More Mouse Talk: On Morals
[Written in the spirit of Erasmus and the vernacular of the later Twain.]
Some people imagine that what we are calling moral behavior has been dictated to us by a higher and wiser power. More often than not, the people making that claim are referring to words in one or the other of several old books written by Moses, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Saul/Paul of Tarsus, and several other now-dead men who claimed to have been God’s secretaries. To Christians and Jews the most famous of those writings appears in what Christians call the Pentateuch and what Jews know as the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament in the Bible. And the most famous part of those writings appears in the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments. To “the people of the book” those few words contain the underpinnings of all morality.
The Jews have logically expanded the less than 200 words of the Decalogue and the less than 100,000 of the Torah into 23 volumes of detailed guidance called the Talmud, of which there are two (but don’t quote me on the number of volumes in each). The Christians, conditioned by ages of separate-but-unequal independent thinking and non-thinking, and thus finding themselves less susceptible to regimentation, have relied upon a more-or-less loose-leaf book of morals, where what is right and wrong is decided by what has come to be called “situational ethics” – that is, they do as they damn well please, but are always careful to logically justify their behavior by turning to one or more of the conflicting “prophets” for their premises. Both approaches – Talmudic and loose-leaf – work quite well. The Jews have managed to maintain their unity as a persecuted people, and the Christians to excel as more than capable persecutors of both the Jews and themselves.
Both groups of well-meaning religionists seem to have believed that the laws of God – as compiled by men – are not the same as the laws of nature. We may violate the laws of God (they thought) but not the laws of nature. Hence the necessity for armed forces here on earth to apprehend and dismember violators and for a hereafter to “take care of” those who escape justice here on earth. Those arrangements also work. Maintaining the armed forces and the places of business of those preaching the hereafter provide a tremendous cash flow and assure the useful employment for many who might otherwise find themselves destitute.
But the same people who believe that men have been endowed with free will – so as to be able to violate God’s laws – also (occasionally) profess a belief in divine providence. This is the belief best expressed in the words of the famous German plagiarist, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, who put it this way: All things are ordered by God just so that the world we have is the best of all possible worlds. It has not gone unnoticed that the notions of “free will” and “divine providence” contradict each other. As we speak, there have been written exactly 234,873 full-size books (a book being a document between covers that consists of at least 111 pages) and ten times that many lesser papers, memos, and bulletins to explain how it is that we are free to do as we please while, at the same time, being compelled by God’s divine will to do as he pleases. Those explanatory writings have not been nearly so successful in making their point as have the armed forces that administer and execute God’s laws, although if the two were evaluated on an economic scale, the writings would certainly be found superior.
[The remainder is written in the spirit of Spinoza and in the Mouse’s own vernacular (though the latter may seem the same as the vernacular employed above, since the Mouse is one of Mr. Twain’s 1734 reincarnations, may their tribe increase).]
God, being God, does not make laws that can be broken. To think otherwise would be to suggest that God is no more than any other earthly potentate whose dictates are subject to disobedience, even to nullification. The sum extent of God’s irrevocable and unbreakable laws is not known to us, and probably never will be. The laws of nature – the ones scientists are trying to identify – are the category we most often think of when we imagine God’s laws, but the laws of science (even if we knew them to be true) presuppose and depend on another body of law, and that body is what philosophers address when they study God’s laws. The most pre-dominate and pervasive of those metaphysical laws expresses itself as the “law of causes,” the law that says there can be no effect without a cause, nor a cause without an effect. You can see that if that law were not a law, whatever laws scientists might discover would be of no effect, since they could not be said to be laws if the law of causes were not a law.
The law of causes, and many of God’s most fundamental laws, are referred to as “metaphysical” primarily because they cannot be proven by reference to the sorts of things scientists refer to as “empirical data.” They cannot be directly observed. They can only be inferred from what is directly observed. We see things, hear things, touch things, smell things … we sense things, but we cannot, in the same sense of the word, sense things like the law of causes. And yet, the behavior we observe in all things implies that they are obedient to the law of causes.
Some philosophers, called logical positivists, in thrall to the physical sciences, have treated the fact, that the law of causes cannot be observed, as proof of the fact that it is a convention of some sort invented by men to enable them to organize their thoughts in an orderly fashion. The logical positivists got their inspiration for this from the German idealist philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who observed, quite correctly, that the law of causes could only be explained as a function of the way the human mind works. This same man, though a devout Christian, said that the existence of God could not be proven, only assumed. Apparently Kant had forgotten, and certainly the positivists have disregarded, Spinoza’s most fundamental claim: Without God, nothing can be or be conceived. That same Spinozistic claim can be understood as an acknowledgement that all things, including human beings and their minds, are in God, either as his creations or as naturally occurring beings. (Christians and Jews may choose the first, Spinozistic pantheists and scientists of the natural religion persuasion the latter.) If that is so, then transcendent laws, like the law of causes, must be understood, either way, as fundamental constituents of the mind of God. We may go so far as to suggest that they are thoughts in the mind of God.
