The Second New (and Great) Commandment:

Thou Shalt Not Force thy Morals

On Anyone Else

The condition we're in now is not unprecedented, actually. Whenever great philosophical theories come into conflict (as in our age with Kant's and Hegel's), there follows--after a period of wrangling--a time of philosophical despair, which takes either the form, "No one can really know anything," or "Everything depends on your point of view," or some combination of the two. And this epistemological uncertainty, which always thinks of itself as "the real true wisdom," spills over into the moral realm, usually with disastrous results. So it was at the time of Socrates, who (after Heraclitus and Parmenides) got the Greek world back on track; and at the time of St. Augustine, who (after Plato and Aristotle) integrated Christianity into philosophical thought; and on through history. So don't despair; we've been through this before, and come out the wiser--and better--for it.

Anyhow, the moral version of the First New Commandment is that people should let other people's morals alone, which of course showed up in spades in the New Moralists' indignation at prying into President Clinton's private life, which was nobody's business but his, as long as Monica was willing. Democrats, being politicians, were quick to assert how they deplore the conduct, but that was meaningless, because all it said was, "I wouldn't do a thing like this myself, but . . ."--but who am I to judge? Who am I to impose my standards on him? This is almost the equivalent of saying, "Well, I personally can't stand Beethoven, but there's no accounting for taste, is there?" Or perhaps, "Personally, I hate pizza, but who am I to say what you should eat?" Isn't morality more serious than that?

The basic stupidity behind the command.

It is indeed, and the New Moralists recognize it as well as anyone else does; in fact, they get very exercised over people trying to "impose their morality" on others--which should indicate, if you've followed me up to this point, that there's something fishy about this Commandment. Who are the New Moralists to impose this Commandment on those who don't agree with it?

Think about this. The father says to his son, "I know you're sinning with that woman, and as long as you're doing it, you're no longer living in this house and eating my bread!" The son replies, sadly and indulgently, "Dad, I respect your morals, but you have your standards and I have mine. You have no right to tell me what to do." The father answers, "Listen here, you! I have a moral obligation to raise my son to be a God-fearing Christian! Who are you to try to keep me from following my conscience?" The son is trying to force the command "Don't interfere with anyone's morals" on his father, and in so doing is interfering with the father's following what he considers a moral command--which happens to include interfering with his son.

Once again, it's hard to talk about this, because we've been brainwashed into accepting non-interference as self-evident truth, when in fact it's self-contradictory idiocy.

Here's this New Commandment's underpinning: There are no moral absolutes. Another way of saying this is that morality is a purely personal matter.

This means, of course, that each person's morals apply to himself alone, and don't apply to anyone else. Hence, if you try to make me conform to your moral standards, you are acting as if your moral standards applied to me also, which is false. Therefore, you should not do it. The problem is that "you should not do it" is a moral command that applies to you, not me.

Think about this, now, don't just react. Look at the logic. It follows from the premise that morals are a purely personal matter that it is wrong for anyone to act as if his own standards applied to everyone. But that conclusion itself is a moral standard that applies to everyone. Hence, if there are no moral absolutes, there is a moral absolute.

Once again, as is the case with "No one can know what the facts really are," which no one really believes, no one really believes that there are no moral absolutes; because if you do, then you can't help believing that those who try to impose their morals on you are doing what is objectively wrong; and should be stopped.

And there's another little secret that confirms this. New Moralists, who in this regard are what they call "moral relativists" (for obvious reasons) are the loudest in asserting the "rights" that they claim they have. But if there are no moral absolutes, there are no rights.

Why? Because, as I said when I was discussing the alleged "right" to your own opinion, my assertion of a right to do something is nothing more than my assertion that everyone else has an obligation not to try to stop me from exercising it--whether they want to or not.

That is, the assertion of a right to do something is absurd and otiose if you're going to let me do it anyway. I only assert it when I have reason to believe that you're going to try to stop me, and I want to prevent this--by making you realize that somehow or other, you're not "allowed" to stop me.

