Chapter 6

When theists find themselves on the losing end of a metaphysical argument, they often go on the offensive and attack the secularists' epistemological justification for "believing in" science. They often allege that the scientific worldview is just as baseless as a religious orientation, in a strange sort of sacrificial gambit which seems to invalidate the very purpose of a religion--its objectivity. We have already touched briefly on the problem of a scientific outlook on Platonic certainty, when Farquhar used solipsism to question the reality of Hell but was not so skeptical toward the world around him during his years on Earth. It was then explained that he did not need to disprove solipsism then because the world appeared to function according to a set of physical rules, even if these rules did not reflect ultimate reality, so the search for a back door out of Plato's Cave would not be especially important. Similarly, science is a method of attaining knowledge, not a holistic philosophy, although the metaphysical naturalism and philosophy of science movements make bolder claims about the nature of scientific understanding as the only valid form of knowledge. This is not an overextension of the purview of the mundane: the dualist world of souls and spirits can be invalidated in much the same way that god itself can: as inextricably beyond the experience of a human consciousness. Given our inability to even perceive the nonmaterial in this world or the next, is it possible to establish that the only valid sort of knowledge is that which is gained through our direct experience and observation of the material world? And if so, what ramifications does this realization hold for a relativist?

Wade Davis provides us with another adequate encapsulation of the theistic position in his defense of the Haitian Vodounist's mystical decision-making process:

For us to doubt the conclusions of the Vodounist is expected, but it is nevertheless presumptuous. For one, their system works, at least for them. What's more, for most of us our basis for accepting the models and theories of our scientists is no more solid or objective than that of the Vodounist who accepts the metaphysical theology of the houngan. Few laymen know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we accept the results on faith, and like the peasant we simply defer to the accredited experts of the tradition.^¹

Here Davis has drawn a two-pronged comparison between the competing worldviews of science (or naturalism) and religion: first, that both are generally accepted unquestioningly by a number of observers within any given population; and second, that the practical benefits for the societies which widely observe them are comparable. The first argument is tenuous at best: while it is true that science and religion are superficially alike in some ways, this does not mean that they are necessarily equivalent in any other aspects. The mere fact that some number of individuals regard science similarly to the way others regard religion falls far short of establishing that the two are truly comparable, except insofar as they are able to be regarded in a similar way by some number of followers. This makes sense: both are constructed to act as revelatory sources of knowledge, so pronouncements from arbiters of either source can be taken as holy writ by some of their more slavish yet uninformed devotees. But the ability to have one's arguments accepted unconditionally does not a religion make; after all, there are those who trust various public figures implicitly, and a human being cannot very well be a religion (they can start one, but they cannot be one), at least not in any meaningful sense (one which would not cause us to require a new, more useful, and less overbroad definition of "religion"). Moreover, in setting up this comparison, he has seemingly abandoned the primary motivation of religious followers: to base one's pronouncements on the weight of the highest conceivable authority, and to therefore achieve objectivity.

It is a curious rhetorical tactic to bring science "down" to the level of religion. When a believer argues that science is "as arbitrary" as religion, it is implied that the believer, perhaps subconsciously, holds that religion is at once more arbitrary than science and yet still a superior way to orient oneself in the world. This is deeply problematic for a religionist, who cannot afford to view his or her creed as anything less than truly objective. Indeed, if religion is nothing more than a collection of mores and stories, it is little more than an illustrated and hopelessly arbitrary philosophy. The numerous pious who interpret personal experiences as evidence of a godly presence in their lives, for example, must believe that their religiosity has been fated--an active, omnipotent being would have controlled those events in just such a way to make believers out of them. So the view that a religion can be held as casually as (religionists assert) a scientist affirms the constant nature of cause and effect in the universe is plainly false.

