In consolidating
their authority in the early stages of the Russian
revolution, the Bolsheviks unleashed what came to
be known as the Red Terror, in which hundreds of thousands
of Kulaks and Cossacks were killed during the years
1919 and 1920. The ongoing slaughter was justified
as furthering the aims of the revolution, intended
to create a just society. A Ukrainian newspaper The
Red Sword wrote: “To us, everything is permitted,
for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress
races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate
humanity”—a very convenient justification
to oppress and enslave a people in the name of an
ideological commitment to a theoretical and unprovable
future. Friedrich Hayek explains in The Road to Serfdom:
“There is always in the eyes of the collectivist
a greater goal which justifies him because the pursuit
of the common end of society can know no limits in
any rights or values of the individual.”
Everything
is permitted? There are no limits? A famous source
for the dictum is found in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
great novel The Brothers Karamazov. Dmitri
Karamazov famously poses the question of what would
happen to mankind “without God and immortal
life,” asking whether this means that “all
things are permitted.” As he speculates in his
debate with the monk Rakitin, “But what will
become of men without God and immortal life? All things
are permitted then, they can do what they like?”
Ivan Karamazov similarly argues that, “if there
had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing
to natural law, but simply because men believed in
immortality . . . The whole natural law lies in that
faith . . . Moreover, nothing then would be immoral
… even crime must become recognized as lawful
and even inevitable.”
German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who read Dostoevsky
later in life, wrestled with the same predicament.
“God is dead,” he wrote in The Gay
Science and later in Thus Spake Zarathustra,
“God remains dead. And we have killed him. How
shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world
has yet owned has bled to death under our knives:
who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there
for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement,
what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not
the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must
we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy
of it?”
This,
of course, is the money question of the 21st Century.
The answer appears self-evident, with its train of
anarchic ramifications. Nietzsche continued: “Nothing
is true, all is permitted.” As he wrote in The
Will to Power, articulating the fulcrum of the
postmodern movement—the cynical philosophy of
epistemic relativism, anti-reason, double standards,
social subjectivism, hermeneutic suspicion and personal
irresponsibility for one’s choices—“facts
are precisely what there are not, there are only interpretations.”
In other words, I am the arbiter of the moral universe.
As the perpetrator of deicide, I myself have become
God. My truth, my interpretation of things, of right
and wrong, is The Truth. Mine is the “Let there
be!”
The work
of Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly Being and Nothingness
and The Flies, purports to show how the belief
in the death of god may function as a productive force
in human life. Such is the central principle of the
philosophy of existentialism. This principle was introduced
initially in Martin Heidegger’s Being and
Time, where he writes, “The essence of
Dasein [being here] lies in its existence.”
Sartre later spiced up this line with the snappy epigram,
“existence precedes essence.” As commonly
understood, existentialists developed a conception
of the self not as some mysterious thing with a prior
nature or “essence” but as a way of being
we are constructing electively from within. We are
performative creatures.
This means
our essence is not given in advance; we are contingently
“thrown into existence,” as Heidegger
phrased it, and are burdened with the task of creating
ourselves through our choices and actions. Hence,
the falderal we see all about us today, for example,
the feminist conviction of gender fluidity, the ascendancy
of feeling over reason as the arbitrator of truth,
and the licence to assume any identity one wishes,
summed up in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
queer (LGBTQ+) movement and its non-stop self-affirmation.
Such absurdities may seem trivial in the context of
the issue of Divine sanction, but they are indices
of the narcissism and self-election that have come
to fill the moral void of the age.
As Mark
Tapman points out, the existential prepossession is
at the source of the revival of the amoral paganism
in our culture and the increasingly popular Satanic
cults and rituals we observe in the public square.
They are manifestations of what Carl Trueman, writing
for The Heritage Foundation, calls “expressive
individualism,” borrowing the phrase from Robert
Bellah’s Habits of the Heart. The idea
is that “human beings are defined by their individual
psychological core, and that the purpose of life is
allowing that core to find social expression in relationships.
Anything that challenges it is deemed oppressive.”
Trueman argues that expressive individualism “is
built on a myth—that we are born free rather
than the obvious fact that we are born utterly dependent
and spend our lives being dependent upon others to
lesser and greater degrees.” The problem is
that it is “a myth built into the core of our
social imaginary,” more so today than ever before
in the wake of the existential creed and its branches,
affiliates and derivatives in the centripetal, postmodern
and laic society we now live in.
