Hate Speech for Me? Then Blasphemy for Thee.

Let's entertain, for a moment, that it is viable to ban hate speech because it can be considered a form of valueless speech. 

This isn't just a liberal position, though the clamoring of busy gutmensch in Universities would have you believe otherwise. Indeed, here's an interesting excerpt from an article by William Haun over at Law & Liberty:

After Nazis marched on the largely Jewish neighborhood of Skokie, Illinois in 1977, William F. Buckley, Jr. possessed the moral confidence in self-government to repudiate the suggestion that “we indulge the little tyrants.” A Nazi march through a largely Jewish neighborhood, or a KKK march through the streets of Harlem, has the worth to self-government of “an obscene phone call.” Rather than hide such speech “under the umbrella of the First Amendment,” Buckley said “the moral is that little boys should not be given dangerous toys.”

What if it was the case that conservatives generally accepted the narrative that it is acceptable to limit free speech? What would American history have looked like if early twentieth century jurists like Holmes, Jr. did not set us on the path of a sort of free speech absolutism, that has led us to this weird position where hardcore pornography & grindcore are perfectly protected expressions available widely throughout the internet, but "hate speech" looks to be slated to be axed?

The great conservative & traditionalist legal mind of our time, Adrian Vermeule, when he was proposing that conservatives abandon some of their originalism and brought forward a fascinating example in an article in the Atlantic, that gives us a glimpse of where that ultimately may have gone: 

Alternatives to originalism have always existed on the right, loosely defined. One is libertarian (or “classical liberal”) constitutionalism, which emphasizes principles of individual freedom that are often in uneasy tension with the Constitution’s original meaning and the founding generation’s norms. The founding era was hardly libertarian on a number of fronts that loom large today, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion; consider that in 1811, the New York courts, in an opinion written by the influential early jurist Chancellor James Kent, upheld a conviction for blasphemy against Jesus Christ as an offense against the public peace and morals. 

The precedent would have been quite clear: the forbidding of blasphemous speech that offended the masses and served no purpose other than to enrage, something that far right speech that agitates on the topic of race is accused of doing. 

The comparison is quite apt: if words hurt, then the N-word is not the only word which inflicts damage. Blasphemous treatment of God (or gods) can inflict emotional distress. I think many of us can even attest to having felt uncomfortable when our religion was insulted, or even when losing our religions. These words are so powerful that I have heard atheist parents tell stories about their children weeping when they hear them say that they do not think that heaven is real. 

Moreover, we can look at incidents in Europe like the Charlie Hebdo shooting or the Denmark riots triggered by the content in Jyllands-Posten that were critical of Islam, or the international riots that were started when the Innocence of Muslims was released in 2012. 

Denmark Riots

Speech bigoted against religion can trigger violence and rioting just as how racist speech can trigger violence and rioting, yet nobody is pushing to reinstate anti-blasphemy laws or get outspoken atheists fired for their rhetoric.

Ultimately, the lack of outrage shows an imbalance of power in the West, and how the new god of the American people is liberalism and not Christ. Once upon a time, and perhaps as recently as the 1980s when there was the famous "Satanic panic," the Christian right could really mount a devastating charge against their opponents in the name of free speech, but it seemed that they were sincerely convinced of the freedom of conscience for their enemies. Perhaps this is because of St. Gamaliel the Elder, who urged the Sanhedrin to listen to the Christians because it would be of no harm if they were wrong and of great benefit to all if they were right, or perhaps it is because of the story of the Prodigal Son,that speaks of the power of men to reconsider things in the end, and does not propose at all the limiting of a man's liberty to force upon them something that they do not wish.

Christians in the West ultimately felt it was OK to let go of authoritarian solutions to curbing sharp criticism, and they decided to turn the other cheek. Yet, the more secular and humanist Western society has become, the more the call for outright illegalizing and having zero public tolerance for dissent on issues of equality has shot up. 

Personally, I speculate that it has a lot to do with the way that secular humanism, believing in no God of the Universe, no cosmic justice, feels that it is their duty to actually fight in the here & now. There simply is no second act in which they will be able to count on justice. Moreover, leftism is an ersatz-religion, and while the key to salvation for a Christian is the individual moral improvement and relationship with God, the path to redemption for secular humanists are all directed towards the state of society. 

