Avatars of Monstrous Nature and Estranged Creators of Unnatural Worlds

Introverted social outsiders fortify their inner selves with philosophical reflections. Alienated from the rest of the world by their self-absorption, they redeem themselves by rebelling against monstrous nature, whether through artistic expressions such as aesthetically meritorious acts of asceticism or through prophetic calls for cultural renewal that periodically awaken the masses who are held in thrall to the institutions dominated by predatorial, sociopathic alphas.

But do the tragically heroic omegas, those who are furthest from being happy and who occupy a sort of cosmic vanguard, since all wise primates are outsiders in their relation to the indifferent universe as a whole—I say, do those enlightened few likewise have an obligation to rebel against the alphas, to oppose theocracies, kleptocracies, or neoliberal plutocracies as so many glorified biologically-driven dominance hierarchies that betray our capacity for godlike creativity? If the diatribes of enlightened outsiders have historically emboldened the domesticated human herds to seek to be more spiritual than animalistic, even if those scraps of wisdom are then typically misinterpreted and quickly coopted by the jealous gods themselves, by what C. Wright Mills called the power elites, as in Catholicism and in all other major religions, is that opposition to our corrupt “leaders” as important as that to the undead wilderness? Moreover, is the latter rebellion, which consists of technological and cultural re-enchantments and vivifications of zombielike, robotic natural processes, displacing the wilderness with artificial worlds embodying our intentions, purposes, and ideals and ironically vindicating the ancient mythopoeic visions of a spirit world—I ask is that rebellion not identical to the surreal means by which the sociopathic alphas deify themselves? Specifically, isn’t technological creativity consistent with the cancerous economics of infinite civilizational growth? Isn’t hostility towards undead nature a premise in the satanic argument of modernity and thus just one more metanarrative rationalizing the gross power inequalities between those who control antinatural systems and those who are degraded in their servitude to those systems? How, then, should the enlightened few distinguish their doomed but honourable resistance from the alpha’s monuments to hubris? Are alphas and omegas perhaps equally unwitting pawns in the grip of monstrous nature so that true existential resistance is impossible?  

The Existential Context

To address these thorny questions, we must first consider what the alpha rulers are actually up to. We can do this by placing alpha behaviour in its existential context, that is, by determining how the power elites deal with the broader, existential problem of human freedom. Our defining feature as persons is our ability to control ourselves, which is to say that in contrast with other animal species, we build up selves in the first place, a self being a mind that can detach from biological and social regularities, thus acquiring the limited freedom to direct its individual course. We’re not entirely free from nature or from society, of course, although the effect of technology is indeed to render us supernatural, to replace the natural landscapes with artificial ones that facilitate our autonomy by allowing us more easily to carry out our will. We’re still physical objects and are thus subject to physical forces and norms, although we use airplanes and spaceships, for example, to overcome gravity. Likewise, we’re masters of our reproductive process and thus aren’t as constrained by natural selection as are the unknowing animals.

In any case, partial freedom from nature consists not of any mythical, metaphysical or theological property, but of the building of an ideological wall around ourselves which gives us the cognitive space to choose how we should act. The wall fortifies us against some environmental pressures, functioning like an event horizon, being the public form of ourselves which encloses our innermost character. That character isn’t an immaterial entelechy but a set of cherished ideas or sacred beliefs which are themselves remnants of our formative acts of faith. Who we really are is defined by what we genuinely, consciously or unconsciously believe. We are just such thoughts and convictions, nothing more, and so we’re liberated when our deepest thoughts are the primary or sole causes of our actions, when our worldview is reflected in what we do so that instead of being merely a chapter in a larger biological or sociological narrative, our life is self-scripted. Whereas the members of most species act out their life cycle as organic vessels for their genes, we’re persons in virtue of our having mental and thus more original, even idiosyncratic control over what we do. 

The Incoherence of Naturalism

In philosophical circles “naturalism” is a shibboleth. Just about all academic philosophers and most self-described intellectuals in the West are quick to reassure each other that however strange their pet philosophical beliefs might sound to the common folk, the thinkers would never even consider abandoning the ship of naturalism. “Naturalist” is an honourific term so that if you admit to being a supernaturalist, you’re revealing that you haven’t thought things through, that at best you’ve studied theology rather than philosophy. Modern philosophy has helped drive the Age of Reason, but the engine has been science, and by definition science’s subject matter is nature. Whatever scientists discover that they can explain becomes part of the natural world. Both American and French-dominated philosophies take scientific knowledge for granted, although the latter is more pessimistic about science’s social impact.

