The Limits of Secular Moralizing: A Response to Zuckerman

   

Some questions are so ill posed that there is some merit in working out why, as questions, they fall limply to the floor. One of these is the ‘who is smarter and more moral than who atheists or Christians’ question. One of the things I have spent a good deal of my life observing is people. I have observed many types of people from many backgrounds and I have come to one clear conclusion about them. People, as Jim Morrison said, are strange. They are puzzling and contradictory both in their capacity for goodness and their capacity for mischief and harm. I have also noticed that the good qualities in people can sometimes be difficult to untangle from the bad. As a result of all this I look on human foibles with a broadly tolerant eye and certainly have no interest in separating the sheep from the goats beyond what is strictly necessary to maintain basic standards of civilization. Nonetheless there is a certain species of moralizer who cannot leave the question there. They simply HAVE to know which group of the many on offer is the best and wisest and most moral so they can belong to that group and, much more importantly, NOT belong to the others. One of these people seems to be Phil Zuckerman writing in Salon (https://www.salon.com/2021/08/21/staunch-atheists-show-higher-morals-than-the-proudly-pious-from-the-pandemic-to-climate-change). Mr. Zuckerman is a secular humanist author who wants you to know that he is a very good person without God. Well, good for him if this is true. Mr. Zuckerman, though, also wants you to know that the ‘type’ of which he is an instance “atheists, agnostics, people who never attend religious services, don't think the Bible is the word of God, and don't pray” display a higher level of moral attainment than “religious fundamentalists who believe in God without any doubts, who attend church frequently, who consider the Bible the infallible word of God, who pray a lot, and who insist that Jesus is the only way, the only truth, and the only life.” As evidence for this conclusion Mr. Zuckerman adverts not to personal observation or experience but mostly to polling and surveys. Polls consistently show that ‘hard core secularists’ (as defined above) express more moral opinions than religious fundamentalists on a host of issues ranging from climate change and COVID to immigration and gun control. Thus, after a brief but quickly dropped nod to the complexity of the world, we get the following conclusion: “the overall pattern remains clear: When it comes to the most pressing moral issues of the day, hard-core secularists exhibit much more empathy, compassion, and care for the well-being of others than the most ardently God-worshipping. Such a reality is necessary to expose, not simply in order to debunk the long-standing canard that religion is necessary for ethical living, but because such exposure renders all the more pressing the need for a more consciously secular citizenry, one that lives in reality, embraces science and empiricism, and supports sound policies — not prayer — as a way to make life better, safer and more humane.” 

And here we see the point of this piece: it is an exercise in moral suasion towards a more secular citizenry, one, moreover, that is ‘conscious’ of its secularity and (one dreads) eager as puppies to make others ‘conscious’ of it too. Mr. Zuckerman is not doing ‘science’ or ‘empiricism’ in any sense of those words. He is engaged in consciousness-raising. This is evident on very little reflection. The procedure of this piece is, regarded as science, empty, trivial and self-referential. Mr. Zuckerman self-certifies the social group to which he belongs as morally superior based on the standards internal to that group (which literally ANY group of people can do). He is addressing only an audience that believes these claims about itself already. What’s more, he betrays a curious weakness for fallacies of reification and essentialism. In his mind ‘secularism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ are fixed independent variables from which predictable, quantifiable results will flow reliably: more morality in the one case and less morality in the other. In the messy real world, alas, ideologies and religions intersect and interact with power, class, geography and history. They are NOT simple essences that express their natures independently of the decisions people make about how prestige and material and cultural benefits are distributed in a society.[1] This a-historicism is not a vice peculiar to Mr. Zuckerman though. It seems a constitutive principle of ‘hard core secularist discourse’ and is the chief reason I would never label myself a ‘hard core secularist’ even if I ceased all belief in a deity tomorrow. That this is a pro-secular puff piece though is evidenced from one more glaring fact: ‘scientifically and empirically’ Zuckerman is not even remotely entitled to the conclusion given above even on his own data. He admits that ‘nones’ and ‘moderately’ religious people are the majority of Americans yet offers no argument or evidence to show that these people are any worse than hard core secularists on things like COVID or any other metric. From this we could just as easily conclude that we would be as well off (if not even better off!) with more of these people quite apart from how many hard core secularists there are. Finally, scientism (blinded by its fascination with quantitative data) sometimes ignores the real world and what almost any fool can observe in it. OPINIONS are only a rough (very rough) guide to behavior. Polling people on what they THINK may reveal little to nothing as to do how they ACT. Anyone who works in a university can tell you that there are people who have ALL the right positions on social issues, can utter a cornucopia of noble, progressive sentiments yet STILL be abusive shits. Judging how moral people are from the opinions they express to pollsters ignores a well known human tendency to hypocrisy: a thing I have observed in ‘self-conscious secular citizens’ as much as in Christians. Beyond certain obvious metrics, such as the fact that hard core secularists seem to be getting their vaccines, we have little purchase on how good or bad they are overall as people from such simple quantitative measures.   