There is no utopia after death, nor is justice meted out to the great sinners. Because racist white segregationists and slave owners that died decades ago have no hell to burn in, we have to create a furnace to throw them into on Earth just as much as we have to strive for Utopia. 

However, these efforts to ban and expel people for a certain kind of speech, and to use Antifa and other means to mete out "street justice" to them as if they were pedophiles are generally ill thought out. They retroactively vindicate all historical blasphemy laws and violent movements against Communists. 

After all, if it is evil to deny someone's full humanity through racism, is it not also completely evil to deny the Gospel of Christ, which brings grace to all the world, and to actively encourage people to indulge in their sins, sins that are fundamentally demonic? For the removal of freedom of another is a political tool, ultimately. It is a statement about what society should tolerate, and when we give permission to one side to be intolerant of the other, we ultimately signal that we believe man is not capable of deciding for himself and some things are too far gone to be tolerated. 

To the far leftists, it is racism and sexism. To the Christians and Muslims, it may be blasphemy. The push to curb hate speech and to be increasingly intolerant of anyone remotely associated with it invites a great backlash from Christians, Muslims, and other conservative forces to propose bringing back blasphemy laws. 

Indeed, if debate & discussion in the marketplace of ideas is no longer the means of settling the score, the conservative forces need to demand to have a say in crafting legislation that will illegalize bigotry against them and also protect them from similar accusations. Failure to do so would ultimately be irresponsible. While hate speech for me, blasphemy for thee is not a serious legal vision that any Westerner truly wants, it's the final recourse for disempowered conservative minorities to gain some semblance of equality in their states.

A closing observation: it would be considered absurd in the 1990s to have argued that the First Amendment would eventually be under assault if we allowed for the mainstreaming of Marxist and Marx-symp thought. It would sound like some exaggerated McCarthyist claim. 

But here we are... in 2020... with renewed battles over what should be permitted to post on social media, and increased calls for European-style limitations to free speech.

Reference Points & Culture

Culture is just as much about reference points as it is about differences in values. I would even argue that it is sometimes because the reference points are different and present the dilemma or the mythos behind the value differently that we sometimes see nuances in values. Even when we agree very much with another person and identical values with near identical prioritization, we will ultimately express these things differently and engage with the world with a different attitude because of the influences we have received from different reference points...

The reference points can be so different that almost no common ground exists. I very much learned this when sitting in a class in Korea and the professor wanted to come up with a neutral reference point to stage an example... Obviously, no major politicians were used, and so he started naming some local celebrities which myself and other foreigners hadn't heard of... He then even named a few famous American singers and movie stars which, surprising to me, some of the other foreigners and locals had not heard of. 

Konan

He finally came down to referencing a character I later found out was the star of a Japanese animated series who played a detective - Konan from a show called Case Closed. He asked if everyone knew who he was, and many of the non-Korean Asians knew, and I remember after describing the scenario, I raised my hand and said,

"Wait, are we talking about Conan... the... Barbarian?" 

I remember someone acted shocked for a moment, like I had just implied that this random Japanese detective character was a barbarian... They had zero reference point for Conan the Barbarian. The professor then acted exasperated... naming even an internationally famous animation character that was beloved in the minds of both Japanese and Koreans was not enough because there was a Westerner and an Uzbek who had no idea what he was talking about, and this confusion even brought about a clumsy exchange of words that came off wrong and made someone even wonder if I was saying something racist because they had no idea about the larger-than-life Robert E. Howard character in the Western world. 

I remember thinking about how my negative and skeptical attitude towards certain things could be confusing. For instance, I found that when I talked about the industrial revolution and WWII being catalysts for feminism because it changed the labor market, people were shocked, some even offended, that I would suggest that the changing workplace was a major factor and not idealistic women revolutionaries. Even conservatives talked about how the newly found roles of women were something that were fought for. However, "women filling in for men who were at war" is a very common trope for explaining the rise of second wave feminism in America. 

I also remember that every reference to multiculturalism in Korea would quickly come back to international marriages, the bulk of which were disproportionately mail order brides, and the discussion was also influenced by the number of women who married soldiers and ran off to America in the decades previously. Slavery wasn't a topic, and there were no ethnic minorities to be found at all 50 years ago in South Korea barring a limited amount of well-off Chinese & Japanese merchants, few of whom were integrated or even necessarily interested in integrating. 

