The oppression hierarchy throws human agency into the dustbin. Without agency, there is no responsibility. Without responsibility, there is nothing to restrain human impulse. In such a world, a social animal such as a human is much better off dead. End of story.
Just a fantastic piece and a reminder of Oakeshott’s warning that before consigning traditions of the past to the civilizational trash heap, one better take a damn hard look at what, if anything, replaces it. This is true conservatism, and it has little to do with politics. I am conservative only in this sense.
This is a fascinating piece! C.S. Lewis's prescient ideas certainly describe what is happening here now. It is remarkable how many thought leaders, including particularly George Orwell, accurately described our current civilizational collapse. It speaks to the fact that human nature consists of a limited range of behaviors that, for the wise, are quite predictable with respect to mass sociocultural movements.
This is really good (And I do mean it in a very objective sense). Objective morality used to be the realm of religion but we do not need religion to hold on to its core. And we do need to hold on to it to avoid despair.
I believe that Morality stems from the single imperative to cherish all life and the world that made it. Anything that negates it is evil. All else is secondary.
As I read Kimberlé Crenshaw sometime years ago (and burst out laughing), I have wondered ever since why the edifice of "intersectionality" of hasn't been ridiculed and dismissed entirely from academic “discourse” (bullshit, to you and me) in the social sciences for obviously faulty mathematical reasoning. I mainly think social sciences are extremely poor at basic math, as we have often seen.
Conditional probabilities (chance of being fired because of race, chance of being fired because of sex) such as her “theory”’s central DeGraffenreid legal case cannot necessarily be additive or compounding - the correlation between compound “oppressive” categories and increased conditional probabilities of firing - or oppression - is neither a given, nor proven, nor even deducible from ordinary algebra, although it feels like it might be. This faulty math logic happens all the time folks.
Years ago after wandering midnight streets around the Bogotá airport, missing a pickup (an amusing story unto itself), I eventually ended up safely at a conference at the Universidad de los Andes the following day, and before my keynote, listened to an American academic expound on the “Perfect Order Reliability” metric calculation in supply chain - “multiply the % on-time, % complete, % undamaged, % paperwork correct” over a period, and you arrive at “Perfect Order Reliability” measurement.
No, you don’t. Conditional probabilities don’t work that way, especially for non-independent characteristics. An order can be late, incomplete, damaged, and priced incorrectly, which puts it in four categories; with two orders a year, one failing in all four categories, the other delivered without issue, and I arrive at the nonsensical 6.25% Perfect Order Reliability, instead of the actual 50%. I took the poor man aside and corrected him; crestfallen doesn’t begin to describe the face which had expounded this junk for a decade.
As for Kimberlé, anyone could easily make the case against her “theory” (“Intersectionality” is more of a failed conjecture) by reasoning that a given person always has advantages from the most beneficial category kind of overwheing others, or always subject to the least “oppressive” category they inhabit, or the most “oppressive”, or that multiple “oppression” categories which have social compensations actually decrease net experienced hardship (aid dollars are additive, oppression may not be). In the US, the benefit to simply being born in the USA is fairly overwhelming.
Given that it is simple to dismiss “intersectionality” through simple reason, I don’t understand why more serious people don’t simply laugh every damn time they hear it.
Life isn’t a Venn diagram of amalgamating power fields, no matter how often we are told it is so.
Perhaps the most important article on Reality's Last Stand, thus far. Lewis used to be required reading in many institutions of higher learning. To the detriment of all, his brilliance can now be summarily dismissed having earned three resounding strikes as a white, male, Christian. Never mind that he was both a prophet and a sage!
It is the institutions of higher learning that are fomenting these ideas of oppressor versus oppressed that now pervade society. I am enjoying watching Bill Ackman's current takedown of these institutions with his plagiarism probes and can only hope that, as more light is shed on the corruptions within the system and the damaging ideas that result, the universities will start a period of reformation.
Fantastic essay--I just about sprained my neck nodding along.
I'll supplement Kurilova's view with this: There is a notion, on both the left and the right, that you are virtuous because you hold the "correct" opinions. We see this among evangelical Christians who explain away a vote for a pathologically dishonest womanizer who would sell out his mother for a buck because, hey, he is with us on abortion or whatever. We ALSO see this among the woke set, who feel justified in destroying the careers of those who disagree with them on gender ideology because, well, we're on the side of the angels.
I call bullshit on both. Morality is not a point of view; it is a choice. Those who wish to regard themselves as good people have to do good things, period. Those who routinely do bad things are not good people.