The unfortunate thing is, and this is my real interest in writing this piece, that morality is unmeasurable to a finite calculator and neither polling nor any other quantitative procedure will ever tell us about it. Morality in a person is not simply a product of right moral views and positive traits of character but of these things PLUS the challenges, obstacles and opportunities an individual faces. Giving to charity is better, taken absolutely, than quitting heroin however quitting heroin may be a FAR greater moral achievement. Give someone a mental illness or an addiction and THEIR moral victories may not be at all obvious to those who utter the prayer of the Pharisee: ““Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” On these terms, a meth addicted single mother in Alabama may have done more morally than I or the most self-consciously secular citizen in Toronto or New York could EVER accomplish. This could even be true if she foolishly and mistakenly voted for Trump! 

Here though we face the elephant in the room: class. Surprisingly for Salon Mr. Zuckerman never once refers to it (this is the a-historicism I referred to above). I will cut to the chase. I said above that morality is relative to the challenges and obstacles a person faces.  Challenges, obstacles and opportunities, in general what we might call moral luck, are NOT distributed equally. In terms of opportunity for discernment, development and growth some people are privileged over others. This is why any elite whatsoever can self-certify as wiser and more moral than the people it rules (apart from the fact that it can define the terms of comparison so that the odds will ever be in its favor). The bourgeois class in particular has ALWAYS had a discourse about its superior moral outlook and has ALWAYS indulged the liberty of expressing noble, progressive sentiments at low personal cost. How much of the ‘moral superiority’ and indeed self-perception of ‘moral superiority’ we find in the ‘hard core secularist’ is a simple function of economic and educational privilege? We would not know from this article as we get no economic or class breakdown of who is a secularist and who isn’t. Mr. Zuckerman does not engage in such an analysis and the reason seems all too obvious: secularity and religion are simple essences that float above historical determination like the objects of ‘science’ are supposed to do (they don’t but that is another argument). They are ‘characters’ (like moral types) that express their simple natures timelessly in a context free vacuum. Thus, it is ‘religious fundamentalism’ that, of its own intrinsic nature, is making Americans worse in abstraction from all the ravages of capitalism and neo-liberal madness. Presumably, it is fundamentalism-in- itself that is making Afghans worse than western secularists in perfect abstraction from a brutal NATO occupation. Certainly, rubbishing public services or killing people with bombs or opioids wouldn’t make  Americans or Afghans more prone to illiberalism would it? Surely it is Islam in its Platonic purity that is causing violence in Afghanistan and not cluster bombs or colonialism! Here a supposed empiricism morphs into the most vaporous idealism one could imagine

The real lesson to be learned here though is the virtue of humility and this, actually, IS a virtue I have observed somewhat more in religious people and ‘nones’ than in hard core secularists who, frankly, often come across as a bit too smugly pleased with themselves. Humility is the recognition of how much of your character or ability you owe to others and how little of it you owe to your own power of self-creation. Character is the gift of others to you not simply your own gift to yourself. Much of this comes in the form of moral or epistemic luck that is in principle a birthright but in practice a social privilege. Who you are is not a distinct thing from who you were born. This is why the self-congratulation of elites is obnoxious and indeed counterproductive on the profoundest level for people react viscerally against it. At any rate, if an elect of the sort Mr. Zukerman describes exists I have no desire to be a part of it any more than I would desire to belong to obnoxious organizations like MENSA. I think I would join Jesus Christ himself in preferring the company of riff-raff to the sanctimonious and smug: “As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” 

 

 

 

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[1] Here is another object lesson. In a lab we could isolate ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’ from other variables and measure their specific contributions to certain predicted outcomes. Alas though, historians and social scientists do not study things in labs and for this reason cannot answer such sweeping, non-granular questions as to whether things like religion (or for that matter sex or alcohol!) are good or bad according to some utilitarian calculus. For similar reasons we cannot actually know if Mr. Zuckerman is good without God. He may be good without explicit belief in God but that is not the same thing. God, after all, might secretly and implicitly be moving him towards the good either directly or through the medium of culture or history.