In paradigmatic fashion, Buddhism passed through a transition that seems to characterize every social movement, from the founder’s elitist cult to broad-minded, sell-out centrism for the masses.

There’s a handy distinction that reflects that transition in the history of Buddhism, between the Theravada and Mahayana varieties.

Drawing exclusively on the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, the Pali Canon, the former say that enlightenment is possible only for committed monastics. The latter kind of Buddhism, the name of which means “the greater vehicle,” is meant to be universal, the idea being that enlightenment is possible for everyone, thanks to the teachings of bodhisattvas, those who delay their enlightenment and thus their withdrawal from worldly affairs to help the benighted folks.

The same sort of distinction is found, for instance, in Christianity, between the elitist Gnosticism and Essene-like puritanical Judaism that may have characterized Jesus’s inner circle, on the one hand, and on the other the later Catholic and Protestant institutions that debased Jesus’s anti-establishment vision to uphold the Church’s political power and earthly ambitions. (That’s not to say that Mahayana Buddhism is necessarily as corrupt as organized Christianity since Eastern religions generally are more philosophically grounded than Western monotheistic ones.)

What’s remarkable about an early Buddhist text like the Dhammapada is the unambiguity of its countercultural elitism, which sets it at odds with modern humanism, contrary to the wishy-washy sentiment that all religions are essentially the same and that they’re open to everyone. Although even Theravada Buddhism is a middle way, compared to Jain asceticism, the Dhammapada is firmly on the side of an anti-establishment cult (in a non-pejorative, technical sense of “cult”).

But what’s also remarkable is that this early Buddhist text seems to contradict itself by presupposing a humanist motive, namely that of self-improvement.

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Early Buddhist elitism

A collection of aphorisms, the Dhammapada teems with elitist remarks, praising as holy, for instance (in 404–418), the person

• “who holds aloof from householders and ascetics alike, and wanders about with no fixed abode and but few wants”

• “who has renounced violence towards all living beings, weak or strong, who neither kills nor causes others to kill”

• “whose lust and hatred, pride and hypocrisy have fallen off like a mustard seed from the point of a needle”

• “who in this world takes nothing that is not given to him, be it long or short, small or big, good or bad”

• “who wants nothing of either this world or the next, who is desire-free and emancipated”

• “who has no attachment, who through perfect knowledge is free from doubts and has plunged into the Deathless”

• “who in this world has transcended the ties of both merit and demerit, who is sorrowless, stainless and pure”

• “who, having abandoned sensual pleasures, has renounced the household life and become a homeless one; has destroyed both sensual desire and continued existence”

• “who, casting off human bonds and transcending heavenly ties, is wholly delivered of all bondages”

• “who, having cast off likes and dislikes, has become tranquil, is rid of the substrata of existence and like a hero has conquered all the worlds.”

The opposite of the wise person is “the fool,” and the Dhammapada says in its chapter on fools, “Should a seeker not find a companion who is better or equal, let him resolutely pursue a solitary course; there is no fellowship with the fool.”

As to what a Buddhist is supposed to do, the Dhammapada couldn’t be clearer, as in its chapter, “The Arahat: The Perfected One”:

The fever of passion exists not for him who has completed the journey, who is sorrowless and wholly set free, and has broken all ties.

The mindful ones exert themselves. They are not attached to any home; like swans that abandon the lake, they leave home after home behind.

Those who do not accumulate and are wise regarding food, whose object is the Void, the Unconditioned Freedom — their track cannot be traced, like that of birds in the air…

Even the gods hold dear the wise one, whose senses are subdued like horses well trained by a charioteer, whose pride is destroyed and who is free from the cankers.

There is no more worldly existence for the wise one who, like the earth, resents nothing, who is firm as a high pillar and as pure as a deep pool free from mud.

Calm is his thought, calm his speech, and calm his deed, who, truly knowing, is wholly freed, perfectly tranquil and wise.

The man who is without blind faith, who knows the Uncreate, who has severed all links, destroyed all causes (for karma, good and evil), and thrown out all desires — he, truly, is the most excellent of men.

Or take this passage from the chapter, “The World”:

Follow not the vulgar way; live not in heedlessness; hold not false views; linger not long in worldly existence…

Lead a righteous life; lead not a base life. The righteous live happily both in this world and the next.

One who looks upon the world as a bubble and a mirage, him the King of Death sees not.

Come! Behold this world, which is like a decorated royal chariot. Here fools flounder, but the wise have no attachment to it.

He who having been heedless is heedless no more, illuminates this world like the moon freed from clouds…

Blind is the world; here only a few possess insight. Only a few, like birds escaping from the net, go to realms of bliss.

In a nutshell, the point is that the material world is rotten because it’s the source of suffering through foolish attachments to the senses and lusts, causing us to commit what the Dhammapada calls “evil acts” out of ignorance and craving. The enlightened Buddhist trains to be rid of those attachments, which frees this person mentally from the material plane. That inner freedom is the void of “Nibbana.”

Humanist pride

At first glance, this early Buddhism is largely at odds with secular humanism. True, both share a naturalistic perspective, and are skeptical of theological conceits. But the ethical stances of these two schools of thought are irreconcilable.

Secular humanists are generally liberal in likewise prizing the individual’s right to liberty. But whereas the Theravada Buddhist says we should be free from nature and foolish society, the secular humanist says we should be free to participate in the natural and social worlds. Humanists take pride in scientific knowledge of material processes and the technological applications of that knowledge that improve the consumer’s lifestyle.

The average secular humanist would be foolish rather than wise and perfected, in early Buddhist terms, because this humanist is emotionally attached to worldly goods, sexual cravings, social status, and political or other tribal conflicts.

Promethean pride in our exceptional human skills that supposedly earn us the right to rule over the animals and dominate the biosphere must be just a vast delusional craving in Buddhist terms, something that condemns us to suffer.

The neoliberal’s self-improvement and happiness industries can be only farcical, oxymoronic circuses, according to early Buddhist elitism. Happiness for consumers would be like peace for a warmonger. The more cravings we have, the more we suffer because we could never be satisfied, as one misguided craving replaces the next.

Curious overlaps and hypocrisies

But there’s an oddity here, as I said, something that’s always puzzled me about Buddhism.

Why do Buddhists prefer to be wise rather than foolish? The answer that emerges from the Dhammapada is that the Buddhist is committed to hedonism, after all. The contention is that foolishness causes suffering, whereas sages are set free and happy. Only in reaching the enlightened state of being free from concern and as neutral towards events as the universe itself is in producing them is the enlightened Buddhist supposed to enjoy blissful tranquility.

Yet that motive behind Buddhism isn’t at all a desire for neutrality. The goal, rather, is to end suffering and promote happiness.

But that’s the secular humanist’s goal too!

The difference is in the strategies of achieving that goal. Early Buddhism is a therapy for transforming our mindset, for driving home realistic expectations so that we no longer suffer out of foolishness.

By contrast, the secular humanist’s strategy is to promote advanced civilization, powered by scientific knowledge of how to exploit natural processes for our benefit, and to preserve economic and political liberties with capitalism and democracy.

Who is happier, the Buddhist monk who’s necessarily estranged from mass society even if the monk no longer cares about the downside of that detachment? Or the professional consumer who competes for pleasures in an advanced industrial society?

More to the point, can the Buddhist maintain the hedonic agenda while shunning the advantages of a “foolish,” materialistic society that excels in understanding and exploiting the apparent world? We can withdraw from the world as elite monks or attempt to dominate nature with technoscientific know-how and industrial ingenuity.

Curiously, these ancient and modern worldviews overlap. Buddhism begins with the self-centered craving for happiness, which is the aim of the consumer’s circus. But secular humanism entails something like the early Buddhist’s revulsion for the material plane, too: we deepen our artificial, social attachments to escape from the monstrous impersonality of nature’s wildness.

Thus, there’s potential for hypocrisy in both cases. The early Buddhist purifies the mind with neutrality, but expects to be rewarded with a state of tranquility. Yet a neutral standpoint would be nihilistic, in which case hedonism would be as parochial as morality.

And the modern secular humanist knows better than to care so much about trivial acts of consumption since she knows via science and philosophy that the universe is godless and inhuman, which makes even our material progress absurd.

There’s a curious line of thought that runs from the Buddhist scholar-monk Nāgārjuna’s austere empiricism, through neo-Kantian epistemology, to the existentialist’s emphasis on the horror of the world’s absurdity.

Hop aboard this philosophical roller coaster, and see where it takes us.

Buddhism and nature’s hollowness

The ride starts with Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamika, or middle way of Buddhism. He defended early Buddhist empiricism against the extravagant metaphysical speculations that were surfacing in the Mahayana tradition.

Nāgārjuna argued that everything is empty of an essence or independent kind of existence that would enable things to come into being by themselves. Instead, everything depends on initial conditions, so there are no metaphysical substances underlying the changing phenomena we perceive, no essences separating types from each other, such as trees from rocks or people from animals.

The reason we’re led to posit such occult essences is that our conceptual simplifications bewitch us.

The concept of a rock is a stereotype that needn’t refer to the geological conditions that bring rocks into being. The concept is liable to leave the impression, then, that rocks have an essence that differs from the essences of everything else. Rather than treating rocks as part of a process that’s interconnected with the solar system and indeed everything else in the grand, cosmic unfolding, we might take our simplistic conceptions to be adequate maps of the terrain.

That trust in our thoughts is the source of unnecessary suffering, the alleviation of which is Buddhism’s central concern. So Nāgārjuna reiterates that just as there’s no substantial self supporting our mental states, there are no objective essences anywhere in nature. The world is “empty” in that the metaphysical extrapolations from our conceptions are gratuitous.

Nāgārjuna defends himself against the charge of nihilism by positing two kinds of truths or ways of speaking. There’s the conventional, pragmatic way, which treats our conceptions as adequate for the sake of argument or communication, and there’s the ultimate, philosophical, strictly empiricist discourse that doesn’t draw metaphysical implications from that utility. The vulgar usefulness of our mental models doesn’t mean that those models are philosophically adequate.

In ordinary communication we simplify because our purposes are more limited than the philosopher’s. You talk about a rock, without bothering to specify the rock’s ultimate nature, because you’re just pointing out that a stray rock recently landed on your foot. It takes an empiricist philosopher to point out that, as far as your senses are concerned, you weren’t aware of a rock’s essence having so landed. We perceive no such metaphysical essence, no such necessary independence of the rock from its source or destination. The perceivable world is a series of entangled processes, not a set of autonomous substances.

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Kant’s noumena

Now, that Buddhist philosophy makes roughly the same epistemological point as Immanuel Kant did, beating him to the punch by around 1,600 years. Kant distinguished between phenomena and noumena, between how things seem to us because of the ways of thinking we bring to bear on whatever we encounter, and how things would be in themselves, were they not perceived or understood by us or anyone else.

Just by understanding something, said Kant, we apply our forms of understanding, including certain categories of thought (such as quantity, quality, and relation) that distinguish human knowing, say, from an extraterrestrial kind. About things in themselves, we’re perfectly ignorant.

The advantage of this distinction, says Kant, is that we can be sure our categories apply to the world we experience because we apply them at every available opportunity. The disadvantage is that this makes all our knowledge partly subjective since our knowledge reflects both what the world presents to our senses and how we represent those impressions due to the type of mind that does our thinking.

Nāgārjuna would say, though, that this guarantee of the subjective necessity of our basic categories applies only to the vulgar, pragmatic way of talking.

Moreover, Nāgārjuna would reject Kant’s reference to the human type of cognition since that’s an implicit appeal to a human essence. A strict empiricist doesn’t credit any conjecture that transcends the perceived contents. So, Kant can speak for himself, but not for humanity.

Indeed, since no one’s encountered any such abstraction, outside of their fanciful imagination, the world’s evidently devoid of such an essence. There are only the series of mental states that amount to individual persons, each of whom is dependent on numerous impersonal conditions, so that the distinguishing features of our “species” vanish like flotsam on a beach carried off by the ebbing tide.

Existential terror

Still, both Nāgārjuna and Kant set the stage for the existentialist by drastically restricting our knowledge, leaving unknowable the ultimate source of what we perceive. If the world as we perceive it is hollow, in that we encounter only the intertwined surfaces of things and can only speculate recklessly and self-destructively about the rest, we have before us a tremendous unknown. And ambitious, self-serving mammals like us are sure to fear any unknown that can never be neutralized by our knowledge.

The problem isn’t that Nāgārjuna’s Buddhism is nihilistic, but that it lends itself to horrific speculations. To be sure, Nāgārjuna’s points are that we should seek therapy if we’re overly ambitious and self-serving, and that we should stop speculating and content ourselves with empiricist philosophy. But Nāgārjuna opens a can of worms: if our concepts are all kludges, and the interdependent aggregation of natural processes outstrips any attempt to model it, we’re in the dark as to what we’re dealing with on any occasion.

To quote Morpheus from The Matrix, “You think that’s air you’re breathing?” Or you think that’s a “rock” that landed on your foot just now? No, there’s no such thing as air, nor are there rocks as such. There’s nothing in the world that conforms to our impudent conceptions. Every concept we apply to some particulars leaves out the infinite complexity of how the phenomena arose interdependently with practically everything else.

The story of the air you’re breathing is nothing short of the story of the whole universe. You can say nothing of ultimate significance about rocks, squirrels, or indeed yourself unless you’re singing the universal song.

Our concepts serve our practical purposes insofar as we’re behaving as benighted dupes. But philosophically, we can awaken to the fact that we systematically fool ourselves when we mistake our conceptual maps for the real terrain.

But here the existentialist steps in to question the Buddhist’s serenity. Is it alright if the universe is metaphysically hollow, as far as we can be responsibly assured? If we can cope with that ignorance only by surrendering our human instinct to trust blindly in our inclinations, as the Buddhist would have it, don’t we alienate ourselves from our preferred sense of self? The Buddhist will say we should change those preferences, so they accord with reality as we perceive it, but not with how we instinctively conceive of it.

But the existentialist is free to ask at this point what sort of world would arrange itself to set us up for such a humiliation. Why are we equipped with the power to generalize when the use of that power only leads us astray? What kind of game is nature playing?

In short, Nāgārjuna’s empiricism and Kant’s transcendentalism are consistent with the existentialist’s conclusion that life is absurd.

The world’s ontological “emptiness” and the “noumenon’s transcendence” are just placeholders for that absurdity. Buddhism isn’t just the correction of a blunder we happen to make in trusting our concepts, nor is Kantian epistemology merely a happy reassurance that we can trust those concepts, after all.

No, if there’s an inevitable mismatch between how we think and how things are, that’s not just our fault. The world must shoulder some of the blame, in supplying us with that inherent confidence, which means the cosmic whole isn’t so friendly. Perhaps we can train ourselves not to worry about that mismatch, but whether the therapy would do justice to our existential condition is questionable.

Happiness can become grotesque under certain circumstances. The Nazi’s happiness next to a death camp would have been inexcusable. Likewise, the Buddhist’s tranquility in the face of an empty cosmos — which is to say an inhuman one — is dubious. And Kant’s pragmatic reassurance about the necessity of our knowledge’s subjective aspect is cold comfort if we’re left wondering about the alien nature of things in themselves.

Russell Vought is President Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and a co-author of Project 2025’s 920-page Mandate for Leadership, which was the Heritage Foundation’s transformational blueprint for the next Republican administration.

Vought is also a Christian nationalist, as he explains in his Newsweek column that asks ‘Is There Anything Actually Wrong With “Christian Nationalism”?’ It turns out that there isn’t, if you dilute both Christianity and nationalism for ulterior reasons, as Vought does in the article.

Dodging the reality of Christian nationalism

Here’s Vought’s definition of “nationalism”: “Nationalism is a political philosophy that says independent nation-states are the best way to organize governments that both (1) avoid the chaos and insecurity of tribes and clans and (2) preserve the freedom and self-determination that globalism or imperialism precludes.”

Vought goes on to say, “Nationalism is not just a patriotic love for one’s country, but a commitment to prioritize the needs and interests of one’s own country over others — not unlike parents who prioritize their family over others, or pastors who prioritize their local church over others. It concerns itself with maintaining the cohesiveness of a particular people and a cultural inheritance…”

Now compare this with Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition, which says nationalism is an “ideology based on the premise that the individual’s loyalty and devotion to the nation-state surpass other individual or group interests.”

The Britannica article also points out that “Throughout history people have been attached to their native soil, to the traditions of their parents, and to established territorial authorities, but it was not until the end of the 18th century that nationalism began to be a generally recognized sentiment molding public and private life and one of the great, if not the greatest, single determining factors of modern history.”

Thus, “Nationalism is a modern movement,” and this is because modernity was mainly the rise of secularism, and in contrast to kingdoms or empires of old, “nations” were based on secular institutions like science, capitalism, liberal (free-thinking) culture, and eventually democracy.

As Britannica says,

The rise of national feeling to major political importance was encouraged by a number of complex developments: the creation of large centralized states ruled by absolute monarchs who destroyed the old feudal allegiances; the secularization of life and of education, which fostered the vernacular languages and weakened the ties of church and sect; the growth of commerce, which demanded larger territorial units to allow scope for the dynamic spirit of the rising middle classes and their capitalistic enterprise. This large unified territorial state, with its political and economic centralization, became imbued in the 18th century with a new spirit — an emotional fervour similar to that of religious movements in earlier periods. Under the influence of the new theories of the sovereignty of the people and of individual rights, the people replaced the king as the centre of the nation. No longer was the king the nation or the state; the state had become the people’s state, a national state, a fatherland, or a motherland.

So according to Vought, nationalism is just the most efficient way of organizing governments to prevent tribal chaos and protect the people’s freedom against foreign intrusions. That is, nationalism is the interest in preserving the nation’s structural and cultural integrity.

On the contrary, as reflected also in the dictionary’s pejorative sense of “nationalism,” which has to do with “excessive patriotism” or “chauvinism,” nationalism is, as Britannica implies, the ideology that assumes the individual’s loyalty and devotion to the nation-state ought to surpass all other interests. In other words, nationalism is a secular cult that idolizes the nation.

This cult was in full swing in the twentieth century’s world wars, as Britannica says: “One of the consequences of World War I was the triumph of nationalism in central and eastern Europe. From the ruins of the Habsburg and Romanov empires emerged the new nation-states of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania. Those states in turn, however, were to be strained and ravaged by their own internal nationality conflicts and by nationalistic disputes over territory with their neighbours.”

Nationalism identifies the people with the nation, whereas formerly, “People did not give their loyalty to the nation-state but to other, different forms of political organization: the city-state, the feudal fief and its lord, the dynastic state, the religious group, or the sect.”

For instance,

During the Middle Ages, civilization was looked upon as determined religiously; for all the different nationalities of Christendom as well as for those of Islam, there was but one civilization — Christian or Muslim — and but one language of culture — Latin (or Greek) or Arabic (or Persian). Later, in the periods of the Renaissance and of Classicism, it was the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations that became a universal norm, valid for all peoples and all times. Still later, French civilization was accepted throughout Europe as the valid civilization for educated people of all nationalities.

You see the more modern idolatry in Vought’s talk elsewhere of “our beloved Constitution” and the need for conservatives to be “radical constitutionalists”: “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years and to study carefully the words of the Constitution and how the Founders would have responded in modern situations to the encroachments of other branches.”

How, then, does the Christian nationalist propose to square this cult of the nation-state with the Christian worship of God?

Vought’s answer is that, ‘As for the Christian part of “Christian nationalism,” part of being a nation is a shared religious heritage. And in America, that historical heritage is, of course, Christianity.’ Thus, “When our Founders formed the United States of America, they instituted a state to govern a nation and provided a Constitution that protects religious liberty and every individual’s right of conscience. But they were not intending to create a secular society divorced of all religion.”

Vought says he agrees with a former Christian nationalist prime minister of the Netherlands who asked rhetorically, “Does our national life rest on the metaphysical presuppositions that deny Almighty God; or does it rest…on fundamental beliefs that honor God as God?” According to Vought, “Christians say yes” to the latter part. “And there is nothing at all wrong with that.”

Finally, there’s Vought’s weaselly synthesis of nationalism and Christianity:

My own definition of “Christian nationalism” would be this: An orientation for engaging in the public square that recognizes America as a Christian nation, where our rights and duties are understood to come from God and where our primary responsibilities as citizens are for building and preserving the strength, prosperity and health of our own country. It is a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society. It is a belief that our participation in the political system can lead to beneficial outcomes for our own communities, as well as individuals of all faiths.

Presumably, the main benefit for non-Christians living in an officially Christian nation is that they’d be given the opportunity to convert to that governing religion. What would happen to them if they declined would be anyone’s guess.

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The Orwellian doubletalk of “Christian nationalism”

Obviously, though, authentic Christianity conflicts with nationalism. Certainly, like any good Jew, Jesus would have condemned a nationalist since the instruments of the state are Machiavellian and secular and are thus part of what early Christians and Jews of that period saw as the natural, demonically governed realm, this being distinct from God’s supernatural kingdom.

Zoroastrian and Platonic dualism impacted both Judaism and Christianity, yet the Christian nationalist must maintain that there’s no such dichotomy between the “fallen” world of nature and a supernatural deity who controls everything secretly and mysteriously, such as by performing the miracles that are central to Christian faith.

Again, the upshot of those miracle claims, as expressed in the New Testament, is that God’s ways are not ours. According to the Bible, our natural preferences end in everlasting punishment in hell. Thus, we needed salvation by divine grace, a superhuman who could save us from ourselves and from the demons’ control over God’s created order. According to Christians, God provided that by incarnating himself as Jesus, and we should demonstrate our thanks by emulating Jesus’ uncompromising, otherworldly ethics, including his pacifism, asexuality, and abhorrence of the hoarding of wealth and material possessions.

All of which spiritual radicalism is antithetical to the prevailing American culture, which is pragmatic, hedonistic, and materialistic.

Nationalists like Vought idolize the American Constitution and the logic of the Founding Fathers, but to avoid coming across as a flagrant blasphemer, Vought must contend that the founding of America was a Christian endeavor. After all, although many of the elites who founded the country were deists and thus virtually secular humanists, the immigrants from Europe were Protestants.

Yet this neglects 18 percent of the total American population in 1790, namely the 700,000 enslaved African Americans. By 1860 that number had risen to 4.4 million. Although those Africans began converting from their native West African religions and Islam to Christianity in the eighteenth century, their conversion was obviously as coerced as their immigration to America.

The relevance of this is that there’s not just a distinction, as Vought says, between the nation and the state, or between the country’s culture or people and the institutions and laws. In addition, in the early American period we must distinguish between the elite and the mass cultures. In effect, there were two “nations” in the early US, the secular humanistic one of the deistic founders, on the one hand, and on the other the radical Protestantism of the poorer immigrants and southern slaveholders, and the submission of the enslaved Africans who worked as ordinary or peasant Americans.

Vought’s talk of how “America” was a Christian nation, therefore, is specious. Many immigrants were radical Protestants, and some were enslaved Africans who might have preferred their native non-Christian religions. But the overall view of the founders who devised the American Constitution was philosophically motivated deistic humanism.

Yet Vought must think it’s just a coincidence that modern America was founded in the middle of the Enlightenment when secularism swept across Europe in the eighteenth century. That secularization was based on humanistic principles that reached back to ancient Greco-Roman naturalism, and that might have been inspired also by the European discovery of Indigenous American anarchism, as Graeber and Wengrow explain in The Dawn of Everything.

You see this secular humanism in the Declaration of Independence’s first sentence, which gives priority not to God but to nature, in speaking of “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle” any people wishing to start a political revolution. Notice the capitalization of “Nature,” which can inform the next famous sentence about the “self-evident truths, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

For the Founders, the Creator in question is effectively Nature (or the spirit of nature), not the biblical God. This is why the Declaration says these truths are “self-evident,” meaning that they’re transparent to reason rather than being established by religious scriptures, Church dogmas, or apocalyptic visions.

Plainly, the canard that America was founded as a Christian nation is balderdash. But a Christian nationalist like Vought, who apologizes for Donald Trump’s grotesque un-Americanness and anti-Christianity, need have no fear of the outright contradiction in idolizing the nation and worshiping the Christian God. Protestantism had already been perverted and politicized for centuries, and Americanized Christianity is only the latest bastardization in a more ancient desacralization of Jesus’s radicalism.

From the perspective of the first Christians, the earliest affront to the Jesus movement would have been the founder’s crucifixion itself, since that represented the Roman Empire’s earthly superiority over both Judaism and the Axial Age’s calls for spiritual and moral reforms, calls which Christianity channeled. But Christians incorporated that humiliating defeat by proclaiming Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. So, the Jesus movement carried on in various forms, be they Gnostic, Jewish, Hellenistic, or Pauline. These movements spread as the Roman Empire overextended itself and sought ways to revitalize its institutions. Thus, Rome struck again in the fourth century, and this time more fiendishly, by adopting Christianity as the empire’s state religion.

From that point onwards, Christianity was pulled in opposite directions, towards

• countercultural, neoshamanic spiritual authenticity, as reflected in the leaders of the Axial Age,

• and the Orwellian abomination of using a hollow shell of Christian rhetoric as cover for all manner of ungodly, secular enterprises.

Vought falls into the latter category since his “conservative Christianity” is just an appalling void of spiritual principles, and a co-optation of Christian rhetoric for the sake of establishing an American theocracy that empowers nothing like a supernatural creator of the universe, but the authoritarian, utterly profane prejudices of Trump and his fellow bad-faith opportunists.

This album, Between Longueurs, changes up the musical style that carries on to the next album too. As with all my other ones, I wrote all the lyrics, and I used the AI platform Suno to set them to music.

Some highlights for me this time are Schmaltzy Idol, Hipster, The Squeeze, and Sage Fools.

Hipster has the best outro, I think, and it uses the word “longueurs,” which gave me the album’s title.

Sage Fools includes the image of a “garden of weeds,” which shows up again as a song’s title and subject matter on the upcoming tenth album. Also, Sage Fools includes some more open-ended, literary lyrics, which inspired me to carry on that style of writing in many of the songs on the next album (since Sage Fools was the last song I wrote for Between Longueurs).

