The third desire

Fukuyama postulated that history would end in liberal democracy since it satisfied our material and thymotic desires. But beyond our need for material goods and recognition is also our need for worship. We can’t understand the current world and its fractures, zealots, and move towards illiberalism if we don’t understand that something more than material well being or superiority was behind the Salem Witch hunters of the 1690s, the Catholic inquisitors in the 1490s, or their woke equivalents today. The need to worship explains why universities have become medieval in their approach to free speech, why irrationalism has taken over the Republican Party, and why Putin is invading Ukraine. The God shaped hole in the heart is the crucial explanatory variable left out of most social theories today and until we recognize it, we can’t find the only appropriate solution.

Rise of Intolerance from Lack of Pluralism?

James Madison understood that freedom is well-served by pluralism, particularly pluralism in religion since it is the realm of life that addresses the most basic, sacred, and fundamental of our beliefs. Until recently, there was a Judeo-Christian “background orthodoxy” that framed the value structure of society in broad terms shared by major American religions, but there was religious pluralism nonetheless which led people of whatever faith to value free speech, tolerance, and openness for the sake of self-preservation if nothing else (when everybody is a religious minority, the Nash equilibrium in game theory is to cooperate on tolerance of minorities. That is now changing with the rise of a new religious majority. As traditional religion declines, woke religion rises to fill the void and, unlike its predecessor, the woke religion is monistic and unitary rather than pluralistic and diverse. There aren’t multiple sects of Wokism with competing dogmas as there were multiple sects of Judeo-Christian religion in previous eras. Tolerance and free speech were well-served by the pluralism that prevailed throughout most of American history, but they are poorly served by the monism of our current religious era.

Comparing Lockdowns to the Iraq War

Both seem to follow a seven-step pattern:

1. SCARY PROBLEM causes panic among the population (9/11, COVID-19 outbreak)

2. General feeling that politicians must do SOMETHING to stop SCARY PROBLEM

3. Politicians roll out a SOMETHING despite the fact that there is no evidence the SOMETHING will do anything to solve the SCARY PROBLEM (Iraq War, lockdowns)

4. Public (and media) supports politicians doing this SOMETHING, assuming they can trust the experts and that politicians wouldn’t be advocating for it if it wasn’t going to help solve the SCARY PROBLEM

5. The SOMETHING doesn’t do anything to stop SCARY PROBLEM and actually causes more harm than good, but the public doesn’t recognize it and still continues to support the SOMETHING as a matter of inertia

6. Public finally realizes that the SOMETHING is actually doing more harm than good, and that their politicians are more inept and less driven by evidence than they thought

7. Public loses trust in those in the government who advocated the SOMETHING (Rumsfeld, Fauci)

“If not A then B” Thinking

One of the scourges of our time is “if not A then B” thinking. It might also be named the “false binary” fallacy or, in some senses, the “law of the excluded middle.” The idea is that if you are against one thing, then you must necessarily be in favor of a specific something else. If, for instance, you are against wokeness, then you must be a Trump supporter. Getting past this fallacy is one of the key challenges of our time, but it requires more nuanced thinking. The political binary of “left vs. right,” makes it especially hard, since we are told there is a “spectrum” and if you don’t want to be on the “left,” then you must necessarily be on the “right.” The idea that there are more options than two doesn’t even occur to many people because their operating paradigm doesn’t allow for it. But, sadly, both A and B are wrong in our current time and the Book of Mormon warned of problems we are seeing in both. Stoking of racial grievance and judging people based on ancestral wrongs is a problem warned of in the Book of Mormon, as is the tendency towards supporting an immoral strong man in defiance of democratic norms (King Men). The correct approach to most realms of life, including politics, is “neither A nor B” and until we can collectively get to this point, we will see a lot of people supporting a lot of really bad stuff from A, and a lot of really bad stuff from B.

Passing Fad or Permanent Trend?

