Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I am Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We're very pleased to have Atlas Society senior fellow Rob Tricinski here today discussing can you be good without God?
After Rob's opening comments, we'll take questions from you, so just click request to speak if you have a question, and we'll try to get to as many of you as possible. Rob, thanks so much for doing this topic.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Oh, it's one of my favorites, and hopefully it'll attract a little attention. The headline that people see. So the basic question here is there's a long standing conservative argument that we need to have religion, because without religion, we can't have morality.
And take what you can, anything goes.
We'd all be back to Lord of the Flies or the hobbesian war against all of all against all.
By the way, I think some of the stuff about how we need religion to have morality, I'll talk about this more later, is undercut by the track record, especially recently, of some of the guardians of religion who have turned out not to be practicing what they preach, let's put it that way.
The other reason I want to address this topic is not just that existing conservative argument, but also because there better be a secular, non religious basis for morality, because that's where we're headed. And you mentioned an article I did for discourse a while back, preparing for the challenge of a secular America. One of the things that's just been coming out recently and explains a lot about what's going on right now in our politics, by the way, is that there has been a huge increase in the number of people who identify.
This is polling going back like 30, 40 years. The steady and large increase in the number of people who identify as nothing in particular, that is, when you ask them, what are your religious beliefs?
The people who say nothing in particular has gone from being this tiny little percentage, like 5% or something like that, less than 5% 30 or 40 years ago, and now it's 28 or 30%. There are two different polls in the last couple of years, 28% and 30%, which is like larger than the number of evangelicals. Evangelicals is something like 24%, and it's larger than the number of Catholics. They're about 20, maybe 26% or something like that. So it's like one of the largest denominations, religious denominations in America today is nothing in particular larger than a lot of the other denominations. All right, so it clearly means that there has been this falling off in religious belief. Now, nothing in particular is not all outright atheists or agnostics about half of them are people who are just sort of lapsed from any particular religious faith, that they're not committed to a new belief in the nonexistence of God. But the number of atheists is much larger. I liked. I just had something.
This is an article that hasn't been published yet. It's in process for the unpopulist, where I talk about how when I was a teenager in the Midwest in the 1980s, if you said you were an atheist, people looked at you like you. Like you were a freak and thought you wanted to bite the head off of a live bat. Now, for those who get the reference, biting the head off the live bat was something that Ozzy Osborne famously did at a black Sabbath concert in 1982. So this is sort of what people had in mind. As you're an atheist, you must be like Ozzy Osborne. Now, the funny thing is still alive. You do remember this, right, Scott? Yeah, he's still alive. He's still around. I mean, what's left of him. Yes, the many years of drugs haven't left a lot. But the funny thing is, I did a little research about this, and I found out that as far as I can tell, there's a couple little things about this. That Ozzy Osborne is actually a member of the Church of England.
So he was people's idea of what an atheist was, but he's actually not an atheist. He's a member of the Church of England.
He's a semi lapsed Anglican. And anyway, the point of this being we better be able to have a secular, non religious basis for morality, because that's the future. That's where things are going. And in those figures about the number of people who are atheists or nothing in particular, one of the parts of that, too, is that it's much, much larger numbers among the young.
And then you think, well, okay, they'll get older and they'll discover religion as they get older. Well, we have some idea of what the conversion rates are. And basically, for every one person who starts out as an unbeliever and converts to religion, there's two people who start out being religious and fall out of the faith. So the conversion rates are going the other way. So we should expect that in the next. Now, they had various projections in one of these things that one of them, by about 2060, America would no longer be a majority christian nation, that it would be a majority, or at least somewhere around there would be a majority, nothing in particular atheist nation. Now, obviously, trends don't always continue in straight lines, but we are headed in that direction. So we'd better be able to have a basis for morality that is a secular basis for morality.
Now, fortunately, I think I'm here talking on behalf of the Atlas Society. So fortunately, I think Iron Rand has provided that we've had a clearly set out secular basis of morality for, oh, gosh, about 60 years now.
Iron man set out some of this philosophically, set out her basic case, I think it's the essay, is it, from 1962 on the objective ethics, where she really set out in full detail the basis for her argument for a secular basis for morality. So I also want to say, normally, I would start up as saying, oh, Ayn Rand had a radical new idea about morality. I also want to point out something people don't recognize, which is it's not that completely radical, because if you go back to the 18th century, the area of the Enlightenment, and even the era of the Enlightenment ideas in America, what you'll find is that people had what was kind of an implicitly secular view of morality already. So if you go back to, like Alexis de Tocqueville famously talks about this, where he. The, he talks about the moral theory of the Americans, is, he says, well, their moral theory is self interest, properly understood, or self interest, enlightened self interest. He says, the universal idea, you find it as much for the poor as from the rich, is universally accepted in America. And if you dig into what the basis for that was, what you find is that they had was essentially a secular case for morality, that you should follow moral principles because it's in your interest to do so. It is what will make you happy here on earth, and that's why you should be moral. And Tocqueville again talks about this. He says the Americans go to church and they hear these sermons about how great it is, how important religion is, or, sorry, how important morality is. But he says, they don't talk about morality the way they used to in the Middle Ages, where you were supposed to be moral so you could get into heaven and enjoy happiness in the next life. All of it's about how you can be happy in this life.