This album also features a duo on romantic love, Schmaltzy Idol and Lovey-Dovey, the latter being about maudlin love songs which I generally loathe. Schmaltzy Idol is probably my favourite song on the album. Together, these two should pack a wallop. Incidentally, I wrote those two in response to a song on Beck’s new album, If You Don’t Know What Love Is.

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Between Longueurs:

Bleeding Neon:

Profane Minima:

Folks misunderstood the accusation that Donald Trump’s presidency was part of a Russian plot to disrupt American liberalism, or that Trump was a secret agent or a useful idiot working for Vladimir Putin.

The Mueller Report said its investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” But the investigation concluded that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election “in sweeping and systematic fashion,” and that Trump welcomed the interference. Moreover, the report linked many Trump associates with Russian spies.

All of that’s a red herring, though.

The connection between Trumpism and Putinism is hiding in plain sight. It’s called Christian nationalism. The connection between Trump and Putin is ideological and characterological, not tactical. Both leaders are cynical authoritarians who promote and exploit Christian nationalists to return their country to a state of neo-medieval theocracy. That is, both wish to restore Christendom to subdue the masses and distract them from the kleptocratic, Orwellian consequences of authoritarianism.

But what is Christian nationalism, and what’s wrong with it?

Stephen Wolfe’s Thomistic Christian nationalism

The Christian political theorist Stephen Wolfe argues for this nationalism in his book The Case for Christian Nationalism. His case is mainly Thomistic rather than biblical, which means he puts a Christian spin on Aristotle’s naturalistic teleology.

Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s philosophies were conservative in that they were elaborate perpetrations of the naturalistic fallacy. Aristotle conflated natural constructs with intelligently designed artifacts. The latter, such as tools and buildings, have “final causes” or purposes, so Aristotle inferred that the former do too. This suited Saint Aquinas since, whereas Aristotle attempted to naturalize the ultimate power in nature, the so-called first cause or prime mover, Aquinas was content to personalize this power in the full-blown theistic manner, as dictated by Christianity.

So, for Aquinas and Wolfe, nature is literally an assembly of intelligently designed artifacts. Hence, everything in nature has a purpose, a good it ought to pursue. Thus, Wolfe helps himself to traditional authoritarian prejudices about what’s natural and therefore good. In other words, he thinks tribalism, patriarchy, and imperialism are natural and therefore divinely ordained and obligatory.

Specifically, he says, ‘The instinct to live within one’s “tribe” or one’s own people is neither a product of the fall [original sin], nor extinguished by grace; rather, it is natural and good.’ Again, ‘the natural inclination to dwell among similar people is good and necessary. Grace does not destroy, nor “critique” it.’

Moreover, “It is also evident, from both instinct and reason, that we ought to prefer our own nation and countrymen over others. This instinct is not from the fall or due to sin; it is natural and, therefore, good.” And again, “Your instinct to conduct everyday life among similar people is natural, and being natural, it is good for you.”

So, tribalism at the family but also the national level is natural and therefore good. Yet what does this have to do specifically with Christianity? Well, argues Wolfe, in effect, Christians should be conservative and therefore tribal, meaning they should prefer a government that supports the population’s ethnic purity. Thus, a Christian people should have a Christian government.

More precisely, the purpose of human tribalism, according to Wolfe, is for our societies to reflect God’s commandments. Similarly, in Confucianism, which is also comparable to Aristotle’s teleology, the earth ought to be in harmony with the heavens.

Wolfe says that “ordering people to heavenly life is a natural end for even the generic nation.” Moreover, Wolfe speculates that even if there had been no human fall from God’s grace, “Adam’s progeny would have formed many nations on earth, and thus the formation of nations is part of God’s design and intention for man.”

Thus, all governments ought to be Christian or at least theocratic in implementing the Christian God’s commandments because that’s how God designed human nature.

As for Christianity’s repudiation of pagan naturalism, in favour of an apocalyptic, communistic, pacifistic, egalitarian community known as the Church, Wolfe gets around that Christian challenge to his conservatism with Augustinian dualism. The Church deals with the soul’s afterlife in Heaven, whereas politics deals with natural, this-worldly goods.

In Wolfe’s words, “The Gospel did not inaugurate a social program that rejects the basic structure of pre-Gospel social life. But the gospel did inaugurate a new means to eternal life; and thus all social structures, which were originally designed to support man in his pursuit of eternal life, should point to and be formed to support this new means to it,” that is, to achieving that eternal life.

The theocratic government should be perfectly medieval, Wolfe implies:

The question is whether a Christian magistrate, having civil rule over a civil society of Christians, may punish (with civil power) false teachers, heretics, blasphemers, and idolaters for their external expression of such things in order to prevent (1) any injury to the souls of the people of God, (2) the subversion of Christian government, Christian culture, or spiritual discipline, or (3) civil disruption or unrest. Modern religious liberty advocates deny this and I affirm it.

And again, “A Christian society that is for itself will distrust atheists, decry blasphemy, correct any dishonoring of Christ, orient life around the Sabbath, frown on and suppress moral deviancy, and repudiate neo-Anabaptist attempts to subvert a durable Christian social order.”

On top of that, Wolfe goes all the way with his Spenglerian promotion of the Volksgeist, or the ethnic culture of a people’s nation. Arguing for what he calls “theocratic Caesarism,” he says this protected culture ought to be led not by a mere secular president but by a Christian prince, akin to a Nazi Führer:

Having the highest office on earth, the good prince resembles God to the people. Indeed, he is the closest image of God on earth. This divine presence in the prince speaks to his role beyond civil administration. Through him, as the mediator of divine rule, the prince brings God near to the people. The prince is a sort of national god, not in the sense of being divine himself, or in materially transcending common humanity, or as an object of prayer or spiritual worship, or as a means of salvific grace, but as the mediator of divine rule for this nation and as one with divinely granted power to direct them in their national completeness.

Moreover, “The prince is an image of Christ to his people,” and “we should pray that God would raise up [a Christian prince] from among us: one who would suppress the enemies of God and elevate his people; recover a worshipping people; restore masculine prominence in the land and a spirit for dominion; affirm and conserve his people and place, not permitting their dissolution or capture; and inspire a love of one’s Christian country.”

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The modern anachronism of theism

Such sentiments could easily have come from Doctor Strangelove. But if you can ignore modern knowledge and adopt an archaic theistic perspective, and if you happen to be burdened with an authoritarian personality, you can assemble a Frankensteinian monster from fragments of Aristotle’s teleology, Christian myth, and conservative medievalism.

The resulting Christian nationalist society would resemble Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale. Living in such a society would be an Orwellian nightmare, and were Jesus to return to Earth with full divine authority, such a grotesque abomination would likely be the first place he’d blast to smithereens.

There are numerous critical reviews of Wolfe’s book by fellow Christians who delve into the Scholastic details of Thomism or fault Wolfe for hiding behind abstractions and not carefully defining his key terms. I’ll focus instead on what I take to be Christian nationalism’s fundamental preposterousness and incoherence.

The most obvious problem is that Wolfe begs the question of theism. Aristotle’s naturalistic fallacy is more pronounced because his teleology is thoroughgoing in its naturalism or his commitment to philosophy rather than theology. Aquinas taints that philosophy with his presupposition of the Christian creed. Sure, if we assume the existence of a personal creator of the natural universe, it’s at least plausible that natural things have some intended function.

But theism is no longer the default in educated First World circles. Hence, theocratic societies, like those in the Muslim world or Russia or Hungary, come across to liberal societies as barbaric and archaic. The problem is that whereas Christians are tied to an outdated biblical standpoint, science and updated philosophy set the social standards of modern, secular humanist societies, so these societies know better than Wolfe, Aquinas, and even Aristotle.

We know that the theist’s deity, who’s supposed to be obsessed with human affairs, probably doesn’t exist. Therefore, a society dedicated to this deity would be inane and farcical. Living there would be like living in a straitjacket. Moreover, such a society would need to employ Orwellian obfuscations to gaslight its citizens, so they’d forget that scientific and technological advances depend rather on skepticism that’s antithetical to theistic credulity and dogmatism.

But presumably, Wolfe would want to cherry-pick his medievalisms. He embraces the Ten Commandments as part of the Word of God, but he’d also prefer to wear suits, for instance, which is to say he’d enjoy clothing that’s manufactured by modern and thus methodologically atheistic and capitalist means. Or in Wolfe’s Gilead he’d enjoy driving to work or flying in a plane from Christian America to Russia’s fellow creeping Christian theocracy. Yet those technological advances are fruits of progressive modernity, not medieval Christian stagnation.

In this respect, the Christian nationalist’s hypocrisy resembles the incoherence of Star Trek’s Klingon species. The Klingons are Viking-like barbarians that nevertheless somehow develop faster-than-light spaceships, enabling them to forge an interstellar empire. That is, the Klingons are socially primitive, but scientifically and technologically advanced. How would such a libidinous, macho race encourage Klingon scientists to make cerebral breakthroughs, when Klingon honour is found mainly in hand-to-hand combat on the battlefield? Wouldn’t Klingons be discouraged from investigating scientific questions, for fear of appearing weak and dishonourable?

Likewise, Christianity is hopelessly at odds with the modern, science-centered ethos. Sure, a Christian people would want to live in a Christian manner, but the time of Christendom is over. For most highly educated people, Christendom ended when medieval Europe adopted secularism and liberalism (the institutions of capitalism and democracy, and the promotion of individual rights, including the freedoms of thought and speech).

Effectively, the Christian nationalist is advocating for a cultural regression that would condemn this religious nation’s inhabitants to a schizophrenic relationship with scientific and industrial progress. That cognitive dissonance would have to be mitigated with Orwellian techniques of gaslighting and distraction, making for a cultural travesty.

Nihilism from nature’s God

But let’s grant theism for the sake of argument. Still, even if a personal deity created nature, and even if natural things have divine purposes or objectively better and worse conditions, depending on God’s plan, Wolfe’s tribal conservatism isn’t rationally compelling.

True, tribalism is natural for our species since early humans were nomadic in the Stone Age. But the same rational faculties that enabled us to recognize our social instincts allowed us to improve on them, to develop tools and eventually sedentary lifestyles and scientific methods of inquiry. Thus, the conservative’s authoritarian personality conflicts with reason.

This is to say that the conservative’s prejudice in favour of dominance hierarchies that establish the full freedom only of the psychopathic ruling class is at odds with the rational calculation that the members of a physically weak species like ours need to cooperate to enhance our fragile, relatively defenseless bodies with technology.

Specifically, the science that advances the civilized business of human enhancement has educated us about the universe’s nature, and what we’ve learned, in short, is that nature at large is inhuman. Hence, the Christian nationalist’s positing of a moral heavenly purpose (as codified by the Ten Commandments) is preposterous. Again, even if God exists, the notion that he designed us to be tribal and to adhere to the Ten Commandments is ludicrous when compared to scientific knowledge of how the rest of God’s creation works.

Who says God cares about morality just because social mammals do? Where’s the morality in a black hole or on the trillions of lifeless planets? Even if God exists, that’s no excuse for adopting such small-minded personifications. The conservative’s image of God is a crude projection of human egoism, and the authoritarian conservative is puffed up by an exaggerated sense of some human dominator’s importance. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” neatly cuts down that pretension.

Of course, we know that, like the stars and planets, morality evolved, as opposed to being intelligently designed and handed to us on a mountaintop. Indeed, morality evolved to compensate for the amorality of natural selection. Nature, not God, selects which mutations are fit to survive in wild (impersonal, practically godless) settings.

The notion that human societies ought to mirror “the Heavens” (outer space) or what the Declaration of Independence calls “Nature’s God” is a recipe for Orwellian nihilism, not Jesus’s countercultural morality. In so far as we now understand nature via science, the deity that made this universe couldn’t be so easily compared to a human king or prince. Human leaders are preoccupied with moral laws because the masses need those laws to live together in large numbers, and we need to cooperate to survive nature’s wild indifference to any organism’s plight.

That would have nothing to do with God. For all we know, life would be an inconsequential part of God’s plan for the universe. Again, the universe as we now understand it, with its perfectly inhuman scale in astronomical space and deep time, is worlds away from how the ancient founders of Christianity understood nature. The ancient view of nature was small and human-centered. Ours is enormous and humiliating.

Hence, modern knowledge of nature severs the conservative’s link between metaphysical teleology and the authoritarian’s social wish list. That list may feature conservative values for the sinister purpose of distracting the Christian subjects from the Frankensteinian freak show of modern-day Christian nationalism. But such a list wouldn’t harmonize with any ordering principle of the cosmos.

On the contrary, as I’ve written elsewhere, adopting a cosmic perspective would entail not petty tribalism but something like transhuman enlightenment, a kind of aestheticizing humanism that urges us to rebel existentially against nature’s monstrosity by out-creating mindless atoms and natural forces.

Jesus’s counterculture was against all-too-natural kingdoms

It hardly needs to be said, but Wolfe’s authoritarian Christian nationalism conflicts also with Christianity’s countercultural foundation.

As the Christian reviewers of his book point out, it’s likely no accident that Wolfe appeals more to Scholastic theology than the Bible since the New Testament is apocalyptic in its expectations for God’s kingdom. The early Christians hardly assumed the Roman Empire would adopt the Jesus movement as its state religion. Thus, these Christians satirized this empire’s ethos, applying Axial Age spirituality and moralizing to the very Homeric, Klingonian macho values that would feature prominently in the modern authoritarian’s “Christian” nation.

Greco-Roman tradition valorized manly heroes who triumphed physically over their enemies, as Rome conquered its territories. For Christians, though, God’s morality inverts that pagan warrior code. As the New Testament emphasizes, the first will be last and the last first, and it’s not emperors who are closest to God, but a powerless Jewish upstart who laid down his life for his friends. Jesus’s countercultural perspective contradicts Wolfe’s tribalism at every turn. For instance, Jesus was egalitarian and not patriarchal, whereas Wolfe would be free to appeal to the naturalness of aggressive men’s dominion over child-rearing women.

Indeed, the very Aristotelian argument that we ought to defer to natural norms in acquiring our sense of morality would seem demonic to Jesus. For early Christians, we needed a divine saviour like Jesus precisely because we’re helpless to save ourselves. Our nature is corrupted by original sin. How did the early Christians know this? Because the brutal Roman Empire conquered the Jews and executed saintly Jesus. That’s why early Christianity was countercultural: Jesus died in defiance of the very Roman imperial culture that an authoritarian like Wolfe would emulate.

Again, Wolfe’s audacity is Orwellian, and “Christian nationalism” is oxymoronic. A Christian nation would be anti-Jesus. Even if God miraculously intervened and inaugurated a Christian society, he couldn’t do so with Jesus’ values because the latter are counter-cultural. Communities that are aligned with Jesus’s sensibilities must be small so that they’re not afflicted with political compromises or any demonic deference to natural norms.

What’s common in nature is for the strong to dominate the weak. Hence, it was natural for Rome to kill Jesus and destroy Jerusalem when the Jews rose militarily against their occupiers. Authentic Christianity doesn’t stand for that naturalness. On the contrary, Jesus advocated his creative vision of a supernatural stand-in for nature, a kingdom of God, not of naturally prudent men and women. Jesus’s kingdom would invert natural norms, not adopt them wholesale.

Wolfe’s “Christian nation” would be only nominally, not substantively, Christian. Again, calling the authoritarian’s dominance hierarchy “Christian” would be an exercise in dishonesty, a case of social engineering and mass obfuscation. That exercise began long ago, in the fourth century when Christians had to rationalize Rome’s adoption of the Jesus movement. Saint Augustine repurposed Plato’s dualism, Aquinas incorporated Aristotle’s teleology, and there were countless other compromises, excuses, and syncretisms that sustained Christendom. Those Christian kingdoms and empires, too, were Christian only in name, in that their political empowerment was antithetical to Jesus’s countercultural perspective.

A Christian nation would be thoroughly un-American

Finally, there’s Wolfe’s tawdry lies about Christian nationalism’s consistency with the intentions of modern America’s founders.

Wolfe says the Founders “all believed that a religious people was necessary for civic morals, public happiness, and effective government, and most (if not all) thought that Christianity provided something distinctive in this regard.”

Yet the Founders were deistic humanists who opposed the rule of kings. Their Constitution established a republic that theoretically empowered all American citizens, the faith being not in the Bible, God, or Jesus, but in human nature. Early America was a product of the secular Enlightenment that occurred in the eighteenth century. The ethos was one of human progress as an anthropocentric taming of nature, as American settlers tamed the frontier and conquered the Indigenous Americans (who were deemed savages and associated wrongly with the wilderness).

Once again, Wolfe’s Thomistic excuses for medieval authoritarianism have no home in America, just as they conflict with scientific knowledge of nature and with Jesus’s counterculture. Wolfe says we should obey nature since God ordained that nature would fulfill a divine purpose. Yet civilization domesticates the wilderness in an artificial, potentially unsustainable way.

How is that possible? It’s because personhood is an anomalous outgrowth of animality. Far from having a happy ending, nature evidently destroys itself. So, a lifeless world allows life to evolve on it by chance, and life develops to the point of threatening the planet’s equilibrium on which the ecosystems depend. If the American pioneers were acting “naturally” in taming the frontier, “natural” would have to be used as a weasel word. Far from being natural, civilization is plainly anti-natural, meaning that civility is opposed to wildness.

And the difference between America and medieval and ancient civilizations is that the US is substantively, constitutionally secular. Most early European settlers of America were Christians, but they enjoyed the freedom to worship as they pleased on liberal grounds, not Christian theocratic ones. On the contrary, they fled such theocracies in Europe, preferring liberties that only a cosmopolitan secular ethos can provide.

Wolfe’s effrontery is scandalous. But the outrage flies under the radar because Wolfe is hardly alone. As reported elsewhere, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 set the stage for the Christian nationalism that would flow through a second Trump administration. That Republican policy agenda would eliminate the wall between church and state.

For instance, this agenda’s “Mandate for Leadership”

• ‘prohibits accrediting bodies from requiring policies or standards that “conflict with the religious mission or religious beliefs of the institution”’

• rescinds “regulations that make certain religious organizations ineligible for SBA loans. The plan would eliminate the religious eligibility determination process — which ensures that such loans do not run afoul of the Establishment Clause — altogether”

• not only protects but prioritizes “faith-based programs in receiving federal grants under both the Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) and the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) programs”

• terminates “the case-by-case evaluation of religious and faith-based organizations requesting a religious exemption to provide foster care and adoption services”

• establishes ‘via executive order “that religious employers are free to run their businesses according to their religious beliefs, general nondiscrimination laws notwithstanding, and support participation of religious employees and employers as federal contractors and in federal activities and programs”’

In general, according to that report, this conservative agenda

would open a free flow of federal funds to grantees empowered to use those funds for religious purposes while also declining to provide important services they object to on religious and moral grounds. Project 2025 envisions an executive branch that recognizes no line of institutional separation between church and state, let alone a wall. At the same time, federal agencies under this plan see virtually no limit to religious exercise. Public school teachers could disregard the well-being of their students, health care workers could deny requests of their patients, adoption agencies could set aside the needs of foster children — all if those are done in the name of Free Exercise.

What’s crucial to understand is that there’s no such thing as Christian nationalist reasoning in support of this agenda because an argument like Stephen Wolfe’s falls apart. Wolfe’s case is preposterous and incoherent. Therefore, a Christian nationalist society would have to be imposed by trickery or force.

Enter the showman Donald Trump and his mastery of selling, which is to say, of bullshitting, or the conning of suckers with a hyperreality, a fantasy world that’s disconnected from the facts except in one respect: the flurry of authoritarian lies taps into the decadent First World’s discontent with liberalism.

How bizarre is Christian nationalism, the attempt by so-called conservative followers of Jesus to establish a totalitarian theocracy in the United States, that bastion of modern secular humanism?

This religious nationalist movement that crept onto the national scene in the 1980s is scandalous from either a Jesus-centric or a modern standpoint.

Obviously, the early Christians would have condemned it since they assumed we’re afflicted with original sin and can’t save ourselves. Instead, they believed the Church is in a holding pattern, waiting for Jesus’ third coming when God alone will set things right by divine force.

White conservative American Evangelicals seem to think their Trumpian antics are part of God’s plan. On the contrary, these folks are more likely to be grifters and demagogues seeking earthly power here and now at real Christians’ expense, rather than striving to be worthy of spiritual illumination in the afterlife.

And it hardly needs to be said that if you’re a liberal secularist, the prospect of Christian nationalism is an Orwellian affront to reason, morality, and good taste. All the conservative Christian’s core convictions are preposterous: atheists generally understand religions better than most Christians, and more realistic philosophies and lifestyles have superseded Christian theology.

Yet Tim Alberta, an Evangelical Christian who’s repudiated this nationalism and its Trumpian Trojan horse, says, “the forces of Christian nationalism — those who seek to demolish the wall between Church and state, asserting far-right religious dominion over the government as well as the country’s core institutions — are now ascendant both inside the Church and inside the Republican Party.”

One thing Donald Trump has in common with these “Christians” is an emphasis on personal grievances. Trump’s grievances are born from his narcissistic sense of entitlement. If some aren’t yet bowing to Trump’s greatness as a debaucher, businessman, entertainer, and politician, he’ll be offended because the loser is naturally supposed to submit to the winner.

Meanwhile, White Evangelicals are aggrieved because they’re lost in time and alienated from modern progress. They lament how human rights are awarded now on secular grounds, based on reason and natural cooperativeness, without the need for ancient theology or superstition. In effect, these Evangelicals are domestic terrorists in the liberal body politic: they want to tear down American institutions, deeming them satanic affronts to God.

Having been poisoned by their myopic upbringing with a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, this virulent strain of conservatism resents not just “wokeness” but the Founders’ secular humanism and naturalistic pragmatism. These faux Christians are assured that the US was founded as a Christian nation, so that late-modern secularism must be anti-American rather than just un-Christian. On the contrary, as relatively neutral historians will attest, while the early European immigrants to America were Christians, the US was founded not on their theologies but on the Founders’ deistic sensibilities, and deism was a halfway house between theism and atheism.

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The American Founders separated Church and State for a reason, knowing how religious wars had roiled Europe. That separation made for the freedom of religion in a multicultural sense. This was supposed to be the freedom for all positive or negative religious views, which means this freedom wasn’t theological but liberal. The point wasn’t that one religion should be favoured, but that no religion should control public spaces. Implicitly, the Founders’ deism meant that just as God had vacated his Creation as soon as he’d laid its foundations, no religion is so obviously superior to others that it deserves to crowd out the alternatives.

Nevertheless, the American Christian nationalist idolizes America in addition to the Bible, Trump, and Jesus. Christianity is arguably a polytheistic religion of idols and the cherry-picking of orthodoxies, so perhaps this nationalism isn’t as bizarre as it is indefensible. Eventually, after Christians deified Jesus in the second century, some Roman emperors realized that Christianity was consistent with their state propaganda since Christians effectively put a Jewish satirical spin on the Greco-Roman dying-and-rising-god mytheme.

Sure, at face value, Christianity mocks and condemns all worldly powers, but it also elevates Jesus as such a power. Anyone who identifies at least superficially with Jesus via sophistry can claim to be Christian. Thus, Christianity could serve the imperial interests of the Roman Empire, which it did, beginning in the late fourth century. Subsequently, Christianity fragmented into its Eastern and Western institutions, and then again into its Catholic and Protestant myriads. Some of these Christianities were truer to Jesus’s countercultural concerns than others, but given the stupendous variety of Christian political compromises, that authenticity has been practically accidental. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Ironically, whereas White Evangelicals cast themselves as being Christ-like in being persecuted by secular institutions, they’re more often the persecutors and betrayers of Jesus’s counterculture, and as authoritarian conservatives, they long to harass liberals. By contrast, liberals espouse multicultural tolerance, which enables all the citizens to pursue their independent ideas of what makes them happy.

That recognition that there’s no overriding divine revelation, that we’re on our own to solve our problems, and that we naturally differ in our personal and tribal conceptions was the basis of the American Revolution. In other words, America broke from the stagnation of medieval European Christendom, establishing a progressive nation that could learn from its mistakes by being open to rational alternatives. Again, this was deism and thus secularism in action, not any application of overt Christian dogmas.

Is Evangelical Christianity being persecuted in America? No, this sect is just losing out in a relatively free competition of ideas and lifestyles. In a liberal context, via capitalism, democracy, and individual freedom under the law, some options come to the fore, and others subside. You must persuade others to take your ideas seriously, and if you fail because your ideas are flawed, or because you’ve lost touch with the zeitgeist, you’d better adapt to the prevailing ways of understanding the world, or you can expect to fall behind.

The American South suffered this humiliation long before President Reagan elevated the Christian nationalists and their so-called “Moral Majority,” ever since the Civil War decided the issue of slavery, and the South stewed in its resentment. But even before that, as I said, Christendom in general suffered the humiliation of the modern revolutions, as the ascents of science, philosophy, democracy, capitalist greed, free-thinking arts, and modern America itself spelled doom for Christianity’s medieval hold over Europe.

The problem, you see, is that conservative, fundamentalist Christianity doesn’t belong in the modern world. White Evangelical Christianity is a vestige of medievalism, so naturally it’s at odds not just with the most flamboyant or decadent expressions of liberalism, but with virtually all modern principles and institutions.

The Christian nationalist thinks this outsider status makes him or her Christ-like since the Jesus movement, too, was countercultural. And the dream is that, with God’s help, a counterculture can overtake the mainstream degradations without being compromised in the process. Thus, this nationalist thinks a Christian theocracy wouldn’t be a gross oxymoron but would honour Jesus’ vision of a world fit for the “spiritually poor.”

Yet just by wearing suits and speaking as polished propagandists for big business and American imperialism, the leaders of White Evangelical Christianity demonstrate they’re not spiritually poor and thus that they’re as un-Christian as their atheistic critics.

