On either side of Christmas, I made two points. First, few people these days even understand what conservatism means. Second, because atheism is fundamentally unsound, it diminishes people’s ability to think straight.
Hence I have for The Times columnist Matthew Parris that special feeling I reserve for people who vindicate my assertions by illustrating them vividly and irrefutably.
This time around he has regaled us with a jumbled attempt to go Nietzsche one better on the subject of good and evil. He reiterates (without attribution) Nietzsche’s point that good and evil men aren’t as sharply polarised as some philosophers think.
They both have the same natural impulses, and the difference is that evil men express the bad ones more directly and comprehensively. Somewhat incongruously, Nietzsche then dismissed traditional, Christian morality – even though that concept of good and evil doesn’t negate it at all.
Quite the contrary, Christianity rejects the notion of moral determinism because it contradicts the notion of free will, making an uncoerced personal choice between good and evil. Christianity also recognises that every man is capable of making either choice.
Mr Parris takes this basic idea and turns it into the cat’s cradle of a convoluted mess: “Friends, there are no demons, no Heaven, no Hell, no cosmic forces of good and evil, no battle between darkness and light. There is only us.”
There he conflates the Christian idea of free will with the Manichaean heresy of an externalised evil independent of good and deriving from a parallel deity. This view sprang from the dual cosmology of the world of light being in perpetual conflict with the world of darkness.
Mr Parris seems to think that, by dismissing Manichaeism, he is also dismissing Christianity because they are roughly similar. But Christian theology never treated evil as an external phenomenon emanating from some competitor to God. Good is primary; evil, strictly derivative. Evil is merely the absence of good.
So why drag in the Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell? What on earth do they have in common with Mani’s gnostic nonsense? Neither heaven nor hell predetermine our free choice between good and evil – they merely emphasise, inter alia, the reward for the right choice and the wages of sin.
Having dug himself into an intellectual hole, Mr Parris spurned folk wisdom and went on digging his way into unalloyed drivel: “Manichaeism goes with the grain of human nature. Fear of the unseen is a natural product of evolutionary biology: self-preservation favours the suspicious and, at its extreme, suspiciousness leads to paranoia, of which there’s a streak in us all.”
So not only is he a theologian and a moral philosopher – he is also an evolutionary biologist. I get it: when Darwin created man, he imbued him with an irrational, paranoid belief that evil may imperil man’s self-preservation, whereas in fact all sensible people, exemplified by Mr Parris, believe that evil… what?
Doesn’t exist? Isn’t dangerous? I wish, as Byron wrote about Coleridge, he would explain his explanation. If Mr Parris wanted to say that he detests Manichaeism and Christianity alike, then he should have said so, thereby sparing me the trouble of trying to untangle his intellectual mess.
Apparently, he has been exploring such ideas from an early age: “As a student I was struck by Aristotle’s rejection of the idea that moral qualities can be lodged within us like downloaded apps.”
Mr Parris, who is roughly my age, must have been infinitely more precocious. When I was a student, we didn’t yet download apps. We read books and had no premonition that one day they would be replaced by Wikipedia. Yet Mr Parris (and presumably Aristotle) was in command of computer-age terminology long before the advent of the computer age.
But back to Mani and Christ. “Nobody expressed it better than St Augustine 17 centuries ago, describing (in his Confessions) the error of his earlier thinking: ‘I still thought that it is not we who sin but some other nature that sins within us . . . I preferred to excuse myself and blame this unknown thing which was in me but was not part of me’.”
One has to infer that St Augustine, hereby conscripted under Parris’s banners, also rejected heaven and hell. In fact, he merely says that, as a youngster, he was a misguided Manichaean. However, as he grew up, chronologically, spiritually and intellectually, he became a Christian – meaning a person who believes in free choice between good and evil, and also in the existence of heaven and hell.
Mr Parris acknowledges that, for which he must be commended. Yet he must be rebuked for then adding: “But the heresy is woven into the very fabric of popular and informal Christian and Muslim belief.”