And american preachers can't take their eyes off of life in this earth and telling you all the ways in which being moral will make you a happy person in this life. And they don't have any real concern for telling you about the afterlife and heaven and all that. So this is a very secular view of. And I could go on and on about this, you should look up a guy named Jonathan Mayhew, he's a guy I like to mention because he was a Boston preacher who influenced the founding fathers. And he basically says at one point, morality, there are certain things that tend to make us happy, and certain things tend to make us miserable. So we should do the things that will make us happy in the long run, and we should do this even without the consideration of God. This guy's a preacher saying, even if we don't care about God, even if we don't care about heaven, we should do these things just because they will make us happy in this life. And this is like 1760 in Boston, being preached from the pulpit. So there's this long tradition of a sort of quasi secular, enlightenment era approach to morality, and it's a long tradition of that in America. So we have that sort of historical basis for the idea that, yes, there can be a secular basis for morality. Now, Einrad, I think, gets to it, though, by not in the 1760s, but by the 1960s, is getting to this in a much deeper, more thought out, more philosophically exact way. So I just want to talk for a few. I have sort of what I call secular morality in seven minutes. I tried to do it in five minutes, but I couldn't quite make it work, so I did seven minutes. But it's basically a short presentation of how you can have a secular basis for morality, why you don't need God to have this. And my basic starting point for this. Now, this is my own. I bring in some references. Ironrad here. This is my own presentation.
This is not exactly the way Ironrad would have done it, but it's my way of getting a very sort of immediate, common sense way of describing it. So let's say that after listening to me talk here today, you decide to go, leave wherever you are, go cross the street, and maybe go get dinner.
But the minute you step out of the street, you look to your left and you see a giant truck speeding down at you. Now, what would you do if you saw a giant truck speeding at you, Scott? What would you do?
[00:10:05] Speaker A: Jump back onto the sidewalk?
[00:10:07] Speaker B: You'd get out of the way. Of course you'd get out of the way. Right? So what we have here, though, in this very simple example, you'd be a fool not to get out of the way. But we have, in this very simple example, we actually get three of the essential ingredients of morality that's involved in that. So first agreement we want for morality is we want there to be some kind of command, an instruction, telling you what you must do, or what you have to do or what you should do, and we've got that here. We have a clear imperative, get out of the way of the speeding truck. Now, second, for you to have morality, you have to have, for there to be a secular morality, this has to be an instruction that doesn't come from some supernatural being, it doesn't come from some revelation. God does not appear in a cloud or hand down tablets to you or a burning bush or whatever.
There's not some source of revelation for this. This instruction of here's what you ought to do has to come just from reality itself. It has to come from your observation of reality. So you know how trucks work, you know you can get hit, you know it would probably kill you. And it's not subjective either, right? It's not like a matter of how you personally feel about trucks. You wouldn't say, as a non binary person of color, try to find trucks make me feel unsafe, right? This is not this loopy, hippie, subjective basis for morality, right? The truck is going to kill you whether you know it or not. So this is an objective fact that you can observe. Now, the third alternative ingredient we need for morality is we need to have some elements of an alternative, a reward and a punishment, right? So you get out of the way of the truck or else. And the. Or else here is. Or else you'll be dead, right? And so that gives us elements of reward and punishment. So you do what you ought to do and you're rewarded in this case by your reward will be, you stay alive, you get to enjoy all the good things life has to offer. You can go across the street and have dinner at your favorite place.
And the punishment, don't do what you're supposed to do and you'll be obliterated. You'll be a stain on the pavement.
Now, again, this is not a supernatural punishment. It's not brought about by God or an afterlife. There's no biblical hell here.
The idea that your punishment is a natural consequence that comes from the nature of reality.
So that gets us out of EiNran's basic insight, which is that a rational, secular morality flows from this choice between life and death. Now, I got a quote here from Rand that I could put in here. So she says, this is her writing about the philosophical basis for secular morality. She says there's only one fundamental alternative in the universe, existence or non existence, and it pertains to a single class event, to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional. The existence of life is not life is a process of self sustaining self generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies. It's only to a living entity of things can be good or evil, unquote. So this is the idea that there's this binary metaphysical choice, existence and nonexistence, and it's conditional. To live, you have to do certain things and not do other things. You have to get out of the way of the truck, right? So this is where we have, so we have these three elements of morality. We have something you have to do. We have a reason why you have to do it.
Life or death. It's a life or death matter of life or death. And we have the fact that this is something you can grasp through your own direct observation of reality. You don't need revelation. You don't need a book written in the bronze Age. You don't need the supernatural to get to that.
Now, the fourth thing we need, though, the one thing we're lacking in, the fourth thing we need for a secular morality jumping out of the way. The speeding truck is too simple to be really a moral issue because it's so immediate and obvious, right? Anybody can grasp it. It takes no thought or effort. In fact, if you see that speeding truck coming, you would probably jump out of the way without even thinking about it, right? So there's no element of thought or choice. So we need to get an element of thought or choice. There has to be abstract rules and principles. And so what we need to do is we need to be able to apply this thing to something that is more complex than jumping out of the way of a speeding truck. You don't need morality or principles or abstract theories to do that. But there are other issues that are issues of life and death that you do need morality and principles and abstract theories.