Tim Alberta is hopeful that the grotesqueness of Christian nationalism hasn’t given Evangelical Christianity a bad name. That hope is silly, though, since an authentic apocalyptic counterculture wouldn’t be so tied to a Christian theology that’s long been tainted by earthly imperial ambitions. What would be far more important than being slavishly Christian in content would be to adopt something like Jesus’ perspective on the dichotomy between spirituality and earthly politics, and thus to be only formally Christian.

Christian dogmas about Jesus’s sacrificial death and resurrection, the coming divine judgment, the Bible’s inerrancy, and so on are all irrelevant and outdated. What would matter to someone like Jesus is the perennial need for cultural renewal through the vision of radical spiritualists, mystics, philosophers, artists, and philanthropists. The Christian fundamentalist’s emphasis on the mere content of ancient dogmas shows that he or she has missed the forest for the trees. These Christians are “Pharisees” in the New Testament’s (biased) pejorative sense. They’ve lost the plot because they’re idolaters rather than “spiritually” or authentically “poor.”

What does it mean to be spiritually poor, in an updated Christian sense? It means surrendering entirely to God, which is to say to what Socrates called his daemon, to an unconscious, countercultural vision of some ideal way the world ought to have been. All the founders of the great religions, and of the revolutionary philosophies, arts, and technologies dip into the reservoir of human creativity, and each of these neo-shamanic visionaries naturally interprets the existential truth in different ways. No two epiphanies are identical, especially after the passage of millennia. Ancient and modern counterculturalists are thus formally (psychologically and sociologically) similar, but the contents of their messages will of course differ.

White Evangelicals are beholden to outdated visionary content, which makes their religious impositions obnoxious in addition to being rationally untenable. Here, then, is another similarity between Evangelical Christians and Donald Trump: both have perverse tastes in cultural art.

Liberals and humanists are brought up to be tolerant. As individualists, we respect everyone’s freedom to come to their conclusions and live almost however they want.

But what happens when these liberties are abused not just by criminals who take their freedom too far since they disregard their victims’ equal freedom, but by those who don’t respect the reason why a free society is supposed to be sustainable?

The disgrace of right-wing Americanized “Christianity”

The Evangelical Christian Tim Alberta has written an exhaustive, immersive account of the gross politicization of White Evangelical Christianity in the US. Speaking as an insider, he details how these Christians view Donald Trump as a mercenary figure who will stop the slide of American culture into secularism and progressive modernity.

Alberta points to how this kind of Christianity has become nationalistic so that these Christians see no dichotomy between the kingdom of God and the United States. For them, their country is a holy nation, specially blessed by God, which means it must be protected against demonic, ungodly forces, such as the Democratic Party and its liberal values.

Of course, Alberta shows how this is grossly unbiblical and anti-Jesus since the early Christians promised that Jesus’s followers would be vindicated not in any kingdom of men and women, but in the hereafter, in a kingdom ruled directly by God. Augustine made this dualism plain with his distinction between the two “cities.”

As egregious as the Republican Party’s politicization of religion is, Alberta’s focus on Trumpism trivializes the scale of the absurdity that is any form of organized Christianity. Jesus was a quintessential counterculturalist, but a religion sprang up in his name and became mainstream in the Roman Empire. Consequently, every predominant form of Christianity has been absurd for some sixteen centuries.

It’s easy to get caught up in the doctrinal disputes, as secularists wrestle with how to respond to fundamentalists’ arguments, but the conflict is far deeper than, say, the classical problem of evil, whether the Bible is self-contradictory, or whether God exists.

No, the overriding problem is that Christianity for the masses is a Hitlerian big lie, a lie so outrageous that the lie exploits our civility. Even the opponents give the lie cover because the alternative would be to admit that something monstrous could already be in our midst. We’d prefer to normalize the monster, to call it “one of the world’s great religions,” a time-honoured respectable faith.

So-called Evangelical or right-wing, White American Christianity, at least, is a grotesque absurdity, from top to bottom. No part of the precious American culture these Christians are so desperate to preserve has anything to do with Jesus’s ethos.

Take abortion, for instance. For Jesus, there would have been no need to prolong our species by having multiple babies per family since the world was about to end, and God was about to show himself and bring a day of judgment to our species. That’s why Jesus didn’t start a family, and why he said hyperbolically that his disciples would have to “hate” their earthly family, in comparison with their spiritual one (Luke 14:26). Conservative “family values” have nothing to do with Jesus’s or Paul’s apocalypticism (Matt. 19:11–12; 1 Cor 7:28–40).

More generally, Jesus didn’t address this kind of issue because he was caught up in apocalyptic fervor. That is, so focused was Jesus on spiritual matters that he downplayed politics. As far as we can tell from the New Testament and the historical context, for Jesus, politics in the natural world is fit for demons and their thrones and principalities, and a proper theocracy would be established only after God has unalterably separated the sheep from the goats.

Or take the right to own guns. Jesus was a pacifist who told his followers to love their enemies, sacrifice everything they own to help the needy, and care nothing for earthly rewards. According to the New Testament, Jesus adhered to these instructions by living as an itinerant preacher and healer, stirring up trouble in Jerusalem, and getting himself executed by the state to inspire his followers with his single-mindedness.

The notion that Jesus would be on the side of those who hoard and cherish weapons is a Hitlerian big lie — not just a doctrinal error or a misunderstanding, but a gross, diabolical distortion of the truth, a distortion that abuses the good faith of those who are clearer-minded.

Or take an issue of “wokeness” that so offends right-wing American Christians, such as support for the human rights of gays and transsexuals in public schools. Would Jesus, who hung around with lepers, prefer to marginalize and demonize these minorities or emphasize their common humanity and their potential to come to terms with God?

Jesus and Paul weren’t preoccupied with championing heterosexuality and denigrating alternative sexualities. For them, sex and family life themselves were obstacles to grappling with the presumed apocalyptic context of facing our transcendent maker. Thus, bigots would be told to remove the log from their eye (Matt. 7:1–5).

If the supposed problem is that sex education is being taught too early or that teens are being forced into sex-change operations because of a fad, those overcompensations would have to be weighed against the multi-century global norm of demonizing these sorts of minorities. Sometimes it’s wise to overcorrect in creating a problem that prevents the return of a much worse problem.

You can go down the list of the “Christian values” that these Evangelicals think are threatened by the resurgence of liberal America, and what you find is just an appalling masquerade. In Christian terms, this right-wing religious nationalist movement is far more demonic than godly.

These fake Jesus-followers are blind even to their plain shadow in the Islamic fundamentalists they demonize. The difference between the medieval totalitarianism of a Sharia society and a Gilead-style, conservative “Christian” paradise is negligible.

The perversity here is that anti-Christians could be so sanctimonious in professing to be the purest Christians. But one reason their big lies are allowed to stand is that their path is well-worn. As I said, organized Christianity has been inexcusable for most of this religion’s history.

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The paradox of the big lie

The more interesting question, though, is what critics are supposed to do about it.

How should we handle “big liars” in that technical sense, as in bullshitters who have no respect for truth or decency and who exploit the principles of liberal tolerance to undermine them from within?

After all, in liberal societies we’re free to think whatever we want. There’s no such thing as a thought crime. Yet the Hitlerian big lie is a crime against good taste. Again, it’s a question of hideousness, of the willingness to exploit people’s faith in humanity to smuggle a monstrous perversion into the discourse.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler accused Jews of perpetrating this kind of big lie (about how Germany lost the First World War):

All this was inspired by the principle — which is quite true within itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

On the contrary, the big lie was the Nazis’ one about the alleged evil of the Jewish people. Hitler was projecting onto Jews the lengths the Nazis would be willing to go to create a totalitarian society.

But the point is that this is what we’re dealing with in the case of Trumpian Christianity. It’s not a dispute about the facts of natural selection or the logic of some proofs for God’s existence. It’s not about the interpretation of this or that biblical passage. The culture of right-wing Christianity is obviously grotesque. The emperor has no clothes. The un-American, illiberal monstrosity hides in plain sight.

But nothing like that can be said strictly on liberal grounds because those statements are intolerant and “politically incorrect.” If White Evangelicals obey the law, they’re free in the US (and in Canada and other free societies) to practice whatever culture they wish. Even as authoritarians gain steam around the world, and even as Donald Trump threatens American democracy with his big lie about the alleged stolen election of 2020, liberals have a problem standing up to this threat. Liberals in Weimar Germany likewise couldn’t recognize the Nazis for what they were — which is how the big lie wins.

We prefer to give each other the benefit of the doubt since that’s what it means to be civil in a late-modern society. No one wanted to believe Hitler intended to fight for German honour by conquering the whole world and committing genocide. No one thought he’d have been so deceptive, bloodthirsty, and full of irrational hatred for Jews and other “impure races.”

No one thought as much because we don’t expect such monsters to pop up in our midst. We lock fraudsters, thieves, and murderers away in prison whenever they rear their heads in criminal acts. And we don’t expect sociopaths to be so proficient at fitting in, or at corrupting liberal society like parasites.

The liberal’s predicament

As appalling as this right-wing “Christianity” is on every front, liberalism faces a weakness that’s perhaps just as troubling. The parasitism here fits liberal tolerance like a hand in a glove.

What’s the point of arguing with these Trumpian “Christians” when they think black is white and up is down? You’d have to take them into a room and deprogram them, treating them like children who need to be retaught the basics. But this would be like the illiberal policy that China practices in its re-education programs for the Muslim Uyghurs.

More broadly, what should the liberal’s attitude be towards the audacity of anti-Christians who masquerade as followers of Jesus or Paul?

• Should the offenders be mocked? But how fragile must their minds be to have fallen prey to their politicized cult?

• Should they be ignored? But how dangerous would their festering nationalist movements become when left in the shadows?

• Should their inanities be refuted? But wouldn’t the intellectual treatment only falsify the situation by normalizing outright absurdities?

Ironically, the very existence of this Americanized Christianity is like a miracle, as in a violation of natural regularities, a violation so bizarre that we have trouble recognizing it because our minds blot it out. This is how strangeness can hide in plain sight, since we understand things only by filtering and simplifying them with our conceptions. We have no name for true miracles because naturally they’d be too rare to notice. And we have no proper name for the perpetrator of a big lie.

We speak of “right-wing Evangelical Christianity,” but that name provides only the illusion of understanding. Anti-Christian Christianity is a contradiction in terms. This kind of religious organization or political movement is fundamentally an incoherent nothing — yet there it is with many loud, voting members.

What is nothing that pretends it’s something? And how can we who live in the real world recognize a monster for what it is without losing some of our good faith?

As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Battle not with monsters, lest you become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Kings of old only wished they could have dictated their culture’s contents with the thoroughness of a late-modern billionaire.

Ancient kings, emperors, or popes had the authority to proclaim what the gods wanted, but they lacked the technological means to enforce their tastes. They could decorate their palaces per their vision, but they couldn’t outlaw folklore that appealed to peasants who lived far from the lord’s zone of domination.

Mass communications technologies enable more complete uniformity of opinions. This is how, for instance, the warped version of transhumanism that’s made its way into some Western subcultures can be traced largely to the deep confusions of a few big tech billionaires such as Peter Thiel.

Thiel is the libertarian, Christian, transhumanist venture capitalist and political activist who sponsored US Vice President JD Vance.

As I’ve written elsewhere, transhumanism is generally associated with the technological transformation of the human body. Transhumanists favour the “acceleration” of technological progress, and thus oppose governmental interference in the market with regulations that restrict innovation. Transhumanism is thus part of Silicon Valley’s libertarian propaganda that rebrands laissez-faire capitalism.

Indeed, Thiel and Elon Musk are likely some of the big tech bros satirized in the movie Mountainhead (2025). Thiel talks just like one of those tech-bro billionaires, using hip lingo about technological rather than social progress. But what Thiel leaves out is the need for a philosophical revolution to accompany the technological one, so that we might be equipped to use the new technologies wisely, assuming those technologies aren’t pipe dreams.

The reason Thiel personally leaves out that part of transhumanism — the need to change our minds and perspectives and not just our bodies — is that his worldview happens to be incoherent, so he ought to fear philosophical scrutiny. Yet because Thiel is an insulated billionaire living in the twenty-first century, he has an outsized influence on popular culture, especially the cultish sense of transhumanism that’s taken center stage in Silicon Valley and for some consumers and social media followers.

Thiel’s worldview

At the Veritas Forum, for instance, Thiel says,

I think the thing that’s striking, on the transhumanist versus Christian thing, is how similar they are. You can point to metaphysical differences, but [according to transhumanism] you’re going to have a transformed body, there’s going to be this radical transformation of the way everything works, and there will be no more random freak accidents that happen to kill you. So, it’s actually the similarities that are striking, and so one shouldn’t try to overlay some metaphysical difference.

Thus, transhumanism is supposed to be consistent with Christianity.

In his YouTube discussion with Ross Douthat, Thiel emphasizes the libertarian side of his worldview. For instance, he recounts a conversation he had with Musk in 2024:

There was a political dimension of getting “back to the future”…I had the seasteading version [of a conversation] with Elon where I said if Trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country. And then Elon said, “There’s nowhere to go. This is the only place”…And it was about two hours after we had dinner and I was home, and thought, “Wow, Elon, you don’t believe in going to Mars anymore.” 2024 is the year Elon stopped believing in Mars, not as a silly science tech project, but as a political project. Mars was supposed to be a political project. It was building an alternative, and in 2024 Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist US government, the woke AI would follow you to Mars.

Thiel returns to that theme in the conversation, saying that “going to Mars” is supposed to amount to a “Heinlein” vision of society or “libertarian paradise.” That’s what “seasteading” means too: the creation of permanent, autonomous dwellings in international waters, amounting to floating cities that are independent of extant governments, like crypto banking systems. What seasteading, crypto, and going to Mars are about for Silicon Valley is Ayn Rand’s libertarian fantasy in Atlas Shrugged, the robber baron’s demonstration that he holds up the world and doesn’t rely on government or the masses, so he can build an alternative, independent society.

Thiel goes on to critique transhumanism from a Christian standpoint:

The critique isn’t that it [the trans person’s transformation of his or her body] is weird and unnatural, but that it’s so pathetically little. We want more than crossdressing and changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and your whole body. The critique orthodox Christianity has of this is that these things don’t go far enough. Transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and your whole self.

Similarly, he says,

If I had to do a critique of Silicon Valley, it’s always bad at [explaining] what the meaning of tech is. The conversations they tend to go into are these microscopic things like “What are the IQ or Elo [chess] scores of the AI, and how exactly do you define AGI?” And we get into all these endless technical debates. And there are a lot of questions that are at an intermediate level of meaning that seem to be very important, which are, “What does it mean for the budget deficit, the economy, or geopolitics?

So again, Thiel thinks transhumanism is consistent with Christianity, and the big questions Silicon Valley ignores aren’t philosophical but political and economic.

As for Thiel’s Christianity, he later defines the antichrist as the “existential risk” of a

bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state because I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance. What do you do about nuclear weapons? We have the United Nations with real teeth that controls them, so they’re controlled by an international political order. Or what do we do about AI? We need global compute governance, a one-world government to control all the computers, log every single keystroke to make sure people don’t program a dangerous AI…And so the atheist philosophical framing is “one world or none.”

For Thiel, the Antichrist isn’t a demonic genius who convinces the world to destroy itself. “In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg” who scares the world into shutting down science to avoid the overly hyped existential risks of laissez-faire capitalism and consumer culture.

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The vacuity of Thiel’s philosophy

The problem with Thiel’s pronouncements is that they must come to nothing because they’re based on his incoherent worldview. Christianity, libertarianism, conservatism, transhumanism — these things don’t go together. They contradict each other in a thousand ways.

Sure, Christians talk about resurrected bodies, and that religious tradition likely inspires the secular humanist enterprise of late-modern transhumanism. But there’s a big difference between expecting God to transform us in an afterlife and planning for our species to transform itself with no God. Christianity is theistic, and the science that would realize transhumanism is methodologically atheistic.

So that’s the first of innumerable contradictions in Thiel’s worldview. His technoscientific emphasis on transhumanism is thoroughly at odds with Christian faith in a supernatural deity.

Similarly, Christianity is antithetical to libertarianism. If “Christian” means anything at all, a Christian is supposed to follow Jesus. That means abandoning the world to save your soul. It means giving up your preoccupation with material riches to obtain rich blessings in an afterlife. It means loving a supernatural deity more than nature or yourself. It means committing to a spiritual brotherhood rather than idolizing your biological family.

By contrast, libertarianism is satanically individualistic and so much propaganda for laissez-faire capitalism, which is itself opposed to Jesus’s countercultural ethics. Jesus said the first will be last, and the last will be first in God’s sight, whereas libertarian capitalism is about promoting those who are materially wealthy, and letting the poor die off in a social Darwinian fashion. The Republican attempt to marry Christianity and libertarianism (or any other distinctively American value) is strictly an Orwellian depth of gaslighting.

Then there’s conservatism, which self-destructs, dissolving like cotton candy. Thiel poses as a conservative intellectual, but that’s like a child dressing up as a businessman. There is no such thing as conservative thought. There is no conservative philosophy. What’s called political conservatism is the disguising of antimodern, anti-humanist prejudices that belong to the benighted ancient and medieval periods. Conservatism is anachronistic, and “conservative thought” is oxymoronic.

Whenever a right-winger like Thiel speaks halfway philosophically, he or she is demonstrating the merits of liberalism, humanism, and egalitarianism that count against conservative policies. The very rational practice of philosophy or science demonstrates the difference between people and animals, and thus negates the conservative’s tribal preference for dominance hierarchies and gross political and economic inequalities.

Adding conservatism to a modern worldview is the equivalent of dropping a grenade.

For example, transhumanism is antithetical to conservatism. Transhumanism is the secular humanist project of using science and technology to progress in extreme ways. Yet the conservative prefers modern reworkings of medieval social norms, such as dictatorships (via fascism or the capitalist creation of monopolies and robber barons), neofeudalism, patriarchy, theocracy, imperialism, and mass ignorance (via cultic demagoguery or social media’s infantilization of consumers).

Transhumanists are egalitarian in wanting to change human nature, not just boost the powers of the upper class. Yet the conservative worships dominance hierarchies, and thus would favor the use of science and technology only to maintain aristocratic privileges. As always, the conservative’s tribal myopia conflicts with the scientist’s broad-minded humanism and objectivity that nullify our sociopolitical games.

This is a case of an emperor wearing no clothes. When you’re wealthy and can afford to surround yourself with sycophants, your wealth is likely to corrupt your mindset because necessity will no longer be the mother of your inventions. Your ideas will be vain and feeble because your wealth will insulate you so you won’t have to face up to harsh truths. Here, the harsh truth is that Thiel, the Christian, libertarian, conservative transhumanist, is a stark-naked emperor of Silicon Valley. I mean, he might as well be sitting there in these interviews naked.

There’s no there there when it comes to the transhumanism that stems from Thiel’s Silicon Valley nonsense. The technologies of AI, nanobots, and genetic engineering may be arriving, and they may or may not be revolutionary. But Silicon Valley’s version of the transhumanist philosophy that’s supposed to motivate that progress is a nonstarter. It’s like a movie script written by a committee of businesspeople rather than visionary artists, a script that would naturally be insipid and full of plot holes.

Someone should inform these big tech billionaires that business leaders aren’t likely to be artists of any kind. Leave the artistry and the intellectual insights to the countercultural underclass. Let the robber barons tyrannize society, and let the upstart peasants mock and scorn them properly for it.

In The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great (2019), the libertarian social conservative Ben Shapiro argues that the twenty-first century surge of American tribalism is due to Americans having forgotten the two great intellectual foundations of the West: Greco-Roman philosophy and the Judeo-Christian tradition.

A synthesis of both reason and religious faith was needed, he says, to drive the revolutions of modernity, including science, capitalism, and democracy. Individualism, the idea that each person has intrinsic worth, is the basis of Shapiro’s libertarian politics, and it stems, he says, from both Athens and Jerusalem.

Libertarianism and the foundations of western culture

According to Shapiro,

We are killing ourselves at the highest rates in decades. Rates of depression have skyrocketed. Drug overdoses are now responsible for more deaths than car crashes. Marriage rates have declined, as have childbearing rates. We’re spending more money on luxuries, and enjoying everything less. Conspiracies have replaced reason and subjective perceptions have replaced objective observation. Facts have been buried to make way for feelings; a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic.

We’re more divided than at any time in the recent past…Something deeper than political differences is going on here. Virtually all of our trust in key institutions has vanished…As for our democracy, fewer and fewer people like it.

Something is rotten in American society, Shapiro suspects, but the foundations are solid. To solve the mystery of how such a glorious civilization could go off the rails, Shapiro takes his readers through a short history of Western philosophy to remind them what Westerners have been taking for granted.

According to him, “We believe freedom is built upon the twin notions that God created every human in His image, and that human beings are capable of investigating and exploring God’s world. Those notions were born in Jerusalem and Athens, respectively.”

Moreover,

Those twin notions — those diamonds of spiritual genius — built our civilization, and built us as individuals. If you believe that life is more than materialistic pleasures and pain avoidance, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. If you believe that the government has no right to intrude upon the exercise of your individual will, and that you are bound by moral duty to pursue virtue, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. If you believe that human beings are capable of bettering our world through use of our reason, and are bound by higher purpose to do so, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens.

Indeed, says Shapiro,

Jerusalem and Athens built science. The twin ideals of Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law reasoning built human rights. They built prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty. Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty, and gave billions spiritual purpose. Jerusalem and Athens were the foundations of the Magna Carta and the Treaty of Westphalia; they were the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Of course, every society has its foundations, so pointing to historically crucial periods of the development of Western civilization is hardly controversial. Certainly, Athens and Jerusalem are foundational in that sense, as a matter of historical fact. But Shapiro goes further in prescribing the culture that rests on those foundations. Shapiro’s point isn’t just the trivial one that Westerners have a particular history, because part of the mystery he’s trying to solve by telling this history is to answer, as he says on his book’s first page, why things are “so good.”

Thus, he contends that

Civilizations that rejected Jerusalem and Athens, and the tension between them, have collapsed into dust. The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting the values of the collective and a new utopian vision of “social justice” — and they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings. The Nazis rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, and they shoved children into gas chambers. Venezuela rejects Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, and citizens of their oil-rich nation have been reduced to eating dogs.

In short, Shapiro assumes that libertarianism is the culmination of Western civilization, and that if Westerners are presently self-destructing in anti-intellectual, tribal grievances and collectivist longings for tyranny, that’s because we’re insufficiently libertarian. More precisely, we’ve forgotten that our cultural foundations point us in a libertarian direction.

As Shapiro says in his book’s concluding section,

We are so angry at each other right now. That anger is palpable. Where did it come from? It came from the destruction of a common vision. We used to believe in the Founding vision, supported by a framework of personal virtue culled from Judeo-Christian morality…We were a community, forged in fire and tethered together by a set of values stretching back to the Garden of Eden — a community of individuals working to understand the value of each other as images of God, a community of individuals who believed in our own capacity to change ourselves and the world around us. We can regain that. We must regain that.

By my lights, Shapiro’s book isn’t egregious. It’s well-written; indeed, Shapiro is much more readable than Jordan Peterson, for example. And much of Shapiro’s account of the history of Western philosophy is roughly correct, as far as it goes. He concedes in a Vox interview that he leaves out some important details. For example, he underplays the Christian basis of European fascism and the conflict between Christendom and science.

But again, it’s trivially true that Greco-Roman philosophy and Judeo-Christian religion have been foundational to what we call “modernity,” to the secular, technoscientifically advanced, liberal culture we occupy in “the West” or in Europe and its former colonies in the Americas and Australia.

The more interesting questions are whether our culture’s foundations are blameless for our present decline, whether American libertarianism and Jewish conservatism are indeed the culminations of that culture, and whether we ought to be sanctifying that culture and its foundations. Let’s keep these in mind as we critique Shapiro’s case for monotheistic libertarianism.

Linear and cyclical interpretations of cultural history

We can contrast Shapiro’s monotheistic telling of Western history with Oswald Spengler’s “morphological” or cyclical one. Shapiro sees history through a Jewish filter: we have our cultural principles, but we often betray them, and when we do so, we go astray and are punished for it. That’s the lesson that’s repeated ad infinitum in the Jewish scriptures, written as they were in hindsight to erase the henotheistic foundations of Jewish monotheism and thus conceal Israel’s commonality with its ancient neighbours such as Assyria, Canaan, and Egypt.

Spengler looks at history in more Eastern terms. He thinks cultures are incommensurable, and each is marvellous in the purity of its youth, as it were. Every civilization goes through stages of vitality and decline, and the decline follows organically from the conditions laid out by the formative presentation of its ideals.

No earthly cultural principles are meant to rule for eternity. They inspire and enable a society to flourish for a time and to occupy a niche, but when circumstances change, and enough generations pass, the principles ossify and hinder more than they promote cultural health.

Thus, Spengler would likely contend that Shapiro’s Western chauvinism isn’t any objective assessment but is a symptom of the natural deterioration of Western values. Of course, the fact that the liberal West beat fascism and Soviet communism doesn’t prove that classic liberalism is the superior philosophy. WWII and the Cold War were hardly so philosophical or academic. And might doesn’t make right.

But the point is that according to some such Spenglerian or cyclical meta-history, we should blame the cultural foundations for any systemic lapse in a late stage of a civilization’s lifespan. Each individual or collective character degenerates in its unique way because the founding principles or experiences prove eventually to be obsolete, or the individual or society loses the ability to remember or understand what was so great about that founding vision.

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Libertarianism as curdled classic liberalism

Of course, this is what Shapiro is trying to correct by reminding his readers what Athens and Jerusalem stood for. But Shapiro is speaking from that late civilizational stage. He’s been as shrill a propagandist in the culture war as anyone else. Libertarianism is far from a rallying cry for healing cultural divides. On the contrary, the libertarian’s mantra is more like, “I’ve got mine. Now get off my property!” And Jewish conservatism is likewise tribalist in proclaiming the “chosenness” of the Jewish people.