But what does that mean? It can't mean simply that there's a law against it, because then the Civil Rights Movement and the Feminist Movement and the Gay Rights Movement and all the rest of the Movements don't make sense. When the law said that black people couldn't sit in the front of the bus, then they had no right (legally) to sit in the front of the bus--but did that mean that they had no right in any sense? When the law said they could be slaves, did they then have no right to be free? If the law says that women can't be in combat, it automatically follows that they have no right to be in combat, and so what's their gripe? Their gripe shows that that's not it at all.

No indeed. The feminists who wanted to be in combat were claiming that they must be allowed to do what they want to do, and if there was a law against it, it was an unjust law which must be changed. That is, what rights imply is that there is an objective, serious obligation to allow the rights to be exercised, an obligation more serious even than that of laws, because if there's a law denying that right, the law is objectively unjust and must be abolished. But then what is this "super-obligation" but the moral obligation?

So no one really believes that morals are purely personal and don't apply beyond yourself. And, as I said, the New Moralists have all sorts of Commandments that they impose on everyone. So don't be fooled by this New Commandment; even its believers don't believe it, let alone follow it.

What happened to get us into this mess?

We don't have to go back all the way to 1600 to find the origins of this, only as far as David Hume, who died in 1776. In his analysis of human nature, he "discovered" that reason, which knew relationships, couldn't tell you what is "good." (As you can see from my analysis in the previous interlude, he was right in saying that there isn't any "good-out-there" which can be discovered by reason.) He concluded from this that reason was incapable of motivating the will (the tendency toward "the good") to act, and consequently only emotions ("sentiment" in his terms) could do this.

But the fly in the ointment of his theory comes in his statement, "Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions" [emphasis mine]. It's one thing to say that it is, but why ought it to be? Because up to his time, people had been basing their morals on what reason says "human nature" is; and according to Hume, this is inconsistent with the function of reason, and therefore it ought not to be done.

In other words, based on his analysis of "human nature," using reason as the foundation of your morals was inconsistent, and therefore it should be avoided. But this very command to avoid it (the "ought" here) contradicts the basis on which the command is founded. In effect, he said, "it's unreasonable to base your morals on reason, and therefore, reason tells you not to do it." So his view has a contradiction hidden within it.

But if you don't see the contradiction, and accept his idea, then certain things follow. The main logical implication is that what feels good automatically is (morally) good; which would mean that rape is fine if you feel good about it, and so is theft, and murder, and so on. Hume tried to fix this up by distinguishing "moral sentiments" from "selfish sentiments" which would lead to rape and plunder and so on; but if you analyze how you distinguish the one from the other, you can't tell why it ought to be the case that the "moral, unselfish" sentiments should win over the "self-interested" ones in a conflict--because the unselfish feelings are almost bound to be weaker. Why should they prevail, then? Well, . . . sort of "just because."

In other words, it's a lousy theory, not only because it's based on the very thing it denies, but because it predicts things that even its author thought couldn't be considered moral. But it sounds very appealing to say to think that if something feels good to me it's okay for me to do it, and you shouldn't try to stop me (not even if it feels good to try to stop me?). So it caught on.

Add to this the contribution of Sigmund Freud, and we have an apparently scientific justification of Hume's view. Freud basically held that when you were born, you were just a bundle of desires seeking gratification. But it was inevitable that in the course of trying to satisfy your urges, you'd run into things that you thought would give you pleasure, but gave you pain instead--sometimes severe pain, very often involving a spanking from Daddy. So you avoided those acts, because you were afraid of the pain, and gradually forgot what actually would happen if you did them (you "repressed" the actual punishment, in his terms); and as you reached adulthood, you just "sort of knew" that you must avoid doing these things "or else," except that you didn't know or else what. But it felt as if something like Daddy would punish you if you did them (that is, it was the same type of fear you had as a child when you expected Daddy to spank you).

