A Naive Series 1.5: Moralism

 At the moment I am trying to avoid short form content, largely because Youtube is pushing it, and I associate it with TikTok and Twitter all bad things.

But I like Subway Takes, conceptually and in execution. And I saw the thumbnail of his take with Zohran Mamdani, and the subtitles said something like "...no matter what literature you've read, I'm not defunding the police."

The Problem of Evil

"The Problem of Evil" is an argument against the existence of the classical god, which generally has the property of being "all loving" or "benevolent."

The trouble with this argument, is that in an atheistic or agnostic worldview, evil isn't really an intelligible concept. Christopher Hitchens believed in evil and defined it as "the surplus value of totalitarianism" and you may or may not be impressed and/or satisfied by such a definition.

Look at this - classical god, properties, benevolent, atheistic, agnostic, intelligible, surplus, totalitarianism. None of these are intuitive concepts nor words the modal person uses in daily life.

We are kind of stuck with the name of this argument, but really it is "the problem of unnecessary suffering" it is pointing to the contrary evidence for a benevolent god in the form of a dear carcass found after a wild fire where a park ranger can determine that it suffered painful burns to a large percentage of its body before taking shelter where it proceeded to die over hours in agonizing pain.

And you go "where's the design of a benevolent god in this circumstance?" and the supernatural to be clear is outside the purview of science as a falsifiable claim, so most theists will respond "god works in mysterious ways" aka "don't ask me, ask our all-loving god."

Again, all of this is very complicated to a majority of people who feel no need to think so deeply about this. They can have an idol of the Virgin Mary on their dashboard and never see a deer in their whole lives.

But culturally, what is commonplace are concepts like "evil" and "sin" that are supernatural, so we don't actually generally know them to exist, but a lot of people act like they do.

Evil also crops up in the real unifying features of storytelling - or the monomyth, where "the heroes journey" is demonstrably not a monomyth.

To recap my understanding, almost all stories are about trouble of some kind, and typically there is something causing that trouble. Like an agent. So the three billy goats gruff face trouble in the form of food security, and that trouble is caused by the troll under the bridge.

Flood myths for example, inject into our understanding of reality, an angry god, they are not just an indifferent weather event. The Mexica told stories (and believed) that the moon was the decapitated head of a woman who attacked their culture hero. Trouble and agency.

We naively believe, that things don't just happen. Evil, is a property of our stories, and when we start to think about Disney animated fairytales, it becomes much easier to define "evil" because we have these very unrealistic malevolent actors who want to make bad decisions. Wicked stepmothers who want to take over the kingdom in order to induce drought and mass starvation.

In reality, our bad actors are often people who want to win political office in order to enrich themselves and so do so on the backs of migrants. But these people are more incompetent than evil, as their regimes often derail when the economy collapses because they didn't understand the net benefits of migration and the complexity of a modern economy. The Trusses and Trumps and Mileis.

Then we get the force in reality that is "trying" to destroy the world and everything else - entropy. But those who understand it at all, understand it as very much a thing like gravity, that has no desires or motivations or interests. The universe expanded, cooled gave rise to life, but will keep expanding until it falls apart. 

The naive default is to set up a moral code simply by sorting "things" into "good" and "bad" buckets. Hence "evil" makes an intuitive sense in a way that entropy doesn't. 

Racism is bad vs Why Racism is bad

To demonstrate this naive morality, most people that I know learned that racism was bad in school. The cliche "I'm not a racist but..." suggests that the speaker understands that racism is bad but also that they have no understanding of why racism is bad.

The reason racism is bad, is because we treat individuals as members of a homogenous group. Something obvious in a thing like racial profiling. this reason is upstream of common effects of racism like when a group in power deprives a marginalised group of opportunity based on notions of race, that we can also cite as reasons racism is bad.

This is also why racism pairs so naturally with facism, which is, even among scholars, hard to define but has a common thruline of asserting that a nation state exists within the blood of its people. 