I’m not sure what popular and informal Christian belief is. Is it at odds with Christian doctrine and dogma? If so, it’s poorly informed or even dubiously Christian. Is that what Mr Parris is lamenting? Is he out to return those stray sheep into the fold of doctrinal rectitude?
Not at all, as it turns out. He is merely drawing far-reaching conclusions from colloquial usage: “Behind every red-top or middle-market tabloid headline about the presence of ‘evil’ or (worse) ‘pure evil’ in our midst, you can discern this thinking. You could hear it in George W Bush’s speeches about ‘terror’, the ‘war on terror’, waged against the forces of darkness.”
Yes, people sometimes use words loosely and emotively. One makes mental allowances for that tendency and, for example, a man doesn’t call the cops every time his wife shouts: “If you don’t wipe your feet, I’ll kill you.”
Sometimes speakers also rely on shorthand for brevity’s sake. Any sensible listener would have known that what Bush meant was that he was out to prevent terrorist acts by waging war on those who have made the evil choice of committing such acts.
Is that how Mr Parris wants our politicians to talk? If so, I’m not surprised his own parliamentary career was so short-lived.
Shining through Mr Parris’s prose is the underlying belief, typical of atheists, that good and evil are nebulous concepts even when internalised. In his own example, doesn’t he believe that blowing up public transport is an evil act?
If it isn’t, what is it? An honest mistake? And if it is evil, what’s wrong with describing it as such? On the contrary, such usage has allowed Mr Parris to parade his enviable erudition by referring to St Augustine’s Confessions, even if out of context.
As a journalist, Mr Parris can’t indulge in philosophising for long. A segue to quotidian politics must be instant and smooth.
So here it is: “At the root of this corrosive philosophy is a pull we all feel and to which I wrongly succumbed during the Brexit debate… It’s the impulse to imagine malign forces behind wrong-headedness.”
In the interests of full disclosure, Mr Parris should have added that “during the Brexit debate” he succumbed to that “corrosive philosophy” so thoroughly that this “natural conservative” switched to the LibDems, the most pro-EU party we have. Clearly he regarded any regaining of British sovereignty as evil and European federalism as good.
He then went on to strengthen his conservative credentials: “Natural conservatives like me are pulled likewise by a Manichaean account of the struggle between Labour’s wicked (we assume) Momentum-inclined Corbynites and what we see as the enlightened Blairite centre-left.”
Well, natural conservatives like me detect only tactical differences between the two wings of socialism. But it’s Mr Parris who interests me here. Does he not regard “Momentum-inclined Corbynites” (communists in all but name, for the benefit of my foreign readers) as wicked? Is it Manichaean or Christian to see them as such?
Oh well, picking on someone like Mr Parris is hardly sporting. It’s just that he illustrated my recent points so exhaustively that I couldn’t resist.
I think what Mr Parris is trying to say is that harping on about good and evil can make one an insufferable moraliser at best, and dangerous fanatic at worst. For example; when that Muslim chap detonated his explosive vest at an Ariana Grande concert, he no doubt thought he was striking a blow against the ‘evil’ of modernity. Had he had no notion of good and evil, he would most likely be living a harmless, philistine life.
In other words, good and evil are purely artificial constructs that don’t really exist — that’s going even further than Nietzsche, with every saint in history, including Jesus himself, weeping. So is every moralist, or moral philosopher, insufferable? As to that Muslim chap, do you think he might have been making an aesthetic statement about the concert?
That is not my position. It’s simply the age we live in. When the late Stephen Hawking proclaimed “Philosophy is dead” I imagine he was driving at the sentiment you so vividly outlined. Of course modernity is not consistent with it’s nihilism. The same people who say humanity ought to go extinct weep at the very thought of a dog being harmed.
Philosophy isn’t dead. Stephen Hawking is.
Sounds like Parris could well have ghost-written the worst song of all time – “Imagine”.
“Friends, there are no demons, no Heaven, no Hell, no cosmic forces of good and evil, no battle between darkness and light. There is only us.”
If you want heaven build it here on earth. Communists say that all the time.
Apart from the Communist aspect, which is as suspect as any doctrine, I approve of Bert’s quotation; it is sound sense, rejecting imaginary and accepting only real entities.