…Or, we should say, it is plainly false from the perspective of a self-consistent theist. As we have established, theists do in fact hold their views in the same fashion that they feel metaphysical naturalists hold theirs: tentatively. But as we will see, there are two problems with this argument: first, a tentatively held religious belief is meaningless and contradictory; and second, metaphysical naturalists need not hold their views tentatively, because rational thought, expressed through the mechanism of the scientific method, is demonstrably the only way to gain actual knowledge. We will first explore the former statement, which hinges on a concept we have avoided discussing in much depth until now: faith. It is a commonly used tactic, though, to employ faith as a stock counterargument to any criticism of a surely-held religious belief, by declaring that it is not surely-held at all, but rather that the believer can vacillate between certainty and uncertainty that god is real.

However, faith as a concept makes little internal sense for a believer. Insofar as faith is tied to an omnipotent and omniscient interloper god who controls every single atom of the universe, it would be entirely contradictory to the notion of that god's vast, immutable power to declare one's belief in a less than positive way. If this overseer controls one's every movement, thought, and feeling, then one's faith in that overseer, or lack thereof, is entirely dependent on its whim. So, when the believer claims to have lost faith temporarily, it is really just another one of god's mysterious works; a believer's faith can never leave him or her because the very concept itself would be alien to the believer without the constant attention of god itself. For the self-styled "true theist," the faith he or she has at any one moment is the direct will of god, as is the profoundly alienating skepticism he or she seems to experience the next moment. But what is a believer without faith? In practice, an ex-theist is not an atheist by any means, but rather a theist who has suffered some calamity and grows not doubtful of god's existence, but angry at its actions. Inevitably, the irrational ex-theist will rediscover faith and reverence when the plain error of that judgment (which assumes that one knows better than an omniscient being) is finally realized.

More often, though, faith is employed as a rhetorical device created to counter the atheist's critique (that it is problematic to believe in the existence of a being without good evidence to support it). In this context, faith is an explicitly nonrational explanation for one's purported belief in a particular god. It has enjoyed marked popularity as a rhetorical device because at first glance it seems that one cannot apply rational criticisms to a nonrational or unsupported belief. To test this, let us return to the hypothetical raised in chapter 3: in it, we argued that a true theist would summarily become encumbered with a range of arbitrary and illogical beliefs as he or she searches for reasons to reject competing god claimants, who have taken the form of many bioluminescent beings of varying color. The true theist was first visited by a blue being, and even though the being was not able to sufficiently prove that it was truly god (an impossible feat), our subject felt compelled to call it one regardless, and to worship it accordingly. Soon, though, the true theist was approached by another god claimant: a red being who claimed to be something else entirely, and whose pronouncements conflicted with that of the blue being. The true theist has to reject the red being as a false impostor, and comes to settle on the being's redness as an indicator that it is a pretender attempting to sabotage the blue being. Given an almost incomprehensibly vast number of beings and traits for the true theist to reject, the mind would eventually be bogged down with these unscientific and irrational thoughts.

However, if faith is conceptualized as an emotional reaction or feeling, then it could conceivably be argued that faith could be used to justify rejecting the red bioluminescent without suffering the attendant stigmatization of its coloration. The theist could simply reaffirm a continued belief in the blue being specifically (and none of the others) because faith compels it, not because the color red signifies evil. The true theist doesn't fully understand why faith compels this selective belief, but claims that it does nonetheless. Recall, though, that our hypothetical atheist came to believe in the blue being after seeing an impressive display of its abilities, so faith alone did not fuel the compulsion to accept the blue being. In practice, the decision to believe is never pure faith; one must first behold a god claimant or hear of its existence from a trusted source before one is even aware of it. Faith is not accidental, nor is it an entirely emotional response--if faith was truly extra-rational and random, as it would need to be to sidestep the criticisms of Chapter 3, a comparable number of individuals would deify objects which are plainly not gods: an air molecule, a tree outside one's window, or a drop of water about to fall from a leaf. The fact that faith so often leads one to believe in the godhood of a hypothetical being which displays traits one would find in a human-conceived being of great powers indicates that even an ostensibly intuitive feeling is fully rooted in our experience of the world and thus inextricably linked to our more rational centers.

