Everything is Permissible

There’s every chance that Neitzsche hated saying God was dead. Aware of the challenge to faith that came from Darwin, he probably doubted if we could maintain a moral system without using strictures from God. By the time he was writing, many other important thinkers had tried and failed to ground morality without the supernatural, and so had come to believe the only coherent moral anchor was that inside the self.

The search for moral systems starts in earnest with Enlightenment thinkers turning away from superstition, hoping instead to rationalize experience, convinced that human behavior, like the material world, would follow immutable laws, now revealed by human endeavour. Take for example Adam Smith’s law of “Supply and Demand,” an understanding considered having the force of Newton’s law of gravity despite being already contradicted, with speculators buying more of a commodity even as its price continued rising, as with frauds like the South Sea Bubble.

The same thinkers would also subscribe to “Natural Law,” with enlightened slave owners happily claiming that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” What exactly is meant for something to be self-evident?

Similarly, Leibniz and others would remain convinced “that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” It would need the ravages of the French Revolution (and the cynicism of Hume) to show no natural equilibrium guaranteeing benevolence in human society, though Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” would hang around until demolished by Goodall’s chimps. Kant, goaded by Hume, would have a last kick at the cat, and recognized, that there didn’t exist in nature and universal morality.

But if there was no natural moral system, perhaps one might be invented. With the Enlightenment played out, Modern Times begins at the Bastille and ends with the Berlin Wall. Within this time frame, there would be a concerted effort among philosophers to build mental structures immune to human frailty. Hegel, Marx, Bentham, Mill, Spenser, Bergson and others soldiered away at their various enterprises, each one doomed to failure as Neitzsche predicted.

By the twentieth century, we would have a flood of “isms” - Communism, Capitalism, Fascism, Imperialism, Social Darwinism, Classical Liberalism, Scientism, Materialism, Nationalism, even Feminism – all self-closing, self-policing mental constructs supposedly improving humanity and ushering in a utopia. Their records of course speak for themselves.

But before we dismiss them as failed, we also need to recognize each came with its own dogma, heresies, priesthood and teleology. These ideologies were secular religions, cultural or linguistic frameworks that shaped the entirety of the adherent’s life and thought. The claim that religions start all wars is only true because ideologies are also secular religions, and atheists making that claim, especially the Marxists, are also true believers.

Teleology matters since all these secular religions contain a spiritual aspect, having as their end goal some undefined “better life” achievable in this world. Most people have some sense of what is meant by Marx’s workers paradise, but for Scientism’s particular form of utopia, consider the ethos of Star Trek where everyone lives in harmony, their material needs fully met by technology. This particular zombie is anything but dead because while technology has much to offer, even if you’re well fed and comfortable, your spouse can still be fooling around, or you getting upset. A full stomach doesn’t get rid of the green eyed monster.

The lessons of history must stand and Lyotard was right to point out the bankruptcy of the great meta-narratives, and that includes the secular religions, and not just one at the expense of the other. In 1989 for example, the Berlin would makr communism as utterly wrong, but it being wrong is not proof as many assumed that capitalism is right, and so we had the financial crash of 2007. Even Nietzsche’s individual conscience didn’t help. Maybe there were some supermen, but all of us must admit to being self-serving, and some of us are sociopaths. Hitler, Stalin and even Charles Manson were each following their hearts.

But now it all wrong since every small kid in the schoolyard can tell you who’s the bully, the liar, the cheat, the tell tale or the trouble maker, and know such behave is bad. This kid is living the Ten Commandments – thou shall not murder, steal, covet or bear false witness. How come this kid will know by instinct the mind of God?

It’s no accident that all the great religions share a similar moral code. However much they might differ in how a person is saved, they all agree on what it means to try to be good. Even think what it means to use a word like good. How come we know good and bad when we meet them? How come we all call the same things good and bad? why do all these kids in the playground use the same deefinitions? There are only two possible answers. Either this knowledge is divinely inspired, or it had emerged though evolution.

The religious approach is easy to handle. Paul’s claim is we all have a natural knowledge of God. To his point, no one has yet to explain what consciousness is, whether what we have is shared with the animals, or how it even came into being. We can however say what human consciousness does. It allows us to examine our behavior, and so it gives us a conscience. Because science tends to focus on how questions to the exclusion of why questions, this gets missed in the research, but maybe being blessed with a conscience is what it means to be made in the image of God. If so then our shared morality becomes what God says in His holy books.

However, if your worldview, your personal secular religion, requires you not to believe in God then you must get to universal conscience via evolution. Perhaps that’s possible. There have been some spirited efforts, but this is not an easy intellectual problem. The starting point is always with instinct, with everything about procreation and survival. For a conscience, there must be a change in kind, with animals progressively learning to regulate their instincts as they climb the evolutionary ladder. The argument is that social animals find benefit in altruistic behavior, but the issue is evidence from the distant past. Without it, claims degenerate into post hoc arguments that by creatures working together to exploit and kill other that themselves, they exploiting and killing is bad. You can make a case for rearing young, growing cognition and language, affection in bonding and so on, but no one was there at the time so can we really be sure.

There are also the other arguments, typically Marxist or Freudian, making the claim for a priestly class intended to operationalize the needs of the elite. These priests are supposed to construct religious requirements intended to cement the existing hierarchy, and that is how these thinkers believe religions come to exist. Once there, it’s a small step to drafting the actual commandments. But here's the question. Why would people willingly follow? Is there some human need to worship? Because, without that need, religions would have no traction. Are people born with a God-shaped hole?

Alternatively, evolutionary biology may give up justifying transcendental morality, accepting that enlightened self-interest is as good as it gets. And Dostoevsky was right when he said, “Without God, everything is permissible.”