species by natural selection. Some of that may be a result of lingering embarrassment over its despicable treatment of Galileo and Giordano Bruno and so on. But this latest concession may be going too far.

Psychology these days pretty much has discarded the psyche. In fact, many practitioners have dropped that term and prefer to be called behaviorists. The consensus (leaving out Jungians, who are widely derided as “mystical”) seems to be that the mind is nothing but a sort of secretion of the brain, and any abnormal behaviors – the “disorders” that seem so numerous these days – can easily be fixed through chemical modification. So “psychological evaluation” consists basically of seeing which set of symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual a person matches, and treatment consists of selecting the right medication to “control” it – because no “cure” is possible.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the church shouldn’t do something to prevent pedophiles from becoming priests. I’m just saying there may be better ways to solve this problem. One rather obvious example: Until about the 12th century, priests were allowed to be married and have families; it was only with the reform movement led by Bernard of Clairvaux and others that a monastic-type celibacy was universally prescribed for parish priests. Other religions allow, and even encourage, their clergy to marry, and don’t seem to have such widespread problems with sexual misconduct.

There’s also a very long-standing system of what one might call “vetting” that might be more harmonious with the church’s mission as a spiritual organization. This system was practiced in the Greek philosophical schools and the early Christian monasteries, and it continues to be practiced today in Eastern Orthodox and Buddhist monasticism, and the Sufi schools.

In all these traditions, students or aspirants or candidates for initiation or whatever must undergo a lengthy period of what one might call “spiritual apprenticeship” under the watchful eyes of a community of aspirants who are undertaking the same struggle. The emphasis from the outset is on ethics: the cultivation of virtue and the eradication of vice; only when the school’s leaders are satisfied with the genuineness of the aspirant’s progress is he or she led to the next level of practice.

While there are still some vestiges of this tradition in Catholic monasticism (reflected to a degree in the works of Thomas Merton), the church doesn't especially encourage either its clergy or its laity to undertake this sort of inner conquest of the Self. Instead, like other Christian sects, it turns its energies, and those of its members, toward worldly affairs and outer victories.

Viewed that way, this announcement about psychological testing makes perfect sense: In a world obsessed with appearances, it gives the appearance that the church is doing something decisive about a festering problem. But from another perspective, one might conclude that the church itself is failing a test and paying the price for neglecting its own soul.