We all want to claim to wear the white hat, but that means acting like we bloody well deserve it.
I can emotionally empathize with Lewis’ position, intellectually I don’t agree.
Who, when, and where did the base “morality’ get defined?
Is it defined by Conservative Christians, Jews or Muslims?
Maybe the UN organization on Human Rights?
State governments?
Maybe morality is a basic human trait that emerges from human communities. There is evidence that being religious is genetic. Maybe changing morality is necessary for human evolution.
I will state that intellectuals in today’s society seem to ignore the long term power of evolution and focus on preserving the current status quo. Intellectuals put out warnings of human downfall.
In the end, evolution and the earth will be the defining forces, not intellectual postering about whether changing the moral status quo will be the downfall of humanity.
There is no a priori moral reason why humans should exist, much less thrive. So in this sense you are absolutely correct.
But if one accepts as a premise the “good” of human thriving ( there are deep ecologists and voluntary extinctionists that don’t), then there are unquestionable benefits to human cooperation. And cooperation takes rules, a moral code if you will. And as we have seen over the past decades, the scope of human challenges requires ever greater systems of cooperation if we are to persist. Take climate change.
Religion is clearly not up to the task, as there is no universal religion. But to the extent morality advances personal safety and the benefits of cooperation, then it’s about as “universal” a value as it needs to be.
I invite you to live in a world without such values. Watch your back.
Thank you! As a gay man, I become uneasy when I come across passages such as the following:
"In 1943, C.S. Lewis . . . warned about the erosion of moral values and the rise of relativism, which he believed would lead to humanity’s ruin. "
"Today, I believe society has reached . . . an era of subjectivism where concepts of “right” and “wrong” have lost their objective anchor and are instead dictated by personal whims and desires."
In the West, gay people have been stigmatized since at least Old Testament times for our supposed immorality. In the words of the Catholic catechism: "Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' " '[1]
It is therefore very easy for those on the Christian right and homophobic philosophy bros to misrepresent the activism and victories of the gay civil rights movement and the growing tolerance of gay people as a prime example of an "erosion in moral values." Since our foes strip us of every element of our humanity except our sexuality, and because they equate sex outside of their sectarian vision of marriage with capitulation to one's base canal desires, reactionaries hold gay people out as an example of what happens when humans abandon morality for the emotional pursuit of sexual gratification. For good measure they'll kick John Stuart Mill around for having caused everything good and proper to go to Hell.
As for the possibility that being religious is genetic, I submit that religion is a universal cultural adaptation that meets certain needs that arise when humans live together. That's a rough piece of pre-post-structuralist anthropology, but then my B.A. in the field is almost 50 years old. My untested corollary is that what humans consider religious revelation is just humankind's reflection as interpreted back to us by those we call prophets.
As Eva notes in her piece, Lewis believed that the Tao provides a moral grounding. All religions have certain ideas in common and those are what provide the essence of morality for human beings.
Most mainstream religions from my perspective are dealing with the "might makes right" conundrum in humanity. The weak want a sense of justice and power.
God in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths is the ultimate "might" for what the religion defines is "right". The Hindu religion is similar. The Hindu religion covers all "Life". The "Tao" for all these religions is that God is the "might" that makes their suffering "right". That gives them hope.
For an agnostic like me (or an atheist). God or higher powers provide no hope. Relationships and Pragmatics are my Tao.
Consider the rape of 200,000 to 400,000 Bangladeshi Hindu women in 1971, when the Pakistani imams issued a "fatwa" declaring these women as "war booty." There were no "rape kits" at that time. Interestingly, reported on Wikipedia. Morality? Where in this world, is it?
Is it possible that the Pakistani imams were objectively wrong, wrong not simply because your feelings are offended but because women are not chattel and rape is objectively an offense against the dignity of human beings?
Of course imams who condone rape as a war strategy are wrong, no matter how far back in history this odious practice reaches. There are interviews now with Hamas members in Israeli custody who claim the Gaza imams condoned and sanctioned these sexual atrocities prior to Oct. 7. BTW, I saw you followed me on substack, thanks, but my blog is uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com and my YT channel is Trans Widow Ute Heggen. I present research on trans widows like myself, collating our experiences of our ex-husbands' "transitions," and research coming out challenging "affirmation" as the only response to cross-sex ideation.