But you'll notice that the argument I've provided for why racism is bad, remains valid for describing why fascism is bad - Just as it is bad to have a young black man who is the best candidate for a scholarship or job denied by a stereotype applied to them based on a Rudyard Kipling poem or some shit, it is bad to put forward as a candidate a white man based on ten minute youtube clip where Jordan Peterson rambles about Judeo-Christian values.

Though "race" has no meaning when it comes to genes, it has traditionally been based on phenotypes (appearances) and accompanying psuedosciences like phrenology and what not.

This meant, and this is my speculation, that for much of the 20th century, the practical difference between knowing racism is bad, and knowing why racism is bad had little consequence. Probably right up to the instigating incident of the War on Terror.

There was a hint in the name, that we were faced with a far more conceptual war, yet many reduced it to an analogy for "racism is bad" the received wisdom of a late 20th century education that had almost entirely abandoned the effort of asking students why racism is bad as they taught us the horror of the holocaust and the plight of Vietnamese refugees resettling in Australia, and the shame of establishing a Commonwealth nation in the absence of a treaty with the human occupants of the land.

It is hard to describe, but the resultant phenomena I walk amongst too this day, is a population of people who understand that racism is bad, and do not understand racism. I am not referring to the well known "I'm not a racist but..." trope, but a population of people who say myriad variations of "Islam is basically Christianity" the errancy of which literally would take too long to write out a single example.

Because I don't want to single out Islam from the incurious secular mind. The point is, it is possible to be bigoted not on the basis of phenotype (appearances) but ideas, giving us phenomena like "call out culture" and "cancel culture."

It gave us extremely weird moments of the last decade, that in the parlance of right-wing commentators scared of reds under the bed, they call "woke" but specifically and technically I would just describe as the "illiberal left" that began to label MLK Jr. as a white supremacist, and free-speech as a racist dog whistle. 

And if you didn't come across someone between 2015-2024 that didn't say something overtly and obliviously racist with all sincerity like "we need to stop hiring white men to management" then you're either a) 15 years old in 2026 or b) were that racist person.

But I explained such encounters to myself with the simplest reconciliation - people only understand that racism is bad, they do not understand why racism is bad.

Eating Red Berries

Naive moralism I'm asserting is just that our default approach to life is to do as our parents instruct. And I mean, while I use the evolutionary story of waiting to see our parents eat the red berries before we eat the red berries, I bet monkeys have been observed to eat all kinds of lethal shit out of natural curiosity.

Conversely, I bet that there's a number of kids that have had the shit beaten out of them hypocritically for imitating their parents - like smoking mum's cigarettes or beating off to dad's lingerie brochure he keeps hidden in his sock drawer.

However the determination, it is not so much a system as a database of accumulated knowledge of "good" and "bad" and all that matters is that it works.

Alas, we have institutions that have enabled greater forms of civilization that are not naive and not intuitive. Like the judiciary branch of government that functions as an institution to make us more civilized. 

The world in which we live, where if you a woman were to divorce me a man and take up with a friend of mine as an intimate partner, and I were to kill that friend for "stealing my woman" we come from a naive past where you the woman would have raped me the man because you are my property and I had benevolantly settled the matter by killing another man and reclaiming you as my property, and you just had the hard work ahead of you of repenting before god to save your soul.

Now we live in a civilized time where a slow, deliberate and cerebral process has determined that actually no. Women aren't the property of men, that irreconcilable differences is a legitimate basis for seperation and divorce and that I have no right to take the life of another person to appease my own unstable emotions.

I feel modern phenomena like "revenge porn" bolster my case that the moralism I describe is naive and that the justice insofar as our civilization achieves is an educated position that requires constant transmission. 

Just on the front of men and boys not possessing woman and girls, some will be educated into this position by stories their parents read them, others by completion of primary school, more by completion of secondary school (with the learning experience of the onset of puberty and the awakening of sexuality) but beyond these formative years, there will still be men who require a psychologist to explain to them in their 30s and 40s that they do not own their (former) partner, and some will require the intervention of a court to essentially mandate they undertake some form of remedial education.

And the rubble that will need to be cleared in all cases, will be a naive intuition as to their own victimhood of a wrong doing. They may, as Jonah Hill famously did, appropriate psychology speak to brandish their own jealousies as "boundaries" they maintain.

