For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself

Lee seems most interested in tackling the first point: it’s meaningless, because we have no “nonhuman source.” To that end, his response is much like Deacon Duncan’s Undeniable Fact: God does not show up in the real world, so everything we say about God must come from humans.

That’s a solid point, but I think it’s also redundant because Hitchens’ second point fails as well: there very little in the world of religion and culture that is beyond the human ability to change.

That means that even if we were to grant Hitchens his first point, it would still do his argument little good. Even if we had the perfect book, we are still not perfect readers. Every word in that book must be translated, transmitted and interpreted. Even if you could perfect those first two processes, that last one would prove insurmountable.

What does “Thou shalt not kill” mean? A quick survey of biblical religions will return different interpretations of those four simple words. Does it apply to killing in self defense? To killing during war? To killing during an unjust war? To killing animals? To criminals, and if not, what types of criminals?

You’ll find Christians, Jews and Muslims on all sides of each questions. So what, exactly, is the advantage of having this “nonhuman source”?

I disagree with Lee that religion makes moral ideas harder to change. From my read of history, religious morality shifts at the same rate as other forms of culturally-embedded morality. Certainly the history of Christianity has shown massive shifts in its consensus over how to live a moral life, and no doubt this will continue. “Biblical morality” no longer means living a celibate life with few possessions, but perhaps it will return to that as the centuries roll on.

Part of this is because humans are champions rationalizers; we can find all sorts of reasons to do those things that we want or that make sense to us. Convincing someone to not do something that doesn’t make sense to them is tremendously difficult, as witnessed by the Catholic Church’s failure to prevent contraception use among American Catholics. But what makes sense to us comes from our preconceptions, which are shaped by our experiences and our society, and not just by what we hear from the pulpit.

For Hitchens to act as if having a “nonhuman source” grants us an unchanging moral code is to ignore most of what we learned from the past fifty years of philosophy and everything we’ve learned from history. There is only one law that continues to govern all human morality: This too shall pass.

You may remember that the Catholic Church has blamed the “moral laxness” of modern society for the actions of pedophile priests and the bishops that covered for them. The usual version has it that the liberalism that was emblematic of the sixties counter culture has pervaded society, and we’re all now moral relativists.

I haven’t heard any representatives from Penn State use this argument, but David Brooks has stepped into the breach, offering his own pseudo-sociological take. It started on Meet the Press, where he dropped this insight:

MR. BROOKS: I don’t think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don’t have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it’s wrong, but they’ve been raised in a morality that says, “If it feels all right for you, it’s probably OK.” And so that waters everything down. The second thing is a lot of the judgment is based on the supposition that if we were there, we would have intervened.

It continued in an editorial titled Let’s All Feel Superior, in which he hopes to knock us liberals off our high horse:

People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. As Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, “Blind Spots,” “When it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear.”

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside.

“In centuries past …” Merciful Moloch, this man has a history degree from the University of Chicago, yet he’s trying to hang a historical argument on a vague line like “in centuries past.” The only saving grace is that he was born in Canada, so the US doesn’t have to shoulder all the blame.

Alright, let’s look at this. If we’re talking about human weakness and sinfulness, there’s a definite Protestant flavor there, so those centuries must come after the Protestant revolution. And if we’re talking about rationally constructed systems of morality, we’re probably dealing with the high Enlightenment. So let’s say that “centuries past” means about three hundred years.

Have the past three hundred years been noted for their high moral tone? Quite the opposite, actually. I look at the wars, the exploitation and the genocide. If there’s a moral system that has produced all of that, I’d as soon live without it. If Brooks is going to argue that we were better off, he’s going to have provide more of an argument.

A second problem shows up in the phrase “… people built moral systems …” The people who are flawed are the same people who create, interpret and enforce those moral systems. Not surprisingly, those moral systems are flawed, their interpretation is self-serving and their enforcement tends to fall on those with the least social power.

In American history, those systems always involved hierarchies: man above woman, white above black, Christan above Jew, Protestant above Catholic, and so on. We’re all flawed, but it seems that some of us are more flawed than others, and the least flawed always seem to be the ones running the system. These systems were torn down because they perpetuated these hierarchies in the name of morality.

Unfortunately, I have a hunch that Brooks considers these hierarchies a feature and not a bug. Corey Rubin’s book The Reactionary Mind is making waves because he suggests that, “Historically, the conservative has favored liberty of the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders.” I suspect that Brook’s main problem with liberalized morality is that it is decentralized, which prevents the upper class from assuming its natural position as the arbiter of what is right and good.

Here was one clever response…

(via)

But to be fair, people without gods kill people, too. The point is gods have nothing to do with it.

Embed this:

Like Unreasonable Faith on Facebook for daily skeptical goodness:

Stephen Pinker suggests that violence and murder per-capita has been in decline through modern history:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I really don’t know how if I’d accept a decline in the murder rate as a sign that humans have become less culturally prone to violence. On the other hand, I’ve heard very similar statements from historians. I’ve heard it suggested (though I can’t remember where) that the past century may have seen less murder per-capita than all previous centuries, despite the horrifically murderous wars.

(Pinker has a 90 minute talk available here, but it’s not embed-able. There is a transcript and charts.)

The second is a column by David Brooks at the New York Times:

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues. [...]

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

This falls into an abundant category of articles roughly titled “How stupid we are.” You know the kind, “three quarters of young people think Joan of Ark was Noah’s wife,” etc.

I wonder what they expected. Throughout all of history, the majority of people have not had the time or resources to seriously engage in moral philosophy. Our common morality is something that we are socialized into. Perhaps in different ages we’ve added a religious gloss to it, but it all boils down to the same thing: most people believe what we were raised to believe.

A large amount of what passes for moral philosophy – religious or secular – is just an attempt to justify what we’ve been socialized into believing. It can’t be helped. It’s not just about what feels right, it’s about what makes sense to us using the preconceptions that have been shaped by our culture.

And according to Pinker, this has led to a period with reduced blood-shed. And I’m not sure what that means.