A Short Attempt at an Atheist Teleology

One of the most persistently recurring questions aimed at atheists by religious of all kinds is how it is possible to reconcile the moral teleology of the world, which the religious hold for self-evident, with the absence of a divine rule to compare behavior to and control behavior with. The religious ask: how is it possible for you to be in any way morally constrained, since for you there is no divine teleology to give an imprimatur to your behavior, beforehand or afterwards? What purpose has your life and what guides behavior when there is no beacon and no horizon?

These are legitimate questions, and perhaps the least easily answered critique of atheism, or at least with the least easily convincing answer, since all disagree on the correct answer to this. After all, secular philosophies are manifold and even formerly religious philosophies can sometimes be applied in secularized form, not to mention the general eclecticism of the average man, be he religious or not. Obviously I would not pretend to know the ultimate answer to this question, and not only because its very nature seems to prevent a definitive answer. But I can give an outline of a theory of practical teleology that I find valuable.

First it must be established that such a teleology cannot come from nature. The idea that one can get an ought from an is, also known as the natural fallacy, has been often enough refuted now to need no further consideration. Additionally, the material circumstances of nature give no indication of any teleology at all, not even a Darwinist one; natural sciences cannot give it to us, since they can merely describe, not prescribe. In fact any such prescriptive content would immediately rule it out as scientific in nature. Since the atheist position applies this reasoning to the 'supernatural' also, any source of teleology from that kind must obviously also be discarded. From what, then, can the teleology come? The only source that is left to us is humanity itself.

Now in humanity we must make the distinction between humanity as a whole, i.e. the collective of human societies and the social rules that bind them, and humanity as a merely collective term for the aggregate of individuals that make up our species. The question is which of these is better suited to provide us the teleology. Taking the societal level seems to provide us with a very unstable basis for a practical teleology, since it makes us in the first place dependent on the actions and ideals of others to constitute a teleology for ourselves. How can what I must practically consider my ideal goal be determined by what others consider it? Not even a radical altruism can lead to such an outcome, since it would merely make that altruism my own teleology which is then in my lifestyle applied to others.

A different objection is the historical nature of society. Society as a concept is basically a way of together-living of a given people, country or population group of any kind, as described in terms of their position in the grand aggregate history of the various sub-histories of all aspects of human life and knowledge. To make this clearer: we describe a society in terms of its own scientific level, of its culture, of its mode of production, of its politics, of its military-strategic position in the world even, and so on. But how can we describe each of those things in terms that are more than just a tautological summing-up of their component parts? We do so by describing what their history was, how they came into being, because this description grants understanding of the meaning and potency of their current composition, and it implies the direction in which each of the component parts is heading.
But this necessarily leads to the problem that any described society is essentially a freeze-frame of the reality of that society, since history does not ever stop. Time goes on even as I am typing this, even as you are reading this, and each of the component parts is already on the move again. This fundamental perpetual change in the nature of things, already so impressively observed by Heraclitus, makes it impossible to give us a firm footing for personal teleology. It's hard to even know your own position in history in light of such constant change, let alone that the whole of that aggregate history can give you at this moment the definite practical ideal you need.

Therefore, having eliminated the large scale (nature and God) as well as the medium scale (society and history), we must turn to the individual level for our teleology. To a certain extent this would seem to modern Western man something begging the question: what I want to know is a personal, individual possible life-goal. Modern man has little patience with determinist ideas of fulfilling pre-set roles in society, history, God's law or whatever after all. So, we must look at what our main problem is in establishing a teleology of our own of a secular nature: mortality.
The thing that seems to demoralize people most about modern secular life is not so much the evils of the world per se, or the absence of things to give pleasure and fulfillment, but rather the idea that there is a fixed limit to the amount of experience of and personal contribution to the world that man has. In other words: the idea that bad guys often get away with misdeeds wouldn't be such an issue if you were around for five hundred years to see them get their just deserts at some point in time at least. The necessary temporal limits to all individual pleasant and fulfilling experiences wouldn't be an issue if man had endless time to undertake new attempts at such experiences over and over again. And so on. Traditionally, this demoralization was fundamentally negated by the ideas of religion, namely the promise of eternal life and/or the idea that there was some vast power that controls everything giving purpose even to such a limited and essentially puny thing as a human life. But since our atheist position rules out such mystifications, we have no more possibilities to avoid this problem: we must confront it.

