The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [68]
Once it’s saddled with nihilism, can scientism make room for the moral progress that most of us want the world to make? No problem.
Recall the point made early in this chapter that even most Nazis may have really shared a common moral code with us. The qualification “most” reflects the fact that a lot of them, especially at the top of the SS, were just psychopaths and sociopaths with no core morality. Where most Nazis “went wrong” was in the idiotic beliefs about race and a lot of other things they combined with core morality, resulting in a catastrophe for their victims and for Germany. The same goes for Stalin and his hatchet men, although most of them were motivated simply by fear in addition to having false beliefs. We can equally well find the false factual beliefs behind purdah, suttee, honor killing, and our own now repudiated sexism, racism, and homophobia. Think about how American Christianity managed to reconcile core morality with African-American slavery for over 250 years. All it had to do was combine core morality with lots of false beliefs about African people. Scientism allows for moral “improvement.” It’s a matter of combining the core morality that evolution has inflicted on us with true beliefs vouched safe for us by science. It’s the failure to be scientific and scientistic that leads from core morality to moral mistakes and even moral catastrophe. (More on this in Chapter 12.)
About the only thing that there is to worry about with nihilism is the name. Most people are nice most of time, and that includes nihilists. There is no reason for anyone to worry about our stealing the silver or mistreating children in our care. As for moral monsters like Hitler, protecting ourselves against them is made inevitable by the very same evolutionary forces that make niceness unavoidable for most of us. There is nothing morally right about being nice, but we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Scientism has to be nihilistic, but it turns out to be a nice nihilism after all.
IN WALT DISNEY’S VERSION of Pinocchio, the Blue Fairy advises the boy-puppet that when it comes to right and wrong, “always let your conscience be your guide.” Then Jiminy Cricket volunteers to be his conscience. If Pinocchio had been human instead of a puppet, he would not have needed the advice or for that matter a grasshopper to help him act on it. Humans have been selected for heeding their consciences—their moral censors. About the only ones who can’t do so are the sociopaths and psychopaths who lack them altogether. Scientism shows us that letting our consciences be our guides enhances our fitness, but that doesn’t make us morally right, or morally wrong for that matter. Instead it shows that there is no such thing as either morally right or wrong.
In the next chapter, we’ll see that when it comes to the conscious, as opposed to the conscience, the situation is quite different. A great deal of what consciousness tells us is just plain false, and provably false. The mistakes that consciousness leads us into are so egregious that the only conclusion scientism can draw is to never let your conscious be your guide. And once we take this moral on board, we’ll be ready to really see how radical, how bracing, how breathtakingly revolutionary a worldview scientism really is.
Chapter 7
NEVER LET
YOUR CONSCIOUS
BE YOUR GUIDE
SOME PUZZLES PREOCCUPY PEOPLE EVEN MORE THAN the ones about morality that we settled in Chapter 6. The puzzles are raised by introspection—by watching or listening to ourselves think. Introspection poses the question, Who is doing the thinking? And it immediately answers the question: Me, of