Where does morality come from? And who’s moral, and why?
- David Barton thinks Democrats cheat because they’re not “God-fearing” (despite the evidence of its being the Republicans who cheat);
- In contrast to Phil Zuckerman’s evidence about how people without religious faith score higher on metrics of morality;
- How Barton aligns to the most basic notion of human morality, about obedience to avoid punishment;
- The every-day evidence of the GOP as a crime mob;
- David Brooks about generosity, and morality;
- A short item about how using the term “woke” is lazy.
Like a bad penny, David Barton keeps turning up from time to time. I’ve written about him a couple times before: in David Barton, Just this once in Sept 2013, and in The Mendacious David Barton in April 2017. Here’s another headline indicating where he’s coming from, from Right Wing Watch in 2017: David Barton: The Same Evil Behind Nazism Is At Work Today In The Push For LGBTQ Equality.
The thing about this piece today is that there’s a tiny core of truth to his claims, even though that core truth doesn’t do him any credit. Rather.
Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 1 Sep 2023: Christian liar David Barton: Democrats aren’t “God-fearing,” so they cheat in elections, subtitled “I can’t believe he said this with a straight face”
Mehta summarizes Barton’s career so far, how he’s “made a career out of twisting and distorting the words of the Founding Fathers and the Bible in defense of Christian Nationalism, homophobia, and bigotry.” How his Ph.D. was a hoax; how his book about Thomas Jefferson was so flawed the (Christian) publisher withdrew it.
And yet conservative Christians and Republican politicians still cite him as an authoritative source of information. They all know the sort of people who take them seriously aren’t really interested in honesty. They just want someone to say, with total confidence, whatever they all wish was true.
That’s why Barton’s latest remarks are so remarkable. They’re not just lies. They’re obvious lies. Or at least they would be obvious to anyone who cares about facts.
Of course, this is entirely consistent with the reactions on the right to Vivek Ramaswamy, as noted in my last two posts. Mehta quotes Barton:
“Generally, the Democrat Party is a very secular party,” Barton said. “They tend to be very secular, and the more secular you are, the less God-fearing you are, which means the less restraints you have on your behavior. So, if there is no God, then everything is right now and the end does justify the means—the Machiavellian thing that the end justifies the means.”
Republicans believe in God, Barton claimed, which is why they are “not going to break the rules just to win”
Which is absurd on many levels, not the least of which is that to everyone who is not an addled right-winger, it’s the Republicans who’ve been trying to cheat on elections, for years, but especially after the 2020 election. This is what I mean by “projection.”
Mehta goes on to mention that, while not all Democrats are secular,
As sociologist Phil Zuckerman has written about so eloquently, the people without religious faith also score higher on just about every metric of morality imaginable:
In terms of who supports helping refugees, affordable health care for all, accurate sex education, death with dignity, gay rights, transgender rights, animal rights; and as to who opposes militarism, the governmental use of torture, the death penalty, corporal punishment, and so on — the correlation remains: The most secular Americans exhibit the most care for the suffering of others, while the most religious exhibit the highest levels of indifference.
With lots of links to the evidence about these things, for those who care about evidence.
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As I said there’s a core of truth, very limited truth, in Barton’s claim. There are indeed people who think that, without the notion of God constantly peering over your shoulder, you would break all the rules. Or, *they* would break all the rules, without the constraint of their belief in God.
But this is the most primitive kind of morality. I wrote about this, citing someone else’s “stages of moral development,” which exist across all cultures, in this post: Notes for the Book: Hierarchy of Morality, posted in June 2020, with paraphrases by E.O. Wilson, who cites these stages in his book On Human Nature (reviewed here in 2019, image above). (I’m not sure this will make it into the book, but it’s a basis for my thinking about culture and morality.) I’ll quote what I posted then:
I’ll paraphrase Wilson with comments of my own. Again, this is a hierarchy from the simplest and most simplistic, to the most cosmopolitan and complex.
- Simple obedience to rules and authority to avoid punishment. [e.g. Biblical threats of hell for disobedience to The Rules];
- Self-interest orientation (what’s in it for me?); conformity to group behavior to obtain rewards and exchange favors;
- Interpersonal accord and conformity; social norms; good-boy orientation, conformity to avoid dislike and rejection by others;
- Authority and social-order maintaining orientation: law and order morality;
- Social contract orientation; laws are recognized as social contracts for the common good rather than universal rules;
- Universal ethical principles; principled conscience [e.g. Kant’s categorical imperative]; [Wilson:] primary allegiance to principles of choice, which can overrule law in cases the law is judged to do more harm than good. [Thus, protesters, who are not lawbreakers, throughout time.]