So the way I put this is, let's say you go across the street and you look off to your left, and suddenly, out of the nowhere, you see socialism bearing down on you with Bernie Sanders behind the wheel, glaring at you like he tends to.
You would.
If you know anything about economics, if you know anything about politics, if you know the history of socialism, if you're watching what happened to Venezuela, you would jump out of the way of socialism the way you would jump out of the way of a speeding truck. You realize this is deadly. It's going to obliterate you. But that's something that's more complex. You need to have more knowledge of.
You have two extremes here. You have, the speeding truck is something that's perceptually obvious. And socialism is something that's complex and political. It requires knowledge of history and morality and political theory, et cetera. All right, so the basic pattern is that we have to come up with these complex rules that would tell us what to do and what not to do, including why not to adopt socialism. We derive these rules by deriving them from a chain of reasoning, from our knowledge of the conditions of human life. And she talks about how, in one of her, I think, most interesting articles, she talks about how life presents man with a great many musts, but each one of them is you must do this if.
And the if stands for if you want to achieve a certain goal. And so here's the kind of chain of reasoning she's talking about here as the basis for morality. She says, for example, you must eat if you want to survive, you must work if you want to eat, you must think if you want to work, you must look at reality if you want to think, if you want to know what to do, if you want to know what goals to achieve, if you want to know how to achieve them. So this is like this whole chain of, we start with survival. You have to eat to survive. That's a basic need of survival. But then there's all these other things you need to do. If you're going to have a steady supply of food, well, you have to work. And then if you're going to work, you have to know, what am I doing when I'm working? How does the world work? You have to observe reality. You have to know how to sort truth from falsehood. You have to know how to make broad generalizations. There's this whole massive set of requirements that comes from being able to, that is evolved in being able simply to survive. So you start from the basic ease of survival, and you can derive a whole complex social system that's based on the basic need of, I have to know where my next meal is coming from. All right, so this is how you can sort of derive a whole code of behavior and action for a whole society based on the needs of survival.
So one of the things I'm going to point out here, though, is that now this is leading to the most radical thing about Einran's morality. But like I said, it's not that radical because it's a whole history of it, which is the assumption of all this is that your goal in wanting to be moral is you want to survive. You want to live, you want to be able to enjoy your life, to enjoy all the good things that life has to offer. So the one thing that a secular morality cannot derive for you is it cannot derive for you a code of why you should sacrifice your interests, why morality would consist of renouncing or sacrificing your interests for the sake of others.
It's sort of an answer to you cannot get on a secular basis. You ultimately cannot get to an altruist morality. Altruist in this sense doesn't just mean helping other people. It means it the way the guy who coined the term meant it, which is, you literally live for others. You have no interest in your own well being beyond just the very bare necessities you need to stay alive from one moment to the next. Everything about that is all devoted to serving others and sacrificing for others. And a secular morality can't get you to that, because it can't give you a reason why in this world, for your well being in this world, you would renounce pursuing all the things that are good for you. So what it will get you to is rational, which is, you know, that's Einran's term, is rational self interest, which is sort of her updated and more exact version of the old idea of self interest, properly understood or enlightened self interest, that you have a society where you have an orderly, unlawful society where people act according to rules that will allow us all to go out and work and prosper and achieve our goals in harmony with one another. All right, so that's the overall, the seven minute version of how you can have a secular morality. And then I want to just open it up for questions, comments, challenges, things people don't find convincing about that, or questions you have about what would that actually mean? How would it be applied?
[00:20:00] Speaker A: Great.
Yeah. If any of you want to ask questions, feel free to request to speak with that microphone button. We'll bring you up. I have questions myself. I guess the first thing, is secular morality too broad a term? Does it not include things like socialism?
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Good question. All right.
And that's the reason why we have to talk about this. Is that part of the context here is when people say, you need God in order to have morality, partly what they're doing is they're reacting to the fact that there was a major attempt to create a secular morality and it was a socialist morality. Now, I mentioned altruism, and I said the guy who invented the term altruism, well, the guy who did that was a french philosopher called August Compt, and he actually created what he called a religion of humanity, and what he called a religion what he meant is he wanted it to be a secular alternative to religion.
And the basis of that secular alternative to religion was this philosophy of altruism, of, you should live entirely for other people and not pursue any goals for yourself. You should starve the self and be only oriented to other people. And Kant was also a guy who helped popularize socialism, and that socialism in its original sense. I wrote a pocket guide to Socialism for the Atlas Society recently. And the big thing in there, one of the big things I talk about is the term socialism existed for a couple of decades and was advocated very vigorously for a couple of decades before it became a very specific economic doctrine. So before Marx and Engels came along, socialism was around for decades before them, and before it had a specific sort of economic theory attached to it and an economic practice attached to it. Socialism stood for the idea that society comes above the individual. It was societyism. That's what the word means.
It was an extension of comp's secular morality. If the goal is to live for others, then the secondary thing we can say about that politically is therefore the individual and his needs and desires and interests should be sacrificed for the good of the collective of humanity as a whole. Society should always take precedence over the individual. And he was very explicit about the idea that this is. Therefore, there's no such concept as individual rights, because individual rights rest on selfishness. It rests on self interest, which it does, because therefore, there'd be no rights, there'd be only duties in the perfect altruist socialist society.