The true theist retorts that while this faith wasn't randomly placed in the blue being, neither is it rational: the being first had to demonstrate some of the capabilities which a human would require in a god before, awestruck, the beholder felt compelled to call it one. Even this decidedly more discerning version of faith is problematic, because it shows that the observation is not fully disconnected from one's rational thought (the emotion accompanying an awestruck reaction is not irrational--an atheist could be awestruck at the bioluminescent being's capabilities without placing his or her faith in it). If a creature must fulfill certain criteria before faith can apply to its real existence, then faith isn't a directionless or insurmountable proclivity for belief. In actuality, the only form of belief which is purely built upon faith is a sort of subconscious disposition for the mystical--an orientation which would not directly cause an individual to attach attributes, feelings, or even sentience to that metaphysical force, but would rather resemble the sort of generalized spirituality which we excluded in Chapter 3 as not representative of a bona fide god belief. It seems that faith has a very narrow use as an explanatory factor, and so it cannot be used to sidestep the existential predicament which would be brought about by the piecemeal incorporation of many irrational, religiously-derived conclusions into one's worldview as successive claimants for godhood are rejected.

We have now arrived at an amended statement regarding the nature of religious belief: there are no true theists among us, but any hypothetical theist who did exist would need to be certain of this conviction and could not cite faith as evidence that he or she has successfully circumvented the human tendency to think scientifically.

While the above equivalency gambit is inimical to a religious outlook and therefore self-destructive, it may nonetheless prove to be equally damaging to a metaphysical naturalistic outlook and is therefore worth analyzing from that position. However, establishing as arbitrary a metaphysical naturalist's basis for holding a scientific outlook would only render the justification for each equivalent, necessitating further differentiation between the two via some relevant criterion. Because the unique strength of religion is its use as an objective yet nonrational universal moral impetus, there is little else that can elevate it above science.

Nevertheless, we must ask if there is any merit to this criticism of our basis for maintaining a naturalistic outlook. Argumentatively speaking, there isn't much substance to the attack (essentially, it asks only "what if?"), but there doesn't need to be: a simple denial is, at first glance, sufficient cause to doubt the universal applicability of a doctrine. We must first note that universality differs with respect to science and religion--when discussing religious belief, universality takes on a prescriptive, moral tone, whereas applied to science it is only descriptive. When a religionist cites the universality of his or her doctrine, it is never in an unfavorable or neutral way, whereas there are plenty who have difficulty coping with the observation that the material is all that we are capable of experiencing (and still make the honest observation nonetheless). This fundamental difference renders comparison between the two difficult, but as we are yet committed to viewing religious argument as generously as possible in order to more thoroughly reject it, we will assume that the objectivity of science is being questioned irrespective of the ramifications of the actual negation of its validity.

We begin from the default position, which is: everyone has experienced some form of the mundane, whereas only a select portion of us claim to have experienced the mystical. The solipsist immediately objects that perhaps none of us have truly experienced the mundane, but rather are trapped within Plato's Cave and are, in actuality, experiencing another, possibly mystical, world entirely. This conceptual world outside Plato's Cave may consist of a different sort of mundane than that which appears to our senses (perhaps the chair in which we sit is the product of sensory information implanted by electronic devices), or the mystical, (perhaps the chair is a magical illusion created by a trickster demon or god itself). The latter possibility is more troubling for empiricists--as long as the possibility exists that we are living a dream which does not accurately reflect reality, and within this radically different waking world there exists a magical being whose presence determines its course, true naturalism will remain untenable (yet science would still be useful for making predictions within this waking dream).

But as we have shown in Chapters 2 and 3, the only solipsistic possibility is one in which the wool pulled over our eyes is of mundane material and held in place by beings who rely on plausible technological methods. In a similar way to Farquhar's hypothetical trip through Hell, we could not experience a world (and therefore could not exist in it, even as brains in a jar being fed a constant illusion) where such mystical beings exist and interact with non-mystical beings. And if it can be established that even Plato's Cave is just a vast collection of entirely mundane technology overseen by entirely mundane beings, then it is still correct that everyone shares a common experience of the mundane--it is merely a different sort of mundane. Naturalism is demonstrably the only potential alternative: if it is impossible to experience the mystical at all, then our experience of the mundane is true by virtue of the elimination of other possibilities. And so naturalism does not need to be held tentatively, but can be held as the only possible arbiter of genuine knowledge, even if that knowledge may not accurately reflect whatever conditions (themselves mundane) exist outside of Plato's Cave.