It’s interesting how much the need for an objective morality described by the Christian Lewis reads almost identically to the need for an objective morality described by the atheist Ayn Rand. Both saw subjective morality as the root of evil in society and objectivity as the solution.
What goes unmentioned by this article, but is often claimed by Christians, is that this need for an objective morality implies the need for a god to provide it. The problem with that argument is that it grounds objective morality in the belief that there *should* be a god rather than that there actually *is* a god. It makes belief a matter of utility rather than reality.
I find great value in Rand’s meta-ethics for precisely this reason. To have a grounded ethics, philosophers must find a way to cross Hume’s is/ought dichotomy. Morality must be demonstrably real. I think Rand showed that it indeed is real successfully, and I’d highly recommend anyone who hasn’t yet to read her argument in The Objectivist Ethics: https://courses.aynrand.org/works/the-objectivist-ethics/
Alas, the “men without chests” have become women (who think they're not women) without breasts (or that they now call chests). Even C.S. couldn't have imagined that!
No one genuinely thinks they are not the sex they are. They just have been given the option to say they do. Everyone is lying about what they feel and lying about what they believe, given incentives to do so.
When I discovered my now ex-husband's diaries (the one who sued me for custody, was negligent while supervising our sons, defamed me in court, now fully owns a coop apt in NYC worth 3M) I realized what my mind could not fully comprehend. Trans widows stories matter, have been suppressed by the trans lobby as well as the "liberal media." Welcome to my world, peopled by women, trans widows, and the children fathered by these men, the trans orphans:
He uses the example of a Roman father telling his son that it is a “sweet and seemly thing to die for his country.”
Maybe I'm misunderstanding - was Lewis arguing this is a good thing? Part of the Tao - an objective truth consistent with how we and the universe work?
Oppression hierarchy definitely fits with the trans ideology.
However, weren’t many of the reported atrocities committed by Hamas actually perpetrated by the IDF? And don’t some say Palestinians have a right to resist occupation?
The oppression hierarchy throws human agency into the dustbin. Without agency, there is no responsibility. Without responsibility, there is nothing to restrain human impulse. In such a world, a social animal such as a human is much better off dead. End of story.
Just a fantastic piece and a reminder of Oakeshott’s warning that before consigning traditions of the past to the civilizational trash heap, one better take a damn hard look at what, if anything, replaces it. This is true conservatism, and it has little to do with politics. I am conservative only in this sense.
This is a fascinating piece! C.S. Lewis's prescient ideas certainly describe what is happening here now. It is remarkable how many thought leaders, including particularly George Orwell, accurately described our current civilizational collapse. It speaks to the fact that human nature consists of a limited range of behaviors that, for the wise, are quite predictable with respect to mass sociocultural movements.
This is really good (And I do mean it in a very objective sense). Objective morality used to be the realm of religion but we do not need religion to hold on to its core. And we do need to hold on to it to avoid despair.
I believe that Morality stems from the single imperative to cherish all life and the world that made it. Anything that negates it is evil. All else is secondary.
As I read Kimberlé Crenshaw sometime years ago (and burst out laughing), I have wondered ever since why the edifice of "intersectionality" of hasn't been ridiculed and dismissed entirely from academic “discourse” (bullshit, to you and me) in the social sciences for obviously faulty mathematical reasoning. I mainly think social sciences are extremely poor at basic math, as we have often seen.
Conditional probabilities (chance of being fired because of race, chance of being fired because of sex) such as her “theory”’s central DeGraffenreid legal case cannot necessarily be additive or compounding - the correlation between compound “oppressive” categories and increased conditional probabilities of firing - or oppression - is neither a given, nor proven, nor even deducible from ordinary algebra, although it feels like it might be. This faulty math logic happens all the time folks.
Years ago after wandering midnight streets around the Bogotá airport, missing a pickup (an amusing story unto itself), I eventually ended up safely at a conference at the Universidad de los Andes the following day, and before my keynote, listened to an American academic expound on the “Perfect Order Reliability” metric calculation in supply chain - “multiply the % on-time, % complete, % undamaged, % paperwork correct” over a period, and you arrive at “Perfect Order Reliability” measurement.
No, you don’t. Conditional probabilities don’t work that way, especially for non-independent characteristics. An order can be late, incomplete, damaged, and priced incorrectly, which puts it in four categories; with two orders a year, one failing in all four categories, the other delivered without issue, and I arrive at the nonsensical 6.25% Perfect Order Reliability, instead of the actual 50%. I took the poor man aside and corrected him; crestfallen doesn’t begin to describe the face which had expounded this junk for a decade.
