Project Darkside: or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Black Mage

So, a few moons back, I'm playing Assassin's Creed, and thinking about good and evil, in games, like you do. Particularly in D&D, where the "payoff" for good or evil is so nebulous. More to the point, in a polytheistic universe with no dominance of celestial force in favor of good, what is evil? The best I could parse out was a general distinction between altruism (good) and selfishness (evil). This is a simple binary, by now intuitive to most people, backed up by common sense, personal experience, and not reading Ayn Rand.

This got me thinking about evolutionary psychology. (The group/self binary, not Ayn Rand.) I don't know what to make of evo psych as a science or social science; only the sexiest bits filter out into the mainstream press, and it's anyone's guess what the real research looks like at any given time. The stuff that's well-publicized, at least, tends to be a heady mixture of racism, sexism, and bullshit, and it's been argued that the field basically boils down to explaining modern behaviors (of which there exists little reliable evidence) by noting procedural similarities with ancient behaviors (of which there exists even less reliable evidence). Most of what you read about evo psych will fail to even accomplish the first of those two--if you want to explain why blonde hair is considered desirable by a significant majority of the species, for example, you first have to establish that it's actually true. (In case you were wondering, it turns out that it's because blonde women are more flammable than normal, non-blonde women, which makes them a valuable source of warmth in the cold Bronze Age winters.) David Livingstone Smith's Why We Lie was quite interesting and informative, and seemed to fall prey to precisely none of the huge methodological problems demonstrated in the shit you see in the Emm Ess Emm, so maybe the field's chock full of talented, sensible people who are drowned out by a couple of fame-whoring shitheads. Who knows.

That said, evo psych--not just people who claim to work in the field, but people discussing "natural" morality in general--tends to asume that selfishness is the default, and that works fine for reciprocal altruism. (In a shout-out to my demon-hunting brother, it is truly wonderful that our textbook example for altruistic behavior is derived from vampire bats.) But what about "pure" altruism, in which no obvious survival benefit presents itself? One current answer is that "pure" altruism is basically a glitch; early human societies may have presented few opportunities for altruism that didn't provide a likely survival benefit, so our genes don't account for the possibility. Ok, makes sense enough. Just because a behavior is widespread/universal doesn't mean it's necessarily adaptive, but could also be a spandrel or a malfunctioning of an adaptive behavior due to a change in context.

But really, do those circumstances exist even now? The theory above is meant to explain the Mother Theresas of the world--fuck off, secular contrarians, you know what I mean--but can we say conclusively that she did not benefit from her work? Because we sure as hell did. Missionary and humanitarian work within Christianity have historically yielded huge benefits for Christian cultures, establishing a cultural beachhead in what might otherwise have been hostile lands; while we're at it, poverty in general is a persistent security risk to pretty much everyone. But still, the benefit to the individual seems negligible, even if the benefit to the group--nation, in poli-sci terms, or just a general sense of "people around you"--is significant. Egoism generally assumes that altruism can only be "rational" when its benefit is fairly direct, fairly certain, and can reliably be calculated rationally. ("Rational" is a word I'll be using, and misusing, quite a bit. Bear with me, and try to tolerate some bendy definitions. Have a drink first, if that helps. I'll wait here.)

(Back? Ok.)

So we have the libido--which just means "drives" in early psychological usage, not specifically sex, although sex is certainly one of the strongest--which provides for selfishness, which encompasses reciprocal altruism. We also have this other, nebulous "moral feeling" that sometimes directs some of us to varying degrees of less-reciprocal altruism. (Or maybe we don't, but lots of philosophers think we do, and hey, sake of argument.) It's been suggested that this second urge is social, and not rational (assuming, of course, that they can be separated), but there are problems with this as well. Niebuhr uses the example of the individual whose moral feeling places him in conflict with, and therefore in danger from, his group to suggest that "conscience," his term for this nebulous "other" feeling, cannot be wholly rational or social.