Just how different can the world beyond that cave be? We may be living a dream, but the waking world is governed by an identical set of rules. For example, if we were to find a method to disconnect ourselves from the dream, we may suddenly find that our old desk chair was actually just a digital representation in a computer program, but that computer program cannot be so advanced that it defies the physics lesson we derived from repeatedly sitting in the chair. This should be a comforting realization--even the act of uprooting ourselves from any conceptual Plato's cave and viewing the real world for the first time in our lives would reveal only more of the same, an alternate world which we as humans would be equipped to understand intuitively. It bears reiterating that the stronger positive invalidation of these mystical alternate worlds (rather than simply asserting that there is no compelling reason to believe in them, as one might find in weak atheism) invalidates a powerful source of existential fear: an awed fear, and--in the case of desirable fantasy worlds such as Heaven--unappeasable longing.

The same logic can also be applied to theoretical scientific discoveries which may someday alter our notions of naturalism and supernaturalism. As was noted in Chapter 2, some improvement upon our perceptive abilities may make us more able to evaluate such extraordinary claims as might be put forth by a god-claimant, but the infinite nature of god would render our abilities forever inadequate. Similarly, some improvement upon our understanding of the physical universe would only ever lead us to a revision of the same closed system and not to any extraneous additions to it. We will never, for example, come upon a discovery which leads us to a creationist perspective, because such a "discovery" would not be scientific; indeed, it would not be perceivable by human minds.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this equivalency gambit is the unspoken idea that the value of all thought can reduced to an equivalent level (zero). Having seen that it was impossible to raise religion to the level of science epistemologically speaking, it has become a common practice among moral absolutists to reduce all thought to the level of arbitrary ideology, rendering all competing viewpoints equally unfounded.^² In this nihilistic milieu, one is empowered to choose whichever worldview brings him or her pleasure without concern for veracity or consistency. With neither rationality nor mystic transcendence, a sort of hedonism prevails. Religion's vehicle of social transmission, provision of emotional gratification, and strong community aspect render it an attractive choice in our current discourse, where this sort of nihilism is not yet entirely accepted. Further reducing the stock put into the rationality and consistency of one's chosen principles would likely increase the number of religious, and reduce the number of individuals who settle on the less popular and more difficult (but more fulfilling in the long term) outlooks such as secular humanism. This is therefore a majoritarian outlook--the idea is that a great many would likely choose religion in order to enjoy its more immediate benefits, such as its capability to assuage their fear of dying. All other things being equal, the utilitarian outcome of one's belief tends to supersede its correctness or consistency, as well as its long term benefits. Provisional religious belief (that is, the closest to sincere belief one can honestly come) is the proverbial "low road"^³--it is easy to follow if one is casual enough about obeying its more inconvenient precepts, and as we have argued, creates a niche for itself to fill with the threat of eternal damnation and tantalizing portrayal of the infinite. But its status as the path of least resistance creates a dilemma: the necessary deficit between truly Christ-like behavior and that of his followers (who are mere human beings) predisposes one to disregard religiosity (and thus morality, in the mind of the theist) outright insofar as one's moral responsibility is not immediately clear (in the business of following given orders, for example). Because Christ's edicts cannot be followed at all times, Christians are asked to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's--whether this be Caesar's enforcement of freedom for blasphemous speech, or his bidding the Christian to torture accused terrorists.