And this is why we have to have this idea. So when I say this is a secular basis for morality, this is one version of a secular basis for morality. But what I want to say is, this is the one that works, right? Because if you actually go into comps theory, it's full of holes. There's no basis for. If you ask, well, why should I sacrifice myself completely for others? How is this a basis for. You find nothing there, and you find the whole idea doesn't even make sense. Like, if you should not care about any of your own interests, but should only be sacrificing for the good of others, well, what about those other people? What are they there for? Is it okay for them to pursue their interests, but not okay for you to pursue yours? And of course, if you take it seriously, you'd have to say, well, no, everybody is sacrificing for somebody else, who's then sacrificing for somebody else. And basically everybody's sacrificing in this sort of endless loop, and nobody ever benefits from anything. And Ayn Rand, actually, her critique of that was she wrote it into the voice of one of the villains in the fountainhead, where he know the ideal world of the future in this sort of altruist socialist viewpoint, is one where nobody has a thought for his own interest. They only think about the good of the person next to him, who has no thought for his own interest, who is only concerned about the person next to him. It says so on around the world. Says, all will sacrifice that none will enjoy, which is, when you think of it, it's a nonsensical idea. It makes no logical sense whatsoever. So when I say this is the secular basis for morality, it's a competing secular basis, but it's the one that actually makes sense. It's the one that actually has.
If people ask you, why should I do this? You could actually give them a coherent answer.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: Okay, well, I've got some follow up, but I want to go to Tucker. Tucker, thanks for joining. Do you have a question for Rob?
[00:24:44] Speaker C: Hey, Scott. Yeah, thanks for inviting me up here, Rob, thanks for sharing all your thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, just a quick intro. Like, I found Einran 15 years ago. I was, like, in university and reading her work. I read the fountainhead first, then Atlas shrugged. Completely changed my life. Mad respect to her and her thought. I regard her as one of the greatest thinkers that I've discovered so far.
I guess what I wanted to ask you, though, Robert, kind of put in front of you is thinking about the founding of the United States.
Obviously, it wasn't atheist people, it wasn't nihilistic people.
I guess a lot of them are described as deists, basically believing in some kind of higher power, but not attaching it to the church or any particular religion.
I thought it was curious when I found in the Texas constitution, so I'm a citizen of Texas, how it's written here, and I'll read it to you. And this is what I kind of want to get your thoughts on. But in the preamble, it quickly says, humbly, invoking the blessings of Almighty God, the people of the state of Texas do ordain and establish this constitution. And then article one, section four, reads like this about religious tests. It says, no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust in this state, nor shall anyone be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments. But then here's the clause, which I am most curious to hear what you have to say. Provided he acknowledged the existence of a supreme being.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it makes sense that being the Texas Constitution. It's not in the Virginia constitution, by the way, to my knowledge, because the interesting thing is the language about no test for public office, religious tests for public office, that sort of thing that's derived from the first version of that was the Virginia statute for religious freedom, which is Thomas Jefferson's offspring here in Virginia, passed by Madison, I believe.
And that was sort of a basis for the First Amendment and those similar provisions in the US Constitution. All right, so let's talk about that. So the thing about the founding fathers and religion is, yes, they were religious, but as you mentioned, they were deists. And I think one of the things that people don't quite get, and I think, as you do, I've done a fair bit of research on this, and it struck me more and more, is that the enlightenment version of religion that most of the founders adhered to. Now, not all, but most of them did. The enlightenment version of religion is something that was very radically different. So I like to use Thomas Jefferson because I'm in near Charlotesville. So he's the local hero here.
But also I was very interested in the ideas of Jonathan Mayhew. He's up in Boston, and then all the way down here, unrelated, in Virginia, we have Thomas Jefferson. So they're sort of representing a range of this enlightenment influence throughout the colonies. And if you really go into it, it is a very me back up a little bit. So a while ago, I used to occasionally listen to Glenn back on the radio, and a while ago, he had this guy on who was saying, making this case, that all the founding fathers were like, the majority of the 90% of the founding fathers were evangelical Christians. This guy was named as Barton. I can't remember his first name, but the last name was Barton. He was a historian that Glenn Beck was promoting. Well, the guy ended up later having to have a book of his retracted by the publisher because there were so many basically made up facts in it. And this idea that all the founding fathers were evangelicals is a made up fact. Most of them were called the time deists, or they had this version of a very enlightenment version of religion. And to talk about what that means more specifically is many of them did not believe in miracles. Thomas Jefferson was even, and by the way, this was fairly common. Tocqueville again, Tocqueville. It's interesting. Religious conservatives like to quote Alexis Tocqueville. So he comes to America in 1832, makes these observations, writes democracy in America, and Tocqueville himself was very much in favor of religion and thought religion was necessary as a basis for society. So he sort of projected that view. But if you go to what he actually says about the Americans, beginning of book two, the very first part of book two of democracy in America, he talks about, on the philosophy of the Americans, and he talks about how well the Americans rely on their own judgment for everything. And he says what? They have little use for anything.
They're very skeptical of anything extraordinary and have an almost invincible distaste of the supernatural. So this is american religion, an invincible distaste for the supernatural. And if you go into the Founding fathers, you find this is the case.