However, if naturalism is supposed to be the philosophical upshot of the scientific world picture, the standard presentation of this philosophy turns out to be a nonstarter. There’s a difference between exoteric and esoteric naturalism, and as in the case of any comparable distinction such as that between vulgar (literalistic) and enlightened (mystical or cosmicist) theism, the exoteric variety is half-baked and rife with delusions. Instead of invoking the pertinent technicalities such as “supervenience,” “physicalism,” or “nomic relation,” which function as mantras and memetic incantations that mesmerize and distract professional philosophers, we should consider a more grounded, intuitive interpretation of what’s at issue. Naturalism is set against the idea that there’s anything supernatural or unnatural. In particular, naturalism is taken to be well-established on at least three grounds. Metaphysically, science is supposed to have established that everything is part of the material world. Epistemically or methodologically, science is supposed to engage in unifying causal explanations, leaving no room for anything outside science’s purview. And institutionally or culturally, science impresses with its practitioners’ intellectual virtues which far outshine the faith-based drivel of religion, the latter being science’s arch rival. On each of these grounds, however, naturalism is incoherent. Indeed, the one ground leads to the other as a defense, so that with the collapse of cultural naturalism, that is, of rationalism or skepticism, we must look elsewhere if we wish to supply content to this shibboleth.

Miracles in the Mechanical Cosmos

The metaphysical point about nature is that nature is composed of stuff that scientists can understand. If we think in analytical terms, cognitively dividing and conquering systems, as it were, breaking them down into their constituent parts to see how the mechanisms interlock, the world is supposed to cooperate with this approach. Indeed, the Scientific Revolution was progressive in so far as these cognitive methods were applied in spite of defeatist religious traditions, and the universe turned out to be largely material and mechanical. The heavens were demystified and depersonalized, the divinities having been reduced to stars and planets. Organic design turned out not to be divinely intended, but the product of blind processes such as natural selection. And so naturalism entails, in short, that there are no miracles.

But having discovered discontinuities in the world, scientists themselves showed the limits of their analytical methods. Gödel’s Theorem showed that mathematical descriptions are necessarily incomplete, while Bell’s Theorem confirmed the direst suspicions of quantum physicists, that at the quantum level the world isn’t mechanical at all. At that level, one thing doesn’t impact another by locally pushing or pulling it, as it were. There is what Einstein mockingly called “spooky action at a distance,” when particles become entangled and affect each other irrespective of the distance between them. Moreover, singularities were discovered in black holes and at the universe’s point of origin, in which the natural laws break down. 

Is Nature Beautiful or Monstrous?

Art by John Kenn

Who but a mad person would attempt to characterize the universe in its entirety? The ancient Greek conceit of all things forming a cosmos, a unified, ordered whole, seems quaint, notwithstanding the cosmologist’s persistent, utopian dream of a single Theory of Everything. Early maps of the lands and seas filled in unknown areas with pictures of monsters and captions like “Here be dragons,” and there are still voids in our knowledge of what’s out there. In addition to the singularities and thus baffling unknowns in black holes and in the Big Bang, there’s an alien weirdness to quantum, merely statistical or nonmechanical events; moreover, there’s dark matter as well as dark energy which comprise most of the universe and yet which are still enigmatic. 

Still, despite those areas of ignorance, there’s an intuitive way of summarizing not just the empirical knowledge we nevertheless have, but the limits on such knowledge to which we cynical hypermodernists are especially sensitive. This is to say that the universe, that is, all of natural reality, is monstrous. But what does it mean to blaspheme in this fashion, to tar the beautiful heavens with such an insult? Is this bit of cosmicism just a nihilistic projection of a wounded soul? No, nature is a monstrosity in every sense of the word, and seeing how this is so is vital to understanding our existential situation as metaphysically homeless individuals whose consciousness, reason, and freedom alienate us from the world. 