And thus was the moral code dinned into your head, and this explains its connection to a god. And, of course, since parents in a given culture tend to punish their kids for more or less the same kinds of things, this accounts for why one person's morals would be similar to those in his culture and different from those in another. It's all in how you were brought up.

And so, morality on this theory has an emotional base; it's a kind of benign neurosis, a "deeply felt obligation" that you can't escape except by something like psychoanalysis; but it's not a reasoned thing; you "just know" what the god wants you to do.

The trouble with it, though, is what it predicts. Freud himself, in fact, used it to explain why a culture's moral code remained constant over years and generations (as it had up to his time). Obviously, if it's a neurotic compulsion that's instilled into a kid's mind by the time he's five, then he's not going to be able to reason his way out of it, and he'll train his own kids in pretty much the same way.

From this, however, it follows that something like the sexual revolution or the civil rights movement could never have happened, because within a very few years, and based on reasons, not mass psychoanalysis, the moral views of the culture did a drastic shift.

Secondly, you could predict from this theory that people would feel as most serious the things they were punished most severely for. But when you look at what little kids are punished for, you find that they tend to be things like coming into the house with muddy shoes, slamming the door, not tidying up their rooms, and so on, not murder, rape, incest, and the rest--for which they generally weren't punished at all. Remember, on this theory, your sense of moral obligation comes from what you actually were punished for, not for what your parents told you in a kind of abstract way was wrong.

Thirdly, if this theory were true, we could never distinguish between feeling guilty and knowing we did wrong; and we often do this. I, for instance, was brought up during the Great Depression, and was a finicky eater, which used to drive my father right up the wall, since he didn't know if I'd have a meal tomorrow. To this day I feel guilty when I go to a restaurant and leave a whole pork chop uneaten on my plate (especially when we're going to a concert afterwards and can't take it with us). But still, I know that it's stupid to turn myself into a garbage pail and get fat and unhealthy just so the food on my plate won't be thrown away. Also, it's common for people who have escaped from fires to know that they did the right thing in not going back and trying to rescue others trapped in there, because all that would do would be to add to the number of corpses; but they can't help feeling as if they did wrong.

Besides, it's absurd to say that if Jeffrey Dahmer "felt comfortable with" cutting people up and having sex with the parts, then it was okay for him to do it; that if people (because they were brought up to hate blacks or gays) feel they ought to go around beating up black or gay people, then they're really being moral in doing these things--that it's a "deeply emotional issue" and we should let them follow their conscience.

When you try to put these "it's the way you feel" theories in practice, they turn out to be ridiculous. Morality can't be the way you were brought up, because you know when you get to be an adult that there are certain things you have to do whether you feel good about doing them or not, and other things you have to avoid, whether you were trained to avoid them or not.

There's a Darwinian variant on this theory, though, which is behind a good deal of the idea that morals involve emotions and not reason; but I want to leave that for the Third New Commandment and its interlude, when I'll discuss the implications of evolution theory on our view of reason, emotions, and morality. Take my word for it at the moment that it also involves an internal contradiction, and is no more valid than what I just talked about.

But there's a view about the basis of morals that tries to get around the really stupid implications of "if it feels right, it's moral." It started as what is called "utilitarianism," whose basic tenet is that "the good" (meaning, what's morally right) is "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," which boils down to what makes the majority feel best.

It was discovered early on, however, that this won't work, because it would mean, for instance, if the German people would be happier with the Jews all gassed out of existence, then (since the Germans were in the majority), this would automatically be a morally good thing. So people tried to fix it up with "rule utilitarianism" and various dodges; but they all come a cropper in trying to figure out why the rule that prevents a minor atrocity from being used for great happiness should apply. How can it "make most people feel better" to follow a rule that prevents most people from feeling better? That is, If a Palestinian can bring world attention to the plight of his whole people by blowing up a bus with twenty Israelis on it, then why is this not a good thing? Well, just because.