So Thomas Jefferson, for example, is famous for writing what's called the Jefferson Bible, which is he took the Bible and he thought, well, there's a lot of good stuff in here, but I'm going to cut this down and get rid of everything that refers to the supernatural and to miracles. And basically he wrote a Bible. What would the Bible be if you thought Jesus was just a guy who had moral teachings?
And so it's something we would regard as radical secular humanism by the standards of today's religious right. So that's the thing. And this is the thing that people don't realize is the extent to another one last thing, which is about bringing us back to Jonathan Mayhew up at Boston, is there's this widespread view was called at the times called natural religion. And so it's this idea, this is this very enlightenment era trend where they said, well, look, usually see natural religion contrasted to revealed religion. Revealed religion is what can we say about religion based on revelation, based on the Bible and the prophets and all that sort of thing.
Natural religion is the opposite approach, is what can we say about the God and the universe and morality, what can we say about that just by observation of nature? And that's why it's natural religion.
The point of all of this is to show that the religion as held by the founders, it was very strongly influenced by the Enlightenment, and it was a highly secularized version of religion. So I would say they were the original rhinos. They were religious in name only, that if you look at the actual philosophical substance of their views, they were essentially believed.
They had very little or little to no belief in the supernatural, little to no belief in faith. They believed in reason and going from evidence and observation, and they had a morality of enlightened self interest where you're supposed to pursue the course of action that will make you happy here on this earth. So if you took all the philosophical substance. They were religious in name only, but you feel free to follow up if you want.
[00:32:15] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for that. Yeah. A couple of thoughts.
Number one, I just want to say I do like your profile banner. I appreciate know I read Ayn Rand when I was young, and since then, I've gotten very involved or aware of what's happening in Ukraine. And reflecting on it now, I'm like, okay, I don't know if I fully understood some elements of Inez thought because I didn't understand Russians, but because I've had this direct, kind of nasty interaction with a lot of Russians, I'm like, okay, I kind of see where she's coming from in a clear way now and what she was decrying and what the dystopian society in her work and the dystopian characters, the wrong answers, so to speak, became more obvious when I actually interacted with russian people.
Just as a little bit of a joke there, or not a joke, but like a serious, that's not really funny.
And so I think a lot of people who misunderstand her work, it's probably because they haven't gotten out of their bubble, out of their american bubble. But anyway, I think for me personally, I do like that that clause is in the Texas constitution. I believe that russian people generally are quite nihilistic, and they don't believe in anything to the point where they even reject that knowledge can be had for any purpose or reason.
And if a government was organized and run by people who rejected knowledge, then I think that that's just going to be a horrible society. And that's how I view Russia now.
And I guess what I'm getting at there is that, again, that clause is provided that one acknowledges that there is a supreme being of some sort. And I personally do not subscribe to any religion. I think religions are kind of baby food. I think that they're just simple ways of looking at the world for people who aren't prepared to kind of step out onto their own and go swim in the ocean of knowledge and of understanding. But to me, I see that there is more than nature. I believe that there is more than nature. And how I would name that would be some kind of conscious intelligence.
And I think that if you completely remove any possibility that there is something beyond in and through nature, then it's dangerous and it's risky, and it's hard to explain where you have any kind of basis, again, for morality, knowledge, right and wrong judgment.
And I would just as a final buzword to throw in. I believe that kind of the link between the natural body and the man, understanding some higher thought, is that conscience, that ability to judge right and wrong in a situation based on particular individual circumstances. But again, by no means do I believe any of the religions are correct or have all the knowledge. And in fact, if the United States were to become a christian nation or a muslim nation or any particular religious nation, I think that would be basically the end of the United States and the end of the nation. But I also think if there is a militant nihilism that takes over, it will all disappear in the same manner as a religious takeover.
[00:35:58] Speaker B: Right. Okay. So a couple of things I want to respond to just briefly there, and we can go on to other things, other responses or questions. But, yeah, the thing about the Russians, I think it's interesting, is the irony of this, is that the whole justification for the war in Ukraine and for the justification for Putin's dictatorship is supposed to be that one of the big justifications offered is they're returning Russia to religion and to basically the Russian Orthodox Church. And they're guardians of, they're the standard bearers of christian society. And this is hugely influential, by the way, among the sort of american religious right that a whole bunch of these sort of Tucker CARLSON types have bought into this idea that, yes, they're the great defenders of religion. And again, if you know much about the Russians, it is a very nihilistic know. I have friends who are Christians, who are classical liberal Christians who will talk just, it's amazing to them that people use this as a justification for Russia. They said, Russia is a far less religious nation.
People go to church less. There's more abortions. There's more. Every, every possible pathology you can think of is there. But I think that gives a lie to the idea of religion being necessary for morality, because go look at religious people. Are they then automatically immoral? Well, no, they're not. And a lot of them are very immoral. But I would also say you said something. I did. The conscience planted in your head being the link between man and some higher power or higher being.
I don't buy that either for the same reason, which is if you look at people acting on their conscience throughout history, in some cases, their view of what is moral has led them to do monstrous things in the past. Have you ever heard the phrase kill them all, let God sort them out?