The major
question that confronts us plainly has to do with
the moral foundation of a world without God in which
the individual is credited for devising his own unique
and autonomous moral franchise, in which there is
no such thing as objective truth but only interpretation,
a world devoid of moral absolutes—the quandary
in which the West is now foundering. Can religion’s
moral and spiritual function be discharged by a profane
belief system? The question is moot. Unquestioned
belief in a political ideology may yield the comfort
of certainty, but it will not stand up to sincere
and conscientious scrutiny. A psychological widget
is not a spiritual conviction. Of course, a moral
system predicated on the accepted existence of a divine
source may be violated by fallible men, permitting
themselves what is not permissible—what is known
as sin—but there is little doubt that in a celestial
vacuum there is no longer a defensible moral system
to be violated in the first place.
It should
be noted that intellectuals are typically prone to
treat the issue with a degree of supercilious flippancy
or self-righteous animus, as if they were somehow
above the basic questions of theology that impinge
upon us all. Nobel Laureate in physics Steven Weinberg,
for instance, has claimed that “With or without
religion, good people can behave well and bad people
can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that
takes religion.” Controversial and largely unintelligible
French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan argued that psychoanalytic
practice inverts Dostoyevsky’s dictum to read
instead, “If there is no God, then everything
is prohibited.” The equally indigestible Slovenian
cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek announces “If
there is a God, then anything is permitted.”
Their arguments are too wiredrawn to be taken seriously.
Christopher Hitchens’ bestselling and error-clotted
God Is Not Great, which denounces religion
as “violent, irrational and intolerant,”
conflates organized religion with the existence of
a transcendent God—or as Søren Kierkegaard
wrote in Fear and Trembling, Christianity
with Christendom—two very different things.
Richard Dawkins’ much-celebrated The God
Delusion is a trove of polemical utterances,
affirming that natural selection can ultimately do
the work of a deity and establish a moral landscape—a
thesis as evidence-poor as any apodictic dogma. Such
pseudo-cleverness only distracts from the crucial
dilemma of our era.
An important
distinction needs to be made here. We are thinking
of the Divine as represented and understood in the
Judeo-Christian tradition, that is, as the supreme
lawgiver, both stern and benevolent, preceptor and
Father, dispenser of both justice and mercy, the giver
of life and the transcendent authority standing between
us and the moral abyss. The seismic problem for the
secular West, as is now common knowledge, is that
the concept of right and wrong, good and evil, the
very ground of ethical behavior, has neither substance
nor sanction in the absence of a Creator, of a supreme
being paradoxically combining strict limitation and
immanent love, underwriting the covenant between man
and God.
In the
Islamic tradition, however, whose votaries perceive
themselves as instruments of the Supreme Will, everything
which does not contravene the Koran is permitted.
Sensitivity
to another’s suffering is contra-indicated.
Here, as the witness of the October 7 massacre in
Israel by Hamas terrorists has made manifest, faith
in a Supreme Being operates precisely as the justification
of violence, of the principle that everything is indeed
permitted, at any rate against the infidel or apostate,
along a continuum from the practice of taqiyah or
precautionary lying to all manner of horrendous torture
and summary execution against unbelievers. While atrocities
have also been condoned in Judeo-Christianity, they
are regarded as the faults of men and not as owing
to the general thrust of scripture, with only a modicum
of isolated passages preaching violence, whereas in
Islam, there is pervasive scriptural warrant for acts
of savagery. In this case, it is not the absence but
the presence of God and submission to His will which
enables acts of moral barbarism to be committed. Morality
demands it.
There
are innumerable such passages in the Koran like Koran
9:33 in which Allah sends forth his prophet “to
make the true faith supreme over all religions.”
Sura 5:33 says about infidels, “They shall be
slain or crucified, or have their hands and feet cut
off.” Sura 9:5 says, “Slay the infidels
wherever you find them . . . and lie in wait for them
… and establish every stratagem (of war against
them).” Sura 47:4-9 promises paradise to whoever
cuts off the head of an infidel. There are, of course,
other more amiable verses, but the underlying theme
in the Koran is that there never can be true peace
until the world submits to Allah, by conversion if
possible, by violence if necessary or expedient. Violence
to that end is permissible.
Thus,
on the one hand we have a theocratic civilization
whose God condones what an apparent minority of Western
men and women of devotion regard as impermissible;
on the other, the now godless civilization of the
West in which what was once regarded as morally impermissible
is pragmatically permitted. It is a consummate irony.