Besides, happiness, like goodness, is a personal, subjective thing; and fifteen tons of subjectivity don't equal one ounce of objectivity. Yet we know it's objectively wrong to kill innocent people no matter what you or your people plan to gain from it. We do know it; don't kid yourself.

The latest twist and turn of this is that it's wrong, not because it feels abhorrent to somebody, but because society disapproves of it; and society's taboos define what the moral code of that society is. The horror people around you feel about taboo acts rubs off on you, and so you contribute to the social pressure at the same time you are subject to it. This collective repugnance seems to emanate from some invisible being (since no one knows where it came from; it's "just there"), and this explains why people think a god is responsible for the moral command. So it's not really the way you were brought up; it's what society thinks.

The trouble with this view is twofold: First, it's just a collective version of "There are no moral absolutes," which, as I'll show in a minute, contradicts itself; and second, like the Freudian theory, it predicts some things that are manifestly false.

Why does it contradict itself? Because if the only real morality is what the society thinks is right and wrong (for whatever reason), then it follows from this that no society should try to force its own moral standards on a different culture.

Notice, for instance, how indignant people who hold this view get (I write this near Columbus Day) at the Spanish missionaries imposing their European morals on the poor, unsuspecting natives of the New World. They should have let the natives alone to follow their culture's morals, which adapted them to the conditions they were living in. Oh? They should? By whose standards? Who are these moral relativists to impose their standard (don't export your culture's morals) on the Spanish missionaries? They, after all, were only following the moral imperative of their own culture--which happened to be "go make disciples of all nations."

(I might remark here, by the way, the little objective fact that the Mayan civilization, for one, had vanished before the Europeans ever got there, though there are still Mayans in the Yucatan. And, as my Mayan guide told me on a trip to Chichén Itzá, "The intellectuals were making the people build whole new cities on top of the old ones every time the calendar cycled, and were sacrificing hundreds of young maidens every year to the god Chac; and the ordinary people finally got fed up with the oppression, and slaughtered them all, and then were able to live in peace. What did they need calendars and writing for?" Apparently, the nobles among the savages were not the noble savages Rousseau rhapsodized about. Many of the natives welcomed Christianity, which forbade such things.)

The point, of course, is that, just like the individual version of this New Commandment, its basis logically entails its contradiction. If morality is private to the culture, then it follows that one culture should not impose its moral standards on another. But that is a moral standard that applies to all cultures, which means that not all morals are private to the culture.

And, of course, in practice, nobody believes this one either. The Nazi War Criminals Trials were a statement that it didn't matter what the German people might think, you can't treat Jews as if they were literal pigs, to be slaughtered if you feel like it; the South Africans couldn't (in apartheid) treat the black citizens as if they were animals, when in fact they were humans. And so on.

In fact, this theory would predict, first of all, that a society's morals could not be wrong, (that is "mistakes" are impossible here) and especially could not be recognized as wrong by members of the society at the time. How could they be, if society's standards define the only morality there is? As William Graham Sumner (the exponent of this view) held, the society could change its moral standards for practical reasons, but not because it suddenly recognized that they were wrong. (You see, I'm not making this up; cultural relativists preach this way all the time.)

And yet, the civil rights movement showed that societies do change their moral codes precisely because the society itself recognizes that what is being done is wrong, not "impractical." It was certainly impractical to get rid of all the black-only, white-only facilities, and integrate the blacks into the mainstream life of the country (we're still feeling the wrenching effects of our efforts to do this), but, practical or not, it had to be done, because you can't treat human beings as if they aren't human. It doesn't matter what society thinks; you can't do it; and if society thinks that it's okay in a given case, then society has to change, that's all.

The theory would also predict that moral reformers, like Martin Luther King, Jr., would be regarded as morally evil people (because they're trying to get people to do what is objectively--according to society's standards, which are the only ones--wrong); and yet in fact, while, like King, they may be regarded as troublemakers, they're not thought of as in the same class as drug pushers or advocates for pedophilia. Why? Because drug pushers and pedophiles can't make out a convincing case that what they're advocating is a more human lifestyle, while Martin Luther King, Jr. showed quite clearly that by our own admission blacks were human beings and we were treating them as if they weren't.