In "Stories of War and Peace: Sacred, Secular and Holy," Darrell J. Fasching writes of the initial crises of conscience experienced by Nazi doctors who were tasked to perform actions in clear violation of medical (and human) ethics, as part of his dissection of the use of religious and mythological rhetoric in the service of so-called holy wars. He writes that the doctors' hesitance generally lasted but two weeks, a remarkably short period given the wide gulf between the sort of behavior one promises as a registered physician and that which is required in the supervision of selections at a concentration camp. He cites an earlier study by Robert Jay Lifton which found that two critical factors--"a biomedical narrative that enabled them to think of killing as a form of healing and a psychological process of 'doubling' which enabled them to disown their own actions"--resulted in the alacrity of the doctors' transformation. The former rationalization was found in the Aryan mythological view of Jews as disease-carriers who threaten the racial health of the collective German body; the latter "doubling" was encouraged via the military command structure of Nazi Germany. Fasching imagines what a typical doctor's internal monologue may have been:

When I go to work I surrender myself in total unquestioning obedience to some higher authority who is in a better position than I to know what I ought to do. Therefore, in my professional role it is not I but this authority who is acting through me and I am not responsible for what I do. Consequently I can go home every evening and be loving and compassionate to my family and neighbors and go off to the camps the next day and continue the mass exterminations with a good conscience.

The roots of this sort of rationalization can be traced back to Martin Luther, who in addition to being a vocal anti-Semite argued for the compartmentalization of the ethical self which was later used to justify Nazi atrocities: he maintained that an executioner need not perform penance after carrying out a death sentence, because the executioner was not acting under his or her own volition, but rather that of the state, which in turn was acting under God's authority. The easy replacement of religion with morality in Luther's argument provides a ready-made rationalization for the commission of atrocities.^⁴ Religion is thus the low road precisely because it claims to be the highest road, a ready-made unachievable standard by which to compare (and conflate) all lesser thoughts and actions.

A large number of generally religious people, regrettably for others and for themselves, are given to advancing illiberal causes and eroding the wall of separation of church and state. This separation, as we argued in the first chapter, is necessary to safeguard the freedoms enjoyed even by a majority sect, because a narrow majority may one day find its hegemonic position threatened--it should thus be interested in preserving a strongly delineated public sphere and minority rights. But this is a highly secular argument built upon one's self-interest and social conscience--if it is accepted that our basis for holding these principles is just as arbitrary as any religious rightist's biblically mandated homophobia, then our ability to argue even the basest rational self-interest is diminished.

Davis' other assertion, that the Vodounist's all-encompassing religious outlook "works, at least for them," in the same way that the Western science-based worldview works for Americans, is also problematic. His point is culturally sensitive, but one can respect the Vodounist belief without raising it to the level of rigorous experimentation. Immediately it seems as if Davis is begging the question: we are unsure exactly what he means by "works." There are several possibilities, both of which we will examine in detail: first, that religion facilitates beneficial actions within the community and fosters a sense of inclusion and ritual tradition for the Vodounist; and second, that it fills the role of science as an accurate predictor of natural events and fosters technological and intellectual progress.

The former interpretation is narrowly correct; after all, religion must have some utilitarian benefit for the Vodounists if it has continued to be propagated through the generations. But isn't this another instance of moral relativism in the service of moral absolutism? Davis asserts that Vodounism "works, at least for them," but if there was any truth to the religion, shouldn't it work for everyone?^⁵ The relative successes of Vodounism provide an anthropological argument for the significance of the religion in Haitian culture, but it does nothing to indicate that its civilizational benefits^⁶ could not be had from some other (perhaps better) secular source, nor that its precepts should be adopted by Westerners or given equal weight to rigorous experimentation. Yet we are considered presumptuous for "doubt[ing] the conclusions of the Vodounist," so clearly Davis is not referring to a mere recognition of the importance of Vodounism to the local culture, but rather our skepticism of the accuracy of its explanations--explanations which have "worked" for them in the sense that they have provided an enduring holistic explanation for the mechanism behind physical phenomena. But even within a highly religious community, surely not every question is left to the divination of the spirits--after all, it would be tremendously exhausting to require ritualistic spiritual possession for every single event of one's day (and how would one decide upon what questions he or she would ask the spirits in the first place?). No, the Vodounist requires another principle by which to make the less important decisions, which he finds within rational inquiry. And what is major civilizational progress if not the evolutionary culmination of vast sequences of those "less important" decisions?

