The unbridled pursuit of personal appetites
I wrote a thing about William Barr’s hypocritical pretense to care about morality while lying and cheating to help the most immoral human slug on the planet do whatever he wants.
He unloaded his deep wisdom at the Catholic college we Yanks call Noder Daym last year, including this inspiring gem:
On the other hand, unless you have some effective restraint, you end up with something equally dangerous – licentiousness – the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good. This is just another form of tyranny – where the individual is enslaved by his appetites, and the possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.
This from a guy who enables Donald Trump. You’d laugh if it weren’t so sickening.
I probably posted about it here last year, but Barr’s revolting behavior since has only underlined the grotesquery.
From Barr (in linked piece:
“Social order must flow up from the people themselves – freely obeying the dictates of inwardly-possessed and commonly-shared moral values. And to control willful human beings, with an infinite capacity to rationalize, those moral values must rest on authority independent of men’s will – they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.
“In short, in the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people – a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.”
Most profound. But before coming to a conclusion of my own on this, I would like to find out what other noted contemporary authorities on matters Trumpian have to say on it, like, maybe, Stormy Daniels. She may not be a totally supreme being, but I would say she’s pretty transcendent.
I have a few religious friends and acquaintances, including one very smart and quite quarrelsomely amenable former colleague who considers himself a devoted Catholic. For them, religion and theology are the study of the transcendental, of the internal experience of humanity and the beauty and profundity of our experiences. I can understand that; I have had a few transcendental experiences, and have often felt a yearning for connection to other people by reflecting inward.
But I cannot understand the refusal of these “sophisticated” theologists to even entertain the idea that these ideas have been abused in the pursuit of temporal power. History is simply dripping with the institutional perversion of authority that these theologies have grown, and have grown out of. A group of monkeys will *always* claim to know the unknowable, to eff the ineffable, and that this gives them the right to eff the rest of us, too.
Eff them, I say.
Barr is, of course, historically ignorant. Our country was explicitly founded without a state religion, and declared by our founding fathers not to be a Christian nation. God was literally voted out of the Constitution.
Several of our founding fathers, for example Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin,Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, John Adams, and George Washington, were more philosophical Deists, or outright atheists, than Christians.
Let’s see what Washington had to say on the matter:
and
Washington never wrote about God, or Christ, only about such things as “the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men,” and “the benign parent of the human race.”
Not good enough? How about John Adams? “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Adams was a materialist:
or
Thomas Paine, of course, wrote an entire book on the subject, The Age of Reason.
What Barr is trying to do in his historical revisionism is to lay the groundwork, or establish a justification for, removing the franchise from non-Christians, or making non-Christians second-class citizens. He, like many of his ilk, want to remake America as a Dominionist nation. In this, he goes directly contrary to the intentions of the Founding Fathers. America was founded as a nation by people fleeing from religious oppression, not people seeking to create new religious oppression. But, as you said, to hear such a scoundrel as Barr talk about morality beggars belief.
Or to have their own opportunity to be the oppressors. Puritans in New England were perfectly happy to oppress dissenters, and Anglicans in Virginia passed laws requiring church attendance and went around beating up Baptists.
Rhode Island was the only colony founded specifically on the principle of freedom of religion. Roger Williams doesn’t get nearly as much attention as he should in discussions of US history.
Maroon, these are good historical facts, but they describe the founding of the English colonies, a century before the formation of our country. In order to form a new country, these different sects, many anathema to each other, had to stand down. Our Founding Fathers were a long way from Cotton Mather.
Papito,
Fair enough. When you said “people fleeing from religious oppression”, that brought to mind the first settlers. The leaders of the revolution weren’t fleeing from anything, and their quarrel wasn’t (at least for the most part) about religion, but rather absentee government. But yes, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison especially were determined to create a secular government.
There’s a good discussion of the history here; I’d forgotten about the Puritans hanging the Quakers.
I rather favor the Wiccan statement, “An it hurt no other, do what ye will.” Christopher Hitchens used to say that you don’t even have to teach children about the Golden Rule, as they have an innate sense of what’s fair or unfair. I don’t quite agree with him on that; I think that the basic notions of fair and just action are common to almost all societies, but children do have to be taught. Nevertheless, I do agree with him that human societies do depend on solidarity with one another. If we didn’t have that, human beings wouldn’t have gotten as far as we have.
Within those limits, however, of not hurting other people, which is not a religious morality but one based on reason and social necessity, the whole point of liberty and freedom is to do what you like, as you like, and when and how you like. Human “appetites” are not evil. Not letting people do what they want is the real tyranny, and the antithesis of liberty. I get the feeling that religionists don’t really believe in or value liberty.
That too. But the Golden Rule, which was first articulated by Confucius (?) and carried to the ME and then Europe via the Silk Road, demands an ability to empathise. If a person cannot imagine themselves into the shoes of someone else, then morality cannot even get started.
I have met one or two people who have been clearly deficient in this characteristic, and have not found their company too pleasant. In my student days, I believed humanity to be divided into economic classes: peasants, proletarians, bourgeois; the usual Marxist stuff. Now I see the line as being drawn between givers and takers.
#8
As far as I am aware, it has been developed and spread from multiple different cultures.
Harry J. Gensler has made a detailed study of its origins and has collected many forms of it. In his collection,
is the clear standout.
The negative form ‘do not do to others what you would not have others do to you’ is arguably superior to the common positive form as found in the Christian ‘Golden Rule’.
https://www.harryhiker.com/chronology.htm#:~:text=chance%20to%20survive.-,c.,this%20as%20the%20golden%20rule.
There’s an argument that “don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you” isn’t such brilliant morality as we’ve been taught to think, because people have different wants and not-wants. It works for explaining to small children why it’s not ok to hit others, but beyond that…it has its limitations.
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OB: “… different wants and not-wants…it has its limitations.”
I might like having my head scratched. But if I go around scratching the heads of all and sundry, I could finish up in a spot of bother.
But if I don’t like my head being scratched, and I go around not scratching heads, where is the problem?
Maybe you don’t like being helped. Maybe that leads you to assume that no one likes being helped, so you don’t help people even when they clearly need help. Et cetera. It’s not all that difficult to think of ways it’s not a universally useful rule.
OB at 14:
It reminds me of the story of the masochist who meets up with a sadist, and the sadist says “come back with me to my place. I’ve just received a delivery of some lovely new whips, all kinds. I can’t wait to try them out.”
So on reaching Chez de Sade, the masochist tears of his shirt, flattens himself against a wall and cries ‘beat me; flog me, till I can stand it no more.!”
And the sadist just gloats, and quietly repiles…
“No.”