The question, then, is whether libertarianism and Jewish social conservatism represent the best of Western culture or whether those ideologies support a Spenglerian reading of what Spengler called (in 1918!) the “decline of the West.”

Early modern liberals such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith argued for the inherent rights of those they called “people,” and they defined personhood in secular, “natural” terms. These were natural rights we have in virtue of our capacities as self-conscious, rational, autonomous, creative higher mammals. Eventually, all humans, including women and dark-skinned folks, were credited with being people in that honourific sense.

That recognition of the power of personhood, in the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, led to the overthrow of European monarchies and their feudal economies. Enter capitalism, democracy, and the rise of the merchant class of private buyers and sellers. No longer tied to the land, people were free to compete and attempt to strike it rich.

Just as the Soviets discovered the downside of communism, however, when they had to send to the Gulags those who didn’t submit to the state’s mass hallucination, Americans learned that the classic liberals were utopian in selling the modern enterprise that had to swoop in to rescue us from the aftermath of what Friedrich Nietzsche called God’s “death.”

A capitalist economy was supposed to be self-governing. That’s what the economists’ math said we should expect from a laissez-faire market, and that’s how capitalism was sold to the masses. Only, the fine print included the giant loophole that the orthodox economists’ models were sheer fantasies all along, and they don’t apply to any real-world economic conditions.

Consequently, when capitalism proved to pass through a boom-and-bust cycle and to have tanked the American economy in the Great Depression, and when untethered consumerism — based on advertising’s manufacture of desires — led to the trashing of the world’s ecosystems, economists protest that their centuries of cheerleading for capitalism can’t be blamed because their academic work included those caveats. Meanwhile, libertarians like Ben Shapiro hide their head in the sand and pretend that the threat of global warming is overblown.

The problem is that even if the early modern liberals would have agreed with the purity of Shapiro’s libertarianism, that doesn’t mean classical liberalism or individualism is or ever was a good thing or the greatest value system. Those principles were inspiring at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see how their implementation has had unforeseen, potentially catastrophic consequences. Likewise, as amazing as we might have thought we were when we each were young, we tend to become humbler as we age, chastened by our mix of experiences, and we may laugh at our youthful follies.

Like the Taliban purist who says Muslims should adhere to a strict reading of Shariah, the libertarian is a market fundamentalist who says government should always get out of the way of private business — even when history shows us that government must intervene to save capitalism from itself, which is what Franklin Roosevelt did with the New Deal. Roosevelt offered those progressive concessions to prevent an outbreak of anti-capitalist socialism in the US, in reaction to the laissez-faire capitalist’s faceplant in the Great Depression.

There’s a difference between being true to certain ideals and being true to reality. The libertarian may be faithful to certain individualist principles, but that doesn’t mean those principles are superior to all others. All ideals likely have their downsides. The purist or fundamentalist is an expert at externalizing blame and protecting the dignity of his or her creed, and insisting that any obstacle can be overcome by doubling down on the founding vision, however antiquated that vision may appear after so many rude awakenings. But that idealism may be so much youthful naivety.

In any case, American libertarianism isn’t a paragon of classic liberalism; indeed, it’s more like the latter’s curdling than its fruition. After all, the early modern liberals were relatively humble humanists who were setting reason in opposition to religious dogmas and ossified theocratic institutions. The liberal humanists trusted in our capacity to solve our problems, but they would have been opposed to replacing religious dogmas with secular ones. At least, they had no right to their overcompensating utopian, “positivistic” pretentions (as in the philosophies of Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte).

Yet that’s the role of Shapiro’s fundamentalist libertarianism. Again, he evidently views libertarianism through the filter of Orthodox Judaism, as though postindustrial liberals sin by departing from early liberal commandments that were received on the mountaintop. No, genuine liberals should want to learn from painful experience, not confuse any human-made principles with a creed of perfect wisdom. Indeed, from a Jewish standpoint, Shapiro’s fundamentalist libertarianism is the sin of idolatry.

The fundamentalist’s authoritarian character is alien to the classic liberal’s humanistic mindset. The death of God should be unsettling, despite how hubristic and self-assured humanists can become in their Faustian pursuits.

How original was Judaism?

Mind you, Shapiro will insist that this nonlinear, Spenglerian account of history is dangerously relativistic because, as an Orthodox Jew, Shapiro is indeed deeply committed to that other aspect of Western civilization: Judeo-Christian monotheism. Shapiro overstates Judaism’s originality to make the biblical God’s jealousness or overprotectiveness seem more sensible.

He says, for example, that Judaism made “four faith-based claims that were utterly different from the pagan religions before it.” First, Judaism said that God is “unified” and that “a master plan stood behind everything.”

But this overlooks the fact that most polytheistic religions were practically henotheistic. Each pantheon typically had a chief god. Zeus, for instance, was firmly in control of the Olympians.

Second, says Shapiro, Judaism maintained that “human beings were held to particular behavioral standards for moral, not utilitarian reasons — we were ordered to be moral at the behest of a higher power.”

But Jews derived that moralistic outlook from Zoroastrianism during the Persian captivity. For the Zoroastrians, we’re obliged to join Ahura Mazda in his struggle against the evil Angra Mainyu.

Third, “Judaism claimed that history progressed: that revelation was the beginning, but it was not the end, that man had a responsibility to pursue God and bring about a redemption of mankind, and that God could use a particular example — a chosen people — to act as a light unto the nations.”

But that directional, eschatological view of time also derives from Zoroastrianism. Ahura Mazda would defeat his rival and vindicate all the previous struggles. And every tribe thinks it’s divinely “chosen” as the vanguard of its way of life. That’s just what it means to commit to one ethos or mythos rather than another.

Fourth, “Judaism claimed that God had endowed man with choice, that men were responsible for their choices, and that our choices mattered.”

But that derived from Egyptian religion, according to which each soul would be weighed in the afterlife against a feather, and we’d be rewarded or punished for our deeds. The Eastern religions, too, such as Jainism and Hinduism, attribute karmic significance to all our actions.

Pragmatism, jadedness, and the essence of Judaism

My point isn’t to quibble with Shapiro’s summary, but to point out that this moralistic monotheism isn’t exactly what distinguishes Judaism. We can grant, for the sake of argument, that Judaism embodies those four principles. Still, the true character of Judaism is found elsewhere, in how those lofty principles were filtered through the ethos of a perennially downtrodden people.

Jews were the quintessential losers who found a way to redefine their losses as victories, and their weaknesses as strengths.

The existential integrity of Jews is such that they couldn’t dwell on the dubious theological implications of their myths. They didn’t codify their speculations about God and his plan but came to see their religious obligations as social, and as having the pragmatic purpose of keeping their hope alive and their spirits up. As Jack Miles points out in God: A Biography, the jaded, skeptical books of Job and Ecclesiastes represent the natural endpoints of Jews’ self-negating theology.

I’d go further in saying that Jewish monotheism is effectively a satire on the all-too-human empires that lorded it over the Jews, from the Assyrian and Roman ones to Christendom and the Third Reich. The distinctive Jewish point is that our true ruler is perfectly intangible, which is the bathos that makes a mockery of the world’s vain kingdoms and dictatorships.

The relevance of this is that as exclusive as Jewish rhetoric may be, Judaism is ill-suited to serve with libertarianism as the ideology of a fundamentalist’s supreme culture.

True, Jews view themselves as God’s chosen people, and it seems like a miracle that the Jewish way of life survived through all the oppressions and persecutions over the millennia. But it’s just as miraculous that Jews don’t bother trying to convert others to that way of life. If Jews saw their culture as so exclusively correct, why wouldn’t they have made nuisances of themselves and proselytized in God’s name, as Christians do? Judaism differs from Christianity in that respect because the Jewish experience is one of humility resulting from a pattern of great loss, whereas Christians inherited the keys to Rome and never looked back.

And granted, Orthodox Jews can be obnoxious and totalitarian, as in the case of Brooklyn’s Hasidic community, as seen in the documentary One of Us (2017). The cult of Jewish orthodoxy is defended typically as a strategy for preserving Judaism after WWII. But again, Jews have always been downtrodden and tempted to crave vengeance against their enemies, and they’ve always recommitted to the rigors of their religion to spite outsiders. (This is rather like how homosexuals normalize their orientation by exiting “the closet” and showcasing their inclinations in Gay Pride parades.)

Likewise, Shapiro’s social conservatism is antithetical to libertarianism, but that conservatism is also drawn from the totalitarian implications of monotheism. Based on some cultish, literalistic readings of scriptural fiction, Shapiro says, for example, “I’m very much anti gay-marriage in the social sense. As a religious person, I think homosexuality is a sin, I think that lots of things are sins that people engage in, I think they should be free to engage in them.”

He might think our capacity to reason is largely what makes for our freedom to sin, but reason also shows the biological roots of our sexual orientation. And if homosexuality is as much a choice as heterosexuality, the God of patriarchal conservatives is a fraud, and their scriptures are works of tribal propaganda, not divine revelations.

The wiser Jewish attitude isn’t exemplified by this zealotry or by these crude prejudices, but by the jaded, pragmatic stance that’s backed by the hard-won experience of having been a conquered, nomadic people.

Monotheism and totalitarianism

In any case, if we focus on monotheism, we can see that Shapiro’s talk of “Judeo-Christian” culture is arbitrary. He leaves out Islam, but all three Abrahamic religions have been at each other’s throats precisely because of the self-destructiveness of monotheism. Each faith or sect deems itself the purest representation of ultimate truth, so the end justifies even the most appalling means for these religious partisans.

Moreover, the vision of that “unified God” and his all-embracing plan did give rise not just to the cults and tyrannies of the regimes that implemented those three religions, but to secular totalitarianism. Although Shapiro minimizes the religious basis of the twentieth century’s fascist regimes, John Gray’s Black Mass (2007) shows that secular utopianism was a Nietzschean substitute for the theistic original. Indeed, the Nazis even capitalized on the anti-Judaism that’s woven into the New Testament.

Shapiro wants to credit monotheism for the scientific concept of natural laws. That concept also derives from the protoscience of ancient Greek philosophy, but even if scientists did turn that faith in God’s plan for nature into methodological naturalism, into the tentative treatment of reality as having an intelligible order, we can ask whether that religious inspiration is a good thing.

If God’s plan is for us to dominate the planet, wouldn’t that justify consumerism and the rapacious growth of economies that threaten to bring about a sixth mass extinction event? And if that’s not God’s plan, or if God prefers for us to be humble stewards of the earth, who’s to say so on religious grounds? God works in mysterious ways, and we’re dealing here with fictions and priestly ravings.

Monotheism is like Pandora’s box. What closed the box and killed God was the secular enlightenment that ramified throughout the revolutions of modernity. Athens, then, is quite at war with Jerusalem. Shapiro recognizes the conflict between them, and he emphasizes the merits of the Western rapprochement. But the truce is superficial, and Shapiro’s libertarianism and jingoistic American patriotism have very little to do with Jewish humanistic humility and jaded pragmatism.

The self-destructive West

We can turn now to whether Western culture is indeed supreme, by contrasting Shapiro’s zealotry with the mature philosophical perspective on politics and religion, which he would call a falling away from the purity of our cultural foundations. Shapiro thinks we’re doomed to flounder if we forget the greatness of Western culture, but it’s at least as likely that that culture imploded and that it carried the seeds of its destruction.

All cultures do if Spengler is correct. But even if that’s not so, both philosophy and monotheism are disheartening and divisive and are therefore not so conducive to social stability. Both transmit great truths and existential inspirations, but the zealot sounds naïve and deranged when he or she puts philosophy and monotheism on pedestals. We all do this with what we love, explaining away the cherished thing’s faults. Yet if we’re trying to understand how we got where we are by adopting a philosophical perspective, we should be prepared to kill our darlings.

Philosophy is unpopular for a reason, which is that philosophy is more destructive than constructive. Nothing that sustains mass happiness survives philosophical scrutiny, and that certainly includes Shapiro’s egoistic principles that provide so many excuses for the plutocratic reign of sociopaths and self-absorbed consumers, which is unfettered capitalism.

With philosophy, for example, we see that monotheism is just a myth. Religions are based on fictions that are so captivating, we’re eager to suspend our disbelief in them. We live by those fictions because the unvarnished truth that gets at reality’s inhuman dimensions is appalling. Monotheism is a noble lie, at best. There is no divine plan behind the universe. Science’s descriptive laws aren’t social commandments, and solar systems aren’t artifacts. Neither are organic life forms, which evolved largely by natural, mindless pseudo-selection in which the environment culls unfit mutations to shape species. There’s no guarantee of perfect justice, nor is there any afterlife.

Again, Judaism comes closest to that modern existential jadedness that’s the legacy of Greco-Roman philosophy and protoscience. And what would a mass society look like that came at least unconsciously to that sober realization? It would look like the postmodern Western world.

You’d have desperate masses turning to fads, conspiracy theories, and substitute saviors such as demagogues and self-help gurus. You’d have misanthropic philosophers like me shooting down nonsense left and right. You’d have social unrest, populist backlashes, tribal divisions, and so on — because God is evidently dead, and we’ve lost faith in the idols that were meant to replace him. You’d have what philosophers called “the postmodern condition.”

Shapiro’s point is that we Westerners should be proud of our heritage, and we should take comfort in those shared foundations. But those foundations are perilous. Philosophy is a universal acid, and monotheism reifies the conservative’s authoritarian, mammalian longing to serve a perfect master or alpha male. In God’s evident absence, libertarians and authoritarians like Shapiro content themselves with the plutocrats thrown up by the free, wild market.

Many non-American conservatives are likely appalled by Donald Trump’s second presidential term.

They know in their bones that Trump is the worst, most corrupt president in American history. They don’t want to be associated with Trump’s authoritarianism, contempt for democracy, deranged narcissism, or acute anti-intellectualism.

More importantly, they don’t think conservatism entails Trumpism. They think conservatism is a separate set of principles and policies that has nothing to do with Trump’s gargantuan appetites and follies. Trumpism is an aberration, they assume, whereas conservatism is a venerable, coherent, sustainable political standpoint.

There are even some American conservatives who are anti-Trump in those respects.

Yet these never-Trump conservatives face a simple challenge:

State what conservatism is such that that political stance

• (1) differs from liberalism,

• (2) doesn’t imply Trumpism, and

• (3) isn’t just a deeply incoherent, self-negating hodgepodge.

I doubt any conservative can meet that challenge, but here are some nonstarters they might try.

Conservatism, they’ll say, is just prudence or caution, which obviously differs from Trump’s radicalism.

Alas, prudence isn’t a political ideology, and liberalism isn’t identical to incautious radicalism. Plenty of liberals are prudent too, meaning that they’re not head-in-the-clouds idealists, but they ground their policies in data and intensive planning. Technocratic liberals are far from being inherently imprudent. So, although this response succeeds in meeting (2), it fails to meet (1). Challenge not yet met.

Still, conservatives might insist that they’re more realistic than liberals, so conservative caution is grounded in pessimism about human nature. We shouldn’t try to deviate from natural norms, such as the evolutionary imposition of dominance hierarchies on social animals, since nature is far mightier than us, and we’re not as wise as the world or its supernatural source.

This response fails in the reverse way. Arguably, it succeeds in distinguishing conservatism from liberalism since it opposes pessimism to the liberal’s secular humanist confidence in our ability to solve our problems and progress without supernatural aid.

But the response fails to meet the second condition since Trump reveres nature too. Indeed, Trump and Stephen Miller take up a quasi-Nietzschean view of how life is a struggle for power between winners and losers. Any set of policies based on this “realism” or covert deference to “natural laws” would be consistent with Trumpism.

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Perhaps conservatism is supposed to be the respect for traditions. Yet while this might satisfy (2), it would fail to satisfy (1). Trump lives in the present moment of his survival instinct and reptilian scheming, having no capacity for higher-order thought or long-term planning, and no interest in understanding history. Moreover, Trump’s patent narcissism prevents him from caring about anything other than himself, including a tradition led by others.

Alas, centuries after the Enlightenment, liberalism also has a tradition. It’s the tradition of generating world-historic progress that started with the Italian Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, and the Industrial Revolution. So, an appeal to a general respect for tradition doesn’t distinguish conservatism from liberalism. Hence, this response fails to meet the first part of the challenge.

Suppose the conservative wants to be more specific. What counts isn’t traditionalism in general, but the respect for specific traditions, including not just that of classic liberalism, but monotheism and other ancient convictions. Conservatives support not only the liberal institutions of science, capitalism, democracy, and personal liberties (freedom of speech and thought), but also some ancient traditions, such as religious worship, patriarchy (sexism), theocracy (religious imperialism), and xenophobia (tribal racism, or the demonization of foreigners).

In effect, this is how the likes of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson would attempt to meet the challenge of distinguishing their “conservatism” from Trumpism. I’ve responded to their defenses elsewhere. Here, we can observe that this appeal to both ancient and modern philosophies is bound to run afoul of (3), the condition that conservatism should be real rather than a self-contradictory nothing burger.

For instance, I show elsewhere how Peterson’s “conservative manifesto” ends up being incoherent gibberish. Peterson confuses classic liberalism with conservatism, and he adds insult to injury with some lame, euphemistic appeals to illiberal values like “community,” “tradition,” and “unity,” which end up conflicting with classical liberal values, making for a mess that would fail to meet the above challenge.

Perhaps the anti-Trump conservative will appeal to the libertarian’s or neoliberal’s trust in “free markets,” thus distinguishing his or her laissez-faire conservatism from Trump’s heavy-handed mercantilism and reliance on meddling tariffs.

This might distinguish conservatism from socialism, “progressivism,” or the social democratic call for regulations of capitalism that correct for capitalism’s inherent instability, but not from classic liberalism. Libertarianism is just classic liberalism, as is evident from the common root word. In any case, libertarianism makes for only a cosmetic difference from Trumpism, so it also runs afoul of (2).

Free markets that prioritize the protection of private property with minimal governmental redistribution of wealth to maintain social stability end up producing monopolies or oligopolies that corrupt the plutocrats and sabotage democracy.

That’s just what Trump is: a corrupt plutocrat and demagogue who arose in a capitalist economy that hasn’t been socialist enough to prevent this kind of “populist” revolt that’s turned the country into a full-fledged, kakistocratic idiocracy. Compared to most other developed countries, America has already been especially libertarian, and the result was the Trumpian apocalypse. Apparently, libertarianism is consistent with Trumpism. Hence, this response fails to meet the challenge’s second condition.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

One thing we should learn from the Trumpian apocalypse is the true nature of “conservatism.” This nature has long been obscured because we focused too much on political rhetoric, and gave too much credit to the centrist media’s framing of a “political spectrum.” We prefer to think in tribal teams of us and them, teams that struggle for supremacy. If there’s a liberal side, there must also be a conservative one to make for a satisfying political contest and narrative. Otherwise, Western politics wouldn’t be sporting. What else could conservatism be, then, but a respectable modern political standpoint that has obviously clashed with liberalism for over a century?

Conservatives have worked tirelessly to sustain this image. Conservatives are supposed to stand for freedom, God, family, strength, order, justice, and so on. That’s been the rhetoric, but if conservatism as an independent, real movement has all along been consistent with Trumpism, that rhetoric must have been hollow. Just because conservatives have said they stood for X and Y doesn’t mean that the systematic effects of their policies align with those stated values. What conservatism that differs from liberalism produces is something like Trumpism, which is to say that most conservatives have all along been closeted authoritarians.

The reality of conservatism is a set of ancient prejudices, known roughly as the authoritarian personality. That personality prefers certain policies that produce a premodern (ancient or medieval) kind of society, one defined by monarchy, feudalism, patriarchy, theocracy, imperialism, and an elite minority’s suppression of the majority’s human rights (as in the institution of slavery, for instance).

What liberalism is or is supposed to be, you see, is liberation from the social effects of that authoritarian personality. Essentially, liberalism is the humanist celebration of people’s difference from wild animals, whereas conservatism implicitly or explicitly denies that there’s such a difference that should govern our social arrangements. As flawed as we are, we’re supposed to be able to progress and build an artificial civilization that’s largely anti-natural. This civilization doesn’t just succumb to amoral, wild compromises since it’s supposed to come closer to fulfilling the ideals we envision.

If some conservatives are horrified by Trump’s inhumanity, they need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask what they take conservatism to be. Are they just relabeling parts of liberalism “conservative,” obfuscating the matter to contribute to mass media narratives of tribal conflict and partisanship? Or are they dressing up the same vices and archaic prejudices that led to Trumpism, with flowery religious and secular rhetoric, again to obfuscate where things stand?

Where are the conservatives who both clarify the political landscape and oppose Trumpism and liberalism?

Here’s my eighth album, Bleeding Neon.

It’s a double synthwave album. Half of the songs are new, and half are covers of some songs from earlier albums. As with all the others, I wrote all the lyrics, and Suno.ai set them to music.

Bleeding Neon:

After doing a trilogy of slowcore albums, I wanted to return to music that rocks, and I think I succeeded with Bleeding Neon. If I had to choose some favourites, I’d pick from the new songs Regilded Age, Summit, Red Dragon, Icon, Ants, and Height of Awe. From the covers, I’d pick Light Speed, Hallowed Black Hole, Junkie, Superstars, and Blue Skies. But honestly, I’m happy with all of them.

It’s interesting that by the time I release one of these albums, I’m already working on the second one that will come out afterwards. So next up is a dream pop, shoegaze album with some light synthwave, and the one after that follows suit.

But likely all artists and content creators who work on big projects have this odd impression that their works are like brainchildren. Of course, content creators usually produce many of these “children,” one after the next, whereas most parents only have a few children. But all of these creators release their offspring to the public, and usually the offspring don’t exactly become world-famous. Typically, they’ll start their own families, but the parents will be some of the few folks in the world who care deeply about their children whom they raised.

This is what it’s likely being a non-superstar who releases content into the cultural stream, whether it’s music, articles, or presumably anything else: when you release a finished product, knowing that it won’t likely go viral, and even if it does, it will be a fad that’s eventually forgotten, your head is already in the next project. We create this content mainly for ourselves, loving it more than anyone else does, and we watch it get rejected and not get the attention we think it deserves — rather like parents who raise children who grow up to be adults that are sent into the world and often don’t fare as well as the doting parents think they should.

This is the disappointment baked into creativity. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the album, and turn on “closed captions” for the lyrics.

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Celestial Trips:

Strata:

Vagaries of Deep Time:

Algos in the Cave:

The two-party political system in the US makes it seem as if liberals and conservatives are evenly matched and locked in an irresolvable, Manichean struggle. The pretense is that there are two sets of political principles and values that are incommensurable, as though liberals and conservatives grew up on different planets.

What if it turned out, though, that there’s just one set of principles, and the other side has only sophistical pretexts and myths to disguise its crude, anachronistic prejudices? What if the upheavals of modernity — the revolutions of art, science, capitalism, industry, and democracy — pulled the rug out from under conservatives, so liberalism became the only game in town? What if conservatives had to capture liberal principles or face annihilation in the public square?

And what if the conservative’s true agenda were the providing of excuses for a regression to a virtual state of nature, as in a patriarchal, racist, slave-driving dominance hierarchy in which an amoral minority oppresses the majority? What if that agenda were dictated by the only authentic conservative philosophy, which amounts to social Darwinism, and what if both that agenda and its forthright reasoning were unspeakable because modernity became synonymous with progress, which is the opposite of stagnation?

This analysis may be anathema because it seems conspiratorial and uncharitable, perhaps even churlish. Let’s test it as a hypothesis, then, by running through the main conservative policies and contrasting their official rationales with the positing of social Darwinism, to see whether the foregoing hypothesis makes for the simpler explanation of the substance of modern conservatism.

Economic conservatism

Supply-side economics: This centerpiece of economic conservatism is also known as laissez-faire or free-market economic theory, the point of which is that market competition is a more efficient way of ensuring economic progress than is government intervention in the marketplace, so most or even all government functions should be privatized.

The fact that this theory is considered conservative is a crystal-clear case of how modern conservatives have eked out a space for their brand of politics by redefining classic liberalism as “conservative.” Laissez-faire economics began, of course, as a progressive criticism of absolute, monarchical control of the economy in the Middle Ages. Adam Smith said the economy could run itself, thanks to the unintended collective benefits of competition between self-interested individuals. Opposition to central planning of the economy was at the heart of liberalism because of its contrast with the entrenched status quo of aristocratic feudalism.

But there’s a reason modern conservatism became associated with this economic ideology. It turns out that the early modern, classic liberals were wrong. A free market is self-destructive rather than self-regulating. With no government support for the losers in a fierce economic competition for private gains, capitalism only reconstitutes the oppressive, pyramidal social structure that had persisted in ancient civilizations for thousands of years. Rule by nobles or aristocrats (those with elite breeding) was replaced by rule by the wealthy (plutocrats or capitalists, the owners of the means of production).

Specifically, as the wealthiest members, the oligarchs and robber barons, consolidated their power by buying off political representatives and regulators, they rigged the market to entrench their privileges, forming monopolies that stifled competition for themselves while ensuring that most workers would still have to compete in a brutal struggle for their survival. Wages froze for most workers, and the middle class shrank.

Thus, there were few consumers left to purchase the products to sustain the upper class, and there was little incentive for the poor masses to go back to work. The Great Depression — brought on by low wages, the proliferation of debt, and wild stock market speculation in the roaring 1920s — added insult to injury. Capitalism’s boom-and-bust cycle means that this isn’t a self-regulating economic system.

And just as Soviet communism depended on the gulags, in practice so-called free market economies rely on slave labour, often run by Third World dictators and taskmasters doing the dirty work of the richer countries. As automation and AI replace human workers, capitalism threatens to put most people out of work, which is hardly the recipe for a self-sustaining market.

Nevertheless, the fact that conservatives gravitate to these unintended effects of the classic liberal support for individualism and liberty is consistent with the foregoing hypothesis: capitalism re-establishes the sociobiological default of the dominance hierarchy, with a minority hoarding the resources and dominating the majority.