Mortality then, is the key issue, and that is what the teleology must address. The only thing that will give satisfaction is some sort of negation of immortality or a way to effectively sideline it. There is perhaps the possibility that a medical means of achieving immortality will be discovered within our lifetimes, but that is unlikely and to put it bluntly, not even Pascal would bet on it. So then it seems to me that the most reasonable approach to the matter is to seek a form of pseudo-immortality, one that does not maintain the immortality of the physical body (which would be effectively the cure as just described) but 'transplants' the idea of immortality into our timeframe. What I mean by this is that the only possibility of perceived immortality for ourselves rests not in our physical immortality but in the immortality of the production of our lives, something that we do have control over to a certain extent. That is to say, there are some things of a person that linger after that person's demise (besides ashes and bones), and those are generally the offspring, the person's reputation or fame, and the person's material works.

Which then of these to choose? Whether or not to procreate is both an emotional and a practical issue, depending on many factors, but it does not seem well-suited to a personal teleology. After all, there are too many people unwilling or unable to procreate, and the period in one's life where the possibility for that exists is even in the optimal case only a rather limited one. And finally, the offspring will turn out to be persons of their own, and it is a dubious undertaking to invest into other individuals your personal teleology, lest you become a spectre haunting your children beyond the grave.
Better then, is fame or the material works. And it happens to be that these are closely linked together. The pseudo-immortality of artists such as Van Gogh, Mozart and Rodin is because of the fame their material works have earned over history. The same can be said of Plato, Kant and Locke, or of Napoleon, Hitler and Lenin for that matter. And those were all things of their lives they themselves did; there is not one iota of anything anyone else did that is directly attributable to the personal pseudo-immortality of these people, except the remembrance of their name and deeds.

And there's the point where the link with a personal teleology becomes clear then. It is only effectively possible to create a simulated negation of your personal mortality by creating works (of whatever kind) that cause others, living after your death, to remember your name and those works, and so cause you to live on in the world of humans, which is the only materially relevant one to the human perception in the atheist view. Vicariously through the remembrance and historical sense of others can your pseudo-immortality be maintained, if you have seized the chance in your own life to achieve such a "life insurance" if you will. That life insurance is your practical teleology, gaining it your goal. And how you do that is entirely up to you.
Posted by Matthijs Krul @ 06:53

 

Some Cases of Western Post-War Censorship

Freedom of expression, the greatest good known to modern society and the bedrock of all fruitful discourse, is now all but guaranteed in the United States. The other Western nations are lagging somewhat behind still, prohibiting opinions deemed "offensive" (which is never defined) against minorities or parts of the population, or even in general. Another deviation occurs in the different ways of treating obscenity laws, which can occasionally lead to some half-hearted attempts at prosecuting producers of extreme pornography, an effort that is almost always swiftly abandoned. However, this was not always the case. One need not go back to the days of the Salem witch trials and the Alien and Sedition Acts of John Adams to find censorship alive and kicking; even in the post-war years, there was plenty of suppression of the vulnerable, the unpopular and the downright rebellious in society. Unfortunately, this goes for the United States as much as for other Western nations; it seems that as with many things, the continental European states are quicker to change laws, but slower to believe in their spirit. As such, there is still a lot of vague censorship remaining in those countries (and in the Commonwealth as well), with Germany being the obvious leader, and the United States now has a vigorous civic culture of freedom of expression as if that had been present from the start.

Most infamous for the reputation of the American courts in this field should be the prosecution of the leadership of the American Communist Party in 1951. Based on the Smith Act, which prohibited not only advocating the violent overthrow of the American government or system, but also prohibited all organizations under whose banner such words were uttered as well as membership of such organizations, the highest echelon of the Communist Party organization was charged with unlawful sedition. As expected the case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Dennis vs. United States that the convictions were valid, despite the wording of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Argument for this (by opinion of Chief Justice Vinson) was the "clear and present danger" posed by the medley bunch of radicals and Stalin apologists among the party leadership: the world was deemed to be "in an explosive situation", and communists were just like fascists, by definition not to be trusted.¹ Hugo Black's angry decrying of the result as "contrary to all constitutional ideas of fair criminal procedure" was of no avail during those days, the height of McCarthyism in America. Despite the temporary setback against such prosecutions found in Yates vs. United States the Internal Security Act, effectively forcing communist organizations to self-incrimination by making them publish their membership lists and the like, was ruled constitutional. Prosecutions based on those (a nice catch-22) were subsequently affirmed in Scales vs. United States.

It was only during the 1960s that the Supreme Court basically invented for the Americans the full right to free expression as it is known today. It was in a series of cases, most notably Keyishian vs. Board of Regents and Whitehill vs. Elkins, that went directly against the will of Congress in consistently ruling their anti-communist measures unconstitutional. Despite the calls against "judicial activism" and whatnot even from libertarian sides, there might well still be things as forced membership publishing, berufsverbote and forced oaths against leftist ideology today.