As for Kimberlé, anyone could easily make the case against her “theory” (“Intersectionality” is more of a failed conjecture) by reasoning that a given person always has advantages from the most beneficial category kind of overwheing others, or always subject to the least “oppressive” category they inhabit, or the most “oppressive”, or that multiple “oppression” categories which have social compensations actually decrease net experienced hardship (aid dollars are additive, oppression may not be). In the US, the benefit to simply being born in the USA is fairly overwhelming.
Given that it is simple to dismiss “intersectionality” through simple reason, I don’t understand why more serious people don’t simply laugh every damn time they hear it.
Life isn’t a Venn diagram of amalgamating power fields, no matter how often we are told it is so.
Perhaps the most important article on Reality's Last Stand, thus far. Lewis used to be required reading in many institutions of higher learning. To the detriment of all, his brilliance can now be summarily dismissed having earned three resounding strikes as a white, male, Christian. Never mind that he was both a prophet and a sage!
It is the institutions of higher learning that are fomenting these ideas of oppressor versus oppressed that now pervade society. I am enjoying watching Bill Ackman's current takedown of these institutions with his plagiarism probes and can only hope that, as more light is shed on the corruptions within the system and the damaging ideas that result, the universities will start a period of reformation.
Bill Ackman isn't exactly a role model of ethical probity, given his double standard regarding his wife's plagiarisms vs. Claudine Gay's et al.
Fantastic essay--I just about sprained my neck nodding along.
I'll supplement Kurilova's view with this: There is a notion, on both the left and the right, that you are virtuous because you hold the "correct" opinions. We see this among evangelical Christians who explain away a vote for a pathologically dishonest womanizer who would sell out his mother for a buck because, hey, he is with us on abortion or whatever. We ALSO see this among the woke set, who feel justified in destroying the careers of those who disagree with them on gender ideology because, well, we're on the side of the angels.
I call bullshit on both. Morality is not a point of view; it is a choice. Those who wish to regard themselves as good people have to do good things, period. Those who routinely do bad things are not good people.
We all want to claim to wear the white hat, but that means acting like we bloody well deserve it.
I can emotionally empathize with Lewis’ position, intellectually I don’t agree.
Who, when, and where did the base “morality’ get defined?
Is it defined by Conservative Christians, Jews or Muslims?
Maybe the UN organization on Human Rights?
State governments?
Maybe morality is a basic human trait that emerges from human communities. There is evidence that being religious is genetic. Maybe changing morality is necessary for human evolution.
I will state that intellectuals in today’s society seem to ignore the long term power of evolution and focus on preserving the current status quo. Intellectuals put out warnings of human downfall.
In the end, evolution and the earth will be the defining forces, not intellectual postering about whether changing the moral status quo will be the downfall of humanity.
There is no a priori moral reason why humans should exist, much less thrive. So in this sense you are absolutely correct.
But if one accepts as a premise the “good” of human thriving ( there are deep ecologists and voluntary extinctionists that don’t), then there are unquestionable benefits to human cooperation. And cooperation takes rules, a moral code if you will. And as we have seen over the past decades, the scope of human challenges requires ever greater systems of cooperation if we are to persist. Take climate change.
Religion is clearly not up to the task, as there is no universal religion. But to the extent morality advances personal safety and the benefits of cooperation, then it’s about as “universal” a value as it needs to be.
I invite you to live in a world without such values. Watch your back.
Generally agree from an idealism perspective.
Your comment is very light on the pragmatics that achieve those ideals.
As such, I operate based on your last statement-I watch my back!
Yes the pragmátics don’t fit in a pithy comment. And yes they are problematic. Basically humanity has to wing it.
Well said.
Thank you! As a gay man, I become uneasy when I come across passages such as the following:
"In 1943, C.S. Lewis . . . warned about the erosion of moral values and the rise of relativism, which he believed would lead to humanity’s ruin. "
"Today, I believe society has reached . . . an era of subjectivism where concepts of “right” and “wrong” have lost their objective anchor and are instead dictated by personal whims and desires."
In the West, gay people have been stigmatized since at least Old Testament times for our supposed immorality. In the words of the Catholic catechism: "Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' " '[1]
It is therefore very easy for those on the Christian right and homophobic philosophy bros to misrepresent the activism and victories of the gay civil rights movement and the growing tolerance of gay people as a prime example of an "erosion in moral values." Since our foes strip us of every element of our humanity except our sexuality, and because they equate sex outside of their sectarian vision of marriage with capitulation to one's base canal desires, reactionaries hold gay people out as an example of what happens when humans abandon morality for the emotional pursuit of sexual gratification. For good measure they'll kick John Stuart Mill around for having caused everything good and proper to go to Hell.