To get directly to the point, that is, to synthesize the contradictory notions of free will and divine providence, and to place them in the context of a consideration of moral behavior … the law of causes stands beneath any conceivable moral code. Whether we conceive the functioning of morality as the mysterious workings of Fate or as “what goes around comes around” or as “whatsoever ye sow, so shall ye reap” or as the human conscience or merely as “the long arm of the law,” we cannot fail to see the law of causes. If there were no such law, then morality, in any sense, would not, and could not, exist.
Human beings have, for the most part, composed their understanding of morality by supposing God to be just, but even the most casual understanding of his true laws – i.e., those laws that cannot possibly be broken – demonstrates the error of that understanding. The law of causes sees to the punishment of the just and the unjust with equanimity. God plays no favorites. To God, humanity is one of the infinite effects of nature. Consequently, to God the word “justice” has no meaning.
It does not follow from God’s (or nature’s) unconcern with the affairs of men that men themselves ought to be unconcerned. (And certainly we are not.) God is infinite and thus need not be concerned with his survival, but men, and all things, are finite; consequently the drive to perpetuate themselves in being operates as a cause with the effect that, in nature, all things are in conflict. (See Hobbes, Leviathan.) And it is from this fact – which is also from God’s divine providence (though not by intent, since God has none) – that the need for Justice arises.
The rest should be easy, but obviously is not. Nature has determined that men are free to interpret their needs differently. Hence, they are free to arrange their moral codes differently. Some – unfortunately, a great majority – have seen fit to identify their codes as God’s, a mistake devastating to the possibility that a truly effective Justice might be obtained. Though the state of nature Hobbes saw as an inevitable outcome, that would be sure to prevail without governments, has been somewhat mitigated, the essential differences and the mistaken authorities assigned to those differences have created a world in which the “all” who are struggling with “all” have emerged as entities far more powerful, and thus far more deadly, than the individuals who would have been at war in the Hobbesian state of nature. We have organized ourselves as “true believers,” ordained our so-called moral codes with the imprimatur of the divine, and have set about to destroy ourselves and, perhaps, all the innocents of the earth.
Well, yes, denial is easy, because we “know” we are right. And yes, finding the power to lift ourselves by our bootstraps out of a sea of error is bound to be difficult. “Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” Those are the final words of Spinoza’s Ethics, and I feel compelled to observe that they have truly resulted from the one mistake that great man made: he spoke his truth so obscurely that men have been able to use their ignorance of it as an excuse for their murderous and “moral” ways.
And those are the Mouse’s final words … for today.
Some people imagine that what we are calling moral behavior has been dictated to us by a higher and wiser power. More often than not, the people making that claim are referring to words in one or the other of several old books written by Moses, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Saul/Paul of Tarsus, and several other now-dead men who claimed to have been God’s secretaries. To Christians and Jews the most famous of those writings appears in what Christians call the Pentateuch and what Jews know as the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament in the Bible. And the most famous part of those writings appears in the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments. To “the people of the book” those few words contain the underpinnings of all morality.
The Jews have logically expanded the less than 200 words of the Decalogue and the less than 100,000 of the Torah into 23 volumes of detailed guidance called the Talmud, of which there are two (but don’t quote me on the number of volumes in each). The Christians, conditioned by ages of separate-but-unequal independent thinking and non-thinking, and thus finding themselves less susceptible to regimentation, have relied upon a more-or-less loose-leaf book of morals, where what is right and wrong is decided by what has come to be called “situational ethics” – that is, they do as they damn well please, but are always careful to logically justify their behavior by turning to one or more of the conflicting “prophets” for their premises. Both approaches – Talmudic and loose-leaf – work quite well. The Jews have managed to maintain their unity as a persecuted people, and the Christians to excel as more than capable persecutors of both the Jews and themselves.
Both groups of well-meaning religionists seem to have believed that the laws of God – as compiled by men – are not the same as the laws of nature. We may violate the laws of God (they thought) but not the laws of nature. Hence the necessity for armed forces here on earth to apprehend and dismember violators and for a hereafter to “take care of” those who escape justice here on earth. Those arrangements also work. Maintaining the armed forces and the places of business of those preaching the hereafter provide a tremendous cash flow and assure the useful employment for many who might otherwise find themselves destitute.