Meanwhile, those who put their faith in secular humanistic progress were repulsed by these results of capitalism, so they explored socialist or interventionist alternatives. In short, conservatives think there’s nothing wrong with the strict applications of classic liberalism, whereas liberals, progressives, or socialists think the history of applying those principles to economics called for a reformation of liberalism. Conservatives thus adopt the flaws of classic liberalism to provide excuses for the re-imposition of the pyramidal society that closeted authoritarians (“conservatives”) favour.

Low Taxes: Following from laissez-faire economics, the conservative argues that taxes should be cut as much as possible. The government should be starved to death so that the free market can manage all social functions. That’s the most extreme formulation of this libertarian conservatism, but it’s what “conservatives” essentially believe.

As Ronald Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” And he went on to say, “From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”

Evidently, Reagan was contrasting “self-rule,” as in a market of free, self-interested individuals, with rule by an “elite group” like a technocratic government that’s arrogant enough to think it can rule over others. Again, that line of argument is just a canard since in practice capitalism generates plutocracy, including billionaires whose whims dictate the circumstances of millions of other people.

In any case, there are likely many complicated economic rationales for lowering taxes. Yet those mathematical models are known for being literally fantastic, which means they assume utopian conditions that are nowhere realized. When the models fail to predict reality, the economist can say the model or the fantasy is blameless. The fault lies, rather, with reality for including “external” factors that are left out of the model. Like supernatural theologies, the economist’s models are thus unfalsifiable.

When the models capture something of reality, the world “approximates” the model, and when the model is way off base, the failure is blamed on the inevitable simplifications involved in any modelling. Again, there’s a more straightforward explanation of the conservative’s zeal for lowering taxes, an explanation that doesn’t have to take economists’ utopian fantasies seriously.

The social Darwinian idea would be to cut government down to size so it can’t act as a counterweight against the billionaire plutocrats. Whereas democratic government is nominally charged with the task of protecting all the country’s citizens, to enable them to fend for themselves, a big business is contractually obliged to be discriminatory and even sociopathic. Legally speaking, for example, an American company’s managers have no social responsibilities and are only supposed to enrich their stockholders.

Theoretically, then, a perfectly free market with a weak government would become not just a plutocracy but a kleptocracy. The wealthy few would capture the government functions, buying off all the regulators and even the judiciary, the police force, and the military, and we’d have a “modern,” postindustrial means of returning to absolute monarchy or aristocracy.

A cabal of wealthy nobles would run everything, and everyone else would be indebted and would need to pay them rent. Short of something like a zombie apocalypse, that’s the closest we can get to a return to life in the wild while preserving our modern illusions of progress. And that warped conservative longing dictates the starving of the government “beast” — to allow for the rise of private-sector beasts.

No welfare state: Based also on the above liberal economic theory, the government should get out of the business of providing environmental protections or public healthcare benefits, since either would be a case of central planning, an arbitrary picking of winners and losers. All business matters should be left up to the unfettered market, and according to neoliberals, practically all of life can be interpreted in business terms.

In the economist’s fantasy world, the market is self-regulating, and all the external factors are irrelevant because they’re outside the model’s scope. Therefore, we can pretend in the real world that the natural environment won’t react to the short-term thinking required to grow an economy, or that buyers and sellers will moderate their behaviour out of self-interest rather than, say, resorting to free-riding and selfishly condemning future generations to maximize the private gains of those who live in the present.

Likewise, according to free-market theory, private healthcare insurers or hospitals wouldn’t have a conflict of interest between helping patients and maximizing their corporate profits. Any such conflict would be psychological and would fall outside the economist’s scope. Out of sight, out of mind.

We can imagine that conservatives are inspired by such tortured economic reasoning, or we can take as axiomatic that modern conservativism is practically equivalent to social Darwinism and see if we can derive these policies from that latter basis.

A social Darwinian would renounce higher-order thinking in toto as being incompatible with the postapocalyptic brutishness you’d need to survive in the state of nature. Remember, the goal would be to model civilization on the habitats that predominate in social animal species in the wild. If consumer capitalism undermines progressive society by wreaking havoc with the ecosystems, that will only usher in a swifter return to the savage status quo.

As for the blocking of public healthcare options, on the surface the reasoning is that there should be no free lunches. If you can’t afford to buy something, you don’t deserve to get it for free. This, of course, overlooks the fact that tax dollars can be pooled to purchase anything, including public healthcare or education. The welfare benefits wouldn’t be free since they’d be paid for by taxes. The libertarian would insist that his or her taxes shouldn’t go to helping anyone else, which only means that the libertarian doesn’t understand the point of taxes.

But there’s a simpler, albeit perverse basis for the conservative’s miserliness in the case of healthcare. The strict social Darwinian point would be to broadcast our true order of rank in the dominance hierarchy. When this ranking is clouded by government assistance, we no longer know where we stand not just in the class system, but in the all-important evolutionary race.

For the social Darwinian, there should be clear lines between the human equivalents of alphas, betas, gammas, and the rest. Those who can’t afford to pay for their healthcare — or their education, housing, security, and so on — without the benefit of other people’s money (known as “taxes”) will be in far worse shape in the libertarian’s dream society. The have-nots would be vulnerable, ill-bred peasants with short life spans. Consequently, their subservience to the upper class would be apparent for all to see, which is what really seems to matter to the conservative’s regressive, authoritarian mindset.

Immigration: Here the conservative argues that immigration should be severely restricted to prevent foreigners from taking local jobs. Superficially, the reasoning is like the opposition to so-called “affirmative action.” Again, the libertarian idea is that we should stand on our merits, and be responsible for our failures and entitled to the rewards for our successful labours in life. No free handouts, no interfering with the efficiency of the market. Those who don’t grow up in the country haven’t paid their dues and don’t deserve the opportunities generated by the local free economy.

But that line of argument is belied by the business community, which is in favour of immigration to fill low-skill jobs. The richer the country, the lower the birth rate tends to be, so immigration is needed to fill out the service sector. And like the impoverished labourers in dictatorships, immigrants can be exploited by companies that are always looking for ways to lower their costs. Conservatives are naturally in favour of such corporate exploitation, so the conservative stance on immigration is incoherent.

But that’s not news since all conservative economic reasoning is essentially liberal in the first place, which is to say there’s no conflict between liberalism and much that passes for something illiberal, namely “conservatism.” As George Will says in The Conservative Sensibility, “American conservatives are the custodians of the classical liberal tradition.” But that means that sanctimonious American conservatism is self-contradictory from the outset.

In any case, there’s a social Darwinian consideration that might drive the conservative’s prejudice against immigrants. The goal would be to preserve the nation’s “purity” or the integrity of a certain bloodline or gene pool. This racism, which became overt in Nazi ideology, is implicit in animal behaviour. Many males in animal species are obsessed with securing access to mates and preventing rivals from interfering with their chances of passing on their genes to the next generation. The conservative’s opposition to immigration could be driven by racism.

Granted, female animals are often in favour of entertaining a variety of suitors and choosing between them since the females bear the greater cost of having to carry and rear the offspring. We might expect that social Darwinian human females would be in favour of immigration to increase their mating options, assuming the male immigrants are often single and of healthy stock. Yet the (heterosexual) female perspective on immigration would be subordinate in conservative circles because of a facet of social conservatism, to which we can now turn.

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Social conservatism

“Family Values”: This is a euphemism for patriarchy. These traditional values entail that there should be a division of labour in the family because men are supposed to lead and be the breadwinners, women should run the household, and young people should respect their elders. According to these “values,” real families are heterosexual, so homosexuals are regarded as deviant.

The main justification for these values has been religious in that God, the scriptures, and the priesthood are supposed to reveal the divine ideal for structuring family and society. These justifications end up being appeals to theocratic force rather than merited authority, though, because the most spiritual traditions in every religion — including the most eclectic religion, which is Hinduism — are dedicated to the opposite of family values, to renouncing the entire material world, including egoism, sexuality, and the very existence of nature, which is viewed as “fallen” and illusory.

If we confine the discussion to American conservatism, it’s hard to avoid pitting the Christian conservative’s family values against the New Testament’s plain hostility to the conventional life cycle. The world’s end was supposed to have been imminent in the first century CE, so our primary duty was to abase ourselves before God and prepare for a supernatural life in God’s kingdom.

Indeed, at the spiritual core of religions is subversive renunciation or asceticism, based on a vision of an ideal realm or a hidden metaphysical unity that undercuts our naïve animalistic habits, including the formation of families, the ambition of competing to earn a living in society, and so on. Thus, the religious defense of family values is a nonstarter.

Luckily, the true reason for these values isn’t hard to find. Once again, what animates conservatives is just social Darwinism, a crude reduction of culture to sociobiology. Evolution drives our mammalian instinct to pursue the most efficient means of fulfilling our natural life cycle. Puberty, sexual desire, raising children, the drive to succeed in some social occupation — all are parts of that cycle.

Of course, our species has been polygynous (one-to-many partners), polyandrous (many-to-many partners), and monogamous (one-to-one partners) in different eras, depending on the circumstances, and these social systems typically benefit some people more than others.

For example, for some 3.4 million years in the Stone Age, the primary social unit for hunter-gatherers wasn’t the nuclear family but the tribe, and under those conditions of living in the wild as nomads, the premium wasn’t on ownership of property. Thus, polygyny or polyandry would have made more sense than monogamy. Property and responsibilities were shared rather than rigidly enforced by a social hierarchy.

But with agriculture and sedentary life in large settlements and civilizations came greater social specialization and the rise of a dominant social class. Most societies have been patriarchal. Men owned their wives, and some men owned other men and women as slaves. Also, due to the larger populations, the tribe could no longer be the default social unit. Families took over that function to accommodate the individual’s special role in society.

The real question, then, is why conservatives in some historical era or culture prefer some family arrangement. And regardless of the sanctimonious religious rationale the conservative may reach for, the more revealing answer will be that that arrangement benefits the dominant members of that society in strictly evolutionary terms. Typically, the conservative prefers monogamy or polygamy, for example, because this structure facilitates patriarchy and the reinforcement of a dominance hierarchy, and what the conservative most wants is the elimination of personhood via nature’s manipulation of us as though we were wild animals.

Thus, the family values of American conservatives are patriarchal and authoritarian because men are in control of that society, men flourish in the capitalistic competition that requires private property laws, and men can maintain their dominance by keeping their children submissive and instilling them with patriarchal values. But the true power behind the throne of patriarchy is a primitive sorting process in which social power is distributed by amoral, evolutionary (mammalian) tricks and contests.

Religious fundamentalism: Conservatives are typically devout members of a religion, which can give the impression that conservatives are idealistic rather than reductionistic. American conservatives, for instance, are often Evangelical Christians. But there are also conservative Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, and in each case, the conservatives take the most hardline stance in defending a literalistic interpretation of their faith and religious practices. Of course, conservatives will defend their religious stance on theological grounds.

But in the modern period, those hardline religious beliefs and practices have become preposterous and barbaric since they violate scientific and philosophical standards as well as the prevailing humanistic faith in our capacity for secular progress. Why, then, do modern conservatives double down in these ways?

The answer is that the fundamentalist’s creed provides a pretext for the lifestyle that’s already sustained on evolutionary grounds. Appealing to those grounds directly would be quite fallacious and obnoxious, so the conservative needs to make it seem as though God ordains patriarchy, priesthood, or war. (The fallacy would be the naturalistic one of confusing what’s normal with what’s good.) The conservative distorts scripture or demonizes opposing interpretations and sects to prop up a wholly mammalian, palpably unspiritual lifestyle.

A glaring example of this in the US is the prosperity gospel, with which many conservatives drum up pseudo-Christian rationales for capitalism and greed, for forms of hubris that would have been antithetical to Jesus’s worldview, given a plain reading of the New Testament. It’s obvious in this case that the conservative’s religion is just propaganda for a state-of-nature free-for-all in which the winner lives like a king while the losers languish and die off in disgrace or submit to the dominator for scraps from his table.

Rather than adopting the spiritual core of any of the world’s religions, the political conservative sanctifies a religion’s most politically tainted, exoteric storyline. In any case, God’s tyranny over the angels, humans, and animals reifies the conservative’s deeper faith in the evolutionary sorting of social creatures. In the myths, God rules over us in the way that the alpha male should rule over his dominance hierarchy. The myths are just cover stories for what’s effectively social Darwinism.

Anti-abortion/pro-life: Perhaps the conservative’s most vehement certainty is that women have no right to terminate their fetuses. The conservative calls this a “pro-life” position, which tells us only that the conservative is compelled to be a genius at marketing because his or her worldview is appalling in the modern context.

Obviously, conservatives aren’t pro-life in any consistent sense since they’re also zealous apologists for capital punishment, promoters of gun ownership, and jingoistic proponents of military interventions. The science indicates that a fetus in the first trimester is hardly a full person with any moral rights. The religious justifications for the anti-abortion stance also fall by the wayside because the scriptures are silent on the issue and because God would be the most “murderous” aborter of fetuses and waster of eggs and seeds, not to mention the greatest killer of adults by natural causes.

But the anti-abortion policy follows patriarchal “family values.” The point is for men to dominate women by denying women full autonomy and control over their bodies. That’s the social hierarchy that conservatives prefer because they’re regressive authoritarians who are inclined to prey on others or to submit to a master. Conservatives draw their politics and social policies not from any authentic spiritual ideals but from their crudest impulses and prejudices.

Gun-ownership: American conservatives love guns, and they celebrate the Second Amendment to the US Constitution as the basis for their opposition to regulations on gun ownership. But just as they distort scriptures to provide excuses for their patriarchal agenda, they twist the law to provide cover for their evolutionary interest in guns.

As is clear from the wording of that amendment, a license was given to American citizens to own guns to form “a well-regulated militia,” which was taken to be “necessary to the security of a free state.” Not only are most American gun owners not members of anything like a “well-regulated militia,” but such a militia is no longer needed for the security of a free state. True, theoretically, an armed militia could help prevent the rise of a tyrant who takes control of the military. But in the twenty-first century, no group of armed American citizens could repel the American military because the US is a military superpower. So the Second Amendment is outdated.

If the appeal to the Constitution is just a pretext, and the love of guns is obviously un-Christian, what could the real reason be for conservative Americans’ celebration of guns? As usual, when perplexed by conservative policies, you need merely assume the worst to understand their basis.

The purpose of American gun culture, including the backing of the NRA, the blocking of sensible gun legislation, the mocking of peaceful people, and the fact that the American citizenry owns 400 million guns, is to destabilize American society, to foster a return to the wasteland conditions in which the authoritarian personality feels most comfortable. Just as terrorist organizations exploit failed states such as Afghanistan, modern conservatives mean to sabotage progressive society so they can rule or submit on more savage terms.

Anti-modernism as Social Darwinism

There are other conservative policies that could be similarly deflated, but you get the idea. Perhaps, though, you’re wondering whether this line of argument is cheapened by the unfalsifiability of evolutionary psychology.

If you could give an evolutionary reading of everything people do by telling a “just-so story,” it’s no wonder you could derive modern conservatism from covert social Darwinism. You could just as well say that George Lucas made Star Wars not because he wanted to tell an entertaining story but because he wanted to be rich and famous and to fulfill his genetic imperative to puff himself up so he could attract or hold on to a mate. Or you could say that Gandhi fought the British imperialists not on spiritual grounds but because he resented foreign rule which thwarted his ambitions.

Some such reductive explanations will be more strained than others, and any such explanation will be strengthened if it can be corroborated. If there’s a pattern such as the one I aimed to establish above, in which the official case for some policies is systematically untenable and all the policies follow easily from positing a social Darwinian grudge against civilized progress, that reductive explanation may illuminate the situation.

In any case, there’s a clear counterexample, which is to say a set of policies that isn’t easily derivable from a preference for a state of savagery. This set is just the one that defines modernity, namely the progressive policy platform of liberal humanism. After all, the modern age is all about transcending the primitive status quo, including monarchy, kleptocracy, patriarchy, feudalism, slavery, and dogmatism.

Take, for example, democracy. Is it so easy to derive that political system from social Darwinism? Not at all, because democracy is quite unnatural, as is everything else that’s modern in being grounded on the revolutions of science, capitalistic industry, secular enlightenment (freedom of thought), and humanistic art. What’s natural is for social species to form dominance hierarchies, rigidify the pecking order and the chain of command, and centralize authority by way of maintaining social cohesion without any recourse to a higher morality.

Even in species in which cooperation is the norm, as in wolf packs and human hunter-gatherers, there are divisions of labour and pecking orders. Prehistoric men excelled at hunting wild game, and women excelled at gathering foods, crafting supplies, and rearing the children. That division of labour was driven largely by the differences between the bodies of men and women.

True, prehistoric human tribes might have been relatively egalitarian, but that was because the nomadic lifestyle prevented the hoarding of possessions. Civilization tapped into the more universal evolutionary strategy of forming oligarchies or rigid social hierarchies that concentrate power and promote a leader.

By giving each voter equal political power, however, democracy does the opposite. Democracy runs counter to the extreme inequality that prevailed in most civilizations before the modern period. Whereas hunter-gatherers had no choice but to cooperate to survive in the wild, members of a republic choose to view each other as equals out of respect for some unnatural ideal, some vision of how things ought to be.

And you could go down the list of progressive values and note how they’re explicitly intended to transcend mammalian norms, deriving as they do from revolutionary modern humanism.

How about firearms regulation? Is that based on some primitive drive to end the progressive experiment of transcending the animal life cycle? No, liberals want to regulate the ownership of guns because they recognize that guns are dangerous, and they value all human life, not just their tribe or caste. Life is relatively cheap in the wild, but human life is precious to those with progressive sensibilities. We view ourselves as people rather than animals, recognizing our godlike capacities for self-consciousness, reason, self-control, and creativity.

This analysis of conservatism stands, then, as an indictment of the shallowness of conservative excuses for their effective, perhaps unconscious ideology. In dealing with conservatives, you can’t go wrong if you disregard their sales pitches and assume that at the heart of their worldview is something like social Darwinian resentment, a grudge against all aspects of progressive modernity, and a half-baked, fallacious yearning for the natural, wild default in human affairs.

Trumpism has been apocalyptic not just for liberals but conservatives, too.

After all, American conservatives had to decide whether to succumb to the cult that papers over the new Republicans’ den of thieves and scoundrels, or join the never-Trump political wilderness and attempt to distinguish true conservatism from the Trumpian madness.

In 2022, for instance, Tom Nichols, the conservative writer and professor at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote “Confessions of a Conservative Apostate” in The Atlantic, in which he repudiated Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.

Nichols said, “The conservatives, in any case, have become completely un-conservative. The traditional conservative emphasis on law and order and on limited government has not held the GOP’s theocratic-nutball wing in check. The same people who decried the growth of executive power now worship a sociopathic real-estate con man as a demigod.”

Yet in a negative review of the article at The National Review, called “Tom Nichols Never Really Understood Conservatism,” Nate Hochman said that ‘what Nichols misses is that the “theocratic-nutball wing” is far closer to the traditional understanding of conservatism than the libertarian individualism that he embraces.’

Whereas Nichols argues that the social order begins with “individual freedom without the presence of the state,” Hochman cites Russel Kirk, who passed for a conservative political philosopher and who said that “the conservative finds that the state is ordained of God.”

This is because, as Kirk quoted Edmund Burke as saying, “Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can be done only by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue.”

This aligns with the standard view of conservatism, found for instance in the PolSci Institute’s “Key Characteristics of Conservatism: Tradition, Authority, and Human Imperfection.” That article, too, takes the Burkean view that we should be skeptical about our ability to improve ourselves and thus our condition in life:

Conservatives hold a fundamentally skeptical view of human nature, believing that people are inherently flawed and limited in their capacity for reason and moral behavior. This isn’t necessarily a pessimistic view — it’s more of a realistic assessment that acknowledges human weaknesses while still appreciating human potential.

This perspective on human imperfection leads conservatives to value what they call “prejudice” — not in the sense of unfair bias, but as inherited wisdom and intuitive understanding passed down through generations. They argue that ordinary people often possess practical wisdom that learned intellectuals might miss. A village elder’s understanding of local customs, for instance, might be more valuable than an urban planner’s theoretical knowledge.

Pessimism about human nature

Notice, though, the wishy-washiness of saying that conservatives aren’t supposed to be pessimistic, since while they posit human weaknesses, they also appreciate our potential. No one thinks humans can do no wrong, so this platitude about our inherent imperfection doesn’t end up distinguishing conservatives from liberals. Sure, we have both limitations and special, creative abilities to progress. Liberals would be happy to accept that balanced view of human nature.

No, wishy-washiness aside, what ought to distinguish conservatives is a medieval emphasis on our limitations: we shouldn’t even dream of progressing or trying to fix our social problems because we’re so inherently flawed, so we should be content with God-given stasis, as in a stagnant, dogmatic, neofeudal, theocratic, patriarchal, imperial arrangement.

Yet, in practice, the wishy-washiness is crucial since the late-modern conservative wants the more convenient option of affirming both our fallibility and our progressive potential. This way, you see, the conservative can rationalize her civility and use of all the fruits of progress that demonstrate that people differ crucially (but not absolutely) from animals. But the conservative also wants to save face in refusing to help perfect herself by disavowing her authoritarian prejudices. So she needs to identify as a “conservative” who somehow opposes modernity’s liberal, progressive, secular humanist ethos.

Western pessimism about human nature goes back to Augustine’s Pauline view that human nature is depraved, which is why we needed God to save us from hell, the consequence of our imperfection.

That Christian view derives, in turn, from ancient Jewish resentment and satire, found in monotheistic Isaiah, for instance. Here was the dynamic: ancient Jews were perennially oppressed by polytheistic empires, but Jews observed that these empires came and went. So, Jews developed monotheism based on an existential perspective that recognized absurdities in history and sought relief by positing a transcendent, supernatural power. In the Hellenistic period, Jews were influenced by Platonic dualism, which in turn was influenced by Jainism, Buddhism, and the Upanishads.

Indeed, the whole Axial Age distinguished between the supposed monistic reality of a permanent, perfect substance, and the illusions of the natural field in which a plurality of things appears to change.

Although we were people with immortal souls, our bodies were part of nature, so we had to be as flawed as all the other material copies of mathematically flawless forms, as Plato put it. Christians adopted the Zoroastrian theological interpretation of this dualism, which is to say that they demonized nature and thus our potential to progress without divine aid. Jesus showed us how to free ourselves from the trap of the fallen, apparently godless universe. We need merely to accept Jesus’s sacrificial payment for our sin debt, and God will spare us the hell we deserve, out of infinite grace.

Now, as you should be able to tell, something fishy happened there at the end. The theological rigmarole looks like a distraction or a rationalization. Conservatives are supposed to be appalled by nature, preferring a transcendent, supernatural source of some moral commandments or myths that elevate us. Yet in practice, conservatives insist on treating everyone as though they were wild animals. The commandments and myths in question end up apologizing for naturally imposed dominance hierarchies, meaning the gross social inequalities that divide people into tribes or castes.

All of which is utterly opposed to the post-medieval alternative of the humanistic standpoint, which is that, while people have animal bodies and did evolve from other mammals, nature evidently negates itself in its productivity. Animals can turn gradually into people, just as fish turned into land-walking, air-breathing amphibians, reptiles, and dinosaurs, and dinosaurs turned into birds.

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Anti-intellectualism

Note also the anti-intellectualism in the conservative’s appeal to folk wisdom, as indicated by the end of that PolSci passage. Sure, book smarts differ from street smarts, so it’s possible to be overly educated in one respect, while lacking education in another. But again, the effect of this skepticism towards philosophy, science, and intellectualism is that it covers for the average conservative’s closeted authoritarian personality.

What philosophical reflection shows is that humanism is justified, so we shouldn’t settle for grossly unfair natural social arrangements such as dictatorships, neofeudal economies, or sexist or racist cultures. If intellectuals tend to side with liberalism or secular humanism — these being the philosophical drivers of the modern institutions that transformed Europe, including science, capitalism, democracy, and free-thinking arts — conservatives must denigrate intellectualism to spare themselves a reckoning with their anachronistic intuitions.

Again, we should expect an unprincipled hedging here, so that a careful conservative won’t be wholly opposed to either intellectual meta-reflection or folk prejudice, tradition, or intuition. She’ll slide from one to the other as convenience and self-interest dictate, making her an individualistic liberal who simply hasn’t come to grips with the implications of the social contract. She aims to prey on society, hoodwinking folks with distractions and obfuscations, pretending she’s liberal or modern in some respects, while voting for regressive, tribal political parties.

Skepticism and performative self-contradiction

Let’s return to the review of Nichols’ anti-Trump conservatism. Nichols is just a classic liberal or libertarian who, like Jordan Peterson in his so-called “conservative manifesto,” fails to distinguish conservatism from liberalism, but just adds to modern humanism some ancient “traditions” based on anachronistic ignorance and authoritarian prejudices.

The reviewer’s distinction, though, between individualism and tribalism is relevant. Early liberals were individualists since they meant to free peasants and merchants from their medieval status in a dominance hierarchy of castes. What distinguishes people from animals is our rational autonomy, our ability to make decisions based on independent reasoning and perspectives. So a liberal society allows individuals to decide for themselves how they want to live, provided that they don’t interfere with others’ equal freedom to decide for themselves.

That classic liberalism was based on skepticism towards medieval metanarratives that rationalized gross injustices with Christian theology. The Church used the revolutionary, countercultural Jesus as a mascot to justify torture, thought control, wars of conquest, sexist and racist oppression, demonization of foreigners, and a host of natural, tribally imposed compromises.

Contrary to Burke’s audacity, skepticism is a liberal hallmark, not a conservative one. How do we know that that’s so? Think it through: if skepticism is the intensive exercise of reason, and animals don’t reason so much, skeptics must differ significantly from wild animals. Thus, if we’re natural in some ways, we must be anti-natural or “supernatural” in others.

Again, nature’s creativity negates itself, which is to say that things aren’t permanent in nature. Things come and go, or they become something else. Animals evolve into people, so those who have the capacity for skepticism (as in meta-doubts that thwart instinctive concessions or routine submissions to older forms of order) shouldn’t be treated like animals. Hence, the liberal’s search for progressive ways of organizing society.