But while these differences exist, I've also learned to realize that Koreans and other non-Westerners have very similar values to us. The prioritization can be different, but I have found that it would be no more radical a difference than you would find between a conservative Dakotan and a liberal New Yorker. What is often incredibly different is the references that they have that affirm these values. 

And it is these cultural differences boil down greatly to the way that we refer back to a thing, whether it is through pop TV, literature, or the local history. It is because of these very reference points that we end up with some very different ideas of how problems should be solved and values should be asserted. A Korean who is against alcoholism would immediately see the problem not just in terms of drunks at bars and drunk driving, but also of people being forced to consume alcohol at social functions through work and family, and also in the overall price of the product. Norwegians would likely not see either of these issues in their society, and the way that they would conceptualize the problem would be more about the individual's relationship with alcohol.

It's hard to come up even with specific examples of 'what an American refers to when they think of X versus what a Korean thinks of,' because so much of what we believe, as Westerners or as Koreans, is actually quite personal. What amount of Americans are strong Christians anymore, and what amount of them are going to come at it from a Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or Mormon angle, that emphasize different aspects of the Biblical teachings of Christ, or maybe not even the Bible at all..? What amount of Americans are patriots, and how many of them are into the 1776 style of patriotism and folk libertarianism that comes with it, or what amount of them are more into the romanticization of 20th century events more than those of the deep history? Such a difference may appear to be subtle, but an Alabaman with roots to the Confederacy and the American revolution may look at these questions of American patriotism very differently than a black American from New York whose grandfather was a Tuskegee airman. 

But what is actually important about American culture in this context is that the black New Yorker and the white Alabaman both are aware of each other's references, while the average Korean could be excused for not knowing much at all about the Tuskegee Airman and 20th century American war (because so much of patriotism in America is located in the framework of military service), the Confederacy, or the American revolution. 

There are, no doubt, easy to find examples of two sets of Koreans & Americans where it is actually the Koreans & Americans having more in common in belief and values than they do with their fellow country men, yet simply not having the same reference points. 

A Brazilian Catholic, a French Catholic, a Korean Catholic, and an American Catholic, all conservatives sympathetic to traditional values and rigid morals, will have infinitely more in common with each other than their countrymen who are opposites, and a lot more in common with each other than even tepid cultural Catholics with one foot in the door of the secular world who are compatriots. They will also have plenty of reference points to draw on from the Bible and Catholic history and characters... 

But the second that a political or social issue comes up, even when they believe the same things, the way they express it and the images and ideas kicking around in their mind will be ultimately different. Even if the Brazilian and the American both support gun ownership, they draw upon different legal principles and histories. Even if the Korean and the Mexican are both against alcoholism and drug use, the contexts in each country are going to be radically different. 

Being of the same culture does not mean being of the same values, but it means being of the same network of ideas and references. Globalism can chip away at this, but the differences are ultimately immutable simply because nobody is surrendering their language nor are they going to spend 15 years watching Brazilian TV and reading pulp fiction novels just because. 

Some shows will be vectors for spreading a nebulous global culture, but we also know that a comedy skit about how terrible your boss is or how funny science geeks are is not actually going to inculcate people with culture. Moreover, Korean Netflix is filled with local content that is generally much more popular than foreign content -- the foreign content is something consumed more individually and in a more niche fashion. Cultural differences will not go away, and thus our reference points will not go away. 

Chess Games & Political Perspectives

I recently played a chess game (Blitz) where, going into the last minute and being 40+ moves deep, I was up a Knight and maybe a pawn or two and felt certain of victory. However, in the last 30 seconds, it became clear that there was no way to win -- he had two Bishops terrorizing me and two passed pawns.  It was pretty shocking how, simply by measuring the game through the most obvious thing (material), I didn't realize I was in trouble, and my perspective did not shift until it was far too late... 

Not the actual chess game but similar enough to it. 

Now, take politics -- it's not a clear game with winners/losers, nor does it  even have clear objectives since everyone can be valuing something different. Moreover, the board is a lot bigger than sixty four squares, and everything can be a "piece" and move. 

How much more uncertain we must be of being right and whether or not we are doing/saying the right thing. How much more careful we must be when assessing the situation. 

Politics should not be mutual combat & debate, but should be centered more around trying to talk about and understand a bigger problem, and to share ideas on it. Since none of us reading this completely determine the policies that are set forward, we should really feel free to discuss these things without malice... 