You used to see that on t shirts like during the Vietnam War. I'm old, so I don't remember that, but I probably remember it from just after the Vietnam War, but you see it on t shirts. Kill them all, let God sort them out. Well, that actually comes from, I think, a bishop or cardinal who was basically from the catholic church in the twelve hundreds. I think it was. There was some heresy that arose in southern France, and there's a particular city where people had converted over to this heretical view. And he was sent to stamp out the heretical view. And as his army was approaching the city, somebody came to him and said, oh, but it's not just heretics. Here in this town there are some people who are still true believers and they're trying to seek sanctuary. And he said, kill them all. God will recognize his own. At least this is the story that comes down. So the whole idea of kill them all, God sort them out, that was stated by a high official of the catholic church in sending out to assert the church's authority in putting down a heresy. So the idea that someone's individual conscience or that organized religion, both of those have proven to be not solid or reliable bases for people acting in a moral way. Now, I do think just saying to somebody, observe carefully, observe and let's have philosophical discussion about the rules required to live a long, healthy, fulfilling and happy human life. I think that's a much more solid basis than anything else because we see from the whole history of humanity that the knowledge of what's good and evil and what's right and wrong is not automatic. It doesn't come to us automatically. If we're going to have a basis for it, it should be, let's observe and think and discuss. And that's actually, if you think about, it's a far more solid basis for morality because it's something everybody can refer to and go look, go out and look at reality, go look at the facts of history. And then we can also say we have a method for solving disputes, which is we have debates and we have discussions and it allows for. And that not everybody's automatically going to agree with observation and debate and discussion, but we're going to get closer, we're going to have a more solid foundation for it than if we give somebody, obviously, the power of force to say, no, this is my view of what's right. I'm going to impose it on everybody anyway. I may have gotten off track a little bit there.
I think we should probably make room for somebody else. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: Well, you spoke about the 18th century preacher Jonathan Mayhew, and that being a turning point for Christianity, considering. Yes, that they were bad about God letting them sort it out before the Renaissance. But can that whole natural religion be used almost as a bridge with mostly rational but religious Ayn Rand fans?
[00:40:56] Speaker B: Okay, well, I think historically, I think it totally was a halfway house, right? It was a bridge from basically medieval Christianity, from the full on medieval solo scripture fundamental.
If you go back to medieval Christianity, it's beyond most fundamentalists today, from a very illiberal, superstitious, very hostile to human life version of Christianity, from there all the way to, if you put this, if you create a spectrum from St. Augustine to iron Rand, right. St. Augustine was very much, sex is evil, this world is evil, life is evil, you should not enjoy anything. He was very puritanical after having been the opposite. He became very puritanical when it splits. He became a Christian. Stew Crefton is very puritanical version of Christianity.
So Augustine on one side and Einrand on the other.
Natural religion, this 18th century view was about like 80% of the way towards the Iran end of the spectrum. So it was definitely as a transitional stage. Now, I'm probably going to write something more about this in the future. It's something I want to do a lot more research on. My impression is, historically, what happened, though, is that natural religion sort of petered out in the 19th century. And the main thing I think that happened is you had a bunch of people who decided.
People decided that, well, if natural religion was a sort of half secular, half religious viewpoint, there were people who basically said, we're not going to go halfway anymore. So there are people who went all the way secular, but then they went baying off after socialism and altruism and this sort of August comps type of thing, where it was a totally secular viewpoint. We're going to replace Christianity with this new secular religion. And the new secular religion was just as puritanical and just as anti happiness and anti individual as the most puritanical version of Christianity.
And then you had the people said, no, we don't want to go halfway. We're going to go all the way back to religion. And this is sort of the 19th century romanticism had these new religious revivals and religious awakenings, and that's basically the path going back to what would you call evangelical Christianity in America today. So I think people sort of said this halfway house between atheism and sort of puritanical religion, and people decided, we don't want to go halfway anymore. We're either going to go all secular or all religious. But of the people who went all secular, only a very small. Only a fraction of portion of them went towards this, kept the rational self interest, this worldly.
Basically, we should seek to enjoy life by living in a system of rational self interest with other people.
Only a relatively small number of people sort of kept on that strain, but that strain did lead to an influence and provide inspiration and basis for what Einran did. And she's sort of a revival of that enlightenment strain, but without the halfway elements of religion to it.
[00:44:24] Speaker A: Okay, I guess part of where I was going with that know to the point of your title, should secular people also appreciate that religious people don't all come in one size either, and that we shouldn't dismiss all non atheists as mystics and that their values have played a role in their aspirations to be better?
[00:44:46] Speaker B: I absolutely agree with the, one of the friends I've made in this business of being a writer. I've made friends with David French, who columnist in the New York Times. He is an evangelical Christian and a classical liberal. I've sort of gotten to know some people in that sort of sector. I'm reading a book right now called all the Kingdoms of the world by Kevin Valier, I think is his name, again, somebody I've made contact with and been discussing with. And he wrote, it's a critique of religious nationalism and sort of integralist people who are against separation of church and state. It's a defense of classical liberalism, essentially from a religious standpoint. So, yes, I think there are people who are very much sort of modern day descendants of Jefferson and Mayhew and Adams and the people who had this more enlightenment style version of Christianity, one that made more room for reason and for freedom and for individual rights and enjoyment of life in this world. So, yes, just that someone's religious, you have to ask, well, what do you mean by religion? Because there are a million different versions of religion and have been throughout history. Now, that said, when I talk to those people, I am also going to be saying, you realize you don't actually need this.