Burke attempted to turn this skepticism around on liberals, as though there were a conservative form of skepticism towards modern thought, including humanism. Alas, that’s self-negating, so it’s a nonstarter for the reason just given. The Burkean conservative is like a skeptic who tries to deny René Descartes’ logic that if you entertain a skeptical thought, you must exist at least as a thinker. The ability to think skeptically is supposed to undermine the modern humanist view that hyper-thinkers are people rather than animals, and that people civilize themselves and search for anti-natural improvements on the wild status quo.

But that lands the conservative in a performative self-contradiction since the act of being so skeptical supports rather than undermines humanism, and demonstrates a difference between people and animals. People have a cerebral cortex that sustains deep, second-order thoughts, and a will to apply them with deliberate, idealistic terraforming. Animals don’t. So don’t get it twisted: skepticism supports liberalism, not conservatism.

What the Burkean conservative must mean by “skepticism” is fatalism, so here again would be a hidden appeal to medieval stagnation and a preference for naturally imposed social arrangements (dominance hierarchies via monarchy, neofeudalism, patriarchy, theocracy, and virtual slavery of the masses).

Individualism and the lower class’s elevation

Humanism is a curious doctrine, then, since it posits that our species is special. Each of us is a person rather than an animal, in psychological and moral senses.

Now, individualism can be exaggerated, as when neoclassical economists used this standpoint to excuse the antisocial tendencies of the plutocrats who end up running laissez-faire economies and sabotaging democracy. An overemphasis on personal liberties can also exacerbate the existential meaning crisis, or feed into Big Tech’s fragmentation of consumer societies with social media. We come to prefer parasocial relationships and forget how to be intimate or to have heartfelt conversations.

Secular humanists are individualists, but they’re also aware that people are social mammals, so we form groups, such as families, religions, and nations. Conservatives aren’t exactly collectivists as opposed to individualists since they assume that elite individuals — the dominators of a natural competition — have special rights. That is, conservatism isn’t about subordinating individual rights to a collective good. Instead, conservatives deny the egalitarian essence of humanism, the view that all people have equal rights due to their personhood, regardless of their gender, age, creed, or income.

What conservatives affirm, as judged by the effects of their policies, if not their rhetoric (which can be evasive and misleading), is that justice is found in the natural sorting of individuals into castes. We can put this in Friedrich Nietzsche’s terms of masters and slaves. In a dominance hierarchy, some members of a group excel more than others, and the elite members deserve a greater share of the resources. In evolution, this process isn’t normative but genetically determined since the natural environment kills off unfit members and groups, and genetic traits are adapted to transmit the fittest genes to the next generation.

In this respect, conservatism is socially Darwinian. The Nazis were thus openly “conservative” in waging a war against supposedly less fit races or societies. True, that dark view of evolution isn’t so accurate, since while wild animals are often amoral in their struggle to survive, they also cooperate. The natural struggle isn’t a “will to power,” as Nietzsche put it. Instead, self-empowerment is the fixation on one genetic mutation, psychopathy, which Nietzsche lauded, in effect, as the Übermensch’s superpower that enables the dominator to creatively overcome obstacles.

From the sadistic, psychopathic standpoint, to which winners often succumb as their domination corrupts their character, losers deserve to be punished. By contrast, humanists seek to elevate losers, deeming all people equally precious in the existential context in which personhood is anomalous in an impersonal, godless universe. Put differently, humanists take the big-picture view of nature in which all people are losers because we’re alienated anomalies who must save ourselves and each other.

In any case, conservatism is often the defense of an aggrieved party that’s in danger of sliding into obsolescence. Whereas Nietzsche said the slave classes are attracted to Christian morality to justify their resentment and inability to defeat the upper classes with a head-on confrontation, the lower classes are rather inclined to be conservative.

Liberalism is for highly educated intellectuals who understand the big picture, and upper-class psychopaths aren’t ideological at all. Their relevance is in providing resentful lower-class members a model to envy. For undereducated, rural folks like Donald Trump’s supporters, so-called conservatism amounts to socialism for white, bigoted “Christians,” based on fear of competition or cooperation with foreigners. That is, conservatism here is little more than the old tribal prejudice of racism, theocratic sadism, or xenophobia.

The humanist impulse is to emphasize everyone’s underlying humanity, yet the conservative thinks tribally, especially when the conservative belongs to a losing tribe. In that case, the conservative turns into a “populist” or explicit authoritarian, calling for the government to restore this lower class to its former glory. Again, this isn’t a principled ideology, but just a perverse appeal to the root condition of liberalism: the war of all against all in the state of nature that’s supposed to motivate rational individuals to enter into a social contract of moral compromises.

Rather than trusting in that implicit contract, conservatives prefer the kind of war they imagine predominates in the state of nature. But they prefer culture war only when they have a reasonable chance of winning it under a strongman’s banner. In the long run, these uncloseted authoritarians lose out since a stronger force will come along and dominate them in turn, treating these traditionalists with the same trolling monstrousness they lavished on outsiders. As the ancient Jews understood, all empires come and go.

Secular humanism is the chance for something fairer and more permanent, a rational society based on scientific understanding of how people differ from animals, and thus how our species can advance by improving on evolutionary kludges.

One of the main obstacles to humanism is the conservatives’ insistence on saving face with regressive policies, as opposed to learning how to improve themselves by outgrowing their closeted authoritarian prejudices.

One of the mysteries in American society is how the anti-American authoritarian Donald Trump twice got elected as the US president.

A large part of the answer is that he won white Evangelical Christian support in the southern states. That’s a paradox since Christians are supposed to know better. They’re not supposed to disgrace themselves by falling for a virtual antichrist without at least putting up a fight. They sided with the gross idol of Trump rather than Jesus.

So what gives?

Trumpism and Christian morality

In his article “Why People Don’t Vote For Atheists,” the Christian apologist James W. Miller tries to solve this mystery of why so many white Evangelical Christians preferred to vote for Donald Trump over a liberal Democrat.

Miller says they appreciated Trump’s pretense of caring about Christianity, since that’s preferable to active opposition to theism and Christianity, which is what you’d expect from a liberal candidate who’s more sympathetic to secular culture.

As Miller says, “the choice between someone who wants to kick you out of the room and someone who thinks it’s important to have you in the room is an easy decision to make. People are holding their noses about the president’s moral behavior for fear that the alternative is to be completely shut out.”

Again, “Christians will vote for a pretend Christian more eagerly than for an overt atheist.”

(Now, Joe Biden is a Catholic, and Kamala Harris is a Baptist, but leave that aside since Miller would likely construe liberal Christians as effectively atheists.)

The deeper reason for this preference, Miller says, is that conservative (real) Christians don’t trust atheists because atheists have no sustainable reason to be moral. Atheists can be moral if they’re raised, for instance, in “Western culture, saturated in the residue of Judeo-Christian values, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years with survival instincts that have given rise to impulses like empathy and kin altruism.”

But atheists have no metaphysical grounding for the assumption that right is different from wrong. They have no compelling story to explain why they or anyone else should be good rather than bad. As Miller says, “All atheists have is what they can imagine and add to millions of years of amoral evolutionary tinkering.” What they have is mere “emotional froth on the evolutionary wave. It’s just a survival instinct.”

All atheists can say is that somehow morality “emerges” from an amoral universe. “Morality is a brute fact of existence. Don’t ask too many questions about how it got there.” If nature is godless, the emergence of right and wrong is a profound mystery, so if atheists are baffled by morality, they could just as easily twist their impression of the mystery to rationalize their vices and bad choices. They’d be like monkeys tapping away at a computer they don’t understand.

The atheist ‘can’t tell me why “bad” supervenes on pain or why empathy should be fundamentally binding. The atheist can simply recognize that evolution has wired her for atheism, realize she doesn’t want to embrace its obligations, and reject it for a fully hedonistic life.’

So while they understand that Trump is a loathsome figure, what conservative Christians are supposed to understand in voting for him twice is that “on theism, morality makes perfect sense. There is a God who has designed us to function in certain ways. Certain kinds of functioning are just healthier and more attuned to our design.” Thus, “we are happier if we live according to our design.”

Also, the Christian can say that the “Designer showed up in the flesh 2000 years ago to show us how life should be lived,” and that “in the end, the quality of our lives will be evaluated by the Designer, and that evaluation consists of whether or not we have lived according to our design, which is how we were supposed to live.”

The upshot is that

On theism, morality is grounded in the correspondence between the nature of God, the nature of human beings, the faculties of moral perception human beings have, and the nature of moral facts. All of these things correspond to one another harmoniously.

Here, morality finds a natural home. It fits perfectly in this worldview. There are no mental leaps to understand or explain where morality came from or why it’s obligatory. It doesn’t require blind faith the way atheism does.

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Trumpism and Southern American resentment

By my gauge, there are roughly a thousand insurmountable problems with that account.

To be sure, conservative Christians think they have the moral high ground, and they condemn coastal elite culture for being immoral. But what the Trump cult of MAGA shows is that these “Christians” don’t actually have that high ground. These Christians aren’t more moral than liberals or atheists, nor do they understand morality better, nor can they explain what morality is without being laughed out of the room by nearly every educated audience in the developed world.

What atheists are left to “imagine” isn’t morality but the audacity of this white Evangelical rationalization: somehow conservative Christians who support the flagrant evil of Trumpism are supposed to be better friends with morality than liberal atheists who share the sentiments of the Scandinavians who are busy flourishing in northern Europe? Hold my beer while I tear this bizarre canard to shreds.

First of all, let’s understand the real reason the southern states supported Trump. No, it had nothing to do with anything as quaint as “morality.” Rather, the support was based on resentments that stretch back to the American Civil War. What rural southerners see are the big-city, blue-state liberals competing and progressing in cosmopolitan fashion, and carrying the entire country by generating wealth from free trade and running America’s institutions. Precisely because America’s conservative Christians are hampered by their anachronistic dogmas and grievances, they’re held back. Thus, instead of progressing, they languish and lash out.

Just like the beleaguered Germans who craved a tyrant to vent their grievances after their humiliation in the First World War, America’s resentful rural Christians cry out for a Final Solution, a neo-fascist movement to sweep away American progress and tear the country down to their sad level. Trump is their “retribution,” which is literally what he promised he’d be.

Trumpian retribution has nothing whatever to do with morality. Trump’s manifest personality disorder prevents him from empathizing with anyone else, including his children. Trump’s malignant narcissism is a seat of evil. The Orwellian gall of suggesting that Trumpism reflects a higher, supernatural sense of rightness should make sense only to these “conservative,” rural “Christians” who lack higher education. Miller has no such excuse, so perhaps he’s just trolling atheists or pandering to these Christians in the familiar Trumpian fashion.

Indeed, the conservative sense of rightness has always been anti-modern. The idea is that secular progress is anathema because conservatives are closeted authoritarians who prefer the kind of dominance hierarchies that ancient and medieval societies featured.

Conservatives want to dominate or submit because that’s how their personalities roll: far from expressing any divine morality, they’re beholden to mammalian territorial and fight-or-flight instincts. Monotheism is just an excuse for domination, as the Lord is promised to reign over us forever, and those who reject him are expected to suffer in perdition. That’s the primitive dominance hierarchy writ large, reified in mythic fantasy. Aligning that narrative with morality is grotesque.

So Miller has gotten it twisted. Far from having just imaginary excuses for evolved reflexes, secular liberals have reason and the ability to learn from objective models of natural reality. For instance, they can learn to ditch benighted religious dogmas for philosophy, science, and liberated art.

More specifically, they can learn what’s wrong with Miller’s Thomistic account of morality. They can read history, so they’ll be as quick as I was to understand that this Christian talk of human purpose comes from Aristotle’s teleology and the ancient Greek emphasis on formality.

Notice the difference between Isaiah’s and Aristotle’s views of human functionality. Isaiah says, “Yet, O Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay, and thou art our potter; we are all the work of thy hand” (64:8). Thus, “Woe to him who strives with his Maker, an earthen vessel with the potter! Does the clay say to him who fashions it, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’? Woe to him who says to a father, ‘What are you begetting?’ or to a woman, ‘With what are you in travail?’” (45:9–10).

Again, that’s the logic of resentment, although this time it belonged to ancient Judaism rather than the American South. The Jews resented that they’d been conquered by various empires, so they imagined a sky god to rule over them and establish an invincible order to come. They worshipped a supernatural “Lord” who would reign over them as though they were so many clay statues fulfilling their maker’s wishes.

The Aristotelian account is far more rational and progressive, which is why the medieval Church had to tame and Christianize it. But the Western Church failed, so its contact with Aristotle (and Plato) eventually launched the revolutions of liberal humanism in Europe.

Aristotle understands that forms aren’t all alike, so there are many purposes or potentials to be fulfilled in nature. People, he saw, are rational animals, so we can moderate our behaviour. We have some degree of self-control, so we can imitate the best human models and strive for virtue or excellence, resisting vices because we can understand how they lead us astray. People can be wise in understanding instrumentally how best to achieve their goals.

We can appreciate, for instance, how something like the MAGA cult of southern resentment is self-destructive because we can use reason to model things and weigh possibilities. We can understand how, in preparing a golem to savage our enemies, the golem will be liable to turn on us, as Trump has trashed the American economy, the US Constitution, and all other worthy facets of Americanism.

Miracles and morality’s emergence

Or consider the irony of Miller’s talk of how Christian morality makes more sense than the atheistic kind. For atheists, morality must somehow “emerge” from amoral, natural processes, whereas for theists, morality is supposed to come from God, who is a person like you or me.

Except that God is like you or me only in naïve polytheism, which is what monotheists are supposed to reject. The Abrahamic God wound up being invisible, bodiless, timeless, almighty, and parentless. The analogy between God and us fails when we realize that the exoteric claims about the monotheistic deity are superseded by the esoteric, philosophical view that takes God to be a virtually impersonal power or mystery. In that case, Christian and atheistic moralities are in the same boat.

Suppose the Christian says that God gave us morality because God loves us as his children or pets. Christian morality is supposed to make sense because it’s based on some such anthropocentric analogy. But the analogy falls apart upon philosophical scrutiny.

Why would God love us when he could create not just quadrillions of other living things, but endless versions of our very selves? Indeed, because God’s power is infinite, there’s no reason why he hasn’t already created all those versions to populate infinite universes in a created multiverse. So why would he love us specifically? Maybe he loves other versions of us more.

The reason human parents love their children is that we’re all limited and fragile, so our lives are precious. God is supposed to be unlimited, so his love wouldn’t work that way. Whereas human parents can’t retrieve their child who happens to die in a tragic accident, God could always recreate us trillions of times. Thus, there could be no tragedies for God. For the same reason, there can be no divine love. Upon philosophical analysis, that love-bombing personification of God is lame and unsustainable.

No, monotheism posits just the super-duper mystery of the miraculous creation of us along with the rest of nature. Why, again, is there supposed to be such a thing as Christian morality? It’s because of the miracle of God’s Creation of the universe in Genesis, the miracle of God’s incarnation as the man Jesus, the miracle of his resurrection, the miracle of revelation in Church history, and so on. Far from having any superior understanding of morality to rival the talk of metaphysical emergence, the Christian forbids scrutiny of God’s miracles, lest we lapse into sinful pride that threatens us with everlasting punishment in an afterlife.

Why would God be defined by love rather than tyrannical insanity? Isn’t power supposed to be corrupting? Isn’t that our well-established understanding of how minds work? So if God is like us, why doesn’t his power corrupt him, turning him into the jealous, genocidal, Trumpian monster that the Jewish scriptures depict?

Or why wouldn’t God’s omniscience make him melancholy and nihilistic? Isn’t that our understanding of how reason works? Reason disenchants, undermines faith, and threatens to deprive us of the zest for life.

As John Keats says in “Lamia,”

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine —
Unweave a rainbow…

Nothing would mystify God. He’d have all the answers instantly, permanently, and with no one to tell him differently. So why wouldn’t omniscience make the deity an insane, bored, decadent aristocrat?

Do you see the problem? The more we evaluate the theistic analogy, the less reason we have to trust God’s commandments, and thus the more mysterious and dubious Christian morality begins to look. The notion that we ought to worship a monster because that’s the “moral” thing to do is perfectly Orwellian, which would make God’s kingdom a dystopia.

The danger of specifying Christian morals

Instead of talking vaguely about “morality,” though, we should ask what exactly Christian morals are supposed to be.

Notice that there are many answers to suit the Church’s long history of compromise and betrayal. Christians made peace with war, torture, slavery, imperialism, nationalism, and capitalist selfishness. So if you ask what it means to be moral in a Christian sense, you’re liable to get many answers, depending on the Christian. Evidently, God didn’t make it clear enough. The longer he waits to judge humanity with his so-called second coming (which would be, rather, his third), the more time we have to rethink or lose sight of the revelation.

Suppose we ask whether the Christian’s moral duty is to raise a family. After all, that’s what the conservative Christians who support Trump insist on: “family values.” Yet early Christians were opposed to precisely that instinct, siding instead with a more ascetic outlook since they expected God’s kingdom to arise imminently, forcing them to raise their standards and strive for spiritual purity.

In the Gospel narratives, Jesus said that philia and agape (brotherly love and charity) are more godly than eros and storge (romantic and familial love). He disowned his mother, preferring the company of his followers. He said it’s better not to marry and risk adultery, but to be “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:11–12).

If we strive to peel away the many layers of Christian politicization and confusion, to find the kernel of Jesus’s moral vision, we might turn to his view of the greatest commandments: the affirmation of monotheism, the obligation to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,” and the duty to “love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:28–31).

The first two commandments imply something like Islam, or Isaiah’s submissive conception of the earthen vessel, and the second negates all egoistic striving. This rules out every trace of modern progress. No science, no capitalist innovation, no economic growth, no advances in medical technology, no personal freedoms. All modern progress must be considered tainted by the sin of pride.

Instead, the essential moral lifestyle for Christians would be something like that of the Qumran community or the Quakers: live simply, humbly, with no striving for secular advances of any kind. Asceticism would be preferable to family life since the latter would naturally usher in lust, jealousy, and hypocrisy. Hence, strict Christian “morality” would die out in the generation of childless, God-loving purists, leaving secularists to inherit the world.

It’s no wonder Christianity is full of so many incompatible compromises, assimilations, and elaborations since they enabled this organized religion to endure alongside empires for two millennia. So much, then, for specifying Christian morality rather than positing hollow meta-ethical assurances.

The morality of creative progress

Finally, let’s correct the record about the alleged baselessness of secular morality. I’ve already pointed out that Aristotelian teleology is one relatively naturalistic way to understand how morality emerges.

There are other secular accounts, such as utilitarianism. The utilitarian idea isn’t simply that pleasure is good. Instead, we should aim for social progress in imitation of scientific advances, so we should use reason to posit rules that govern us in the most uplifting, harmonious way. One such rule is that we should maximize our chances of being happy in this life. We should act to maximize happiness rather than selfishly living as a predator or parasite.

I think that’s right as far as it goes, but I’d add an existential perspective. Far from imagining morality out of nothing, as Miller would have it, the atheist bases morality on modern knowledge of our universal condition. We know from science that nature is enormously self-creative, yet that creativity offends us because it’s impersonal, whereas we evolved from social mammals, so we prefer to deal with fellow minds. We’re therefore alienated from nature, finding its sheer physicality or absolute objecthood inhuman (monstrous and absurd).

The rationally enlightened distinction between right and wrong begins with an aesthetic reaction to the wilderness, namely civilized disgust and the so-called sinful desire to out-create our Maker, to improve on wild, amoral aggregations with our intelligently designed constructs.

According to conservative monotheists, this progressive enterprise is sinful, but that’s only because they’re beholden to the primitive instinct to dominate or submit, so they posit an absolute dominator to subjugate all of us. Once we outgrow that impulse, reshaping our character in the crucible of existential angst and horror, we discover the majestic folly of secular civilization. Given the realistic appraisal of everyone’s basic condition in life, the best we can do is tragic heroism.

If morality has to do with our highest values, those values ought to be based not on love of a figment of our authoritarian imagination, but horror for the reality of nature, and the heroic creativity to build something better than the cosmic wasteland.

That ambition to be transhuman, to fully outgrow our mammalian limitations, to become a godlike race of anti-natural creators, such as you find dramatized in optimistic science fiction, is at the root of modern secular morality. This is the Promethean ethos that threatens conservatives and may even prove to be vain or futile. Yet our modern ancestors simply had enough with medieval excuses for gross unfairness, degradation, and failure, and decided to experiment with rational progress. Hence, the Anthropocene.

Again, we may or may not succeed in building a lasting alternative to nature’s wildness. But one thing we can’t justifiably say is that this experiment is nothing at all, or that it’s groundless and based on an appeal to mystery or a mere figment of the imagination. Obviously, it’s the monotheist who’s guilty of those projections. Secular progress is based on (1) scientific knowledge of nature, and (2) an aesthetically fueled humanist revolt. Our obligation is to creatively destroy nature because that’s all there really is in the universe: creative destruction that’s subject to aesthetic praise or condemnation.

One of the issues that bedevils metaethics is what it means to say that morality is objective or subjective. Lots of folks are confused about this, including theists and atheists, and the confusion hampers their debates about morality.

I recently replied to James W. Miller and his criticism of atheistic morality, and he responded to my reply in an article called “Proof That Atheists are Amoral.” But rather than getting into the weeds of his reply here, I’d like to focus on analyzing the central concept: “objective morality.” What could that morality possibly be? Once we’re all clearer on that concept, I think much of the rest of the discussion takes care of itself.

The two senses of “objectivity”

Notice, then, that there are two relevant senses of “objective,” at least with respect to Merriam-Webster’s definitions:

• (1) expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations

• (2) existing outside of the mind: existing in the real world

The first definition is epistemological in that it has to do with a statement’s justification. If you appeal to reason or science to back up your claim, you’re being objective in the first sense, whereas if you’re just expressing your feelings or bias, you’re being subjective in that sense.

The second sense of “objective” is more metaphysical since it’s about a statement’s content. If the statement is about objects, meaning things other than minds or subjects, the statement is objective in the second sense. Yet if you’re talking about people, you’re being subjective in a way that contrasts with “objectivity” in this second sense.

Mind you, the two senses are closely related because we assume that to talk well about things other than people, and thus to be objective in the second sense, we must use reason rather than merely indulging our feelings, and this requires objectivity in the first sense. Thus, science is the arbiter of specifying the nature of objects, meaning the things in the universe that have strictly physical, chemical, or impersonally evolved or complexified natures, and this is because scientific methods of inquiry are highly objective in the first, epistemic sense.

The prospects of objective morality

So that’s what “objectivity” means. What, then, could be objective about morality? Well, we could be objective in the first sense by arguing for our moral views. I could say, “Murder is wrong because it’s counterproductive and foolish: if you commit that crime, you’re liable to get caught and be sent to prison or worse. Also, people have special rights that shouldn’t be violated.”

That would be different from merely venting my emotions in response to a murder, by saying something like, “This evil sonuvabitch just killed that man. Let’s all gang up on him, tear him to pieces, and burn his house down.”

But is that kind of epistemic objectivity enough for the religious critic of atheistic morality? Not at all, because there are sophisticated secular justifications of morality in philosophy, including virtue theory, utilitarianism, and deontology. Now, I think that while each of those theories teaches us something important about morality, none gets to the essence of what morality is in nature. For that, I think we must turn to existentialism and a cosmicist construal of naturalism, and reconstruct moral, humanistic discourse in aesthetic terms.

Miller thinks this just concedes that atheism negates morality, or that all thoughtful atheists must realize they’re amoral after all. Yet that looks like a mere semantic point. If we capture the essence of morality in aesthetic terms, we may use other labels to describe what we’re doing, but that doesn’t mean we’re no longer dealing with morality. Instead, we’d have shown that what some thought of as morality was really something else all along.

Alternatively, we could just provide another sense of “morality,” namely one grounded in the reality of God’s death, so atheists would be moral in a sense that would differ from the theist’s preferred sense. Would both kinds of morality be legitimate? Well, that’s what’s in dispute here.

Returning to the question of objectivity, the religious critic of atheistic morality must surely say that “objective morality” means something other than the use of reason to justify your actions. After all, as I said, there are rational secular justifications of morality, yet the Christian apologist wants to say, as Miller’s title declares, that atheists are amoral. Christian morality must be objective or meritorious in a deeper sense, for atheistic morality to be impossible.

What’s missing? Let’s look at Miller’s definitions. He says,

“Subjective,” in the conversation about moral realism, means without grounds that are binding to all human agents, or subject to preference or cultural norms.

“Objective” means binding to all moral agents regardless of their concurrence.

He’s talking there about moral realism rather than objective morality, but I think the key factor nevertheless pops up in that context. Before I turn to it, I’ll point out that moral realism is supposed to contrast with moral antirealism, so the issue there is whether there are moral facts in the world that make the talk of morality factually true or false. If morality has to do with how we evolved, our evolutionary history would be one such fact. A moral antirealist or noncognitivist would say instead that the talk of morality is vacuous or somehow subjectively arbitrary, so it’s not strictly true or false.

But this issue of moral realism is tangential. I raise it here only to counter Miller when he says, “the moral realist’s claim is that moral facts adhere and bind regardless of the process of evolution.” If evolution is a mind-independent fact, that’s certainly a realistic basis for moral statements that would then be factually true or false. Granted, any such realistic theory would run up against the naturalistic or genetic fallacy, but that’s another story.

Anyway, Miller thinks the issue here is about what’s binding for all “human agents.” Objective morality would be “binding to all moral agents regardless of their concurrence.” This is the key point for the apologist since the suspicion is that atheistic morality is just a matter of our personal or collective opinion or arbitrary taste. In that case, atheistic morality wouldn’t be binding since we could just change our minds about what’s right or wrong.

Consider, though, the disparity between what Miller says here and the crucial, second definition of “objective,” given above. Miller says or implies that objective morality must be independent merely of human agents, yet “objectivity” in the second, metaphysical sense has to do with independence of “the mind,” meaning all subjects.