It took other nations even longer to allow some radical or "subversive" activity. The infamous British case of National Viewers' and Listeners' Association vs. Gay News is a good example. The Gay News magazine, edited by a certain Denis Lemon, had published in 1976 an illustrated edition of a poem by Professor Kirkup about a Roman centurion who takes Jesus from the cross and subsequently fucks him, and some apostles besides. The poem itself rather lacks all aesthetic qualities (which the author was very willing to admit), and the illustrator called his work "the worst I have ever done". Nevertheless this was obviously not what the case was about - a certain Mary Whitehouse, a fervent Christian, was the sole brain behind the so-called "National Viewers' and Listeners' Association", and used every opportunity to litigate on behalf of the viewers and listeners of Britain against offensive and subversive material.² So the common-law blasphemy charge, which had long been dormant (no prosecution in fifty years, and the statute law had been repealed years before), was used by her to silence the Professor and the editor of Gay News. Subsequently, under the guidance of Justice King-Hamilton QC, who disallowed all expert witnesses à decharge but two, the Old Bailey jury took little time to return a guilty verdict. Lemon was sentenced to a nine months suspended sentence and a five hundred pound fine, and to pay Whitehouse's court costs. Appeals to the Royal Courts of Justice and afterwards the House of Lords and even the European Court of Justice were ineffective - the prison sentence was quashed, but the poem remains to this day a prohibited work in England and Wales. The fact that the ECJ managed in 1982, during the years of Thatcher, Reagan and "tear down this wall", to deny relief to the appellants stating that in fact Whitehouse's human rights had been violated by publishing the poem in the first place, merely adds insult to injury.

The continent is no better in this matter, though, and going forward in time does not remove the specter of oppression and censorship. Later Presidential hopeful Jean-Marie Le Pen called the gas chambers in an interview with Le Grand Jury-RTL dated September 1987: "A point of detail of the second world war". This was actually in the context of whether the holocaust revisionism on this point was significant enough to care about, but that did not prevent prosecution on the charge of holocaust denial. The French Fabius-Gayssot law of 1990 outlaws all revisionism about crimes against humanity (definition based on the Nürnberg trials). Le Pen was charged ex post facto, convicted and fined a very hefty sum to the equivalent of $233.000. Appeal to the European Court of Human Rights led to nothing. A real Holocaust denier such as Faurisson was also charged under this law, to the great support of all major newspapers and even self-proclaimed human rights organizations such as B'nai Brith.

Similar cases happen in other Western countries too, though. One need but point at the Dutch prosecution of the radical imam El-Moumni for calling gays "pigs" and similar language (though this led to acquittal), or the Canadian prosecution of wannabe neonazi Ernst Zundel for holocaust denial and other charges. In none of these cases was the idea freedom of expression being an absolute human right, comparable to say the right not to be enslaved physically, even considered. More striking is that prosecution against Zundel was brought under Canada's Human Rights Act, which apparently applies exclusively to those the majority agrees with!

Down under, things are just as bad as everywhere. The Australian government seems to be especially good at suppressing movies of shocking or controversial content, banning Pasolini's Salo in 1998, Breillat's Romance in 2000 and Baise-Moi in 2002, despite public outcry. The next year, only two years ago now, saw the general prohibition of the American shock flick Ken Park, a ban which was widely subverted by illegal public screenings and internet reproduction.
Similar things occur with the Australian state legislatures' favorite pastime, which is apparently the passing of internet censorship laws, particularly in South Australia. Additionally, "category 1 restricted" texts are still off-limits even to consenting adults in Queensland and similar jurisdictions, which includes an article on female genital surgery in the women's lifestyle magazine Australian Women's Forum.³ Comparable to such puritanism with regard to women is the Republic of Ireland's Regulation of Information Act, which actively bars women from availing themselves of information that "advocates or promotes the termination of pregnancy" outside the State.


That modern censorship cases, of which these are but a few rather arbitrarily picked examples, persist in this age baffles the mind. All legal fallacies and all well-meant paternalistic tendencies aside, not to mention the suspicious influence of the religious right all over the Western world, it is inconceivable that more than 135 years after the publication of J.S. Mill's compelling appeal for free speech and free expression the most advanced of the advanced insist on proscribing radical ideas and shocking movies. Can they not read? For all must realize

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

¹ Interesting detail: the case for the petitioners was argued by famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
² This same mrs. Whitehouse would later bankrupt herself by unsuccesfully suing the Independent Broadcasting Authority over the movie Scum as well as a theatre director for the play The Romans in Britain. The NVLA is now called Mediawatch UK.
³See here.
Posted by Matthijs Krul @ 03:10