Divine Command Theory

Something that should be better known is Socrates dialogue "Euthyphro" but with a name like that, we are basically fucked. In it Socrates asks Euthyphro, presumably able to pronounce his name, but maybe Socrates just called everybody "Gus" (he seemed the type):

 "Is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

Socrates to modern Christian nationalists was an abhorrent pagan, but monotheism makes this dilemma even more delicious.

Say Jesus descends from the heavens tomorrow, robes flapping in the breeze, a crown of light resting on his brow and a sword suspended in mid air from his tongue, and he holds up his stigmatized hands and declares "Yo, the legal age of consent is 12 or first menses for women, whichever comes first. Statutory rape is bullshit, a woman's honour can be repaired through marriage to her rapist."

Here is the dilemma (if you are Christian, or otherwise recognise Jesus as some kind of authority) is something good just because god commands it so? 

Because of particular interest in this philosophical dilemma, is the way most with an emotional stake in the character of god might choose to weasel out of it - "god would never say that" - because this assertion demands an argument so as not to be dismissed.

At this point, I'm regretting my example, because in all likelihood for all but recent Catholics (and I don't actually know if the Pope has ruled on age of consent etc.) it's likely that a lucid exegesis of scripture would lean towards "this is precisely the kind of thing the Christ of scripture would say" hence why this was practiced in Christendom up until shockingly recently.

But if he said "kill all puppies and kittens" you really have to argue why, your god would never say such a thing. This dilemma destroys the basis of what some apologists call "divine command theory" that is used to pooh-pooh secular morality as baseless. They are arguing that morality comes from burning bush voices distributing tablets to bearded men on mountaintops. Literally what the scene from the Simpsons where Homer the thief greets Simon the adulterer with "my wife sends her regards" before Moses hands down the new morality.

The beauty of Socrates youth corrupting dilemma is that if god would never command us to kill all puppies and kittens, then god is deferring not just to his own reasons, but reasons he is constrained, there is a greater principle than god says so. 

In "Le Petit Prince" the titular character on his journey to earth, comes across a planet inhabited by a king who commands the stars to twinkle. (Questions of atmosphere are not addressed) The Little Prince asks how he can know that the king doesn't just order the stars to do what they were doing anyway, for which the king has no good answer.

Just so, if god(s) can change what is good and bad, then what is good and bad is arbitrary. If he can't then we are a long way towards what atheists routinely do in excising the divine command as unnecessary and just using reason.

Lifelong Scandelization

The bigots often make the mistake of fixating on religious fundamentalists, and we should be sympathetic to this bigotry, because we as a society are pretty pour at acknowledging that we don't really believe in freedom of religion.

We have a tacit understanding that the world we live in largely works, because while people like religiosity in theory their own religiosity usually survives on a kind of wilful ignorance of the contents of their religion. 

Christianity being the one I am most familiar with, this means I come across really wishy-washy ways in which the contents of scripture are dismissed, like for example, a lay insistence that the only real commandment of Jesus that supercedes the heavily livestock obsessed commandments of Moses is to "love thy neighbour" and this basically means the same as "buy the world a coke."

I'm a fan of Jonathan Rauch who can speak soberly about the reality that most US Christians are "secular Christians" a rough analogue to secular Jews. 

But in this post, I am asserting something far more universal - that almost everyone defaults to a naive moralism, they accept uncritically notions of good and bad as presented to them. 

Yet even half an average human lifespan is plenty of time to observe social mores shifting, and witness the friction caused by naive moralism. For example, two generations removed from me I heard the opinion that gay marriage would destroy society. One generation removed from me, I saw someone struggle with two dads spending the afternoon at a park with young kids, with no visible "mother" present, and I am of a generation that assumes either the two dads are a couple, or a couple of divorcees with their kids.

The remedy to such scandalization however, is brightly an achievable one - argument. The prejudices of other generations and our own can be relieved through argument. The trouble we face is the regression we have experienced in our abilities to even furnish arguments. Indeed, we have members of younger generations currently alive that find arguments, and being expected to furnish an argument, itself scandalous.