This is why the apologetic argument against atheistic morality fails. Sure, the Christian presents a kind of morality that would be independent of the human species, but not a kind that would be objective in the second sense. Why not? Because the Christian says morality comes from God, and God is supposed to be a mind. That makes Christian morality subjective in a way that clashes with the second sense of objectivity.

That is, regardless of whether God’s moral commandments are objective in the first sense, or regardless of how God might readily argue rationally in support of his plan for humanity, those divine edicts wouldn’t be objective in the second sense. Thus, they’d be subjective, assuming a statement’s content is exhaustively either objective or subjective. The reason is that those commandments would derive from a subject, not something other than a mind.

This is why I said that atheistic morality has a much easier chance of being objective (in the crucial, second sense) than the theistic kind. Atheistic morality emerges from real, full-blown objects, as does everything in godless nature, since everything would be based ultimately on physical forces and dynamics, according to the atheist who’s a philosophical naturalist.

As I explained, atheistic morality is best regarded as a humanist reaction to our existential condition of being people who are embedded horrifically in an impersonal, objective domain, which is the cosmic wilderness. We come from a planet that comes from a star, which comes from a nebula, which comes ultimately from quantum chaos or a black hole or some other perfectly Lovecraftian monstrosity. So if our actions are capable of being morally right or wrong, that distinction can be genuinely objective on a naturalist view because such a view posits things that are ultimately objective in being mindless (atoms, physical forces, cosmic or geological cycles, and so on).

Indeed, how could morality possibly be objective in the second sense for a theist? If God exists and is metaphysically primary, everything that he creates is artificial, but this is just to say that everything would have a program or purpose that derives from God’s mind, the intelligent designer. Thus, everything would be at least partly subjective. There would be no purely objective things in a theistic ontology. Pure objectivity (in the second, metaphysical sense) exists only for naturalistic atheists, not monotheists.

Miller seems to bite this bullet when he says:

Morality is objective because God has designed us for it. We are made to function in certain ways, and we fail to function when we don’t honor our design. Thus, morality is objective. It’s written into our hardwiring.

The fact that God is a subject doesn’t change the objective nature of our design.

A car manufacturer is a subject, a person. The fact that the car needs gas to go is objective.

The reason Miller thinks that analysis holds is that I’m supposedly “confusing objective with impersonal.” But that’s not so. We’re dealing here with the second sense of “objective,” which is about independence from minds or subjects in general, including, therefore, God. We could argue about whether animal minds would be included as genuine subjects, or whether they’d blur into quasi-objects. That would be a red herring, though, since the point is that God is supposed to be at least as sentient and thoughtful as a human person. All people have minds, which makes the reference to them subjective in the second sense.

So, let’s cash this out with Miller’s analogy. Yes, a car manufacturer is a subject, a person with a mind (or a group of minds), which makes the manufacturer not a mere object. The car is the manufacturer’s product, so it’s supposed to fulfill a purpose. Is the statement, then, that “the car needs gas to go” objective or subjective? Miller thinks it’s objective, but I doubt he’s thought this through.

The “going” of a car would fulfill the manufacturer’s or car owner’s purpose. That purpose is an extension of their desires, which are subjective, meaning they exist in their heads. True, gas itself, as a physical thing, is an object, and so is the car. But the use of gas to fuel a car is a technique that achieves people’s goals, which are subjective.

This is why Aristotle’s teleology was so flagrant in running together natural causes and effects, on the one hand, and purposes on the other. There are no strictly objective purposes, so modern scientists abandoned the talk of “final,” normative causes in lifeless parts of nature.

Likewise, if God designed us to fulfill a program outlined by divine commandments, we become artifacts. When we function well, obeying God’s plan for us, we’d be doing well subjectively since we’d conform to God’s plan that would exist in God’s mind. When we malfunction, we’d be doing poorly again in a subjective sense, since we’d be arousing God’s anger, which would exist solely in God’s mind. Just as the purpose of using gas to power a car doesn’t exist objectively or perceivably in the mere chemical or physical composition of the fuel or vehicle, but is a ghostly extension of human intentions, God’s commandments wouldn’t exist objectively in nature.

Granted, we can infer the purpose from an intelligently designed artifact, but the purpose itself vanishes with the producers and users, as in the case of a post-apocalyptic scenario in which our technology outlasts our species. And we could say that the purpose exists indirectly in the intelligently designed thing since that product would entail a designer in which the purpose exists or existed. This is the sense in which theism would make everything in the universe partly (indirectly) subjective or mind-dependent, as opposed to being metaphysically, wholly objective and mindless.

As David Hume would say, while the Ten Commandments might be carved in stone, their rightness or wrongness wouldn’t exist as a physical, perceivable fact. Insofar as religious morality is grounded in God, and God is essentially an incorporeal mind, theistic morality must be subjective, in contrast to the second sense of “objectivity.”

Now, Miller tries to slip through the theist’s typical loophole in this context. He says, “Though God is a person, God is not human. So he is a subject, but not changing.”

This is supposed to imply that theistic morality is objective enough, we might say, since it’s not based on human subjectivity, meaning our whims, goals, or rationales. But that’s not objective enough because it’s still contrary to the second sense of “objectivity.”

Miller agrees that God is a subject, but he points out that God is supposed to be an immutable one. God’s nature is superhuman, so his mind doesn’t have to change like ours. To me, that makes the concept of God incoherent. “Changeless mind” is oxymoronic, especially since the only minds we experience are ours. What would it mean for thoughts and feelings to be permanent? Why still call them thoughts or feelings? Or what could it mean to call something alive if the thing doesn’t have a body?

But that’s another side issue. If we grant, for argument’s sake, that God is a nonhuman mind, the theist must concede that God is a subject who creates things to serve his purposes. Those purposes must be as subjective as the conventionally correct use of humanly designed products such as cars. And when we conform to God’s wishes, that rightness is subjective, not objective, since it’s not objective in the second sense. Ultimately, the rightness would be about God, who is supposed to be a subject, not a mindless object.

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The uphill battle of countercultures

I’ll close by responding to a few more of Miller’s statements from his reply. He says,

Ben’s hope, that counter-cultures will arise to be “naturally anti-natural” and thus preserve traces of what is actually just Christian morality, is feeble. He’s saying that smaller tribes will always fight back, but the conclusion is constant war, never peace. And no one has the moral high ground, because there is no objective moral high ground.

That’s not my view. There have always been countercultures, at least since the Axial Age, and many of them have been non-Christian. So I wasn’t saying that all countercultures must live up to the Christian ideal of supernatural rightness. Indeed, the Christian ideal borrowed from Platonism, which was part of Greece’s prior contribution to the global monistic revolt against the civilizational norm of polytheistic excuses for worldly castes.

Still, Miller’s main point there is that countercultures are bound to lose out against the amorality of mainstream cultures. I agree that it’s an uphill battle, which is part of the human existential predicament, and it puts some of the horror in cosmicist naturalism. But I’m contending that that’s morality for grownups.

Incidentally, the early Christians were just as forlorn about the prospect of imposing their ideals on the world. That’s why the Epistle to the Hebrews defines “faith” as hope for the afterlife, based on the expectation of sacrifice in this life. The assumption was that the demonic forces animating Machiavellian rulers tend to defeat righteous upstarts and their egalitarian, neoshamanic visions.

When the Roman Empire adopted the Jesus movement, seeing it as a fittingly cynical bit of syncretism between Jewish monotheism and the Hellenistic mystery cults, Christian morality, too, became mainstream and existentially inauthentic. Organized religions tend to politicize their founding principles, so the Church found all kinds of excuses for secular vices. Countercultures are what revitalize spiritually compromised mainstream cultures. That’s just the downside of adding the exoteric to the esoteric.

The superiority of atheistic morality

Miller says, “Realizing that he’s surrendered the whole argument, Ben then tries to tell me that God won’t save me.”

Where do I say that God won’t save James Miller? I’m unclear what he’s referring to there. Of course, I don’t think God will save anyone because I don’t think God exists. But I don’t believe I said anything about God discriminating against Miller or Christians.

What I said is that atheistic morality is superior to the Christian kind because Christianity retains the caste system and strays from the humanist insight about the equal rights of all people, including the rich, who are supposed to have great difficulty entering God’s kingdom. And I’m saying that atheistic morality is superior if you think that morality should be objective, because theism makes everything at least partly subjective, so ontological objecthood is possible only on an atheistic worldview.

The motives behind Christian morality

Miller says Christian morality is about love rather than self-interest. According to him, “Christians find goodness to be a fulfillment of our nature. We are designed by a being who IS love, and so we are made to be beings of love. We find our deepest meaning, calling, and satisfaction in love. Heaven, for the Jesus-follower, is an afterthought.”

I’ve written elsewhere about the canard that God is love. If God is love, he’s not also justice. So why the Christian emphasis on divine judgment? Why the threats of hellfire for everyone who rejects the archaic rigmarole of Christian theology?

Sure, Christians may think of their religious commitment as being all about love, not self-interest. Few Christians would be as crass as Blaise Pascal when he set up his wager.

Yet most Christians adopt their religion when they’re young, and they’re often taught at that impressionable age that Christian faith is needed to escape a horrible punishment in the afterlife. Christian children are indeed likely to make a simple, self-interested decision to do what’s necessary to avoid a horrendous punishment, even if Christian adults find it convenient to rationalize their religious affiliation. That’s a psychological matter.

Yet regardless of how Christians think of their faith, self-interest is built into Christian theology because the threat of hellfire figures prominently in the gospel. Why is salvation through Christian faith good, making for the “good news”? Because it’s salvation from eternal damnation. You can focus on love, if you like, but elementary Christian theology features the logic of self-interest, the desire to escape the hell of everlasting separation from God.

Incidentally, an example of the theological rigmarole would be the notion that God is love despite the punishment of hell for nonbelievers. Liberal Christians who want to preserve this uplifting image of God are inclined to say that God eventually annihilates nonbelievers precisely out of mercy or love, which is indeed what we’d expect a loving creator to do. But the early Christian documents aren’t so obliging since they were uncompromising, countercultural repudiations of a mainstream culture.

The punishment is supposed to be eternal, roughly for the Nietzschean reason that Christian theology was born not from love but resentment. The poor in spirit resented their earthly oppressors. That’s why Christianity advocates not for humanist egalitarianism but a reversal of worldly values and power dynamics. The first will be last and the last first.

An existential humanist says instead that we’re all equally first and last in different respects. People are first in being anomalous and godlike in absurd, wild, mindless nature, and we’re last since that very knowledge alienates the enlightened, reflective people who best fulfill their godlike potential.

The bond of atheistic morality

Miller thinks the atheist simply has no means of binding people, so secular morality wouldn’t force people to act well. If we’re relying on mere conventional games, personal preferences, or characteristic tastes, how can we expect everyone to obey moral principles when the going gets rough?

Miller calls this “the nihilistic precipice,” and he points out that if secular life is just an absurd game, we’re liable to flip the gameboard when doing so is to our advantage. As he says, “Human history has shown us enough of what we’re capable of for all of us to realize that the default setting of the human moral conscience is ‘Screw your rules.”’

Sure, short of something like establishing the dystopia of We, Brave New World, or 1984, atheists don’t have a way of forcing people to be good rather than evil, or of punishing all violators of moral standards. Welcome to morality for grownups! Some people are good, and some are bad. Some stick to their principles, and others betray them. Religion makes no difference here whatsoever. Most people have always been religious, and still, immorality was rampant while sainthood was rare.

The oldest part of human nature is bestial because we evolved from wild animals. Morality is a thin layer of training and shaming that’s supposed to reform millions of years of amoral evolutionary compromises. Theology and religious myths are mainly rationalizations that praise us when we do well in easy, conventional ways that don’t call for much self-sacrifice, and that excuse us when we act poorly. The devil can quote the Bible to suit his purposes. The Church found religious excuses for all kinds of atrocities and vices, including war, torture, slavery, and consumer selfishness.

What’s binding on the atheistic picture is everyone’s existential condition of having to face — and decide how to live in spite of — our maker’s inhuman neutrality towards all our concerns. We’re all mortal mammals with godlike creative powers of discernment, thrown into the impersonal domain of nature. Clearly, that confrontation is compatible with many lifestyles, including what we’d consider immoral ones. But religiosity, too, is compatible with all actions under the Sun since theology is untestable, speculative poetry that can be rewritten to suit any circumstance.

Still, the existential condition isn’t entirely subjective since it’s the meeting of subjects and genuine objects. There are no such objects in theism, so theism masks our existential condition with anthropocentric projections and fairy tales. Secular morality is grounded in the reality of our objective substrates. Nature replaces God for atheists, so instead of a deity commanding us to act in a certain way, there’s the need to build a worthy alternative to nature’s absurd wildness.

Being moral isn’t even the best kind of behaviour. Morality is just prosociality, which can be instilled by training gullible children. The problem is that entire societies can be flawed from a higher perspective. That perspective is one of philosophical enlightenment, and I characterize it as being existential, cosmicist, humanistic naturalism.

Our highest task isn’t simply to obey certain prosocial rules since even pets can do that. We must appreciate why certain behaviour is best despite the suspicion that life is absurd because of our monstrous origin. What we think is best means nothing to the cosmos that is manifestly our maker. Nature is inhuman and amoral, and we care about cooperation and self-sacrifice because we’re part of a long-lasting anti-natural enterprise. Our task isn’t just to be lovers and suckers. We should be heroic in the face of great horror and tragedy.

Monotheists say we’re pets of an almighty creator, so our job is to submit and obey like dogs. That’s monotheistic “morality”: love everything, especially your master in the sky, and don’t whine like Job when things don’t go your way.

But that morality isn’t good enough for people, as in self-aware, rationally autonomous, curious, and creative individuals who cooperate not out of love for nature’s source, but revulsion towards the wilderness (God’s supposed handiwork). People, as opposed to animals, are civilized, which is to say we’re engaged in a Promethean revolt. We don’t merely obey and conform; instead, we terraform, creating artificial worlds that enhance our strange civility.

What matters more than moral subservience is noble productivity. Sure, we shouldn’t steal or kill people, because selfishness is unproductive in the existential context. Human predators and parasites are appalling affronts to the knowledge that we’re all in the same basic predicament. Philosophical enlightenment may be as rare as sainthood, but modernity democratized humanistic, naturalistic liberalism, and that’s a much more enlightened perspective than anything found in the ancient theistic cultures.

It has often seemed to Christian apologists that morality depends on God, so nonbelievers must be untrustworthy beasts. Over the last few centuries, the Church has moderated this demonization of outsiders, but the sentiment remains in theistic arguments from morality.

Fyodor Dostoevsky captured the essence of these arguments when he wrote roughly that if God doesn’t exist, “everything is permitted,” even the worst crimes. In other words, without God, there’s just physicality and survival instinct based on selfishness. There would be only our fallible opinions, not real morality or binding commandments capable of keeping the peace once and for all.

Theism and objective morality

The academically highly trained pastor James W. Miller has made this case in “No God, No Morality—No Exceptions.”

For atheistic naturalists, he says, “Empathy was, at some level, a mutation that simply stuck.” Yet “That kind of empathy isn’t moral. It’s selfishness in the form of teamwork.”

And modernity hasn’t helped much. “We are big, angry, selfish tribes at war with one another. Those who think that we’ve enlightened ourselves past the stage of tribalism are showing their privilege.” Indeed, he says, “we have not evolved into anything that looks like real morality. Just tribes at war.”

Christianity shows us what real, “objective” morality looks like, he says. For the follower of Jesus, “Instead of revenge, we love our enemies. Instead of meting out well deserved justice, we pray for those who persecute us. We don’t chase money or glory. We don’t advance ourselves.” Again, “With Jesus, we defend the weak. We sacrifice our own needs.”

What makes Christian morals real, as opposed to being mere illusory excuses for selfishly wired genetic behaviour, is that “These morals are not subject to public approval. They cannot be voted upon. They don’t expire. That’s because they are objective, not subjective. They are facts, not opinions.”

And the reason these morals are real is that they’re grounded in God: “With God, objective moral facts are easily the case. Like a Platonic form, God’s goodness is the ultimate, defining expression of goodness. All microexpressions of goodness, the particulars, derive their goodness from the Form, the nature of God.”

Thus, Miller argues, atheists face a dilemma: accept the fact that there’s real morality, and thus accept theism, or deny them both. You can’t have real morality without theism. To remain an atheist is to “dismiss God and realize you lost the foundations of morality with him, leaving you not only alone but without values in an empty and dying universe.”

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Confusions about objective morality

Now, I’ve been over this before in numerous other places, but the upshot is that this theistic argument from morality is based on several confusions. Once more, I’ll try to clarify things.

I’ll start with the main source of confusion: the oxymoronic notion of “objective morality.” This notion is just gibberish. It’s like talking about a round square.

Notice that moral realism isn’t the same as saying that morality is “objective.” The realist says there’s a fact of the matter that makes moral statements true or false. But some facts pertain to subjects. For instance, it may be true that you prefer hamburgers to hot dogs. That truth accords with a fact, but it’s a subjective one, and it could change because subjects, which is to say minds or persons, have some autonomy, and they’re creative and sensitive to their environments.

So we could be realists about morality in saying that moral truths are about the conventions that evolve to regulate human behaviour. Moral rules would be game-like in that once they’re stipulated, they’re not subject to debate. Morality would be like a fictional universe. Once you’re a fan of some fictional franchise, you can’t change its canon willy-nilly. You must abide by the shared universe of assumptions, and the truths or facts of that fictional world pertain to subjects, not objects. The truths are social and psychological.

Now, Miller wants morality to be not just factual in that neutral sense, but “objective.” This is because he wants morality to depend on something other than people. Alas, turning to God won’t supply him with this objectivity because God is supposed to be a subject, a living mind and person. It should go without saying that if God isn’t a person, the Christian is an atheist, so Miller could have no Christian case against atheistic morality. This is because theism, that which the atheist denies, is the view that a perfect person created nature and intervenes supernaturally in our affairs to aid us.

Miller tries to get around this evident subjectivity of theistic and specifically Christian morality by appealing not to God’s mind but to his “nature.” What exactly is God’s nature? Is it just God’s character, in which case it’s subject to being changed as God learns and evolves? If so, Christian morality would be fully subjective in that God could change his mind about what’s best for us.

If not, and God’s “nature” is immutable, then we might wonder what makes God’s nature the standard of goodness for humanity. What would be the difference in appealing to God’s nature and appealing to the physical universe’s nature as the source of morality? In both cases, you’d be dealing roughly with an object, something other than a mind or person.

Is it supposed to be self-evident that God’s nature makes for a perfect guide for us, when we can’t even say what this nature is since God is supposed to be transcendent, supernatural, and immaterial? Think of the Lovecraftian satirical conception of gods, which points out that the source of nature must rather be perfectly monstrous, from a primate’s intuitive standpoint. Why would God have a saintly rather than a tyrannical nature, given that absolute power necessarily corrupts the empowered individual?

So even if appealing to God’s nature might make human morality objective, that wouldn’t make this morality unobjectionable. God might keep the peace in his creatures’ affairs by lording it over us, scaring us into submission with threats of hellfire. Is that prospect of a Lovecraftian dystopia the theistic essence of morality? Certainly, it’s not self-evident that morality must be theistic in that sense since we can imagine alternatives.

A superior conception of “objective” morality is the one I developed that combines naturalism, cosmicism, existentialism, and secular humanism. In short, we can say that atheistic morality can be objective in the apologist’s sense, in that morality is grounded in an uplifting reaction to the horror of natural facts. Enlightened morality begins with a recognition of nature’s wildness, which is to say its absurd physicality and impersonal creativity. People, as opposed to the wild animals that nature enslaves, are inspired to out-create their creator. Hence, the emergence of civilization that seeks to terraform nature (God’s alleged handiwork).

Miller holds out something like social Darwinism or a naïve appeal to natural selection as the chief alternative to theistic morality, but this is a red herring. Natural selection is crucial to explaining animal behaviour, but people aren’t animals in the crucial respects.

The theistic explanation of the specialness of personhood has been quite superseded by anthropology, archeology, biology, and the soft sciences. We know that behavioural modernity, the human facility for imagining and manipulating symbols, formed cultures in stages that went on for tens of thousands of years, beginning with stone tools and the invention of fire, and proceeding to language, writing, agriculture, complex social classes, art, commerce, technological advances, scientific inquiry, and the Anthropocene that currently threatens the very biosphere.

So we don’t need monotheism to understand that people are very special animals. We have a cerebral cortex and opposable thumbs that enable us to imagine far-flung scenarios and implement our models with sophisticated tools. We bootstrapped ourselves into an unnatural position on Earth. Instead of just evolving naturally, like wild animals, we took control of our environments, so we adapted to artificial, cultural expectations. We civilized ourselves, becoming godlike in our cities.

Amusingly, Miller seems to think this boastful talk of modern civility is just a matter of “showing our privilege.” This humanist pride is meant to be politically incorrect, and yet what could this privilege possibly be on the social Darwinian alternative that Miller holds out in his caricature of atheistic morality? Is there no privilege to speak of because we’re just wild animals, selfishly pursuing our course like barbarians or savages, with no self-sacrifice or thought of a greater good?

No, the First World privileges are real because secular progress happened, because people are different from wild animals, and thus social Darwinism is false and a red herring in this context. So by speaking of a supposedly dubious modern human “privilege,” Miller inadvertently concedes that this social Darwinian account of morality is false and irrelevant.

The inferiority of Christian altruism

Let’s look for a moment at Jesus’s countercultural morality that’s supposed to be the God-given standard for our species. In lauding self-sacrifice, Miller likely shortchanges animals since they, too, often sacrifice themselves for their young. There are forms of cooperation and self-sacrifice in the wild that could have served as the starting points for the development of human morality.

But let’s concede for the sake of argument that Christian self-sacrifice is unnatural. That doesn’t mean it comes from God since nature is known for negating itself, for wildly complexifying emergent levels of order or novel stages of evolution. Newtonian mechanics rests on quantum indeterminacy, life comes from nonlife, the spatiotemporal order sinks into black holes, and the stelliferous era will end in the unimaginably long reign of black-hole madness. If all that newness is naturally possible, why not suppose that some clever social mammals could get carried away with their ideas, overspecializing in culture in something like the way giraffes overspecialize in reaching leaves on tall trees?

In any case, Christian self-sacrifice is spoiled by the biblical threats of hellfire for nonbelievers. So Christian morality isn’t the paragon after all. There’s no alternative here to self-interest. Miller says Christians don’t seek to “advance” themselves, and that they “sacrifice” their needs. But that’s obviously not so. As Pascal’s wager makes explicit, Christians calculate that if they make temporary sacrifices, they’ll obtain long-term gains, namely, eternity in paradise and an escape from everlasting torture. How is that an alternative to self-interest that could have evolved from the selfish impulses of naturally selected genes?

Once again, secular humanistic morality is superior to the Christian kind because the former is much more realistic and fair to everyone. The Christian counterculture only means to turn the tables on the upper class, sending those who prosper under demonic or what we’d call Machiavellian conditions in ancient civilizations to hell, and rewarding the lowly underclass that the aristocrats had oppressed.

That misses the big, existential picture in which empires do both enormous good and harm, as they domesticate the wilderness and provide the seeds for the relative deification of everyone (compared to the wild animals that nature enslaves). As Friedrich Nietzsche and Yuval Harari point out, the underclass may resent its tormentors, but that doesn’t give fair consideration to the civilizing force of empires that keeps even the lower classes from sleeping and foraging in the wilderness. In the Hellenistic period, for instance, many Jews appreciated Greek culture, and the Hanukkah story celebrates the Jewish fundamentalist termination of that more sophisticated cosmopolitanism.

As to the origin of the moral leap of self-sacrifice, no, we needn’t imagine the miraculous incarnation of God as a man. Again, the evolution of the godlike powers of personhood themselves occurred in stages, and one of these stages, the Axial Age, preceded Christianity by several centuries. Alexander the Great’s imperialism globalized the Eastern and Western civilizations, and in The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India, Richard Seaford theorizes that the prevalence of coinage in Greece and India in the middle of the first millennium BCE provided the model for abstract monism, for an all-pervasive, translatable substance that can be exchanged for anything.

In any case, countercultures arose — and still arise — because of the political and economic compromises needed to sustain large sedentary populations. These compromises forced the shamans who led the spiritual thought of nomadic hunter-gatherers to go underground with their absolutist, psychedelic visions. Thereafter, philosophers, priests, gurus, and artists have found themselves either staying true to their visions or betraying them and catering to mass demands for worldly success.

Moral purists may feel the need to sacrifice their chance at earthly happiness because they’re beholden to ideas, these being the same strange attractors that entranced prehistoric people and led them to live relatively unnatural lives in increasingly artificial settings, governed by civilized laws rather than the laws of the jungle. Countercultural thought leaders perform a neoshamanic function of envisioning how civilized societies can be improved by laying out philosophical, religious, or artistic ideas to inspire social reforms.

Instead of thinking of this process as supernatural, we should understand it as naturally anti-natural. That’s a paradoxical way of saying that nature is the supreme creator that out-creates itself, building layer upon layer of novel arrangements. The relevant negation here is how civilized society developed from the primitive life of nomadic bands of foragers in the wild. Civilization is unnatural in that it’s intended to be anti-natural, and that’s likely as close to supernatural as we’re going to get.

What are the chances that if you were very confused about one thing, you’d be confused about some other things too?

True, we’re able to mentally compartmentalize so that we might excel at some tasks even if we’re hopeless at others. A Christian, for instance, might surrender her critical-thinking skills when practicing her religion, yet adopt those skills in other areas of life.

But there’s also a spillover effect, especially when the same fallacies we perpetrate in one line of inquiry might find purchase in others. Similarly, when pride drives us to excuse some of our cognitive deficiencies, we might taint our involvement in other matters. This would be like the one lie that snowballs into many lies. (“What a tangled web we weave…”)

I’ve noticed this snowballing pattern in Christian apologetic talk of the so-called problems with secular morality. The problem of evil is supposed to count against theism, but theists attempt to turn the criticism around on atheists, arguing that atheists need a robust sense of morality even to frame the question of why God would allow evil to occur, a sense that requires a divine lawgiver.

