Umberto Eco shows himself to be a moralist in spite of himself:
Human
beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go
through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by
religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th
century.They insisted that they were describing the universe in
rigorously materialistic terms – yet at night they attended seances and
tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently
meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are
superstitious – to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to
be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps
a priest….G K Chesterton is often credited with observing:
“When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He
believes in anything.” Whoever said it – he was right. We are supposed
to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous
credulity.
Eco, a non-Christian but a great humanist
in the best sense of the term, herein expresses the essence of
Voltaire’s point regarding the fundamental necessity of religion. Human
beings are not capable of maintaining a spiritual vaccuum and they will
fill that void with faith in something. In some cases, they will fill
it with something harmless, in others, something silly, in still others,
something actively evil.
I see Eco’s article as tangentially
related to yesterday’s discussion, which demonstrated again how decent
atheists and agnostics raised in a Christian culture parasitically and
irrationally latch onto the greater part of the morality they reject as a
whole, causing them to react in horror as their fellow disbelievers not
privy or more resistant to such moral indoctrination behave rationally
in the manner exhorted by Nietzsche and accepted with sardonic
resignation by the existentialists.
The essential point that
continues to evade most of these decent disbelievers is that regardless
of the ethical structure he erects to rationalize his subscription to
traditional morals imposed on his consciousness by society, he has no
logic beyond simple utilitarianism to offer anyone else. His definition
of good and evil – assuming he even accepts such things – is his alone.
He can say to the rapist “what you do is evil”, but he has no
effective response when the certainly rapist says to him “what I do is
good, because I define good as that which pleases me” or ” A living
thing seeks above all to discharge its strength” nor does he have a
legitimate grounds for preventing or punishing the rapist.
Even
the ethical arguments based on utilitarianism can fail here. In a
demographically declining West, the rapist can quite reasonably argue
that he is committing an act for the good of society, even for the good
of humanity, in forcing himself on a woman who intends to remain
childless. Indeed, an honest devotee of “the greater good” would have
to at least consider supporting a policy of forcibly impregnating the
most intelligent women, accompanied, of course, with a revivial of the
historical eugenicism aimed at sterilizing the least intelligent.
This
is, of course, abhorrent to the Christian morality, which Nietzsche
rightly viewed as a defender of the weak. But on what grounds does a
utilitarian object?
There is no dearth of philosophical systems
of ethics, and they are all useless because they make no logical claim
on those who do not voluntarily accept it. This is why the atheist, the
agnostic and the pagan so readily resort to force as a substitute for
ethics, because their arguments are toothless. To be fair, one must
admit there is no shortage of Christians who do the same in their
confusion of government-mandated legality with Biblically-mandated
morality.
Eco quotes another lapsed Catholic, Joyce: “”What
kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is
logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and
incoherent?” I would add: what profits it an individual to forsake
a morality which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is
illogical, incoherent and inapplicable to others?
(In case it is not readily apparent, I did not translate this for The Telegraph.)