The spread of wokism to all corners of society, with a concomitant tendency to restrict speech, fire heretics, and establish orthodoxy, is clearly a reality, but the question is, will it burn out, or is it a more permanent trend? In my optimistic moments, I see the comparisons to previous witch hunts (such as the McCarthy era) where, in the short term, decent people were cowed into silence by the powers that be, but in the long term, public opinion turned and the leaders of the witch hunts went from enjoying unchallenged power to being historical villains (Sewell, McCarthy). The opinion cascade peaked and reversed with a well-placed “have you no decency, sir?” in a public forum. But the differences make me think we are watching not a fad that will burn out, but a general move into a new medievalism. First, wokism isn’t just a hysterical reaction to a perceived new threat (communism), but an entirely new worldview. McCarthyism operated within an overriding Judeo-Christian worldview while Wokism is itself a new overriding worldview. Second, the spread of wokism has been long in developing. Whereas the red scare emerged quickly after World War II, the wokist perception of “oppression embedded in systems” has been growing and expanding for at least a generation. It’s not a sudden overreaction to a perceived threat, but a longstanding, long building worldview that didn’t flame into existence suddenly and so probably won’t flame out of existence suddenly. Third, the elites, by and large, were never on board with McCarthyism. It had the support of the masses, many politicians, and some cultural elites (e.g., the Hollywood studio heads), but it had significant opposition—virtually all academics, novelists, and journalists were vocally anti-McCarthy from the beginning. There is no such opposition today. Wokism dominates media, Hollywood, and academia with almost no concerted cultural pushback. Where are the Arthur Millers writing Broadway plays denouncing the cowardice and conformism? The religious elements of wokism and its takeover of virtually the entire elite culture make me believe that it’s a new revolutionary force, establishing orthodoxy much as Catholicism did at the time of Constantine, or Protestantism did at the time of Luther. The historical metaphors to 500AD seem more apropos than the metaphors to 1950AD.

Standardized tests to get IN to college? Standardized tests INSTEAD of college.

More and more universities are waiving standardized test requirements for admission on the grunds that there are racial achievement gaps in such tests (this is like shooting the messenger—it’s far better to help fix the underlying problem that creates the gap). Obviously, this will attenuate the primary function of universities—signaling the ability to get in and complete the requirements of a college. Because of the waste, bloat, inefficiency, and intolerance of campuses, social theorists keep looking for the educational model that is going to “disrupt” higher education and send it to the ash heap of history (where it probably belongs). For Clay Christensen, it was going to be online education; for Peter Thiel, it was going to be private fellowships; for Sal Kahn, it was going to be lecture videos—none of these has worked out. The college degree (particularly elite college degree) remains the standard way to signal ability to employers and society. But what if the disruptive signal has been underneath our noses this whole time? What if it’s the standardized test itself that is a terrific way to signal one’s intellectual abilities to employers and society? Instead of waving around a degree from Yale, why not wave around a 1500 SAT score? If those SAT’s correlate really tightly with success in college (they do), and are a terrific way to signal ability to college admissions committees (they are), and college is mostly about signaling (it is), then why not skip that intermediate step of spending four years to acquire a degree as a signal, and use the standardized test itself? The shift would need to be cultural: somehow, it’s currently seen as unseemly to flaunt one’s standardized test scores, but not one’s college degree, but this is arbitrary. Employers should begin asking for those scores. Employees should begin putting those scores on their résumés. Writers should begin putting their scores in bylines the way they currently do with their college degrees. If society needs a signal of ability, let’s save ourselves four years and thousands of dollars per person, and simply have the standardized tests be the first barrage against the inefficient and largely corrupt higher education system that, as Bryan Caplan has pointed out, is primarily a remarkably expensive signaling system.

Bringing morality into politics?

To a friend who was looking for answers when students asked him about legislating morality and bringing religion into politics:

As far as reading material that addresses these issues, the first that came to mind was a 2011 speech by Elder Oaks called “Truth and Tolerance”:

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dallin-h-oaks/truth-and-tolerance/

Basically, he identifies one of the two key fallacies that your students are making (and the way you worded your inquiry suggests you already understand all of this, so I’m a little embarrassed to be writing to you “sharing” my thoughts—but, hey, you asked for it :)

1. First, as Elder Oaks points out, it’s a fallacy to assume that we “can’t legislate morality” since all laws (all of them) legislate morality. Every single one. Laws against theft are legislating the morality of “thou shalt not steal.” Laws against murder are legislating the morality of “thou shalt not kill.” Laws providing government assistance are legislating the morality of helping the poor. Laws against slavery are legislating the morality of racial equality (etc. etc.).

So the question isn’t, “Should we legislate morality?”—we already know the answer is “yes”—but “Which morality should we legislate?” For Latter-day Saints, Section 134 gives clear guidelines on this (as do the rest of the scriptures, but just in a less direct, concise way).

2. The second fallacy is the idea that some people get their moral insights (and, by extension, their beliefs about which morality we should legislate) from religion while others do not, and that it’s somehow illegitimate to bring religious values into politics. This is a critical error.

