Jeremiah61
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One cause of misery and vice is always present with us in the greed and pride of men, but at certain periods in history this is greatly increased by the temporary prevalence of some false philosophy. Correct thinking will not make good men bad ones; but a purely theoretical error may remove ordinary checks to evil and deprive good intentions of their natural support. An error of this sort is abroad at present. I am referring to relativism, sometimes called subjectivism or pluralism.
After studying his enviroment man has begun to study himself. Up to that point, he had assumed his own reason and through it seen all other things. Now, his own reason has become the object of his reason: it is as if we took out our own eyes to look at them. Thus studied, his own reason appears to him as the epiphenomenon which accompanies chemical or electrical events in the cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process. His own logic, hitherto the king whom events in all possible worlds must obey, becomes merely subjective. There is no reason for supposing that it yields truth.
As long as this dethronement refers only to the theoretical reason, it cannot be wholehearted. The scientist has to assume the validity of his own logic even in order to prove that it is merely subjective, and therefore he can only flirt with subjectivism. It is true that this flirtation sometimes goes pretty far. There are modern scientists, I am told, who have dropped the words truth and reality out of their vocabulary and who hold that the end of their work is not to know what is there but simply to get practical results. This is, no doubth, a bad symptom. But, in the main, subjectivism is such an uncomfortable yokefellow for research that the danger, in this quarter, is continually counteracted.
But when we turn to practical reason the ruinous effects are found operating in full force. By practical reason I mean our judgement of good and evil. If you are surprised that I inculde this under the heading reason at all, let me remind you that your surprise is itself one result of the subjectivism/relativism which I am discussing. Until modern times no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgements of value were rational judgements or that what they discovered was objective. It was taken for granted that in temptation passion was opposed, not to some sentiment, but to reason. Thus Plato thought, thus Aristotle, thus Hooker, Bulter and Doctor Johnson. The modern view is different. It does not believe that value judgements are really judgements at all. They are sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes, produced in a community by the pressure of its environment and its traditions, and differing from one community to another. To say that a thing is good is merely to express our feeling about it; and our feeling about it is the feeling we have been socially conditioned to have.
But if this is so, then we might have been conditioned to feel otherwise. 'Perhaps,' thinks the reformer or the educational expert,' it would be better if we were. Let us improve our morality.' Out of this apparently innocent idea comes the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its 'ideology' as men choose clothes. Everyone is indignant when he hears of Hitler defining justice as that which is to the interset of the Third Reich. But it is not always remembered that this indignation is perfectly groundless if we ourselves regard morality as a subjective sentiment to be altered at will to whatever is "true for _____." Unless there is someobjective standard of good, over-arching Nazis, Fundamentalists, Anti-Semitists, and ourselves alike whether any of us obey it or no, then of course the Nazis, even the people who spread homophobia, are as competent to create their ideology as we create ours. If 'good' and 'better' are terms deriving their sole meaning from the ideology of each person, the of course ideologies themselves cannot be better or worse than one another. Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, as a ruler is independent from a plank. For the same reason it is useless to compare the moral ideas of one age to those of another; progress and decadence would alike be meaningless words.
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After studying his enviroment man has begun to study himself. Up to that point, he had assumed his own reason and through it seen all other things. Now, his own reason has become the object of his reason: it is as if we took out our own eyes to look at them. Thus studied, his own reason appears to him as the epiphenomenon which accompanies chemical or electrical events in the cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process. His own logic, hitherto the king whom events in all possible worlds must obey, becomes merely subjective. There is no reason for supposing that it yields truth.
As long as this dethronement refers only to the theoretical reason, it cannot be wholehearted. The scientist has to assume the validity of his own logic even in order to prove that it is merely subjective, and therefore he can only flirt with subjectivism. It is true that this flirtation sometimes goes pretty far. There are modern scientists, I am told, who have dropped the words truth and reality out of their vocabulary and who hold that the end of their work is not to know what is there but simply to get practical results. This is, no doubth, a bad symptom. But, in the main, subjectivism is such an uncomfortable yokefellow for research that the danger, in this quarter, is continually counteracted.
But when we turn to practical reason the ruinous effects are found operating in full force. By practical reason I mean our judgement of good and evil. If you are surprised that I inculde this under the heading reason at all, let me remind you that your surprise is itself one result of the subjectivism/relativism which I am discussing. Until modern times no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgements of value were rational judgements or that what they discovered was objective. It was taken for granted that in temptation passion was opposed, not to some sentiment, but to reason. Thus Plato thought, thus Aristotle, thus Hooker, Bulter and Doctor Johnson. The modern view is different. It does not believe that value judgements are really judgements at all. They are sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes, produced in a community by the pressure of its environment and its traditions, and differing from one community to another. To say that a thing is good is merely to express our feeling about it; and our feeling about it is the feeling we have been socially conditioned to have.
But if this is so, then we might have been conditioned to feel otherwise. 'Perhaps,' thinks the reformer or the educational expert,' it would be better if we were. Let us improve our morality.' Out of this apparently innocent idea comes the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its 'ideology' as men choose clothes. Everyone is indignant when he hears of Hitler defining justice as that which is to the interset of the Third Reich. But it is not always remembered that this indignation is perfectly groundless if we ourselves regard morality as a subjective sentiment to be altered at will to whatever is "true for _____." Unless there is someobjective standard of good, over-arching Nazis, Fundamentalists, Anti-Semitists, and ourselves alike whether any of us obey it or no, then of course the Nazis, even the people who spread homophobia, are as competent to create their ideology as we create ours. If 'good' and 'better' are terms deriving their sole meaning from the ideology of each person, the of course ideologies themselves cannot be better or worse than one another. Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, as a ruler is independent from a plank. For the same reason it is useless to compare the moral ideas of one age to those of another; progress and decadence would alike be meaningless words.
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