The Universe’s Immensity

One sense of “monstrous” is obviously fitting, this being the sense in which a monstrosity is extraordinarily great in physical size, meaning huge or immense. We take such knowledge for granted, but the ancients thought the universe is considerably smaller and indeed centered on our planet. The Age of Reason decentered us as a result of increased understanding of how life arises accidentally, without any personal creator’s plan or good intentions. This sense of never having been as important as the ancients intuited feeds into the experience of nature as horrific; at least, this experience is thrust upon those whose scientific and philosophical knowledge deprives them of the conventional feel-good delusions. So the universe is indeed monstrous in scope, not a mere terran neighbourhood but an inhuman, stupefyingly vast X in which living things aren’t even afterthoughts exactly but hapless drifters, vomited up by blind and dumb material exchanges and interlocking mathematical codes.

Even this most obvious kind of natural monstrosity is deleterious to our preferred way of life. We’re biologically driven to want to feel at home rather than lost, because we’re social mammals hormonally compelled, for the most part, to form families and thus preoccupied with the task of protecting our loved ones by laying claim to a plot of land and calling it home. Homelessness is thus a mark of evolutionary failure, since it implies either dereliction of duty towards your family members or a lack of such members to keep safe in the first place. A familiar place called home that keeps out the alien noise beyond is required to ensure the healthy upbringing of children and thus the passing on of genes to future generations. In a smaller, geocentric universe, our planet could serve as home for the extended human family because the ancients could trust in the landscape’s good intentions. In the decentered universe in which there are no such cosmic guarantees of our survival let alone our happiness, our planet begins to creek like a haunted house. How safe are we really on this rock which we’ve taken for taken for tens of thousands of years, but which must likewise be fundamentally as bizarre as the rest of the universe that pursues its strange business? With the world’s alien scope comes the high probability that our genetic code’s pointless trek through the ages will eventually cease; just as an earthquake or a tornado can rip apart a house, depriving the parents of the ability to safeguard their descendants, the universe will surge in our cozy corner of it and terminate our evolution. Along with the loss of faith in our home, there’s the growing postmodern distrust in all natural, commonsense intuitions since those too bear the world’s inhuman stamp. In short, our cosmological decentralization disaffected us with the world we’d once cheerfully interpreted as being run for some familiar, social purpose, such as its being a testing ground to prove our worth to the deities. 

Beasts in Suits: The Regressive Impact of Scientific Management Theory

You wouldn’t know it from the appalling technocratic style of business speak, but business management theory has existential consequences, meaning that how we choose to organize labour affects the primary struggle we’re all engaged in as lone persons in the wilderness of nature. The scientistic flavour of modern business discourse conceals the fact that modern business doesn't advance a radically creative, progressive agenda, but models our social structures on the primitive pecking order. Humanists are incapable of stemming the tide of this antihuman conservatism, because they're not awed by their struggle's existential stakes.

Scientific Management Theory

Work was transformed from the medieval period to the modern one, as the guild’s form of craftsmanship was replaced by the scientific management of workforces. Some centuries ago in Europe and elsewhere, master craftsmen would practice and protect the secrets of their trade, whether it was carpentry, masonry, textiles or the like, hiring apprentices to keep those secrets alive in the next generation. These closely-guarded techniques were considered arts or mysteries, and so this division between insiders and outsiders took on religious significance. The insiders had esoteric knowledge of how to improve God’s earth, and in Europe, at least, craftsmanship was tolerated as something other than a blasphemous attempt to compete with God’s running of the natural order. The Church could tolerate the crafts, because of the ambiguity of the Christian myth of redemption after the Fall. We’re meant to be godlike, if not fully divine, and although the heavens were made perfect by God, freewheeling humans and the fallen angels ruined this particular planet, and so terrestrial conditions can be either further degraded or improved. Although Christian commonsense would dictate that craftsmanship (the attempt to excel at projects of intelligent design) is implicitly satanic in establishing so-called masters as rival creators and in challenging the natural order—even without any devilry inherited from the fallen angels themselves—the Church’s unmatched talent for compromise enabled the craftsmen to rationalize their business with a narrative of Christian enlightenment. According to this narrative, the kingdom of heaven won’t descend from above, but will be constructed from below by the faithful. Craftsmen restore a piece of Eden when they excel at their work, as long as they appreciate that their techniques must remain secret not only for the profane reason that workers inevitably compete to stay in business, but in view of their conviction that all human labour occurs in this mythical context of a spiritual war between good and evil.