And we should remember that, just as how we can be surprised in a game like chess that we do not actually have the full perspective necessary to win, so, too, in politics or other arenas, we should not even pretend to have the entire picture. Instead, we should simply argue our perspective and our values, presenting them persuasively, in hopes  of receiving some  amount of validation for our concern and hoping that the public takes  into account our perspectives when they evaluate what they will advocate moving forward. 

Unnecessary Dichotomies & Narrative Thinking

We are sometimes taught to think in the direction of opposites, and that "sadness" is the opposite of "happiness," but isn't it also the case that anger or nausea is just as distant from happiness as sadness? You could say that this is an unnecessary dichotomy -- I think 'false dichotomy' would be too strong since it is not deceptive to make a comparison between the two...It's just not the fact that we have to conceive of sadness as the opposite of happiness.

I think there's actually a lot of unnecessary dichotomies like this -- for instance, Capitalism and Communism are opposing economic visions, but if we were to look at a partially planned economy from the premodern period, we could scarcely say that it is a "mixed economy," nor could we say that it either validates a Capitalist or Communist world view. Thus, while Communist & Capitalist are opposites in a sense, it does not mean that, by necessity, an economy which has property rights/ownership that would be considered "mixed" by somoene from a capitalist/communist perspective is necessarily mixed. 

Just as such, we cannot say "There are atheists who do not believe in heaven or hell, and Muslims that believe in layered heavens and hells, and Buddhists as well who acknowledge near infinite heavens & hells, so a Christian is a moderate, perhaps even closer to an atheist!, since he believes in one heaven, one hell." 

By thinking too much "logically" in a linear, graph-paper sense of the word, we come to unnecessary dichotomies. The sort of thing that school teachers would drum out of us -- the attempt to map everything out and categorize things has actually resulted in all of these unnecessary dichotomies that clutter the mind. 

We can see this as well with the "racist" and "anti-racist" dichotomy. Yes, in a sense, the opposite of someone who believes in the superiority of their race and dislikes other racists is an anti-racist, but this is not a scale that actually has to be applied to everything. It's not useful in every circumstance.  In fact, it may even be the case that it is very much not useful in most circumstances. 

Unnecessary dichotomies is one of the things that hampers any form of debate because it draws people into the practice of trying to define their enemy in unflattering ways -- ways that does not actually amount to how they define themselves. It breeds a sort of dishonesty in discussion that rarely anyone moves beyond. 

 

And this is the stuff of narrative thinking: everything that exists in the world is reuploaded into the context that the partisan thinker wants. So, for instance, gender roles in a Sri Lankan fishing village or 19th century art becomes something that is then looked at through the lens of a 21st century feminist, and the whole world rewards her as an intellectual for translating it all into the biases that she has. 

People think they are doing something objective when they literally take a foreign, independent cluster of references, meanings, and ideas, and then reconstruct them within their own framework of bias in a way that is usually unflattering. 

This isn't philosophy. It's thought terrorism. 

Market Mythos & Programming

An incredibly powerful series of Tweets graced my eyes today that I felt like commenting on -- these were brought to us by Mr. Cyrillic Name. It hits on multiple levels in such a short space, making it delicious. 

Before we begin, it is important to remember that, in the same way that a dominant subconscious may exist to push people towards passive acts of racism, as is popularly believed by the left, people on the right see an anti-family, pro-consumer bias that is driving our culture away from traditional values and into sterilized & atomized living. 

"Aspirational mythos" is an incredibly important concept for us -- we should not view what is on television or in the media ever as a sort of reality, but as a virtue signal. Every story has within it some moral that is being presented, and often times, when it is most hidden and buried in the content, it is the most important message of the times. 

The aspirational mythos is not something that is just given to us in our films, sit coms, novellas, and BuzzFeed, but is also presented to us in short commercials and minor social transactions that we are not so conscious of. This sort of advocacy is also something that does not exist on the surface -- the surface, that we often think of as the "content," is really just a series of vapors that obfuscate the real plot and the virtues that are being presented.

For instance, it is the Leave It to Beaver imagery is what stands out to all of us -- the plots were all forgettable, but the clean home, loving and competent parents, rascally kids that are causing a hubbub but are always duly fixing it & looking slick doing so is what really stays with us. This is a series of tropes that all tell us, but not so explicitly, how to align our behaviors and values with our proper stations in life, and how these stations are rewarding. 