You're still in that halfway house.
I think you have to overcome that fear, the fear that historically some of the large number of the people who went all the way towards atheism ended up howling off after basically a new God in the form of socialism. And so I think that's why I try to make this argument that, well, you don't have to do that. Actually, the much more sensible, the much more firmly grounded secular basis for morality is this enlightenment era morality of enlightened self interest, rational self interest, and that this is actually a far better grounding for this than any of the other so called secular views of morality. But the important thing being that to have the kind of morality you want to have the kind of world you want does not require. Having basically a world in which people can live a good life and be good people does not actually require God. You can let go of that last bit of the halfway viewpoint.
[00:47:15] Speaker A: Once we get to the standard of using our reason to act in our own self interest, doesn't it become a fine line between subjectivism, theoretically, and just not totally knowing what your long term interest is?
[00:47:33] Speaker B: Meaning that if you have to rely on your own judgment, well, your own judgment might be biased, it might be difficult to tell what the answer is, et cetera.
[00:47:43] Speaker A: Right.
[00:47:44] Speaker B: But the problem is, what alternative is there?
What alternative there is? You could say that about anything.
If you want to land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to Earth, which we did in 1969, which we're trying to do again now, by the way, there's a new program out there. It's called Artemis, I think is what they're calling it.
The idea is, in 2026 or somewhere in the late 2020s, we're going to land a man on an American on the moon again and bring him back and land an american crew on the moon and bring them back. So we're going back to the moon. So if I'm asking you, how do we get to the moon and bring somebody safely back? If somebody said, well, look, if you're just left to your own judgment, isn't it all kind of subjective? Is it kind of hard to tell? You might be biased? Well, you actually try doing it, and you test things, and you engage in a scientific process. You gather the knowledge. You test the knowledge, and you go, and you can actually do something immensely complex. And you and I will never do anything in our lives. We will never do anything as complex as landing a man on the moon and bringing him back. Right. So this is one of the most complex things you could do in the world, but people can do it. They have done it. You can gain the knowledge for that. So saying, well, shouldn't you just rely on faith instead as an alternative would not seem like a remotely plausible answer to that.
Now, the equivalent of landing a man on the moon would be something like, put in not in technological terms, but in moral terms, would be, can you build a prosperous, free society?
And so if you ask, how do you build a prosperous, free society? Again, this is a hugely complex task, but people have done it. And they've done it by saying, well, let's come up with some rules. Let's look at the lessons of history. Let's observe the results. If you go back to the debates that the founding fathers went through, they were drafting the constitution, all that sort of thing that they would talk about, well, let's take the lessons from ancient Greece, and let's take the lessons from english political history. And all the rules that are in the constitution, all the things that are foundation of our american system, are them doing essentially the equivalent of politics of what the Apollo mission did in sending a man to the moon. It's let's come up with rules and principles based on evidence and experience.
And remember the english civil war happened. But why did that happen?
The greek city estates couldn't unite, and they felt they were overtaken by the roman empire and conquered by the roman empire. Well, why couldn't they unite? How can we make sure that we don't make the same errors? So all of this was them doing that task of observing, looking at results, testing things out. There's a whole period after american independence and before the Constitution where we were testing stuff out and it wasn't working and providing a process for amendment in the Constitution. So if stuff still doesn't work, we can fix it then. So it's the same thing of observing, looking at the evidence, testing things out, seeing the results, and then constantly improving the system that you create. So we've shown, I think, in politics, in the american constitutional system, we've shown you can create a society that's a free, benevolent society where everybody becomes more prosperous and we're all able to live together in peace. You can do that by observing results, fixing mistakes, constantly making improvements. Right. So we know that this is something that's possible to do. So we know that this thing of, well, what would it all be? Subjective? Well, look at the evidence. Has it all been just been subjective, or is it possible to come up with good rules and come up with good procedures and actually make this happen? And I think the answer is, it is possible.
[00:51:41] Speaker A: Good stuff.
You referenced how more people are identifying as nothing in particular.
Is it fair to say that that's maybe what the culture was like in the Roman Empire right before the rise of Christianity? That's a transitional phase.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: That's an interesting question. I don't know enough about the roman empire at that period to say that I think the problem with the Roman Empire is I think they were more towards the subjectivist, nihilist end of things, that they had a religious religious views were people still believed the pagan religious views. There were still lots of believers in the old gods, so to speak, but that their religion basically never developed to a point where it's adequate to really support the civil, to support and keep their civilization going. And I think a number of things about that. They had secular philosophy. But I think what happened, though, was that the secular philosophy, they were not an educated society. Education was still kind of an elite thing to a large extent, in the Roman Empire.
Again, I'm not an expert at this, but my guess, my initial theory on this is I think that they had an existing religion, pagan religion, that was not really adequate to support a complex society in terms of the answers that it gave to what's the nature of the world? How should I live?
And then they had secular philosophy that might have offered some guidance, and there's some good stuff in stoicism, there's some better stuff in Aristotelianism, but which was too much of an elite phenomenon.