Associations of craftsmen evolved into guilds which formalized the advancement from apprentice to journeyman to master and grandmaster, and which jealously guarded not only their trade secrets but the rights of their artisans, functioning thus as proto-unions in the absence of an all-powerful nation state. Eventually, medieval guilds suffered the fate of all large organizations, becoming corrupt in their rent-seeking, that is, in their unproductive extraction of wealth. Again, the rationale for the rigid and secretive standardization of techniques was that they were generally considered tactics in a spiritual war. Deviating from tradition could mean succumbing to demonic temptation and arrogance, in which case the cosmic scale would tip and instead of working on God’s behalf to restore the divine order, a craftsman would be undermining that order in service to the insane and evil forces of chaos. But the unearthing of ancient Greek works in the Renaissance led Europeans to recognize the depths of ignorance into which they’d fallen. The little bird of Renaissance scholarship of Greek literary texts had whispered into the ear of the Christian world that its myths were so many distractions from the horrific reality of its situation: there wasn’t progress towards a heavenly kingdom but a slump, from the collapse of the Roman Empire, which had carried on the excellence of Classical Greece, to the subsequent Christian theocracies. Humiliated by this discovery, the early modern power elites took up the challenge of rebuilding secular society, which required boundless skepticism about the Christian nursery rhymes that had allowed Europeans to slumber through what they came to call the Dark Age before the age of true enlightenment by Reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Secular enlightenment encompassed not just the familiar scientific process of understanding nature, but the quasi-prescriptive business of regulating social relations. Thus was born scientific management, the theory credited to Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late nineteenth century, whose mission is still pursued by the theorists that adapted his principles to the automated industries which made strict Taylorism obsolete. Taylor’s mission was to make business more efficient by maximizing workers’ productivity. This was achieved by a managerial class that functioned like a bureaucracy of social engineers whose expertise was in improving their business’s workflows. Instead of the craftsman’s secret tradition, there was an open, scientific sharing of universal (empirical, mathematical) knowledge among experts; instead of a religious context of work, there was a narrow, secular one of happiness through economic success; but most importantly, in place of an advancement of rank from apprentice to master, there was a reduction of all labourers to cogs in what Lewis Mumford called the megamachine. 

Opposing Nature: Life's Meaning in the Monstrous Universe

While most people are blissfully ignorant of academic discussions of philosophy, at least one quintessential philosophical question has long been mainstream: Does life have a meaning, a point, a purpose? Because this question is philosophical, it’s obscure, which is what lends the question its mystique. Thus, there’s the preliminary matter of the meaning of the question of the meaning of life. Douglas Adams satirizes the need for such prior analysis in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, telling of a supercomputer that discovers that the answer to the question of “life, the universe, and everything” is 42, which bafflers the questioners because they haven’t figured out the true, ultimate question. What kind of answer, then, do we want and what exactly is at stake? Could life be the sort of thing that has a purpose or a goal such that it might have a specific, knowable one? And whose purpose would it be? Could life be meaningful without a personal creator of living things?

Biofunctions and Absurdity

The prescientific approach is to interpret the problem as teleological and thus to compare organisms to artifacts, which entails that organisms are intelligently created. By comparison, a shovel has meaning because we assign it a standard which determines when the shovel performs well or poorly. A broken shovel fails to work as planned so that it no longer approximates the ideal for shovels. For a person or even an animal to have meaning in this teleological sense would seem to require that we be artifacts designed by some foreign intelligence whose plan for us includes the ideal we’re meant to fulfill. (A natural, as opposed to supernatural, creator of terrestrial species would need a comparable creator in turn and that creator would likewise need one, in which case either the series of creations would be infinite, like a baton race that has no beginning, or else there would be an ultimate Creator who would be a deity, a miraculously self-creating or eternal person.)

The mystery of life’s meaning would amount to the mystery of the content of our creator’s mind: the answer would consist of a revelation of what that creator intended to do by creating us or of what the creator hoped to achieve. The movie Prometheus explores this scenario, depicting protagonists who discover both that powerful aliens created life on our planet and that the aliens might have had dubious rather than noble, let alone divine motives for doing so. Were our creator flawed or inhuman, our ultimate function might be horrific rather than anything we’d want to enshrine. We might have been created on a whim so that we’d be akin to an absentminded doodle, in which case our life would be fundamentally absurd. Alternatively, we might have been spawned by a malevolent or arrogant deity so that our highest purpose might be the moral one of opposing our original function, of malfunctioning, in our deity’s judgment.

