Some scattered thoughts (In defence of atheists/David Crane had a point)

God willing, here will be art here on the 15th. If I can get it done by then. Until then, there's some topics I've been thinking of writing about, but decided against for now - first among them the usual Christian arguments against atheist morality, which annoy me massively - specifically, the complaints that "if it's just one complex arrangement of molecules causing structural damage to another complex arrangement of molecules, what's wrong with that?" or "if it's just the arrangement of electrochemical discharges in my brain that make me do wrong, why blame me for it?" etc. These implicitly assume that God exists, or at least, that a hardline materialist explanation of morality is a priori insufficient, and then proceed to sneer at atheist morality on the basis that it's self-evidently insufficient. (Christians often back this up by quoting a certain dead atheist's words on the is/ought problem like they were holy scripture.) This seems to me not dissimilar to the standard atheist argument against miracles, which runs as follows: "Miracles do not happen. We know this because we have constructed and think according to a philosophy in which there is no room for miracles. QED." By probably meaningless coincidence, the aforementioned dead atheist is quoted a lot in that context too.

However, writing down all my thoughts on this will have to wait until I know something about atheist moral philosophy, which at present I don't. Knowing something about Christian moral philosophy might also help. Knowing the first thing about philosophy should probably be on my list at some point...

On a somewhat briefer note, Mark Shea's hammering away on the issue of torture eventually got me pondering a few things - firstly, that once you've started thinking about torture and/or prisoner abuse/hostile interrogation (and I'll admit to my shame that it took a while for me to really start being bothered about this issue), the degree to which popular culture is totally blasé about hurting people for the greater good can become rather disturbing. I was reading issues of Starman the other night in which the O'Dares - and not the black sheep, Matt O'Dare, but the upstanding side-of-good-and-light ones - were administering beatings and arm-twistings to various criminals to get information; and the Sandman was shown beating/intimidating people for the same reason. I'm pretty sure Batman does this a lot, too. Implied assumption: hit a dead end and you can get somewhere by beating up enough criminals. What the hell?

Now, Starman's a mature comic (as in, "written for adults", rather than "unsuitable for kids"), but I remember a while back reading a '90's Captain America comic (Comics Code Authority Approved, kids!) where he interrogated a white supremacist terrorist by "waterboarding" him (if that's still the right word) in a tar pit.

Then there's Sin City, where I'm pretty you're not supposed to approve of Marv's tactics (but I have the feeling some people would), and 24 which I've never seen and therefore can't comment on but is apparently rather popular and highly brutal, and doubtless numerous other things I've been spared by the simple expedient of not having a TV (which is why my list of examples consists chiefly of comics).

Anyway, some of Mark Shea's comments on fear as the problem made sense to me, and, after a short while percolating through my subconscious, re-emerged in the form most disturbing to me. (It sometimes takes a while to reformulate arguments into the form that makes most sense to me, which isn't always the form that made most sense to anyone else.)

It comes naturally to worry about and imagine situations (see: "ticking bomb" etc, and all that I just listed) in which brutality can prevent crime, loss of life, etc., and may even be the necessary price of protecting people. Such scenarios are easily constructed.

It is equally conceivable and reasonable to fear the negative consequences of brutality: alienation of allies, increasing the resolution of one's enemies, demoralisation of one's own side, tipping people over the line between passive and active hostility, and other things besides. No-one seriously imagines that violence comes without a downside. But unless we can convince ourselves that the potential target of our violence is an overhyped threat (an approach which is fine as long as there's no actual danger), it can be difficult to give the downside a thought, let alone fear it like we can fear a ticking-bomb scenario. This is logically inconsistent, to say the least. (And a good reason to value having pacifists in your society to correct the imbalance.)

Torture and prisoner abuse are weapons of a sort - double-edged swords, so to speak. On a purely practical level, not even considering the (commendable) moral horror of sinking to certain acts: why should the fear of going... not even unarmed, but devoid of these particular weapons be so much stronger than the fear of the weapons cutting back? And why (to take a current example) is it so much easier to support torturing terrorists - or at least, using "advanced interrogation" techniques on them - if one thinks that al-Qaeda are really the vanguard of the barbarian horde at the door, and so much easier to oppose if one thinks that the whole War On Terror is overhyped fearmongering by Bush & co.? This disturbs me greatly.

Chesterton had this to say about Carthage (Everlasting Man, I:VII): There is always a sort of dim idea that these darker powers will really do things, with no nonsense about it... In the New Town which the Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia, the god who got things done bore the name Moloch... the worshippers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished civilization abounding in refinements and luxuries. The consequences were slightly different but the fundamental error is the same: a casual indifference to the potential blowback of being brutal, coupled with an irrational fear - even terror - of not being vicious enough to survive. The assumption is that the world is just a plain nasty place, and only the nastiest can get by - that the world will punish you harder for not adopting the Devil's tactics than God can possibly reward you for it.

It's not like I ever approved of waterboarding or kicking the crap out of prisoners, although I could see where they were coming from who approved of such things. But for some reason, only when it clicked how irrational it is that fear of disaster almost invariably acts as a drive towards brutality did it really disturb me, and it's been bothering me all evening. Previously it looked like an understandable error, but from this angle it looks positively demonic.

...I know, this should not be news to anyone who believes in Original Sin. But Original Sin still has power to disturb. God have mercy.

"He has not given us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of love, and of power, and a sound mind - " St. Paul, 1 Timothy somewhere. So may it be.