Nihil novi sub sole, secunda pars

Experience appears to teach that many people exhibit a kind of moral cognitive dissonance according to which they express moral repulsion toward some behavior (usually historical), together with approbation of some other behavior that is in many ways morally similar. At present, this most commonly takes the form of moral approbation or tolerance of abortion coupled with a denouncement of various other historical activities such as nineteenth-century slavery or the activities of the Nazi regime.

My hypothesis is that the contradiction is not true cognitive dissonance regarding a moral principle, but rather a consequence of apparently moral judgments being based on something amoral in nature, namely social mores. Our cultural rejection of the Nazi regime is more a social phenomenon than a moral one, which is why we can at the same time revile it and nod approvingly at contemporary eugenics movements. In general, people will tolerate any sort of behavior that does not violate prescribed social norms. In other words, we are fundamentally amoral. Our putatively moral principles are derived not from natural or divine law but from custom. And so we should not be surprised that perfectly ordinary and otherwise decent people can so easily be deluded into accepting the most vile moral outrages. There are a great many people who, though at present they would never dream of supporting the reinstatement of the peculiar institution, would quickly flock to it and find all kinds of rationalizations for it were it to come back into fashion. The same can be said of almost any other behavior whatsoever.

Perhaps this is an obvious truth, but it was only relatively recently that it occurred to me in these terms.

They spoke as if forced by truth itself

There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. –Barack Obama.

 

HT: SDG

This is what happens

When those charged with enforcing the law have a monetary incentive to see the law broken. Same thing happens in the U.S. Can’t we ever get a sane political structure to handle these things? One would think that there would be an incentive to ensure that the law is followed, not the other way around.

Deuteronomy 28:50

A most insolent nation, that will shew no regard to the ancients, nor have pity on the infant.

Revelation 6:8-10

And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying: How long, O Lord (Holy and True), dost thou not judge and revenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And white robes were given to every one of them one; And it was said to them that they should rest for a little time till their fellow servants and their brethren, who are to be slain even as they, should be filled up.

The Problem with Postmoderns…

…is that they make parody well-nigh impossible.

Casus

I read this snippet on Google News:

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday night that it had missed repeated opportunities to discover what may be the largest financial fraud in history, a Ponzi scheme whose losses could run as high as…

and the first thing that came to mind was Social Security. (The actual article is here.)

Nihil novi sub sole, prima pars

I recently encountered some of these images (of the staff at Auschwitz) for the first time. What struck me was how creepy they are, in particular those depicting the staff laughing and enjoying themselves. A friend I was with at the time made the same observation. And so I began to wonder, why are these pictures creepy?

The answer, I believe, is that, knowing the atrocities these people committed, we have a tendency to view them as Moral Monsters. Evil People. The Bad Guys. Them, as opposed to Us. Because of this, it is jarring to see them behaving like Normal People; it challenges our tendency to fit them into the other half of the mold, the side that we aren’t on. It’s creepy to see Them acting like Us.

It seems to me that this dichotomy is flawed. I really doubt that the citizens of Nazi Germany were somehow more depraved than the citizens of pretty much any other time and country, such that they were capable of assisting in the commission of widespread grave evil. The first sign of this is that other times and countries have (and have had) their own widespread grave evils. The nineteenth century U.S. had slavery, the modern day U.S. and many other countries have abortion. Pagan cultures have had all sorts of evil customs throughout history.

Certainly, this observation supports that of Chesterton, that original sin is the only dogma of the Faith that is empirically obvious, or something to that effect. But what I find interesting is this. We postmoderns tend to look back at things like slavery and Nazi Germany in a sort of high-minded moral disgust, utterly certain that We are better than Them and would never participate in such evils. But of course, as noted, we have our own grave evils going on all the time in which we do participate. This seems to me to be a kind of cognitive dissonance, and I think it is informative regarding the character of moral judgment in people generally. What can we learn from it? That’s a question for the latter part of this post.

A prediction

This sort of phenomenon (which has always been obvious) will not inspire the self-described “Brights” who view religiosity as the pinnacle of irrationality to brave the wrath of the PC police and assert that therefore males are more rational (although the fact itself shows that males are, in some respects, less rational).

Absolutely Stunning…

that anyone would be the least bit surprised when politicians begin distancing themselves from their campaign promises.