The conventional secular wisdom is that this teleological interpretation of the ultimate question has been superseded by Darwinism, according to which life forms evolve from each other: each is created by an impersonal process of natural selection. This scientific explanation will be completed as soon as we come to understand how the simplest living things developed from nonliving things. Assuming that sort of final understanding is on the way and life does evolve to that extent, from nonlife, life’s origin isn’t planned. Thus the analogy between species and artifacts breaks down, and we have no nonhuman, pre-assigned purpose. (Even if there were intermediary intelligent designers, such as extraterrestrial but carbon-based seeders of our planet, the mechanistic, Darwinian view would be that the first organisms emerged from nonliving matter.) The process by which we deliberately devise technologies differs greatly from that by which natural forces, initial conditions and elements come together to produce organisms. In particular, personal traits like reason and desire have nothing to do with life’s origin, according to the Darwinian perspective. 

Donald Trump vs The Comedians: The Farce's Existential Import

In the flood of images and stories purveyed by mass media, the spectacle of Donald Trump’s political campaign is trivialized just by being part of that flood, since each narrative is invariably replaced by another and soon forgotten. Comedians like Jon Stewart make a show of longing to keep the Trump spectacle alive forever, but along with most popular comedians, he serves the institutions that churn out infotainments so that he’s obliged to pounce on each new spectacle that captivates mass attention, without pausing to reflect much on the deeper meaning of any of these news items that he ridicules.

For just a moment, let’s think about what’s really happening in the confrontation between Trump and the comedians. First of all, who are these people? More specifically, what are their social functions? On paper, Trump is a wealthy and famous businessman, but as far as his character can be discerned from his public image in his television shows, interviews, and political speeches, Trump is also a buffoon and a troglodyte. The mystery is how someone whose many privileges afford him every opportunity to refine himself could exhibit such gross character flaws in public. How could anyone with his stratospheric wealth and fame appear to be so uncivilized?

That mystery is solved as soon as we consider two dynamics that are at play. First, power acquired through affluence and stardom tends to corrupt the character. In this respect, Trump indeed serves as the GOP’s id, as observed by comedian Bill Maher. Those drawn to business dealings that have notoriously outsized payoffs are already more likely to suffer from sociopathic tendencies, which the payoffs only exacerbate. Younger, idealistic people who wear their heart on their sleeve are thus more liberal than older individuals who have more to lose and are tempted to rationalize their possessions with conservative ideologies that warp their mindset. The deranged conservatism of a plutocrat like Trump is only a limit case that reflects this commonplace transition from youthful idealism to jaded, old-age realism. 

Mind you, the natural reality in question isn’t necessarily seen more clearly by older people so much as it captures them in the forms of their accumulated fears and hatreds which sustain their social and political prejudices. For example, political and economic power is reserved for adults who are afflicted with bodies that gradually fail them as they enter old age. As we approach death, our control over ourselves and our work and leisure activities is offset by nature’s grip on every cell of our body, and we mitigate that maddening tragedy in turn with self-serving delusions. If you invite any older person to attempt to express his or her innermost thoughts in a monologue, chances are what you hear will appall you.

Second, Trump likely plays a role or at least exaggerates his churlishness for the sake of certain business transactions. He only seems to be carefree and clueless, whereas he’s calculated that even if he can’t be president, he can appeal to aging, white, blue-collar Americans who, as Thomas Frank explains, resent being abused by the globalized free market and are primed to lash out. Trump can profit from being a right-wing demagogue in the infotainment sector. In this respect, Trump himself plays a role much like the average comedian, except that he laughs his way to the bank.     

Who, then, is the comedian? The comedian is a truth-teller but also a janitor. She sweeps horrors under the rug, calling attention to unpleasant facts with oblique references, only to comfort the audience with the opiate of laughter. Most comedians are able to uncover a subversive truth because they’re social outsiders and the silver lining of their alienation is heightened objectivity. In King Lear, this social role is famously formalized by the court jester whose silly hat and speech distance him from the audience members as well as encouraging them to laugh at his mock madness. The modern standup comedian is likewise distanced by the stage and the spotlight, but again those are formalizations of her underlying alienation. The comedian is typically bitter from being at least initially victimized and marginalized in life, and her isolation affords her the chance to scrutinize society and thus inadvertently to be sickened by what she finds. She then consoles herself with comedy. 