But the same people who believe that men have been endowed with free will – so as to be able to violate God’s laws – also (occasionally) profess a belief in divine providence. This is the belief best expressed in the words of the famous German plagiarist, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, who put it this way: All things are ordered by God just so that the world we have is the best of all possible worlds. It has not gone unnoticed that the notions of “free will” and “divine providence” contradict each other. As we speak, there have been written exactly 234,873 full-size books (a book being a document between covers that consists of at least 111 pages) and ten times that many lesser papers, memos, and bulletins to explain how it is that we are free to do as we please while, at the same time, being compelled by God’s divine will to do as he pleases. Those explanatory writings have not been nearly so successful in making their point as have the armed forces that administer and execute God’s laws, although if the two were evaluated on an economic scale, the writings would certainly be found superior.
[The remainder is written in the spirit of Spinoza and in the Mouse’s own vernacular (though the latter may seem the same as the vernacular employed above, since the Mouse is one of Mr. Twain’s 1734 reincarnations, may their tribe increase).]
God, being God, does not make laws that can be broken. To think otherwise would be to suggest that God is no more than any other earthly potentate whose dictates are subject to disobedience, even to nullification. The sum extent of God’s irrevocable and unbreakable laws is not known to us, and probably never will be. The laws of nature – the ones scientists are trying to identify – are the category we most often think of when we imagine God’s laws, but the laws of science (even if we knew them to be true) presuppose and depend on another body of law, and that body is what philosophers address when they study God’s laws. The most pre-dominate and pervasive of those metaphysical laws expresses itself as the “law of causes,” the law that says there can be no effect without a cause, nor a cause without an effect. You can see that if that law were not a law, whatever laws scientists might discover would be of no effect, since they could not be said to be laws if the law of causes were not a law.
The law of causes, and many of God’s most fundamental laws, are referred to as “metaphysical” primarily because they cannot be proven by reference to the sorts of things scientists refer to as “empirical data.” They cannot be directly observed. They can only be inferred from what is directly observed. We see things, hear things, touch things, smell things … we sense things, but we cannot, in the same sense of the word, sense things like the law of causes. And yet, the behavior we observe in all things implies that they are obedient to the law of causes.
Some philosophers, called logical positivists, in thrall to the physical sciences, have treated the fact, that the law of causes cannot be observed, as proof of the fact that it is a convention of some sort invented by men to enable them to organize their thoughts in an orderly fashion. The logical positivists got their inspiration for this from the German idealist philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who observed, quite correctly, that the law of causes could only be explained as a function of the way the human mind works. This same man, though a devout Christian, said that the existence of God could not be proven, only assumed. Apparently Kant had forgotten, and certainly the positivists have disregarded, Spinoza’s most fundamental claim: Without God, nothing can be or be conceived. That same Spinozistic claim can be understood as an acknowledgement that all things, including human beings and their minds, are in God, either as his creations or as naturally occurring beings. (Christians and Jews may choose the first, Spinozistic pantheists and scientists of the natural religion persuasion the latter.) If that is so, then transcendent laws, like the law of causes, must be understood, either way, as fundamental constituents of the mind of God. We may go so far as to suggest that they are thoughts in the mind of God.
To get directly to the point, that is, to synthesize the contradictory notions of free will and divine providence, and to place them in the context of a consideration of moral behavior … the law of causes stands beneath any conceivable moral code. Whether we conceive the functioning of morality as the mysterious workings of Fate or as “what goes around comes around” or as “whatsoever ye sow, so shall ye reap” or as the human conscience or merely as “the long arm of the law,” we cannot fail to see the law of causes. If there were no such law, then morality, in any sense, would not, and could not, exist.
Human beings have, for the most part, composed their understanding of morality by supposing God to be just, but even the most casual understanding of his true laws – i.e., those laws that cannot possibly be broken – demonstrates the error of that understanding. The law of causes sees to the punishment of the just and the unjust with equanimity. God plays no favorites. To God, humanity is one of the infinite effects of nature. Consequently, to God the word “justice” has no meaning.
It does not follow from God’s (or nature’s) unconcern with the affairs of men that men themselves ought to be unconcerned. (And certainly we are not.) God is infinite and thus need not be concerned with his survival, but men, and all things, are finite; consequently the drive to perpetuate themselves in being operates as a cause with the effect that, in nature, all things are in conflict. (See Hobbes, Leviathan.) And it is from this fact – which is also from God’s divine providence (though not by intent, since God has none) – that the need for Justice arises.