As for the possibility that being religious is genetic, I submit that religion is a universal cultural adaptation that meets certain needs that arise when humans live together. That's a rough piece of pre-post-structuralist anthropology, but then my B.A. in the field is almost 50 years old. My untested corollary is that what humans consider religious revelation is just humankind's reflection as interpreted back to us by those we call prophets.
[1] https://www.usccb.org/sites/default/files/flipbooks/catechism/568/
As Eva notes in her piece, Lewis believed that the Tao provides a moral grounding. All religions have certain ideas in common and those are what provide the essence of morality for human beings.
I don't believe this.
Most mainstream religions from my perspective are dealing with the "might makes right" conundrum in humanity. The weak want a sense of justice and power.
God in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths is the ultimate "might" for what the religion defines is "right". The Hindu religion is similar. The Hindu religion covers all "Life". The "Tao" for all these religions is that God is the "might" that makes their suffering "right". That gives them hope.
For an agnostic like me (or an atheist). God or higher powers provide no hope. Relationships and Pragmatics are my Tao.
Consider the rape of 200,000 to 400,000 Bangladeshi Hindu women in 1971, when the Pakistani imams issued a "fatwa" declaring these women as "war booty." There were no "rape kits" at that time. Interestingly, reported on Wikipedia. Morality? Where in this world, is it?
Is it possible that the Pakistani imams were objectively wrong, wrong not simply because your feelings are offended but because women are not chattel and rape is objectively an offense against the dignity of human beings?
Of course imams who condone rape as a war strategy are wrong, no matter how far back in history this odious practice reaches. There are interviews now with Hamas members in Israeli custody who claim the Gaza imams condoned and sanctioned these sexual atrocities prior to Oct. 7. BTW, I saw you followed me on substack, thanks, but my blog is uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com and my YT channel is Trans Widow Ute Heggen. I present research on trans widows like myself, collating our experiences of our ex-husbands' "transitions," and research coming out challenging "affirmation" as the only response to cross-sex ideation.
It’s interesting how much the need for an objective morality described by the Christian Lewis reads almost identically to the need for an objective morality described by the atheist Ayn Rand. Both saw subjective morality as the root of evil in society and objectivity as the solution.
What goes unmentioned by this article, but is often claimed by Christians, is that this need for an objective morality implies the need for a god to provide it. The problem with that argument is that it grounds objective morality in the belief that there *should* be a god rather than that there actually *is* a god. It makes belief a matter of utility rather than reality.
I find great value in Rand’s meta-ethics for precisely this reason. To have a grounded ethics, philosophers must find a way to cross Hume’s is/ought dichotomy. Morality must be demonstrably real. I think Rand showed that it indeed is real successfully, and I’d highly recommend anyone who hasn’t yet to read her argument in The Objectivist Ethics: https://courses.aynrand.org/works/the-objectivist-ethics/
Alas, the “men without chests” have become women (who think they're not women) without breasts (or that they now call chests). Even C.S. couldn't have imagined that!
No one genuinely thinks they are not the sex they are. They just have been given the option to say they do. Everyone is lying about what they feel and lying about what they believe, given incentives to do so.
When I discovered my now ex-husband's diaries (the one who sued me for custody, was negligent while supervising our sons, defamed me in court, now fully owns a coop apt in NYC worth 3M) I realized what my mind could not fully comprehend. Trans widows stories matter, have been suppressed by the trans lobby as well as the "liberal media." Welcome to my world, peopled by women, trans widows, and the children fathered by these men, the trans orphans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLhxvxm-a7o&t=1s
He uses the example of a Roman father telling his son that it is a “sweet and seemly thing to die for his country.”
Maybe I'm misunderstanding - was Lewis arguing this is a good thing? Part of the Tao - an objective truth consistent with how we and the universe work?
Some thoughts that incorporate and critique your excellent essay.
https://medium.com/free-factor/is-a-sunset-beautiful-if-no-one-sees-it-c398e2f56476
Oppression hierarchy definitely fits with the trans ideology.
However, weren’t many of the reported atrocities committed by Hamas actually perpetrated by the IDF? And don’t some say Palestinians have a right to resist occupation?