For instance, a self-professed former atheist who became a Christian theologian, Guillaume Bignon, made this point in 2015 in reference to the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris. According to Bignon, “to deny God is to deny objective good and with it, objective evil.” Hence, atheists had no business condemning the attacks as substantively wrong. All they could do was express their arbitrary opinion.

Bignon says, “to be a consistent atheist one must affirm that the Islamic terrorists in Paris didn’t do anything ‘wrong’, as such. They only acted out of line with our personal preferences, (and in line with theirs). If there’s no ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, that’s all we are left with.”

Yet contrary to that relativism about morality, “we all sense there is something really, deeply, objectively evil about this. That intuition can only be true if there is a transcendent God, a moral lawgiver, who gives good and evil a moral reality.”

Bignon elaborates on this point:

The only option for French atheists (among whose ranks I used to count myself), is to maintain that there isn’t really any such thing as evil. When one denies the existence of God as a transcendent creator of the universe who ordains how humans ought to live their lives, one is left only with conflicting opinions about what individuals like and dislike. If there is no God then there is no objective truth about the good and the bad.

Thus, “denying the existence of God, and with it the objectivity of evil, isn’t attractive.”

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The basis of secular morality

The problem is that this talk of objective and subjective morality is a sloppy confusion, and it’s the kind we might expect from a theologian who spends much mental energy pondering preposterous creeds and dogmas about miracles, human sacrifices, and infallible scriptures.

Of course, even theists must say there’s a subjective component of moral judgment since they, too, don’t like what they regard as “evil.” But they maintain that they have something other than just their feelings to ground their moral opinion, namely God’s existence. God turns these feelings into commandments and grave sins.

Do atheists have anything besides their feelings to ground their moral evaluations? Sure, they do, such as the difference between heroic and psychopathic character traits. Aristotle even made a mathematical point of this by observing that virtue lies between extremes, so that ethical goodness is behavioural moderation.

Whereas theists may speak mystically about the basis of evil, positing demons that supposedly possessed women and foreigners, leading in Christian history to witch burnings and crusades, atheistic naturalists have a more concrete conception of evil. Evil is essentially malignant narcissism, or some related personality disorder that causes grossly antisocial behaviour.

But what makes this disorder wrong? Is it just that this personality type is abnormal, as Aristotle says? Is it always wise to avoid extremes, or does this preference for moderation amount to a fallacious appeal to popularity or tradition, and a mistaking of norms for values? Just because something is common doesn’t mean it’s good, and just because something is uncommon doesn’t mean it’s deviant in a morally relevant sense.

Indeed, heroes may be as uncommon as monstrous villains, so what makes the former good and the latter bad? Is it just that we prefer one to the other, in which case we’d be back to a subjective preference?

Setting aside Aristotle’s virtue theory, the question is ultimately why we should think of life — and specifically human life — as good, since we can infer that some types of personality or behaviour promote life while others hinder it. Heroes or moral exemplars are life-affirming, whereas antisocial individuals are parasites or predators that might have had a role in natural selection but have become obsolete in civilized societies.

What makes life good and worth preserving other than instinct or divine fiat? It’s not an easy question to answer, and the answer is likely to be highly philosophical and thus open to counterarguments.

My view is that godless moral values should be reconstructed in aesthetic terms that follow from scientific objectification and an existential analysis of our position as personal civilizers.

Aesthetic values aren’t as pejoratively subjective as they might appear since they’re universal, not arbitrary: they follow from the scientific knowledge of nature’s self-creativity that entails pantheism. That is, the values of human creativity are grounded in scientific models of nature’s modes of productivity, such as the universe’s complexification and evolution. The issue becomes whether we ought to be countering nature’s creativity with a contrary, intelligently designed kind. The monstrous absurdity of nature’s wild productivity would ennoble the Promethean revolt, as it were.

That’s a complicated story, and who knows whether it’s viable? But is a theist like Bignon in some securer position to speak so blithely about “subjective” and “objective” morality?

Theistic confusions about objectivity

Notice what’s obvious, which is that theistic morality must, on the contrary, be subjective since that morality is supposed to be grounded in the existence of a special subject, not an object. Where theists and atheists differ, after all, is that only theists posit an ultimate person as being metaphysically crucial. God is the supposed source of everything in the natural universe, including us and our moral standards. But God must be a person, or else theism would be indistinguishable from atheism, and there would be no real dispute here.

Thus, theists supplement their moral feelings and interests only with those of another person. How does that entitle Bignon to say theists alone affirm the “objectivity” of morality? Indeed, how is that not so much gaslighting that reverses the truth? Only atheism could entail this objectivity by basing morality on real objects, as in stuff that has no trace of personhood.

On monotheism, remember, there are no real objects. There would be God, a subject, and his host of artifacts that would have indirect intentions or proper functions that depend on God’s plan. Only in the atheistic scenario in which nature is monstrous enough somehow to have generated itself and spun off into countless forms would there be real objectivity, as in the sensitivity to the objecthood (impersonality, mindlessness, and inhumanity) of some things such as space and time, atoms and physical forces, stars and planets.

It’s the theist who has no basis for speaking of “objective morality,” not the atheist. What the theist can say is that morality has an extraterrestrial origin, but that’s far from entailing that morality is objective in not being susceptible to subjective contingencies, such as a change of the lawgiver’s mind.

The monotheist fudges matters here, treating God’s mind like an impersonal object, declaring that God’s mind is fixed, timeless, and immutable. God’s so-called mind would be equivalent to an object that’s only figuratively a subject. Of course, what it means to be a subject rather than an object is to be a living thing with some freedom to act not by force but by the imperative of some beliefs and desires that form a mental model, motivating self-interested actions. None of that applies to a timeless, immaterial, changeless being.

In any case, why would we want morality to be wholly objective? Purely objective morality would be like the so-called laws of nature, but in that case, they’d no longer be moral since they couldn’t be violated. This is precisely why the notion of a law of nature is tainted by its deistic origin in history, since this conception implies that natural processes are God’s artifacts that can function or malfunction. Real natural patterns aren’t like that precisely because they’re thoroughly objective: they’re forced to just happen and can’t happen otherwise.

Unlike people bound by the rule that murder shouldn’t happen, things in nature can’t physically violate the force of gravity. Models of natural patterns deal with probabilities, whereas moral principles are prescriptive since they apply only to subjects. So why should an objective domain dictate what subjects should do? Why wouldn’t such behaviour be spoiled by the naturalistic fallacy of confusing what does happen with what should happen?

Secular morality is explanatorily grounded in natural facts, but that’s not to say this morality is reducible to them, that a moral action is nothing but some natural norm. On the contrary, what counts as morality is partly what appeals to real subjects, meaning that the environmental facts must be filtered in the act of understanding them, for those facts to motivate a praiseworthy response. Things that are subject to “objective morals” would be machines or glorified dolls.

The bottom line is that we should be wary of the theist’s pontifications about philosophical matters since they’re liable to be tainted by the gross, loyalty-testing irrationality of the theist’s religious commitments.

My seventh music album, Profane Minima, is out now on YouTube. As with the others, I write all the lyrics, and Suno generates the music.

This completes my slowcore trilogy, which includes Doldrums and Glum Reveries. If I had to rank them, I’d say PM might be my favourite, or it’s at least as good as Doldrums. Some of my favourite songs on PM are Theater, Junkie, Ritual, and Light Speed.

The next album is one I’m especially excited about since, although I’m obviously biased, in my opinion, it kicks ass. It’s a double album done in the synthwave genre. Half of its songs are new, and half are synthwave versions of some of my favourite songs from previous albums. These new versions sound completely different, so they’re effectively new songs. (Junkie and Light Speed reappear on this upcoming synthwave album.)

After the double album will be a dream pop and minimal synthwave album, which is mostly finished.

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Looking back, it’s interesting that I was introduced to Suno and started working on the first album, Algos in the Cave, in June 2026. This means that in just four months I produced seven albums and wrote lyrics for some ninety songs.

Of course, it’s easy when an AI supplies the music at the push of a few buttons. But this is also a measure of how inspiring it is for a writer to work with this AI. There’s no chance I would have written such a flurry of poems if I didn’t know I could instantly turn them into professional-sounding songs with Suno.

Profane Minima:

Glum Reveries:

Doldrums:

There must be something in the water at Princeton’s philosophy department.

As I discussed elsewhere, one of the graduate students there, the popular Substack writer, Matthew Adelstein, recently converted from atheism to theism, and now Joe Schmid, another Princeton graduate student, has converted from agnosticism to Catholicism, the religion in which he was raised.

Schmid’s a popular YouTuber, and he posted a cringy, manic video proclaiming his conversion, following that up with a seven-hour-long video that runs through the arguments that supposedly convinced him. After that, he posted a ten-hour video on Catholic miracles, and another seven-hour video answering objections to Catholicism.

All of that’s overcompensation, though, a clear case of protesting too much. It’s no accident that Schmid reclaimed the religion of his youth rather than, say, Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism, so all the supposed theistic arguments and proofs of miracles are rationalizations for him. You can tell that’s so because the arguments are pitifully weak.

The arguments he summarizes in his unhinged conversion video are similar to Adelstein’s, but I’d like to focus on the fine-tuning argument here. Assuming that there’s a necessary being to support the various contingencies we find in the world, Schmid says we can ask, “What is this being?” He goes on to say,

Well, maybe let’s examine the character of its effect. And when we look at the character of its effect, it’s just utterly saturated with extremely fortunate coincidences that had to happen just right for anything interesting or valuable to occur in the world. So, it’s striking to begin with that there are any laws of physics at all. But let’s suppose there are.

Even then, it’s pretty surprising that those laws of physics have constants that even have life-permitting ranges to begin with. I mean, we can imagine hordes of different laws, many of which are much simpler than the laws that we actually have, which would preclude anything interesting or valuable from happening. You know, like it is a law that there’s a single particle which just vibes for all eternity. You’re not going to get anything interesting or particularly valuable in such a world. But we didn’t get a world like that. Instead, the law structures that we have are at least compatible with life. And not only that, but these law structures, the form of these laws, they contain certain constants or fixed values. And those fixed values need to fall within exceedingly narrow ranges for life or anything interesting to develop. So, we hit the complete cosmic jackpot there.

Now, some famous atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins thought the fine-tuning argument is the strongest one available for theism. Anthony Flew cited fine-tuning as a reason for his departure from atheism.

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A miracle-worker isn’t part of nature

Yet this argument is confused, as a response video to Schmid’s conversion points out, posted on a channel called “TMM.” Drawing perhaps from the physicist Sean Carroll, who I believe made a similar point, TMM says,

Insofar as your argument is fine-tuning, I don’t understand how anyone can see that as anything other than evidence against the existence of a god, because its central premise, that life is impossible in a universe with even slightly different parameters, is only true if an all-powerful god does not exist. If an all-powerful god exists, then that god would have the power to put life into a universe with any set of parameters, and wouldn’t need to fine-tune it.

That’s very well said, and it calls for a Copernican revolution or gestalt switch to understand what’s going on here. The problem is that theists who put forward the fine-tuning argument are dabbling in science, so they’re forced to make a host of naturalist assumptions. They take on board scientific theories, such as theories about the laws of nature, and they argue that this knowledge points to theism rather than atheism.

But this is a doomed strategy from the outset since science is methodologically naturalistic. The proper subject matter for theists is theology, not science. If you’re thinking scientifically, you’re thinking skeptically, and you’re preoccupied with solving mysteries by naturalizing their modelled causes.

This is relevant because theists like Adelstein and Schmid evidently go so far into scientific territory, studying as they are in a prestigious analytic philosophy department, that they forget what theism was supposed to be about. They forget that God is supposed to be a miracle-working, supernatural mystery, not a natural cause working through nature.

So, the fine-tuning argument looks at some apparent coincidences that allowed life to exist in nature, and the proponent concludes that theism best accounts for those coincidences. Yet that’s the opposite of what we should think. Precisely because those coincidences are natural, we have every reason to think they’re naturally caused. Theism entails that God can do anything, including violating laws of nature. God wouldn’t be bound by narrow, natural ways of evolving a life-supporting universe since God could do magic.

Thus, if we can imagine a boring universe, defined by alternative laws and constants, a universe that’s supposed to be incompatible with life’s emergence, why on earth should a theist, let alone an atheist, think God would be bound by the human understanding of that thought experiment? Wouldn’t it be blasphemous for a theist to think her imagination is so powerful that it can constrain an omnipotent being?

Indeed, as we’ll see in a moment, just because we can imagine something, this doesn’t mean that what we can imagine is naturally possible. Logical possibility is different from the physical kind.

No, something’s gone dreadfully wrong here, and the source of the problem is that intellectual theists like Adelstein and Schmid are liable to equivocate between the folk theist’s deity and the philosopher’s God. Catholicism posits a deity who cares about humanity, but science objectifies everything it explains. If you turn to science for data to support archaic religious fantasies, you’re liable to objectify God, which is the height of blasphemy in Jewish monotheistic terms.

If God can create life only by tweaking nature’s parameters, God isn’t supernatural enough. God would be another natural force or parameter, one that constrains some other parameters.

Compare this with the evolution of life by natural selection. Charles Darwin identified that natural mechanism, and some theists replied that God works through it. Once more, that missed the point of theism. God isn’t supposed to be just a part of nature, but a transcendent, supernatural being. God would create miraculously, unconstrained by any natural consideration.

So science and naturalism are traps for theists. Sure, theists had little choice but to fall into those traps some centuries ago in the West, as they arrogantly presumed that reason would support their transparent theological fictions and political propaganda. Infamously, Aquinas tried to reconcile Aristotle with Christianity, but his arguments connecting the first cause, or the philosopher’s abstract God that underpins nature, with the folk theist’s naïve personification that figures prominently in Christian scriptures were fallacious and asinine.

The irrelevance of odds to cosmology

There’s another problem with the fine-tuning argument, which is that coincidences, odds, and probabilities have no bearing at all in the cosmological context. As TMM points out, Schmid presumes that the ranges for the laws or constants were contingent. Yet

We have no reason to believe that those values were ever free to vary. They’re not like a roll of the dice, because there was never a time when they weren’t already in place. There was never a time when any dice were being rolled. And again, if there is an all-powerful god, then that god would have the power to put life into a universe with any set of parameters, so the “life-permitting ranges” would be infinite in size. They are only narrow if there is no god. An all-powerful god would not need to finely tune the parameters of the universe. In fact, if the parameters of the universe were such that the natural development of life were impossible, and yet we were still here, that would be far greater evidence that the existence of life is not a merely natural phenomenon.

Again, that’s well said. In talking about the origin of a universe, we’re talking about the origin of space and time, so who says the concept of probabilities that applies to mundane spatiotemporal events applies also to quantum mechanics or the primordial phase of the Big Bang?

Just because we can vaguely imagine the logical possibility of a universe with different, boring parameters doesn’t mean that possibility is relevant to the conditions in which a universe emerges. Why would physical possibilities be bound by what humans can imagine, unless we’re presupposing theism by assuming an anthropocentric scenario in which we’re made in God’s image? On the contrary, the foundations of physical reality tend to be counterintuitive, which is why they baffle even theoretical physicists.

Here, then, is the gestalt switch. The theist wants you to be amazed by some natural coincidences since life could have evolved only if nature’s parameters were set within narrow ranges. God is supposed to be the best explanation of those coincidences, yet the opposite is true. Precisely because the ranges are so narrow or coincidental, God couldn’t have been involved, because God’s supposed to be a supernatural miracle-worker who wouldn’t depend on such restricted techniques.

God could create life under any circumstances by magic, so his creative parameters are infinite, not narrow. Since the actual parameters are narrow, as far as science can tell, those parameters are consistent with atheism, indicating the scenario in which no miracle-worker arranged the universe for life’s emergence. Hence, the fine-tuning argument that appeals to the narrow, physical parameters goes nowhere.

Moreover, if the ranges were very narrow so that our existence sits on a knife’s edge, that would indicate that life’s emergence isn’t nature’s purpose.

Indeed, contrary to the ancient heliocentric cosmology that informed Schmid’s anthropocentric religion, if we look around the universe, we find that life is exceedingly rare. Most of the universe isn’t hospitable, so why think theism is the best explanation of some coincidences that allowed a tiny pocket of life to emerge? Theism would predict the creation of a supernatural heaven teeming with life and miracles, not the production of mostly lifeless, inhospitable nature, which Gnostics characterized as a corrupt pit or prison for our souls.

To see why the fine-tuning argument is such a red herring, we need merely to remind ourselves of the difference between folk and philosophical theism, and note that philosophy and science have always been traps for intellectual Western theists.

The Princeton philosophy graduate student Matthew Adelstein, who writes Bentham’s Newsletter on Substack, posted a written debate he had with a skeptical philosopher about whether God exists.

There, Adelstein says,

My general view on the God question is that I think there are quite a few different individual bits of evidence for God’s existence, each persuasive individually, and decisive in combination. Take, for instance, the fine-tuning argument, which proceeds from the fact that we have both constants and law structures that are conducive to life. The cosmological constant, for instance, falls in a tiny range that gives rise to life roughly one googolth of the possible values it could have taken on. That strikes me as quite surprising and good evidence for God. If there is a God, life permitting laws and constants are expected — if not, they’re quite striking.

This is just one of the many lines of evidence. You combine that with psychophysical harmony, the anthropic data, and a bunch of other considerations and it seems pretty decisive.

I’ve addressed those latter so-called “lines of evidence” elsewhere. Here, I’d like to focus on Adelstein’s case for the fine-tuning argument, which will turn partly on the question of God’s goodness.

The fine-tuning argument

Adelstein adds, “There are a great many features of the world that are quite shocking given atheism and only one that is really surprising given theism. That feature is that the world is filled with pointless evil. Fortunately, I think that while this fact is surprising, the theist can explain it without taking too much of a probabilistic hit — both because there’s a not totally crazy theodicy and there’s the possibility of a great many unknown reasons.”

I’d like to point out that if this is true, and an atheistic worldview shocks us with the unfamiliar, that’s a good thing because it indicates that this worldview is realistic. By contrast, theism isn’t as liable to shock us because theists take refuge in childish, parochial intuitions that shield them from alien possibilities. Theism trivializes reality by humanizing it, constraining our cognitive horizons to mitigate existential worries.

So if the theistically interpreted world isn’t shocking, that’s possibly because theism is a self-reinforcing delusion that hides behind intuition and myth, explaining away something like evil by further extending our self-knowledge as though that knowledge were relevant to the rest of nature, or to nature’s source.

But of course, the assertion that natural regularities aren’t surprising, given theism, is blasphemous on theistic assumptions. Why assume that theists would understand what a God would want? If God supposedly revealed his intentions, such as his interest in creating life, why assume that any theist has adequately interpreted that revelation?

Adelstein thinks the fine-tuning argument works because it’s obvious that God would create life, whereas the existence of life is supposed to be surprising on atheistic naturalism. Yet there’s no such special surprise on naturalism because most of the universe is inhospitable to life, and the talk of calculating odds in the creation of universes is simply impudent.

Adelstein says the cosmological constant could have been otherwise in one googol ways, and presumably he has in mind mathematical possibilities. But how does Adelstein or anyone else know which mathematical possibilities are physically or metaphysically relevant to the creation of universes? Just because we can imagine possibilities doesn’t mean we have insight into the conditions that went into our universe’s creation. After all, we’re proficient at imagining fictions, too.

Indeed, the impudence of speculating on these cosmic odds is similar to the blasphemy of presuming to know what a personal creator of a universe would want. If God wanted to create life, why did he leave most of the universe lifeless? Note that this self-serving theistic presumption was much more compatible with the ancient geocentric model. Now that we know our habitable planet isn’t central in any cosmological respect, we ought to have rethought our vain pronouncements on what a God would supposedly want.

In response to the objection that theism predicts the creation of heaven rather than our natural universe, since a good deity wouldn’t tolerate evil, Adelstein says he agrees that “theism doesn’t predict our world. My claim is merely that it predicts it better than atheism. Compare: if I see a piece of paper in front of you that contains some crude drawing, it would be evidence that you drew it rather than that you randomly spilled ink that was in that pattern. This is so even though my prior in you making a crude drawing is rather low.”

In other words, Adelstein contends that theism explains the universe as we find it better than does an atheistic account, such as naturalism. But that’s vacuous since theism is, at best, a pseudo-explanation. You don’t explain anything by saying that a miracle produced it. So theism loses by default because “God” isn’t a well-defined concept, and religious myths aren’t scientific theories. Saying that theism explains the existence of life is like saying the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale “explains” why children shouldn’t trust seductive strangers.

Naturalism explains why the universe is mostly lifeless, and why the ages in which the universe can’t support life (such as when all the stars are burned out and only black holes remain) may far exceed the universe’s stelliferous era. Naturalism also explains how life emerges from nonlife, and how the variety of species evolves by natural selection and other mechanisms.

By contrast, theism posits a miracle that appeals to childish human intuition, shrinking the potentially humbling range of phenomena to assuage our self-centered existential fear of being alienated from the world.

Is the existence of life especially shocking, given naturalism? No, but everything ought to shock us because of the general strangeness of being. This is so regardless of whether you’re an atheist or a theist. If you’re a naturalist, the existence of a natural order is metaphysically strange.

If you’re a theist, the fact that a person is ontologically primary ought to baffle you. Why would a person be at the bottom of everything? How could a person be eternal and uncreated, whereas all the organisms we’re familiar with have parents? Why would a deity who’s supposed to be perfect want to sully himself by creating something imperfect, such as a natural realm in which life evolves and suffers?

There are mysteries aplenty either way, so this discourse of the “fine-tuning argument” strikes me as irrelevant and far from adding to a “decisive” case for theism, contrary to Adelstein’s assurance.

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God’s moral character

Adelstein supports his guess about what God would want to do by saying, “I think of theism — of the sort I advocate — as the hypothesis that simply one of these things (mind) exists totally without limit. God is a mind without limit. Being unlimited, nothing restricts his power or knowledge. Because he has no rational constraints, following [Derek] Parfit, he’d be motivated to always do the right thing.”

Later, he clarifies: “being ignorant of some facts is a limit on a mind. It means its awareness is restricted. So therefore if a mind is totally without limit, it would know every fact and lack any rational constraints so [this mind would] always pursue the good. Just as a rational agent would, as you’ve noted, care about their own interests on a future Tuesday, they’d also care about the interests of others.”

So, the idea is that God’s goodness follows from his omniscience. Evil would be caused by ignorance, and since God knows everything, he’d have no reason to be bad. This is the naïve view of morality found in ancient Greek virtue theory, according to which philosophy is beneficial because knowledge strengthens the character and relieves us of the ignorance and irrationality that cause crimes.

Alas, that rosy view of reason falls to pieces when naturalism is broadened to include the alien vistas opened by modern discoveries. Reason, in that case, is liable to add to our meaning crisis, confronting us with alienation that must somehow be honourably overcome. It shouldn’t need to be said, but a reiteration of outdated anthropocentric delusions, such as theism, is no such honourable solution.

Thus, just because you know everything doesn’t mean you’re automatically motivated to do the right thing. On the contrary, you might succumb to alienation or despair, turning to evil out of spite for the absurdity of being.

Moreover, the theistic assumption that God would be bound by right and wrong is more self-serving impudence. Sure, the concept of monotheism entails that the Creator would know everything, so God would lack ignorance. God would therefore know what we all want.

Does that imply that God would be motivated to help us all? What if some of us are evil, so we have psychopathic desires? Should God have wanted to help Adolf Hitler win WWII and exterminate Jews? Obviously, that would have conflicted with many other people’s wants. So does theism predict that God would create a heaven in which everyone plays out their fantasies, as in a virtual reality, sci-fi scenario?

This is just instrumentalism, which is quite insufficient for morality. Just because we want something doesn’t mean we ought to achieve that goal in a moral sense. Some desires are amoral, and others are immoral, from a higher (existential, aesthetic, cosmic) perspective.

Why would God want to help anyone else, assuming God is perfect? Doesn’t a desire entail a lack? Is God pained when he sees his created beings suffer? Can God suffer even though he’s supposed to be invulnerable? Could God suffer to the point of wanting to extinguish himself? Why wouldn’t God’s singular status as the metaphysically primary being cause him to be lonely, which would make him vulnerable to being exploited and misled?

You see, the concept of God is incoherent, so theistic “explanations” are futile. The psychological positing of beliefs and desires applies to living, embodied, finite agents, not God. The theist equivocates, assuming human psychology applies to the supposed deity, and then switching to the more metaphysically respectable analysis which depersonalizes God, treating “him” as an ultimate ground of being, first cause, absolute essence, primordial way, and so on.

Supposedly, God “wanted” to create life, which is why life exists in nature, as per the fine-tuning argument, and this myth is supposed to make better sense of things than naturalism. Yet as I said, this provides only an illusory expansion of our understanding since theism’s primary purpose is to alleviate our existential alienation by flattering our egos.

If you follow the theist’s impudent psychological analysis of God’s mind, you’re hardly led to a satisfying explanation that answers all doubts. Again, why would God have wanted to create life? Why wouldn’t God have created more life, as opposed to leaving most of the universe inhospitable? If God favours life, why does he cause living things to suffer? If God has desires, he must have limitations, which means God could suffer and be misled, in which case God wouldn’t be perfectly trustworthy. Why, then, should religious folks follow any promise that’s supposed to have been divinely revealed, or why adhere to any religious creed as though the universe’s creator would have to be bound by it?

Atheism’s upside is that it doesn’t indulge in those archaic confusions and childish simplifications. Atheism is consistent with scientific methods of explanation, so it explains the good, the bad, and the ugly. The downside is that science opens us to the potential inhumanity of the deepest reality. Atheism leaves us with a grown-up’s dose of alienation, so atheism ought to be coupled with a liberal culture that lets the arts and technologies flourish, since neoshamanic exploration and technoscientific empowerment are the best remedies for despair.