In a sense, sit coms and TV dramas are our real value drivers. Films are often more story than substance, for they are only with us a short time and cannot build up a whole system of values in our head. But the TV shows that we will spend dozens of hours watching, many of which interconnect by having the same themes, producers, and writers, are more about the tropes, and the stories are just ways to get the tropes to interact with each other. While its primary function truly is entertainment and the average writer and producer is not necessarily seeking to program anyone, but to simply be a reflection of life, it invariably results in broadcasting their interpretation of life to the world.

Like all interpretations, the story is viewed from the perspective of the heroes who interact and tell the story, and who these heroes are, and how they view the story, becomes the way that average people who watch the show begin to interpret their own lives. 

The heroes are the archetypes and tropes, and the stories that they navigate are simply a structure through which the audience laughs & cries with whilst becoming indoctrinated, in part or in full, by what is being advocated. 

It is through these aspirational archetypes found in the social mythos that we are largely programmed. Unlike previous mythos, which is based upon virtue and centered around ideals, the social mythos of today is economical and practical. The secular world itself has stripped it of virtue because we now longer function as nations, but as markets, and in Market World you get Market Mythos.

Market Mythos wants you to think about the next few years and your consumer & career options. It wants you to choose smartly. 

Nation Mythos wants you to think about history and community and your relationship to both. It wants you to choose wisely. 

Let's focus more on what is really being advocated in TV and sexual education. 

The prevailing spirit of sexuality has proven to be exponentially beneficial to the ruling class. We are basically told to endlessly prolong our high-consumption youth and avoid saving up for the future which stunts reproduction in general. 

This is because having children is very costly to the state when compared to foreign immigration because of the amount of government resources sunk into a single child as they proceed through all of the steps of formal education. Migration is instant gratification -- a worker that produces and pays taxes without having ever sucked up as much as the native class, and they are also a full grown adult making a lot of self-centered consumption decisions. 

The DINK model is also ideal for a wide range of corporations that focus on you living immaturely forever. 

While this series of Tweets does make this model sound conspiratorial, it does not have to be that way. As I hinted at before, there does not have to literally be a cabal of business interests & politicians consciously discussing and making these decisions together. There's already the ingrained bias of the people who are used to interacting with the world as consumers and product pushers, who think like marketers, that are writing all of our entertainment, or who simply find themselves in positions where they are writing public policy while trying to think of themselves as in the shoes of their neighbor, who they view as a consumer. 

In the case of sexual education, it is the case of simply wanting to stop unplanned pregnancies through informing kids, and the result is simply overshooting the target. They think they are doing their Fellow Consumers who are likely aiming for bright futures with new cars and jet-setting vacations by teaching them to delay pregnancy and marriage, but the kids are scared not just through their teens, but through their twenties and beyond. 

Moreover...

The point about an atomized dater versus a mom/dad with accumulated interest & stakes goes back nicely to the point that you would frequently hear from Weimerica Weekly back in the day -- the concept of skin in the game. When the average person has more & more investment in the future of America as a place for family and community building, the consumption patterns will change and the very way that they vote will likewise morph. They no longer think in terms of the next several years, but in terms of decades, in terms of grandchildren, in terms of nation. They are more reflective about right and wrong, not just concerning pleasure and thinking of everything as delineated. 

They are more sensitive to the fact that everything interpenetrates. They become more zen. 

Even though there is an industry based around child rearing that benefits from people having more kids, this is absolutely dwarfed by the rest of capital. Moreover, in terms of the labor market, your boss doesn't want a dedicated mom as his head of marketing, nor does he want a worker that is less dependable due to familial ties -- they want a sterile cubicle dweller committed to a career-path who views his/her workplace as their source of independence, and has little interest branching out into something else. 

To some degree, this can be intentional. I am sure there are those who are at the top that crunch numbers and consider things in these cold of terms. However, again, this is not dependent upon a conspiracy that you're literally being Psy Opped by Coca-Cola: the initial push of promoting consumer culture is all that is necessary for this to become normalized, and it is within this framework that these sorts of conclusions write themselves.