So what if conscience isn't a glitch of the libido, but a key part of it? What if self-preservation, the drive to keep breathing, keep eating, and keep fucking, and make sure one's children survive to adulthood to do the same, has developed ways of presenting itself that are purely survival oriented, but not (consciously) rational, and therefore not calculable, in their expression to our consciousness? In a review of Christopher Strain's Pure Fire, a work concerning self-defense ideology in the civil rights movement, the author was criticized for including essentially suicidal actions under the rubric of self-defense. But there are, perhaps, different kinds of suicides, some quite life-affirming--there's some fine work on the social identity of suicide bombers that would seem to support this idea. Niebuhr's example, like Strain's, just means that the individual in question had determined, though not on a conscious or rational level, that staying in his current community "as is" constituted sufficient uncertainty and terror to be functionally equivalent to suicide, and a less pleasant one than a de facto suicide brought about by direct action.

So, essentially, what we have here is hard to pin down within the philosophical schools with which I'm familiar. In its early, pen-and-paper conception, I called it ethical nihilism, which is apparently a phrase both vague and in use, so here I use the more humble "Project Darkside," or simply D. It's egoistic, certainly, but not rational. It leads to a kind of enforced altruism (or "altruism," if you please), for reasons to be discussed, but doesn't require a god's-eye view like utilitarianism. It is ultimately consequentialist, but posits moral actions with no clear consequences in sight. More to the point, it encourages no particular actions, but seems to do a good job describing how people actually live; yet, by its insistent directionality it seems to be proscriptive as well as descriptive. It posits that morality is not a duty, per se, but but something that arises, emergently, from the chance interactions of horny people who don't want to die. Things like aggregate happiness, respect for free will, or adherence to rules derive their value from their contribution to the needs of the libido, and may be provisionally discarded when it's convenient to do so, i.e. when they cease to contribute. (And there it is, folks, the sentence that can be quoted out of context to undermine my credibility in anything I say or do in the future. Public office, here I...stay quietly away from!) Which is where it gets a bit creepy.

Because we can't accurately imagine the past or recreate lived experience from texts, D suggests that morality is entirely contextual. The treatment of women as property--or, if another of my pet theories is correct, the creation of the concept of "property" as analagous to women--might be so historically pervasive because, under different material/cultural conditions, it was actually beneficial overall. It's clearly not now, but when someone disagrees, all the ethical nihilist feminist may offer in reply is that the enslavement of women is detrimental to one's ability to keep breathing. (Conveniently, it allows said feminist to morally add, "...because if you keep doing it, we'll kill you.") So it's pretty damn relativistic about rights in general, and rights advance only by economic pressure and the threat of violence, but is that really so different from now?

Now, the theological implications. It's obviously compatible with atheism, and a rationalist would say it requires atheism, but a fan of D would make a rather crap rationalist. If religion is viewed primarily in terms of its value as tribal affiliation, things get muddier. It's fairly compatible with transcendentalism, or unitarianism, or the American civil religion, of course; interesting, since those traditions all draw heavily from Europe, but are also as American as cherry pie. Or, well, you know.

In more old-school religion, D is oddly compatible with the doctrine of total depravity. In fact, it might be the doctrine of total depravity, with a weirdly sunny eschatology tacked on. Simply put, if the sum of all human kindness and decency is an unconsciously calculated selfishness, it's easy to see exactly what's wrong with the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. We can't be moral because we can't even conceive of what real disinterested love would be. Or, for that matter, real faith in God. Faith is instead something we believe provisionally and socially, and through that loophole, you could drive a camel.

Now then. Back to the games.

First Things

It is quite easy to become bored with Mere Christianity.

You don't even have to read it to become bored with it, because like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, it's kind of everywhere. Maybe not quite so widespread--it's not a recurring joke on South Park--but if you frequent right-wing political blogs, it's hard to escape. C.S. Lewis' reputation as the skeptic's apostle seems to have made the transition into the 21st century quite nicely, and whenever a Christian conservative (that oh-so-specific label currently popular here in the States) mentions their road-to-Damascus moment in which they abandoned atheism, liberalism, and any other unhealthy -isms associated with the political left, Mere Christianity seems to get the credit.