Individuals, as Wilson notes, can stop at any rung on the ladder. The Biblical fundamentalists stop at stage 1.
Barton stops at stage 1. He doesn’t understand how society works; he either thinks simplicity, or he’s cynical.
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Meanwhile the world outside the simple-minded Christian MAGA cult sees this kind of evidence every day.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 1 Sep 2023: From RICO charges to loyalty pledges: Trump’s transformation of the GOP into a crime mob is complete, subtitled “The first Republican presidential debate made it clear: MAGA may be a cult — but the GOP is a crime family”
Today’s Republican Party is a de facto criminal organization. The crime boss is Donald Trump. Like in other criminal organizations, Trump rules through an inner circle of his closest advisors and lieutenants. Trump the boss also uses threats of violence and intimidation to keep control and to punish his enemies.
Unlike other criminal organizations, the Republican Party administers its loyalty oath in public.
During last week’s Republican presidential debate there was one such moment when moderator Brett Baier asked the 8 participants the following question: “If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party’s choice? Please raise your hand if you would.”
Six of the eight prospective Republican presidential candidates said they would support Trump.
The party of law and order? Rather the party of tribal loyalty, and disinterest in facts.
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Another piece roughly about morality.
NY Times, David Brooks, 31 Aug 2023: People Are More Generous Than You May Think
Are human beings fundamentally good or fundamentally bad? Are people mostly generous, or are they mostly selfish?
Over the centuries, many of our leading lights have taken the view that people are basically selfish. Machiavelli argued that people are deceitful, ungrateful and covetous. Classical economics is based on the idea that people relentlessly pursue their self-interest. “The average human being is about 95 percent selfish in the narrow meaning of the term,” the economist Gordon Tullock once wrote. In his book “The Selfish Gene,” the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argued, “We are born selfish.” In the public at large, only 30 percent of Americans say they can trust the people around them, suggesting quite a grim view of human nature.
But what if this dark view of our nature is not true?
David Brooks, as I’ve said, is a little too preoccupied by ancient wisdom and verities of the past, and unaware of modern ideas about evolutionary psychology and human evolution. The modern take, if a bit simplistic, is that humans are both selfish and generous, in different contexts. This is E.O. Wilson’s notion of individual vs group selection. The key point is that human culture could not have arisen if everyone were mostly selfish; it’s cooperation — not tool using — that has been the key in humanity’s evolution into the dominant social species on the planet.
Brooks goes on to describe studies into this matter. When people are nice, are they doing so just to be noticed, to gain cred?
Benkler stepped back to hammer home the core conclusion from this vast body of research: “The point is, across a wide range of experiments, in widely diverse populations, one finding stands out: In practically no human society examined under controlled conditions have the majority of people consistently behaved selfishly.”
Humanity hasn’t thrived all these centuries because we’re ruthlessly selfish; we’ve thrived because we’re really good at cooperation.
Exactly.
And I think individual reflection is worthwhile here. In how many interactions with other people, throughout the day, do we actually experience someone being selfish? Or much more often, people we encounter being routinely polite, even helpful? This notion that people are fundamentally selfish arises, perhaps, from the Christian notion of humans being fallen creatures in need of redemption, a distasteful notion on its face, and counterfactual from the evidence. And yet another effect of mass media, including the daily news, that highlights the bad things that happen every day, and not the thousands of other nice things that happen every day.
And Capitalism isn’t helping. Brooks ends:
Finally, I’d say we in the West have gone overboard in building systems that try to motivate people by appealing mostly to their economic self-interest. We build inhumane systems in which material incentives blot out social and moral incentives. And we’ve made ourselves miserable along the way.
There are other systems.
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Here’s a leftover item from a few days ago.
OnlySky, Jonathan MS Pearce, 19 Aug 2023: What is ‘woke’? It’s my trigger word
The writer discusses how the term “woke” doesn’t mean much of anything, except for whatever the speaker disapproves of. As I’ve noted before.
When you use a term so much, in so many contexts, to attack so many ideas and so many people, it loses any coherent meaning or utility. In economics, this is the Law of Diminishing Returns. The first pint of water in the desert is very useful and rather refreshing. The 31st? Somewhat less so. We are now at a point that the term “woke” is empty, vacuous. It is the new “libtard”. If that’s where we are at, count me out.
It’s a very lazy term.