The rest should be easy, but obviously is not. Nature has determined that men are free to interpret their needs differently. Hence, they are free to arrange their moral codes differently. Some – unfortunately, a great majority – have seen fit to identify their codes as God’s, a mistake devastating to the possibility that a truly effective Justice might be obtained. Though the state of nature Hobbes saw as an inevitable outcome, that would be sure to prevail without governments, has been somewhat mitigated, the essential differences and the mistaken authorities assigned to those differences have created a world in which the “all” who are struggling with “all” have emerged as entities far more powerful, and thus far more deadly, than the individuals who would have been at war in the Hobbesian state of nature. We have organized ourselves as “true believers,” ordained our so-called moral codes with the imprimatur of the divine, and have set about to destroy ourselves and, perhaps, all the innocents of the earth.
Well, yes, denial is easy, because we “know” we are right. And yes, finding the power to lift ourselves by our bootstraps out of a sea of error is bound to be difficult. “Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” Those are the final words of Spinoza’s Ethics, and I feel compelled to observe that they have truly resulted from the one mistake that great man made: he spoke his truth so obscurely that men have been able to use their ignorance of it as an excuse for their murderous and “moral” ways.
And those are the Mouse’s final words … for today.
posted by Benedict S. at 11:30 AM
8 Comments:
Written in the Spirit of hope-
“Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
Salvation is neglected because they prefer thier own morals over the morals of God.
What did God ask of us how can the volumes you speak of be reduced to thier most essential component? God asked this, that we love Him and each other, that we acknowledge Him in all of our ways, and that we consider the needs of others over our own needs. This is a morality that men of REASON will have a hard time finding fault with...
"Men of reason" wrote the "word of God." Further reason to have faith in the "spirit of hope."
Written in the spirit of full disclosure-
CE says: I am Josh S, and Thierry Beauchamp(not the actor), and Roger Willco, and one of the anonymous's that show up here, and once I said I was Senor Doom as sort of a joke, and there was this time I called myself anonymouse and so on and so forth...
and the beat goes on!
But CE, why "Thierry Beauchamp"? I understand anynonmouse, which I think came up on my blog -- but of all people in the world, Thierry Beauchamp? and phrases in French? Full disclosure, please!
Actually I did not know that there was even such a person named Thierry Beauchamp. The first name, Thierry, was the name of a french student my sister brought home to mom and dad's house for the holidays while she was a student at GWU.
Mouse's topic that day was on his lack of prejudice and the wonder he had about growing up without said prejudice in an environment that normally fostered prejudice. It just so happened that Thierry and I had a similar conversation during Thanksgiving dinner that year. My sister's boyfriend at the time was complaining about the condition of houses in certain neighborhoods in The City of Brotherly Love. I stated that the people living in those houses really couldn't be held accountable for thier condition because they obvioulsy lack the finances to make essential repairs even to something simple like the broken windows boyfriend was harping about. At that Thierry , who had made his disdain for America known with some of his earlier comments, went into the french equivalent of a rant regarding the deplorable conditions of racial relations in America.Like mouse, I have never been inclined toward racial prejudice so I didn't disagree with him, but I thought he should know that other countries did not need to struggle through racial problems the way we have; obviously we have brought these problems on ourselves but we have made efforts( at least on paper and through a civil war to begin to atone for our sins). I then asked Thierry if there was a group in France that was oppressed in the way African Americans had been in America. He responded that the French did not like the ----, and went on to explain how the ---- were treated in France. To which I asked , "isn't that just as bad as what we have done? "No". said Thierry, "because the ---- are pigs."
Mouse's blog reminded me of Thierry and his comments, my comments were meant to point out that we all have prejudices to some degree.
As far as the French phrases, what else would a frenchman say? The Beauchamp part I made up and it is purely a coincidence that there happens to be an actor with that name. Thierry Beauchamp just sound so french, doesn't it?
I have some other monikers you may be familar with, I've posted under Chuck, Jimbo, and my personal favorite- scaredstraight- on OC.
Scaredstraight should be an obvious choice from what I was reading back then( maybe he's changed). Scaredstraight was a cool cat-real smooth daddy-like Maynard G Krebs-grooving with Doobie Gillis in the coffee shop of the mind... These is were everybody snaps thier fingers!
Do you guys know the real Beauchamp?
Jeez, BTW, I don't even know the real "CE."
True enough BS, true enough...
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