Once it is normalized and the next stages are clear, it becomes something that is more consciously advocated for. Never will you really quite see the point where it is crammed down your throat, but the fact that most people feel childlessness is a respectable and admirable option, something which was historically viewed as living with a hole in one's life, shows how consumer culture can ensorcell an entire generation. 

Power to the People Corrupts People

When the democratic process becomes combative and unpleasant, it is basically a sign that the democracy has failed. The political body may still stay together, but it is holding captive a significant amount of citizens who are well aware that they will be forever cut off from representative government. 

Representative government to them becomes insulting, not fulfilling. The idea that they could benefit from representation vanishes, and they begin to feel alienated from the very society that they were born into. This perhaps brings up an interesting side point: democracy works best when it is localized, and when it is happening in a homogeneous body where nobody is being categorically cut out from representation. 

It is probably only in those circumstances where democracy is sustainable over a long period of time, but even then, a single-culture city changes through rifts between rich and poor, young and old, and developments in religion or culture. 

We can sort of conclude that Democracy is on a crash course... but it is resilient, because its system is open to change. It's more of a demolition derby than a one-off crash course or even series of crashes, because the wear and tear makes it necessary to reach for the reset button frequently. 

It's also true that we can look at the way that America has evolved and come to the conclusion that there are perhaps 2-4 Americas that have respectively lived and died, and this is not even counting the American groups that were born & went extinct without ever tasting any of the power. 

When we invariably have one voting bloc or a united group of voters imposing their will on the people, we also begin pitting the people against one another. They see each other as competitors with conflicting interests as opposed to seeing themselves as subjects united with purpose under the same banner. We also create groups among people -- groups of empowered people, and groups of people that are at the mercy of the majority -- the famous two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner analogy. 

It's also worth thinking of the idea that "power corrupts," and "absolute power corrupts absolutely." What happens when we give power to the people? 

Giving power to the people makes our systems more resilient, but it also brings to the people the corruption that power also often naturally brings to individuals. Power to the people corrupts people. And when people have become corrupt, we see toxic democracy -- democracy which no longer benefits its own citizens but turns them into competitive, disparate groups competing to dominate one another.  

When they get a taste of power, the democratically engaged winners believe that they are filling a divine mandate, just like a King whose power has gone to his head, and they think that it is not just their right but their obligation to history to exercise this will. This is especially true when they are confident and their rhetoric is strong -- just like a petty tyrant, they vanquish their enemies, and then they put into the history books how glorious it was. 

The "Republic" that we have built was supposed to prevent this by coming up with inalienable rights for the minority, and this will continue to hold as long as the jurists and the unchanging forces within government are able to withhold the line on democratic will run amok. But we see the rhetoric gets dangerously hot, and the rights of the minority begin to look quite distant and irrelevant when a lot of effort has been made to dehumanize them and write them off as if they already belong in the dustbin of history. 

Naturally, we want the jurists and the Constitution to hold strong and to create a political 'safe space' that endures. But there's an even easier way to take care of all of this...

Skip the promotion of democratic engagement and simply rely on learned jurists, a hereditary executive branch, and localized democratic action that is relevant for each region but does not spill over into the backyards of others and, at the same time, constantly promoting self-sufficiency and cooperation between the subjects of the realm so that they have a sense of interconnectedness and can flourish without recourse to government at all. 

When we remove democratic power brokering on the national level, we can begin removing toxicity from democracy by keeping it localized, polite, and prevent it from coming off its leash and resulting in mob rule. 

There Is No Moral Progress

Introduction

The far social left, which have come to dominate a lot of public discourse and who we often refer to as "SJWs" and "wokescolds" and enjoy reaching for the word "bigot" and "Nazi" when anyone disagrees with them, often come off as the primary opponents of the Dissident Right, just like how the scientifically illiterate fundamentalist Christians and heartless robber baron capitalists and their corrupt political sprog are the primary opponents of the far left. But it's actually a bad habit for us to spend so much time with them. While some of the material we have of them is useful for trying to push people who straddle the center further right & galvanize our movement, the actual ideas we always have to deal with come from the progressive left humanists like Steven Pinker who are nuanced and can actually have a very tight argument. They aren't bad, either, and the arguments are perfectly reasonable, intelligently written, and have slick appeal.  

