The Four (-1) Horsemen

The paradox is that people working for good in the world (helping people, overcoming hardship and helping others do so) can only, if experience serves, be carried and inspired by some sense of an absolute Truth. In order to deliberately forfeit our own material benefits, we need to ascribe it some sort of meaning, probably derived from our morality —there has to be a reason for our actions.

If we act out of a sense of fighting injustice, say, the sense that we have of that injustice has to have some kind of template of what is Just or Right. Not only do I need to have a sense, an understanding of what Just or Right is, but most importantly I have to decide that it is necessary to make it so. In other words, there has to be a gap that I can see between what is and what should be instead. It has to have some kind of end goal that 1) feels irrepressibly true to the people embracing it and 2) will not actualize if I do nothing. Whether communist workers working to better their plight and others’, or monks or priests, they apply actions to bridge the gap between is and should be (I prefer to stay away from the overused "ought from is" debate terminology —not because it’s wrong, but because it bores me) . In order to face hardship and seek to overcome it, against your own apparent rational interest or comfort, there needs to be some morally non-neutral inspiration, there needs to be some drive beyond the deeds that justify and compel the deeds.

Science and atheism give no such drive. They give you no such end goal. All they contain is precisely that there is no end goal. Without an end goal that can be shared among a community of people, there is no drive for energy being put into selfless deeds. This is really where the moral vacuity of atheism and science lie.

In all the so-called « God debates », the question of morality will come up. The horsemen address this early on in their conversation, in typical fashion, such as very early on in the first hour at 2:40, by claiming that they too have morals. They will often shout « Don’t you dare ! » to their antagonists who suggest that atheism is immoral, that you need an all-powerful deity to be moral.

This I think is where the fundamental misunderstanding lies : it’s not that atheism, science, atheists or scientists themselves are immoral. It is that they do not provide a means, a vector, a substrate, which compels moral deeds. Atheists and scientists can be driven to moral, selfless deeds, the evidence is obviously plenty. But it is not atheism or science that drives them to these deeds, it is some other reason. And that reason has to be irrational, at least in current understandings of what « rational behavior » means. Rational behavior, by definition, is behavior that optimizes your own material interests. There is no such thing, literally and by definition, as selfless rational behavior —in fact, that is the most potent and damning criticism of liberal economics, whose main assumption is that people are driven by rational behavior to maximize their own material self-interest. It is empirically clear to all of us that, although it is possible to argue that all actions are selfish on some level, even apparently selfless ones, they are clearly not based on rational material optimization. It is empirically clear to all of us that selfless deeds are driven by non-rational behavior.

To those who would argue that it’s not true, because « I’m a rational, atheist person and I feel bad because of poverty, suffering and injustice in the world », I would ask them then why are they not taking arms against injustice somewhere ? Why are they not joining, I don’t know, the Tibetan monks ? If they feel bad even about their own societies, such as the so-called "war on drugs", or the never-ending middle-eastern wars of aggression waged by our western governments resulting in the deaths and misery of countless people, or the raping of productive endeavor by a caste of bankers who steal the proceeds from the rest of us, why are they not starting a revolution ? Have you joined Occupy, or something ? Even writing in blogs or op-eds in the NYT, or giving atheist conferences is not motivated by scientific truth. It’s motivated by the fact that you believe that the world must be exposed to and understand scientific rationality, and that you have to do something about it. It’s not science that tells you to do this. Your belief that science and atheism have to be defended and pushed forward as a worldview does not itself stem from scientific truths.

If you are actually doing something, is it because you’re a scientist or atheist ? No, it’s because of something else. It’s because you have a template buried within your gut of the world as it should be. The tenets of science or atheism cannot deliver a deep feeling of the world as it should be. Yet one could argue that a key force of the evolution of civilization is that people act against injustice in irrational ways, driven by a goal of what the world should be like. Interestingly, it’s probably possible to show that true social and political upheaval can only happen when there is a perceived rational choice that either I take to the streets to seize power, or I will not have anything to live on pretty soon. However, even if it’s possible to show that this is an objective individual fact, it’s quite obvious that the collective context that makes mass action possible can only come to be if there is a set of shared beliefs that arises. You cannot have succesful collective action only based on a sum of « I’ll go take what I need ». Successful upheaval requires leadership, discipline, inspiring speeches for people to overcome their physical fear or to forfeit their creature comforts. You cannot inspire people to action by scientific arguments, you have to give them a sense of moral outrage and a sense of a shared end goal. You cannot inspire them to aspire to this shared end goal that requires them to act by means of a materialist deterministic epistemology.

Religion, such as it evolved, is probably the key matrix of such behavior : some book or some individual provides a set of propositions about the world. It gives a fictional account of how we got here and why, frames it in moral terms, and then gives a message from some third party who knows better, who knows everything we don’t and who played a major role in why we got here. That message is both normative, prescriptive and predictive. Its predictive part is that it tells people that there is an unescapable plan for the world, that certain things will happen in the end, no matter what.

Yet, strangely, it requires the normative and prescriptive part to come to be : it requires individuals to perform certain deeds in order to make that plan work. It’s a subtle balance, almost a double-bind : each individual should know that the plan will happen whatever they do, yet they are urged to act a certain way in order for the plan to work. It’s a peer pressure thing, really. As an individual, your choice is : since the plan is going to happen anyway, and yet it depends on people doing certain things for it to happen, then that means everybody else, or enough of them, will do as they are told, so that the plan will be realized. Therefore, if I don’t follow the prescriptions, I’m running the risk of being the odd one out, and the message is usually pretty clear about what happens to these guys.

The key puzzle here is : since such texts and discourses abound, what are the criteria by which their message from the third party gets authenticated by a given society, so as to become prevalent ? I suspect that some natural selection process happens here by which one framework will come to dominate a particular « socio-system », so to speak.

All of these statements about religion apply remarkably equally to any ideology, as far as I can tell.

So what religion and ideology do is to provide an end goal framework that can be shared across large communities so that collective action is possible, or even individual action, informed by a collective creed.

This is the driver for the best deeds in the world, as well as the worst deeds.