U.S. Steps Up Iraq’s Military Training by Attaching American Heads to Iraqi Bodies

Dateline: ARLINGTON COUNTY—American military officials order surgical attachment of American soldiers’ heads to the bodies of Iraqi soldiers to improve Iraq’s military training.

Prior efforts to train democratic Iraq’s military have been stymied. Instead of fighting Islamic State insurgents, Iraq’s soldiers became infamous for fleeing the battlefield, allowing waves of IS fighters to control key sectors of Iraq.

“The problem,” says U.S. General Buttercup, “was the training that had already been done not just in Iraq but throughout the Middle East. Those folks had trained for decades to be tribal theocrats, to be Sunni, Shia, and so on. Their traditions go back many centuries.

“For example, IS fighters are Sunni and most of Northern and Northwestern Iraq is also Sunni. Iraq’s government is dominated now by Shias, so the Sunni soldiers and tribesmen don’t want to fight fellow Sunnis. Nor do they want to fight for their Shia leaders.”

“It’s a case of a clash of indoctrinations,” says an American military psychologist. “Muslim sectarianism is deep-seated, because the Middle Eastern countries are tribal, meaning that from a very early age Muslims are taught to identify with only a subset of Muslims, not to mention a subset of other humans. That’s the start of their extensive training.

“Now Americans want to retrain Iraq’s soldiers’ to be liberal humanists, to see past their tribal and religious allegiances. Alas, each soldier has only one brain. American training techniques are unparalleled, but no matter how hard you train a brain that’s already been thoroughly trained to adhere to a vastly different mindset, you’ll run out of room in that brain to store your memes and mores.”

General Buttercup concurs with that analysis. “I told President Obama from the start,” says Buttercup. “We’ve got to give those already-trained Iraqis a second brain. Their brains were full of Muslim nonsense before Bush had invaded Iraq. We spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars training Iraq’s military to fight for Western values and interests. But how could even all of that overcome centuries of Middle Eastern history and tradition? 

“It’s like flapping your arms to see if they’ll fly. No, it took millions of years of evolution to get them to work like arms rather than wings. You’re not going to overcome that anytime soon. But what if you could add wings to the human form? That’s what planes are for.”

For budgetary reasons, President Obama selected brains that have already been trained at world-renowned military bases in the United States. According to military sources, these soldiers’ sacrifice is part of the U.S. effort to win hearts and minds in the region.

“Their minds are opposed to ours,” says General Buttercup. “They’re Muslims and we’re Christians. They’re used to theocracies and dictatorships. We love our political and economic liberties. What we need is a meeting of minds, so we’re attaching hundreds of American military heads to Iraqi bodies.”

Instead of undoing Muslim and tribal indoctrinations, which would require beheading the Iraqis, the hope is that the new heads will compensate for the un-American worldview.

“We don't do beheading. It's just not in our playbook,” says Buttercup. “If we could train the Iraqis to be American by beheading them, believe me I'd be all for it. But I can't go against my training.”

“No one trains harder than us,” says USMC Staff Sergeant Kyle Killsalot. “You just wouldn’t believe how hard I trained. If you asked my opinion of whether I approve of having my head surgically attached to an Iraqi soldier’s body, you wouldn’t get it. I have no independent opinions since I serve my military collective, my brothers in arms. Believe me, I’ll whip that Iraqi into shape and there will be no more running from insurgents. If he tries to run I'll turn my head and spit in his eye.”

Clash of Worldviews: Free Will Edition

MODERATOR: Welcome to another edition of Clash of Worldviews, the show in which our guests cry out philosophical ideas in the wilderness. We’re joined this evening by biologist and determinist, Professor Sam Harrison Coyney, who believes free will is an illusion. Arguing against his position is Adam Garnett, noted liberal secular humanist and believer in the existence of human freedom. Professor Coyney, shall we begin with you? Tell us why you don’t think people are free.

COYNEY: Well, it’s obvious to those who understand the science. We think we’re free because we’re ignorant of all the causes of our actions that precede our apparent choices. Our so-called choices are forced on us by the prior physical state of the universe, and if you rewound the cosmic tape, as it were, we’d repeat exactly what nature forces us to do the first time. We’d have no choice in the matter. So the freedom to do other than what the laws of physics and the physical initial conditions compel us to do is the impossible miracle of one natural being’s act of negating all of physical reality. No one’s that powerful or transcendent. We’re stuck in nature, with no immaterial spirit inside us, so we’re forced to do what the universe causes us to do.