And it turns out that if you scratch any moral code deeply enough, whether of an individual or a culture, you don't confront a haphazard set of taboos, you find the same basic moral command:

You must never deliberately do what is inhuman.

Or, to put it in a way that teenagers would like:

You must never be a hypocrite

--that is, deliberately pretend you aren't what you really are. You are a human being, and so you shouldn't try to pretend that you aren't.

In this sense, the leap from "is" to "ought" is inescapable. It isn't even escaped by the people who think that you can't make the leap--because they think that you ought not to try. Remember, I said that Hume claimed that because (according to him) it was inconsistent (and therefore inhuman) to base morals on reason, therefore people ought not to base morals on reason.

The differences in actual moral codes, then, don't come from the basic command; they come from different definitions of what "human" means, and therefore which acts are thought to be inconsistent with what you really are as human.

Let me give you some examples of how this works. First, there's the widespread theory (following the First New Commandment) that "there's no such thing as 'human nature'; a human being can do whatever he pleases with himself." This came from the existentialist philosophy of people like Jean-Paul Sartre in the middle of this century; and the existentialist notion of "to be human" means "to be free"; that is, to be able to make yourself into anything at all. And, as Jean-Paul Sartre holds, there is a command that follows from this notion: what he calls "bad faith," which is to choose not to choose (i.e. to let somebody else do the choosing for you, pretending that this choice--to allow this--was not your choice, and so the responsibility is his, not yours).

But of course, to say that we're absolutely free to make of ourselves anything whatever, because "there's no such thing as human nature" is just plain silly. Let me see you become a crocodile, or put out leaves and photosynthesize the way an elm tree does. Let me see you breathe water like a fish, or flap your arms and fly, the way birds do. Granted, you can fly in an airplane, but that's a human way to fly, and you can don your scuba gear and swim (for a while) under water, but that doesn't make you a fish. And the crocodile and the elm tree present rather greater problems, don't they? Why? Because you're human, and humans aren't elm trees, and in fact can't do what elm trees do.

But, you might say, who'd want to become an elm tree? My point is that, no matter how much you wanted to, you couldn't do it, because your humanity isn't capable of doing it. But let's take a case closer to home. Suppose you're a man, and you feel as if you should be a woman. You go and have a sex-change operation, and after it you're a woman, right? Wrong. A woman has two X chromosomes in every cell of her body; you've still got an X and a Y chromosome in every cell of yours; a woman has a different skeletal structure from you, different musculature, a different endocrine system, a different nervous system, different thought-patterns (no matter what you might think yours to be), and where is your uterus? Having your penis removed and a hole cut in you doesn't make you into a woman, nor does taking female hormones to enlarge your breasts (normal men have some female hormones too, it turns out); all you are in reality is a mutilated male who can pretend that he's a woman; but a simple DNA test will betray you. The only way a man could really change his sex would be if he were infected with a genetically altered virus which would replace his Y chromosome with an X chromosome throughout his body, causing a chrysalis-like rebuilding of the whole organism.

But of course, those who follow the First New Commandment go along with this charade, and call him "her" when everybody knows what the real situation is. To say that the only thing that distinguishes a man from a woman is the presence of a penis and the absence of a vulva is to trivialize sexual differences to the point of imbecility. The only way you can do it is to say that the fact is that there's no such thing as a fact.

And the notion that we ought to make this pretense follows from the equally idiotic position that it's inhuman not to let human beings make of themselves anything they like, even when that's impossible.

And what the rest of this book is about is how this Second New Commandment is violated in practice by its own adherents.