One of the issues with them, however, is that in a godless universe sans metaphysics, everything comes down to utilitarianism, which Fr. Seraphim Rose refers to as being ultimately nihilistic. Nihilistic in the literal sense that there is no acknowledgment of a greater moral authority, and everything hinges around forming some public consensus of how to give the greatest good to the greatest number. Because no good can be pointed to beyond what is the most obvious, and the second we begin talking about what the good is everyone begins to disagree because our visions are so radically different, the arguments generally focus on reducing the bad, which is usually more obvious. 

After all, many things feel good which are not good, and many people debate how good things really are, whether we are talking about a strict work life-to-work balance or eggs, but we can all agree that someone throwing acid in the face of a stranger is bad -- an example I remember Sam Harris using when questioned by a sharp philosophy student in the UK. Atheist ethical systems are ultimately constructed from what is most obviously evil, and hopes to branch off of this until we can come up with some public concept of good. 

Sam Harris is famous for making really basic arguments to large audiences. It's a mystery how he has become a spokesperson for secular humanism. 

So, all of morality is reduced to avoidance of what is agreed upon as bad, and moral progress is the trend in history of the world to generally improve. 

Their vision of moral progress generally all comes down to the following:

Moral progress is the reduction of pain and suffering. 

• There is less pain and suffering because of progressive policies which focus on reducing this.
• Premodern governments were ignorant (at best) and morally reprehensible (at worst) were illiberal and based on superstitions.
• We must have progressive secular humanist governments that focus on reducing pain and suffering, thus are decidedly intersectional, secular, and socialist.

In addition to these arguments, there is also one smuggled in assumption that never gets talked about: the universal moral equality of all individuals, and the general disregard for groups. Individuals have rights, and groups are artificial constructs. 

There's a lot of shying away of what this could ever mean for groups. Even the primal human inclination is to look out for one's family first and foremost, then one's tribe and broader community, we have to take away this kind of thinking because the bottom immediately falls out from this concept of the moral. When we can question where it is important to primarily reduce pain and suffering and become specific, we start taking the globalist-humanist basis of this out of the framework it has to be understood in & open up a different box of questions and ideas. The whole plot is lost because we all are now thinking in terms of our own benefit and our own group before others, and we begin to see the world as a competition of groups with differing systems to acquire the means to reduce suffering, and we think in terms of hierarchy and competition. This idea could be expanded upon, but that would be another essay. 

Is Moral Progress Really Just Less Pain & Suffering

The statement is rational in the sense that no person is going to say that I do not believe that the reduction of pain and suffering is moral.

However, this is simply not the right way to measure morality, because:

i. some virtue is acquired through elements of pain and suffering. To learn discipline, we sacrifice leisure and laxity.
ii. some pain and suffering is deserved. Men who commit murders that now feel the pain of isolation in jail are receiving a just desert.
iii. some pain and suffering is caused entirely by amoral agents and has no moral quality to it. Thus, some questions of pain and suffering are no longer in the scope of a discussion on morality.
iv. morality just generally transcends pleasure. The right thing is not measured ever by what feels good, but by what is in concordance with what is beneficial to the growth of people and provides the greatest cosmic outcome. Pleasure may be the just reward for moral action, but the joy from self-satisfaction at having done the right thing is a stark contrast with the hedonist's pleasure.
v. some reductions in pain and suffering flies in the face of moral progress. Indeed, there are papers that argue that even things like child smut can reduce the instances of actual victimization of children (Science Daily).

Less Pain & Suffering Is a General Improvement

The reduction of pain and suffering is not always even a moral concern, and sometimes the reduction of pain and suffering can come at the cost of morality, such as the example of smut potentially reducing sexual violence and assault. Surely, nobody would argue that increased consumption of that stuff is a moral good, at best it would be morally neutral (like everything should theoretically be treated in the atheist universe), but it would be hard to argue that a man who logs onto the internet to view women doing degrading things is involved in a moral act.

Less pain and suffering is nearly always desirable, and thus can be conceptualized as a general improvement. For instance, better technology and warnings that results in people being safer from hurricanes is a great improvement, but it does not really have that much in the way of "moral progress" in the sense that nobody killed by a hurricane is being killed by an evil agent. It is tragedy and pain in the same way that any other untimely death is that cannot be blamed on some agent acting nefariously.

I would hesitate to even refer to any of this as progress. Progress always implies a path toward something, and while many things can be imagined to have a desired end like less pain and suffering, morality is not something that we progress to because it is something which is not worked toward or progressively understood, but timeless and beyond man.