Here it would appear that we have reached an inconsistency. In Chapter 1, it was argued that while social strife and military conflict may not be incepted solely by religious disagreements between the participant groups, it has an important role in motivating either side to fight if it is offered as official justification--after all, a conflict requires warm bodies and cold hard cash, and if the citizenry's decision to donate either was influenced by that religious rhetoric, then we cannot exonerate religion as a primary facilitator of these regrettable quarrels. But this also suggests that we cannot write off religion as a motivator of social good, such as we have done here when attributing the real source of progress in the Vodounist village to rational thought. It would seem that if the public religious reasoning was a crucial justification in the case of a holy war (or of suicide bombing, kamikaze attacks, witch hunts, and other forms of violence often justified with religious rhetoric) which was actually motivated by mundane interests, it would also be a crucial justification in the case of a Vodounist whose "religious revelation" led to the adoption of a new and more efficient farming method (though he or she was actually motivated by mundane interests, such as avoiding starvation, and informed by rational inquiry, such as the experimenting with farming techniques), or in the case of a Christian who cites a religious belief as the cause of his or her charitable action (though he or she was actually motivated by humanist empathy). But the question remains: in which instances would the event still have taken place if not for the religious justification? Is there a qualitative difference between "good" events and "bad" events^⁷ with respect to the aptness of religious justification to facilitate them, even where the real motivation is nonreligious?

As argued in Chapter 1, there is a particular advantage to utilizing strictly secular arguments: appeals to arguable and testable principles are far less likely to result in a harmful or disastrous decision--because justification of this kind does not rely on an arbitrary mythology, baseless arguments are more likely to be proven wrong. Such logic-based thinking is more likely to be refuted if it is in error, but the question remains: what if it is not refuted (or is refuted, but effectively championed nonetheless)? Certainly history is teeming with examples of invasive wars brought about by one community's ostensibly self-interested desire to increase its borders, enslave the population of another nation, or make use of its resource-rich land. While at first glance these motives seem to be both secular and rational, it will be argued here that slavishly unthinking self-interest is not truly rational, but shares a place alongside religious justification (as well as racial prejudice, nationalism,^⁸ and "gut reactions") within the overarching umbrella of illogical, and ultimately empty, justifications for aggression. This is an expansion of the idea, first introduced in Chapter 4, that even a self-interested person, if he or she applies rational thought, would find few tenable reasons to practice gratuitously violent behavior, even if doing so would at first appear to be consistent with the self-interest motivation.

In the absence of a transcendent religiously-derived standard of action, it is of course not a given that the only decision-making principle remaining would be one's prurient self-interest. There is a wealth of secular philosophy which does not rely on the mystical; however, in the interest of completeness, we will assume, as we did in Chapter 3, that rational self-interest is the only necessarily tenable alternative, and that all other moral principles' lack of transcendent universality reduces them to the level of mere suggestion. Let us then propose another hypothetical, this one centering on a religious Christian whose faith comprises the totality of his moral outlook. Will he abandon himself to reckless hedonism, or will he summarily find a reason to adopt some secular moral principle to guide his decision-making? This hypothetical will share many traits with the Rawlsian original position, given that it is built upon a rational interpretation of one's self-interest. It does not presuppose any other preconditions, except one of historicity: it is taking place in the present, with the full experience and knowledge of history available to all actors. They need not be entirely rational, merely capable of learning of recalling.

As Richard Dawkins has written in the God Delusion,^⁹ there are trenchant evolutionary benefits of altruism in organisms, so it may be argued that it is in our best interest from a Darwinian perspective to be occasionally self-sacrificing. However, altruism cannot be narrowly justified on these grounds--as Dawkins himself points out, there is the ever-present specter of Social Darwinism which results from the (willful) misapplication of evolutionary observations (in that not everything which may be good for the species as a whole is necessarily morally justified--see eugenics programs). Therefore, we require a self-consistent philosophical lesson which would inevitably make itself clear even to a willfully self-interested person.