But just to reinforce what I said, that a culture's moral code is a spelling out of what that culture's definition of "human" is, consider the following different codes:

Why was dueling accepted in the culture of the middle ages (though it was condemned by the Church)? Because the people considered their bodily lives to be their "animal" lives, and their social lives (their "honor") to be what distinguished them from mere animals--the essence of their humanity. Thus, if you insulted me, you destroyed my "real humanity," and I could regain my honor by putting my mere physical life on the line.

Similarly, the Japanese considered suicide something morally obligatory when a person brought disgrace on his family or organization. Why? Because, again, the individual, physical (animal) life was not the real human life; your humanity was vested in your social relationships; and that could be restored from damage by removing the physical life that had harmed it.

Cannibals don't eat people. Anthropologists who studied cannibals were startled to find that the members of other tribes (who got eaten) were thought literally to be animals and not people--but of course, since they were so like people, their flesh ought to be nourishing. But you don't eat other members of your tribe.

Why were black people held as slaves, while white people weren't? For a couple of reasons. In Jefferson's time, the scientific theory was (I kid you not) that black people were the offspring of women who had been raped by orangutans (Jefferson disagreed with this, by the way, because he saw that blacks had a moral sense and only humans had a moral sense). Certain theologians took a passage of Genesis (6:1) about the "sons of heaven" (the descendants of Adam, the people, the theologically "real" humans) taking wives from the "daughters of men" and concluded that there was a theologically non-human race--which, of course, they thought were the blacks. So, since these people were not really human, what was the problem in owning them as slaves?

In our own day, the abortion question, for all its complications which I'll discuss later, boils down really to the assertion that a fetus is not really a human being. Those who hold that abortions are all right in the case of rape, for instance, would not agree that if a woman didn't know she'd been raped (because, say, she'd been unconscious at the time), and thought the child was her husband's, and then discovered when the child was two years old that he was the result of rape, she could kill him then.

Let me finish with this: Karl Marx held that "bourgeois morality" was no morality, but simply a way the business class kept the workers from rebelling. But if you examine the foundations of his view, humans differ from beasts in that humans use tools and transform matter into something useful. Thus, your humanity consists in your use of the forces of production, or your work. When you work for someone else, however, he (according to Marx, now) owns your humanity (your "labor power"), which is then "alienated" from yourself into his control. And he isn't (always according to Marx) human either, since he doesn't do any work, but simply makes you work. Thus, no human being has his own humanity any more--until the classless society, in which workers work for everyone, not for some individual (in which they "alienate" their humanity into humanity itself--and thus get it back--all according to Marx). It follows from this (a) that working for the classless society is the only real moral imperative, and working against it (being "reactionary") is the only real evil, and (b) since no one is now human, anything goes in trying to achieve the classless society, even to starving millions into submission, as Stalin did in Georgia.

Let this suffice to illustrate my contention that there never has been a view of morality which was not a spelling out of what the person or culture thought were the practical implications of what it means to be a human being.

Now I would be the first to agree that "human nature" is not an absolute, fixed, rigid something that we all have identically. For instance, my human nature is a married one, not a single one; and what this entails is that, by the promise I made, I have exercised my control over an aspect of my reality and made it over into one that has a special relation to this woman and no other. It has always been recognized that your reality as human can change.

But whatever your reality is at any given moment, then it's immoral for you to act as if it isn't what it is; and that's what the moral obligation says. That's why it's wrong, and recognized as wrong, to go back on a promise. By making the promise you are saying, "I have control over myself, and I will do such-and-such tomorrow," and when you break it, you are denying that you are the kind of thing who can control what he does tomorrow. But you are that kind of thing.

--Or are you? This raises the question of whether we're free to control our lives, or whether we only think we are, which we'll now have to look at a bit more closely. It will bring up the issue of when it is legitimate to interfere with another person's following his conscience, as well as a distinction I consider crucial in moral studies: the difference between values and morals. No, morals are not values.

But for now, hold on to the notion that it is a stupid moral stance to say that nobody should interfere with anybody else's morals--because that very stance is an interference with those who think they are morally obliged to interfere with others.