MODERATOR: Seems clear enough, Adam, no?

ADAM: No, I’m not free to destroy the universe, but I’m free to control myself a little. That’s because I have a brain. A rock does whatever the universe tells it to, because it can’t think about it and mull the options. Its weight will force it down a hill because it can’t do anything about gravity. But I can think about jumping even though gravity’s telling me to stay put. Also, people thought hard about how to fly and they built airplanes, so now we can go even further against that force of nature. Freedom comes from the brain, because the brain controls the rest of the body. A rock has no brain, so it’s not free.

COYNEY: No, no, no, Adam, you’re missing the point. You may think you’re free when you learn how nature works and exploit that knowledge in your behaviour, but your ability to learn is likewise the result of evolutionary processes which derive ultimately from chemical and physical regularities. The brain is blind to all of those prior causes, so it thinks the only relevant causes of its actions are those it seems to control, namely the mental ones such as its conscious thoughts and feelings. But mental states are themselves forced upon us by our past and by the environment which is governed by natural laws.

ADAM: I thought you said the lack of free will is obvious to those who understand the science.

COYNEY: Yes, that’s exactly what I said.

ADAM: So why are you talking about natural laws?

COYNEY: When you were younger, Adam, didn’t you sit in a science classroom and hear about how scientists discovered the laws that govern the universe?

ADAM: I did, but didn’t you once find yourself in an English class where you might have learned how a metaphor can become outdated? 

The Miracle of Modern Conservatism

It’s a miracle that conservatism survived in the West after the rise of modern free societies. To see why, reflect on the difference between two kinds of conservatives, the preservationist and the reactionary. The preservationist seeks to maintain the status quo as the culmination of favourable developments of certain traditions. For example, a preservationist such as this one here could approve of the rule of law, the separation of political powers, and the right to liberty as secular values that stem from ancient Greek and Roman innovations. By contrast, the reactionary draws a red line between two historical periods and calls for a reversion. Typically, the reactionary opposes the revolutions that began with the European Renaissance and that were largely fulfilled in the more recent civil rights movements. Thus, unlike the preservationist, the reactionary doesn’t approve of just any tradition in the names of social stability and continuity, but explicitly condemns modern culture.

Preservationist conservatism turns “tradition” into a weasel word and thus should be opposed merely by radicals who will accept a social order only if its origin is arbitrary and chaotic. Everyone else is “conservative” in the sense that we don’t think our beliefs and practices fall from the sky. We all demonstrate this when we complain about some governmental dysfunction, but are loath to actually change our social system. As flawed as the system may be, most people assume there are no viable alternatives and any establishment is better than none. Innate fear of the unknown makes all but the most adventurous and naively youthful among us conservative about the need to avoid pandemonium.

For just that reason, preservationist “conservatism” is uninteresting, since it’s irrelevant to our prominent social and political divisions. Indeed, by labeling the roots of Western secularism “traditions,” from the rise of democracy and reason-based ethics in ancient Greece, to the rule of law in the Roman Republic (which contrasted with the later arbitrary power of the emperors), to the rediscovery of those secular possibilities in the West’s period of modernization, the core principles of liberalism end up being consistent with this so-called conservatism. After all, liberalism is the relatively recent realization that we could break from the autocratic norm of human history that naturally also prevails more generally in social animal behaviour.

That break occurred in early modern Europe primarily when the rediscovery of North America fired the European imagination with thoughts of radical change and when mercantilism and democracy replaced the feudal order. But there were forerunners to this transition in ancient Greece when rationalists worked out esoteric philosophies such as Plato’s, which offered intellectuals respite from the prejudices of the masses. By exploring their rational potential, Hellenic philosophers paved the way for the Enlightenment principle that the individual’s right to liberty is based on everyone’s capacity for rational self-control. Likewise, in ancient Rome, when pragmatists confronted a version of the global practice of tyranny in the rule of the Etruscan kings of the city of Rome, and worked out a proto-American form of government that used checks and balances and the rule of law to prevent natural forms of corruption, this was a radical means of protecting and empowering the majority, which foreshadowed the liberal’s ideal of social equality.  