In the presence of one god and in the absence of another,
everything is equally permitted: lying, murder and
totalitarian control are not phenomena to be deplored
but have become the order of the day, whether as the
result of a perverted moral atavism in the East or
a defunct moral code in the West, a god who slays
indiscriminately, or no god whatsoever to prevent
the eclipse of reciprocal decency and mutual respect.
Islam
will no doubt resist comprehensive reform, as it has
since the hijra of 622 AD. But it is not germane to
the spiritual life of the West. We are not dealing
with a mandate but with a vacancy. What, then, is
to be done?
One possible
solution was proposed by the German philosopher Hans
Vaihinger in his magisterial The Philosophy of
‘As if’: A System of the Theoretical,
Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (German:
Die Philosophie des Als Ob). The book argues for inexact
premises or cropped assumptions or partial fictions
as a viable way of negotiating an overwhelmingly complex
world. It does not recommend lying as such but suggests
simplified models of human disciplines and discoveries
that are often formally incomplete, but nevertheless
close enough to a possible truth to furnish some degree
of cognitive security. The practice of Als Ob
is an art of adjustment, whose chief instrument
is the construction of myths, figments, paralogisms
or analogies by which life becomes manageable.
It is
as if we were treating with the Gestalt Law of Prägnanz,
which helps us to see wholes out of clusters of indiscriminate
particulars, assembling ambiguous or complex shapes
and images in the most coherent form possible. Issues
of morality or faith are obviously orders of magnitude
greater than merely arranging for sensible aggregates.
On this higher level, we must proceed in the daily
practice of life and relationship “as if”
ethical certainty were possible; in the sphere of
religion, we must believe “as if” there
were a God. Such actions may help to unify and make
sense of our experience and may ideally constitute
the first step toward genuine conviction.
The theory
of Als Ob bears some resemblance to the argument
from Intelligent Design, which states that the almost
infinite array of patterns, honed mathematical sequences,
physical constants and “exquisitely improbable”
complexity (in physicist Stephen Meyer’s words
from his monumental Return of the God Hypothesis)
that we observe in the world point to a cosmic Designer
rather than an evolutionary dice thrower. The parameters
that allow for life on earth have to be finely tuned
to one part in 10 to the 90th power, which is like
“looking for one elementary particle blindfolded
in 10 billion universes our size.” The information
that organizes such sequences cannot come from the
sequences themselves—information does not inform
itself—but argues for a supervening mind. “We
may have good reasons to believe in God,” Meyer
concludes, “without being able to achieve that
unattainable standard of absolute certain proof.”
Intelligent Design (or theism) has at least as much
or greater explanatory power than competing systems
of origins. It does not provide proof, “but
the best explanation of the same kind of standard
of evidence that we would want to attain for a very
good scientific theory.” The world actually
looks as if it were designed by a transmundane mind.
Als Ob has much to recommend it.
It is
at this point that Blaise Pascal’s celebrated
“wager” enters into the equation. Simply
put, it pays to believe in God and abide to the best
of one’s ability by His commandments. If there
is no God, nothing has been lost. If He exists, then
there is an afterlife and your reward may be eternity
in heaven or, should you falter, suffering in hell.
It is, therefore, a supremely rational decision to
worship the Lord and strive to live a good life. Everything
is not permitted. Live and behave as if there were
limits to unbridled desire and rampant egotism, as
if there were a God who presides over the moral universe.
However we may temporize or indulge in skepticism,
the most serious matter in life is death.
One can
envision three possible objections to the wager. For
many, imagination just doesn’t stretch that
far. Also, one is forfeiting pleasures and advantages,
however ill-advised or corrupt, in this life for what
may amount to a conjecture. And it is somehow demeaning
to consider brokering a business deal with God, investing
in faith for future dividends, which does not feel
like real spirituality—although that didn’t
stop Abraham from bargaining with the Lord (Genesis
18:20-33) or the Lord from bargaining with the Devil
(Job 1:6-12). Nevertheless, without assuming the existence
of a moral universe in which charity, honesty and
empathy, however honored in the breach, determine
the behavior of individuals and groups, social misery,
political suffering and personal hopelessness will
continue to be the human lot, at least for Western
man.
For myself,
I do not know whether God exists or not; after all,
who am I to say? Nor can I simply will myself to believe
or force myself to love the Lord because it happens
to profit me. I am not betting man. But that doesn’t
prevent me from talking to Him most every night when
I sit in the garden nursing a glass of vespertine
Scotch.