Like our Vodounist, tragedy soon befalls the Christian: his son is also killed by a falling tree, and in despair he finds that his faith is lost. He also wonders, for the first time, about the question of god's existence, and finds little in the wake of his jarring experience to justify further belief. Now abandoning himself to abject amorality, the ex-Christian resolves to live out the rest of his life by maximizing his own happiness and foregoing all other concerns. He first decides to divorce his wife of twenty years, and to find a younger and more beautiful woman to satisfy his sexual desires. Soon the combined anguish of the recent events leads the abandoned woman to commit suicide, and the ex-Christian finds himself plagued by feelings of intense guilt. He attempts to shrug it off by reasoning that he is now purely focused on his own pleasure, and so the death of his former wife should only be a minor inconvenience (in that he must now take part in the dreary funeral activities, or alternatively, find an excuse not to). At length he is successful, and now, having severed most ties with his former life, he sets about finding a younger woman and living his version of a purely hedonistic lifestyle.

Even assuming that the ex-Christian's guilt is surmountable in the case of his wife's suicide, would self-interest lead to the sort of malevolent misanthropy which would foster a willingness to commit the ultimate moral atrocity: taking the life of another? The ex-Christian has already discovered that there is a cost to his newfound self-centeredness--his former father-in-law, a wealthy stock broker, was considering the ex-Christian for a position in his firm, but because he placed the blame of his daughter's death on their untimely divorce, he has instead promoted another employee. Now the ex-Christian has realized that there is a crucial distinction between living for one's short-term and long-term gain; had he remained with his wife, he would have been less happy in the short term, but the material gain from his choice promotion would have likely made up for it. Realizing that some happiness must by necessity be given over by those around him, the ex-Christian resolves to be ever conscious of the impact his decisions have on others. Perhaps, he concedes, some present altruism may be necessary to secure some greater benefit down the road. Having established this, the ex-Christian should be conscious of the fact that wronged acquaintances may soon return the favor.

At the very least, the prospect a lengthy jail sentence or fine should serve as a deterrent to most self-interested would-be criminals. But a punishment only serves as a deterrent if there is a chance of being caught, and while that chance is certainly never entirely reducible, there are instances in which it can be minimized to a sufficient degree, such that committing the crime may be judged a worthwhile gamble to a fully self-interested individual.

Our ex-Christian soon learns that the man hired in his stead is an old friend of his, whose absolute trust he has previously earned. He has also learned that circumstance has afforded him the perfect opportunity to kill the man without any chance of being caught, and because he is the only other employee qualified to take over the position, management would have no choice but to override the complaints of his former father-in-law and hire him in his friend's absence. The ex-Christian carries out his plan, and his seemingly airtight alibi (the particulars of which are of little consequence), coupled with the lack of other suspects, causes the murder to go unsolved. Although hesitant and somewhat suspicious (word of the ex-Christian's total self-centeredness has now begun to creep around the office), the board decides to advance the only other qualified candidate, and so the ex-Christian's plan seems to have gone perfectly. He enjoys the high standard of living provided to him by his new job, but only for a brief period: a new hire at the company has seen how a perfect murder can go entirely unpunished, and he has coincidentally also taken it upon himself to live in an entirely self-interested way. And like the ex-Christian, he is a relative neophyte in the art of hedonism. Biding his time, the new hire, like his predecessor before him, waits until conditions are perfect, and strikes, killing the ex-Christian at his home and framing another associate for the crime. Assuming that the framed associate is found guilty, and that management finds no reason to look suspiciously on the abnormally high turnover rate the job has been experiencing of late, it would appear that the new hire has also committed the perfect crime.

Where it had escaped the board members and ex-Christian, though, would the new hire see a pattern? His self-interest has made him highly aware of possible external threats to his well-being, and he has been keeping a close watch on his new assistant, who has proven herself to be something of a prodigy and seems to desire his position. He is now highly cognizant of the fact that his life is in danger, and when his assistant announces that she too has begun to forsake all morality and live by her self-interest alone, he becomes paranoid that she will continue the cycle and usurp his position. He even contemplates killing her to ensure his safety, but in this instance he is unable to formulate an adequate alibi, and has grown wary of attracting any more police attention to his office. Unable to ensure his own safety, he grows fearful of his young assistant but must take care to hide his feelings lest he betray his guilt. Yet he soon finds that his paranoia is unfounded, as months pass and his assistant remains ever faithful, never so much as looking menacingly at the new hire. The reason for this is that she has already learned what each rationally self-interested person would come to understand in due time: that there is no such thing as a perfect crime. Even if one can be relatively certain that he or she will never be brought to trial, observers will note that there is a greater possibility that they too will be able to get away with such a crime, thus endangering the original aggressor. Violence inevitably begets violence.