I'm not a Narnia afficionado, and am thoroughly unversed in any of the English quasi-Christian fantasy canon, so my prior experience with Lewis' writing was pretty much nil. But it's a book you can't seem to avoid, especially if your worldview is as comfortably confused as mine, and I picked up a copy from the library after class one day. The edition in question was a printing from the 1950s, visibly falling apart, and came appended with a note from the librarian apologizing for the book's deteriorating condition. By the third yellowed, crackling page, I knew I'd just end up buying the damned thing.

I knew I had to buy it not so much because it appeared to me as Truth--as an apologetic, it was more convincing than I'd expected but less convincing than I'd been told--but because of the quality of the writing itself. I've shown a tendency to write with a shotgun, to scatter thoughts far and wide and work out what the hell I'm doing by looking at the grouping after the fact. Lewis writes like the Saint of Killers shoots: with absolute certainty, with no more rhetorical flourish than is necessary, and with astonishing clarity. When he's not certain, when he's on uncertain doctrinal ground, or when a possibility for which he cannot answer appears, he explicitly acknowledges as much and says little. He doesn't fire if he's not sure where the bullet's going.

Part of this has to do with the fact that I can only really read in one language, and it's the one Lewis wrote in, less than a century ago. It's possible I'd feel the same way about Augustine or Acquinas or even Paul if they had the same kind of advantages, but they don't. And the world Lewis depicts certainly seems more similar to my own than those depicted by Augustine or Acquinas or Paul. Which is not to say it's bulletproof: it is a bit unnerving that our relationship to God is at one point like that of a disobedient child to an adult and at another like that of a tin soldier to a toymaker. (Presumably, the "disobedient child" refers to some kind of transitional state between the perfect and fallen humanity. Or maybe not. At any rate, we're all tin soldiers now.) I'm of the opinion that contradiction is not necessarily a problem when you're dealing with this kind of deep subjectivity, but Lewis resorts to subjectivity only sparingly, and attempts to marry it to empiricism to boot. As he notes in The Problem of Pain, "nonsense remains nonsense even if we talk it about God." Which is, on its face, hard to argue against; I suppose it depends on what one means by "nonsense." A lot of my thoughts would have seemed like nonsense even to me if I hadn't gone to the trouble of repurposing a slew of unrelated words to help articulate them.

Where Mere Christianity is at its most impressive is when it deals with logic, the structure of Law, free will, sin, and redemption as naturally following from one another. Put succinctly, most of what Lewis writes struck me as eminently plausible whether or not a man called Jesus of Nazareth ever existed at all. Which, incidentally, is a point he doesn't dwell on: the canon is the canon, take it or leave it. This stance is likely having to due with the "mere" of the title, meaning common, universally accepted within the mainstream Christian community, and the opposite of esoteric. Turns out that whole "historical Christ" sticking point predates The Jesus Seminar, who knew? But it's particularly interesting, given that Lewis' own conversion (detailed nicely in The Question of God, although that borrowed it from somewhere else) begins with an acceptance of the Gospel's historical accuracy, that he would ignore readers' questions about that particular issue. In what is perhaps the book's most famous passage, Lewis offers an argument a bright child could knock down:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

A man who was merely (merely?) a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher, if he actually said those things. Or if those things meant what popular interpretations suggest they mean. Both are issues worth debating, and I'll get to them in other posts.

Nonetheless, the above passage seems to be the killer app of Christian apologetics for the right-wing commentators I read, despite their reluctance to acknowledge the other things Lewis talks about--talk of evolution as an obvious fact that could help deepen our understanding of God's plan for us and the world, for example, or a depiction of homosexuality that's still progressive today by right-wing American standards. I don't suspect they have as much of a problem with a reliance on sexist stereotypes in the discussion of Christian marriage, but I can't imagine they'd like his assertion that secular marriage ought to have nothing to do with Christian morals. I'll be writing more about Mere Christianity, and C.S. Lewis in general, for a number of different reasons: the questions they raise, and their delineation of a moral worldview that's much more funky and organic and, well, weird, than the stuff we get from the secular deontological, aretaic or consequentialist paradigms. And like those paradigms, it's basically a rule system, and one that can be simulated, tweaked, and resimulated, preferably by people who actually know things about morality, code, or both. In short, not me.