Morality Has No Dimension of Progress

What is right is always right. Obviously, different times produce different circumstances, and the good may not align exactly with the terms of those circumstances. For instance, the concepts of "serf," "slave," "sharecropper," "nobi," "Brahmin," "warrior," are not universal, nor do they necessarily extend across time. Yet, when the terms are even accounted for and we think about the principles of right and wrong, we can apply the general virtues to specific situations and come to conclusions.

Because we are not God, there will always be disagreements on the priorities of the virtues and sometimes even what these virtues are. However, it still remains generally agreeable that we can condemn a cruel slave master in the 1st century BC because their cruelty is universally abhorred. We can also condemn a kind slave master for maintaining someone as a slave, and yet, we can also see some people perhaps venture forth with the argument that a master who keeps his slave living in good conditions -- conditions relatively better to the majority of free citizens -- is even doing well by the same universal measure of what is good.

The good is not relative to us -- we are simply relative to the good. Moreover, our inability to precisely articulate or even know the good is not proof of its non-existence, just as how the inability of the Egyptians in the year 2,000 BC to construct airplanes is not evidence against airplanes. If man were to have been wiped out by an asteroid before we ever invented airplanes, it would not mean that heavier-than-air flying machines were ever impossible just because sentient life never developed them. It would merely mean that it remained unknown by man. The good is real whether or not we know it, and whether or not it is knowable. 

There's Less Pain & Suffering Because of Technology

People mistakenly believe that things like the liberation of women, of serfs, of slaves, etc., were all accomplished by men becoming moral giants and realizing some profound truth.

It's completely the opposite.

Man develops the technology to transition out of a previous organization of labor, and then he declares that the old organization of labor was bad, and he forgets the reason such an organization of labor existed in the first place but pretends it existed due to prejudice or hatred. In reality, these forms of labor existed like this because it was the most efficient division of labor, and just as the people then thought of themselves as the end point of history and could not imagine much beyond them, some of them took up the pen and wrote about how this may be the best that it can get.

Because we live in an era that looks like this, we have decided that we created the best institutions, and not that the technology created the institutions that are normal to us. We think our authorship over the current era to be greater than what it actually is.

The general improvement to all man's lots is the result of

- modern medicine
- electricity
- mass production
- mass surveillance resulting in greater accountability
- greater rates of education. 

Through these developments, we have reached a heightened state of material improvement that has reorganized a labor and daily life to be free of the deprivation and lack of surveillance that used to fill life with a lot of suffering we do not know now. Our morality has now matched these expectations. Less desperate people means less crime. Less extreme master/slave relationships make it so less sociopaths are able to have vast amounts of people at their whim. It also means that more sociopaths are observed, and more sociopaths are choosing rich fantasy lives over actual crimes or other various means to scratch their devilish itch because the chances of being caught are exponentially greater with modern technology. 

Because everything has been restructured to match where technology is, our sensitivity to certain things has changed. Because the state can be a father to a bastard, we no longer think particularly ill of the unwed mothers. Because of the anonymity of urban centers and how even rural people no longer really know their neighbors, the personal vices of man are not just things that we tolerate, but they are things that we are encouraged to completely and totally ignore. 

These things appear to be an advancement of morality because they match the living conditions which correlate with less pain and suffering to us. However, people who believe in God or virtue recognize that this is an incomplete view of morality. There is no moral progress for all of society because morality happens at a fundamentally individual level where our intentions are being measured. 

The closest thing to universal moral progress would be nothing more than providing a greater basis for education which happens to result in a greater amount of individuals attaining a higher moral state. However, one could say that the education of previous generations, which occurred in far more impoverished conditions, actually had another layer to them because of the poverty. If poverty and the threat of starvation, if close communities and large families, tend to produce greater sensitivity to the needs of others and, through humility and selflessness, make humans more inclined to prosocial moral behavior, it could even be the case that those who have access to all of the benefits of modern education but none of the above may actually morally regress. 

Still, we should ultimately never think of things in the framework of moral progress because morality is about the will and intention of individuals, and the second that we remove morality from this context it no longer makes as much sense. Thus, it is safe to say, moral progress does not exist, and the ingredients for moral progress might even be significantly different from what we would normally expect.