The society hadn't developed to a point. You had a large group of educated people, so that the secular philosophy wasn't able to pick up the slack, as it were, from the gaps left by religion. And so you had the decadence, the famously decadent roman empire, right, where the bread and circuses and the orgies and the vomitoriums or all that sort of. So a lot of that's exaggerated, but that was a real thing, that they were in need of moral reform. And Christianity succeeded in part because that was the only people offering moral reform. Even if I think they said, we're going to save the Roman Empire, take over the roman empire with these moral reforms, and instead, oh, whoops, we collapsed it. We collapsed the roman empire because the new christian morality wouldn't allow for the ability to build a large, prosperous, free society. It became much more restrictive. It became much more. You had these guys in the early days of Christianity, these guys going off into the desert in Egypt and mortifying the flesh and wearing hair shirts and not bathing and all these other things that were considered. Basically, we're going to show what we can do to be as puritanical and aesthetic as possible and totally renounce any kind of enjoyment of life on this earth. Well, when you have people going and doing that, it collapses the basis for a complex society where people are building and creating and keeping this whole empire afloat. So I think that's the problem, is you had the only people offering moral reforms were needed, and the only people offering it offered a reform that collapsed the system.
[00:55:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's where I'm saying maybe we're clamoring for moral reform in our own way today.
[00:55:35] Speaker B: Well, I think the thing is, nothing in particular today.
I've got several articles referring to it. But you can also look up the Pew survey. Pew, it's a company that does lots of surveys and polls, very trustworthy for good methodology for doing that. So their data is generally pretty good. And they go into talking about, their recent study is about, well, if their religious beliefs is nothing in particular, what do they believe? And that's why they said, well, about half of them are atheists or agnostic. And those people tend to be very intellectual, and they have lots of things they believe in. They have a whole worldview. So they're your sort of educated elite types. So it's not just they don't believe in anything.
They have a belief in the power of science or a belief in a scientific worldview. They have beliefs that are secular beliefs that they have articulated. But about half of nothing in particular are people who do, for the most part, believe in nothing in particular. That is, they've sort of drifted out of religion, but they don't have a clear, articulated, explicit philosophy. So those people are kind of not for grabs. They could go all sorts of different directions. But on the other hand, also, they asked them, well, how do you make moral decisions? And the two big answers that people gave for how they make moral decisions if their belief was nothing in particular, well, I don't want to hurt other people, and we should act on reason and logic. Well, that's a pretty good answer. Right? So these people aren't completely, they're not nihilist, they're not completely lost, or at least most of them are not. They're not completely lost. They have some inkling of, here's how you go about doing it. But like I said, I think this is more than anything, it's a big opportunity to sort of promote to people. Okay, if you need to find a new basis for morality, if God is no longer convincing to you, and I agree, I don't think he's convincing that the concept of God is convincing. If God's no longer convincing to you, you need some other thing, some other thing to replace that, some other thing to put in place of that. So, by the way, the other thing I'm going to be writing about this very soon is I actually think that there is a source of sec, that in practice, so that if you get down to the ground level to the average person so I can talk about the secular basis of morality is this philosophy? And here are these articles of philosophy you can read. Well, not everybody's going to read that optimistically.
Maybe 10% or 20% would read that. That's an optimistic analysis. But what people might do is a lot more people have, say, read Ein Rand's novels, where they're going to get it in a popularized form of fiction. But Ein Rand's novels are very highbrow, they're long, they require, they have little philosophical issues and speeches in them. Not everybody's going to read that where they're going to get it from. And I think where people are getting their alternative, their sort of substitute for going to church and hearing a sermon these days is people get it from popular fiction. And I think especially know if you're a Star Trek person, and I know you are, Scott, if you're a Star Trek person, there's a whole sense of a view of the world and of human beings, and a whole sense of moral values that comes along with that. So I think we actually do have a society that's awash in all these sources of secular moral values, but they're coming through us in a way that doesn't seem like religion at all. They're coming through us by movies and television shows. And maybe you're not a Star Trek person, and you're a Harry Potter person. And by the way, I think some of the anger at JK Rowling is the fact you have a bunch of people who's basically the prophet of their religion, did something they consider heretical, so they're having like, a crisis of faith. I can't explain why. There's no other explanation for why people get so worked up over her. Anyway, that's previewing a future article. But I think we do have this sort of positive basis for a secular morality that's already out there propagating in the culture by reason of these sort of fictional franchises and fictional universes, like Star Trek and Harry Potter and what have you. And the best thing about it is that we actually know it's not real. Now, sometimes for the Star Trek people, you wonder, but unlike if you use the Bible as the basis for your values, you're supposed to believe that everything is the Bible was real, that it actually happened. If Star Trek influences you to accept certain humanistic values, the sort of Starfleet Federation kind of values, you have the benefit of knowing that, okay, look, this is just fiction. I don't have to believe this is literally real, but I can take this as a projection of how we could live. And if I like that vision, I get to adopt it. So I think this is sort of the ultimate answer of the sort of secular how do you get values on a secular basis? But I think we're out of time.
[01:00:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it's great stuff. I look forward to your paper. Work on it.
Next Thursday at 06:00 p.m., Eastern, we're going to be back on spaces with Richard Salzman, conservatives on their heels. What do they hope to conserve? So looking forward to that one. Thanks to everyone who joined, everyone who participated. Rob, thanks so much for doing this, and we'll look forward to seeing everyone next time.
[01:01:05] Speaker B: Thanks, everyone. Thanks.