Thus, by speaking of any status quo as the completion of a certain tradition, including the Western tradition that ushered in modernity and its corresponding liberalism, the preservationist uses a rhetorical trick to attempt to marginalize her opponents. By glossing periods of historical progress as continuations of some culture, the preservationist would turn moderate liberals into inadvertent traditionalists so that the ideological options would include only preservationists (conservatives) and radical outsiders and anarchists. 

The Wistful Quest for Honour

As in The Walking Dead, the protagonists in the wonderful postapocalyptic movie, Mad Max: Fury Road, wrestle with the question of whether to hold on to ethical principles and fight for something greater than themselves or to regress along with the world and act as narrow-minded animals. A quotation at the end of Mad Max reads, “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves.” The heroes search, then, for honour despite the futility of that effort. Their honour is at best tragic, although perhaps the world’s indifference to our struggles is a precondition of moral value. There would be a worse sort of absurdity to the lack of impediments in heaven, since in that deathly state of bliss there would be no need for improvements nor any desire at all since a desire entails a lack of fulfillment.

In our hypermodern culture, though, honour itself is outmoded.

What is Honour?

Honour isn’t just about moral reputation or respect for someone’s high moral standing; it’s not just a matter of performing deeds of renown. An honourable person has integrity and so honour is opposed to hypocrisy. This means that an honourable person has no inner conflict, so that he doesn’t wear different faces, as it were, in different companies. He’s discovered his deepest self and honours that self in his actions and beliefs, regardless of the circumstances. So honour is a virtue, not just a matter of obeying moral laws.

Still, honour is a masculine preoccupation, which is odd because the interest in morality is universal. Moreover, honour is a mainstay of tribal societies as opposed to those ruled by law. A society that can’t afford the governmental institutions to guarantee a monopoly on the use of force within its borders relies on a code of honour so that its members don’t descend into anarchy when an opportunity arises to take advantage of each other. Desert tribespeople, for example, feel honour-bound to shelter travellers, and lords of medieval Europe would back up their word by pledging their estates “on their honour.” These prescriptions, that strangers in need should be assisted and that oaths should be kept are implicit rather than codified, because there’s no institution that could enforce such prescriptions in pre-industrialized societies. Honour works by an appeal to prestige that depends on how the rest of a population feels about each of its members. If you have honour, you enjoy society’s goodwill towards you, if not necessarily any protection by an all-powerful government. If you’ve committed some dishonor and your shameful act is discovered, you’ll be shunned, at a minimum, rather than automatically punished in some regulated fashion.

I’d submit, then, that honour arose prehistorically as a modification of the power dynamics that stabilize groups of social animals. Alpha wolves are more respected than betas in their packs, but that respect is little more than fear, because wolves lack the self-control to be interested in questions of what they should do as opposed to what they must do. Human societies are still defined by their dominance hierarchies, and there’s a sense of “honour” that captures the animalistic origin of this only-slightly-more-sophisticated form of social interaction. After all, honour can apply to rank rather than merit, so that an unscrupulous aristocrat, for example, can have more honour than a Christ-like peasant, because the aristocrat has access to more privileges in his society. The “respect” shown to such a high-ranking individual is akin to both fear and jealousy, whereas that shown on moral grounds is a kind of awe that something as virtually unnatural as morality could break into dismal nature. When the morally-compromised masses bow before a monk who always obeys a stringent moral code rather than succumbing to the natural course forced on creatures that lack autonomy, their reverence indicates that they recognize that the monk stands apart from nature and has even miraculously reversed its flow, like Moses parting the Red Sea.

In any case, the hypothesis is that moral hierarchies function like dominance ones or crude, power-based pecking orders, in that they stabilize a social group by dividing it into classes whose members feel obligated to maintain their place rather than upset the social order. When animals first became people, they acquired self-control through language, reason, introversion (self-reflection), curiosity, and creativity, and so they sought to set themselves apart from the “lower” animals, by making their societies meritorious rather than necessary or naturally compelled. Beta animals rally to their alphas for protection from the elements, and fear of the alpha’s wrath is the mechanism that solidifies their social arrangement. Again, human groups are still largely shaped by the same mechanism, but we’ve supplemented it with another hierarchy befitting our freedom and the emergent choice we face, of what we ought to do now that we needn’t necessarily do anything (because we have sufficient control over our actions). In the interim between animalistic dominance hierarchies and lawful civilizations, we used morality and the mechanisms of ostracism and fame to maintain a social order.