The reality is that everyone gets their morals (and therefore their ideas of which morality we should legislate) from religion, i.e., faith. As Paul pointed out, faith is knowledge of the unseen and since moral truths are completely invisible, then what we know about morality is entirely a matter of faith. Science is the realm of the empirical (the seen) and can give empirical knowledge, but the most important truths, such as truths about morals, are non-empirical. No scientist ever looked into a microscope and said, “Hey, will you look at that? It’s wrong to torture innocent children!” or looked at a test tube and said, “I’ve just found out that we should be compassionate!” We know such moral truths (and much else) by the faith which precedes scientific investigation.

Anyone who says otherwise is deceiving themselves, but boy are they trying hard and getting good at this self-deception. My friend Michael Shermer, for instance, once sent me a long article he wrote arguing that we can get morals from science because we can see that “Humans everywhere seek to survive and flourish and therefore we should do what helps human flourishing and survival.”

This is bad reasoning because he’s engaging in the futile task of trying to derive an IS from an OUGHT. Philosopher David Hume showed this was impossible over two centuries ago, but it’s also just basic common sense. Every rational person knows that it’s absurd to say, “It IS the case that men abuse their wives therefore men OUGHT to abuse their wives” or “it IS the case that humans are greedy therefore we OUGHT to be greedy.”

If we used Shermer’s logic, then we would need to conclude that we OUGHT to commit every evil act because it IS the case that humans do commit every evil act (genocide, rape, murder, cruelty, etc.). Sorry, but Hume was right: IS has nothing to do with OUGHT.

So Shermer saying “It IS the case that humans survive and flourish therefore we OUGHT to promote human survival and flourishing” is no more empirically valid than saying, “It IS the case that COVID-19 viruses survive and flourish and therefore we OUGHT to promote COVID-19 survival and flourishing” (actually, we OUGHT to do the opposite, which is why Shermer got vaccinated). IS has nothing to do with OUGHT and therefore science (the realm of IS) can’t even begin to shed light on morality (the realm of OUGHT).

And it’s not just Shermer. Pretty much every atheist begins their appeals to a scientific basis for morality with, “If we can just agree that…” but this “just agree” is where the leap of faith comes in. What are we agreeing on, and how do we know it? They’ll say something like, “If we can just agree that we should maximize human well-being…” or “If we can just agree that we should respect human rights…” or “If we can just agree that compassion is better than cruelty…” but these are all appeals to non-empirical assumptions for the “agreement.” They are all taking a leap of faith before the scientific investigation even begins.

Atheist Steven Pinker’s claim that, “I don't want other people to hurt me so I shouldn’t hurt others” is no more scientifically valid than saying, “I don’t want other people to hurt me so I should kill and control others to prevent them from hurting me.” And, in fact, the latter statement is far more justified and common from a Darwinian point of view: those most successful in reproducing their genes throughout history (e.g., Ghengis Kahn) were those who were the most ruthless in killing and controlling other people. The most successful reproducers throughout history have made the Kahn survival calculation, not the Pinker one, and it has paid off big time. So why should we heed Pinker instead of Kahn? There’s no good reason except that we know through faith (i.e., intuitions) that the Kahn survival strategy is morally wrong and the Pinker survival strategy is morally right-. You simply can’t get that knowledge by conducting experiments in a laboratory, observing nature, or reading a biology textbook. All other “science gives morals” arguments are based on the same faulty reasoning. Nietzsche understood this, but current-day atheists do not (or, more likely, pretend not to).

Which brings us back to the two fallacies: since morals can’t be known empirically, then they can only be known through revelation, i.e., “moral intuition,” and since this is non-empirical knowledge, then we are knowing moral truths through faith, i.e., “religion.” Everyone gets their morals from religion, no matter how “secular” they believe themselves to be, ergo, the idea that we “shouldn’t bring religion into politics” is absurd because it would mean excluding all morality from politics and yet all law, as Elder Oaks pointed out, is an implementation of someone’s idea of morality

Just this past week Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor fell into this error, when she claimed that it was somehow illegitimate to oppose abortion because believing the fetus is a life is a "religious issue." It’s true that believing that an unborn child is a person is a religious belief, but so is the belief that slaves were people—does she believe, then, that the Supreme Court shouldn’t have overturned the Dred Scott or Plessy rulings? Would she have excluded all of the 19th century anti-slavery arguments from public discourse since virtually every abolitionist organization in America was explicitly Christian? The essence of personhood is not something we find out through scientific investigation, nor is the idea that persons have rights. These are non-empirical truths known only by religious means—faith—and nobody is seriously considering excluding morality from laws, and therefore, by definition, they can’t be in favor of excluding religion from consideration in the making of laws.

All the best --