Certainly such a developmental moral system (one in which each participant must kill another in order to learn the ultimate lesson) would be unwieldy in practice, but self-interest of a provisionally rational kind would never reach this point, because history provides an enduring case study. It is only through an extraordinarily unlikely combination of outcomes that a purely self-interested person would manage to consistently put that moral code into practice for any significant length of time. The ex-Christian, for example, would almost certainly be aware that a world in which everyone acted in their own short-term best interest would soon collapse into unrestrained violence and vigilante-style mob justice, before having to experience such consequences firsthand (Kantian philosophy at least is freely available to most).

It should be noted that many destructive lifestyles are not the result of conscious attempts at living life entirely for one's own enjoyment but are rather the product of a chemical imbalance or other form of environmentally-caused irrationality and cannot be considered truly logical self-interest. This seems to pose a problem, because humans are not truly rational creatures. They are, however, intelligent ones, capable of deriving a lesson through thought experiment and recalling it even in moments of high emotion. If we cannot assume that moral actors will think cogently with respect to their own self-interest, then no philosophy, religiously-derived^¹⁰ or otherwise, would stop them from committing crimes of passion and hatred--only a concerted effort to assuage the exigencies of circumstance and environment which originally brought about that ill mental health would be sufficient in such cases. Moreover, it is rational thought which typically leads to an abandonment of religious morality, so there is a comparatively higher chance that these secular individuals will continue to think in such a fashion (or at least attempt to do so).

Self-interest, as we have been discussing here, does not equal impetuous, short-sighted egomania; each of us would come to understand in due time that we have a great incentive to educate ourselves as broadly as possible, in order to better understand how our actions will cause others to behave toward us.^¹¹ Thus the ex-Christian would not naively attack his old friend and expect the situation to work out well for him: purely amoral lifestyles so often lead to self-destruction and alienation that any actor cognizant of this would take care to construct at least a barebones moral system, if only for their own self-preservation. And in doing so, they begin to adopt a narration of moral rights in which such useful metrics as Mill's harm principle (which formed the basis of our argument in Chapter 1) inform a commonsense allocation of rights and privileges to those around us--and to ourselves. If it can be established that sufficiently rational self-interest leads to any kind of moral concern for others, then the floodgates of secular morality cannot remain closed for long^¹² and the argument that religious thought has some unique use as a call to nonviolence is rendered untenable. This thought, after all, must be interpreted in light of the holder's rationally-derived view of the world if it is to be put to beneficial use, and anyone who is consistently unable to do so would unquestionably be mentally unbalanced enough to pose a threat to self and others. Unfiltered religious thought--that which is unchecked against observation and long-held deductions--can only lead to directionless and hence destructive action. Similarly, Sam Harris concludes that "where [religions appear not to be intrinsically hostile], it is because secular knowledge and secular interests are restraining the most lethal improprieties of faith."^¹³

While it is fairly obvious that wanton aggression breeds (sometimes violent) hostility in those around us as a matter of fact, there is another lesson to be found in the Lockean Proviso, which will be interpreted to provide a moral argument for unselfishness by finding certain passive forms of aggression (namely, the unchecked acquisition of resources) to implicitly legitimate self-defense reprisals by those who are harmed as a result. Short-sighted self-interest which attempts to morally justify itself is thus every bit as untenable in the long run as short-sighted self-interest which does not attempt to do so.

In attempting to formulate a system of morally just property rights, philosopher and academic Robert Nozick cites John Locke's theory of acquisition, which contains a proviso against unchecked avarice in the process of primitive accumulation^¹⁴ of wealth: when one claims ownership of an object, doing so must not have diminished the ability of others to lay claim to similar objects. Nozick writes:

It will be implausible to view improving an object as giving full ownership to it, if the stock of unowned objects that might be improved is limited. For an object's coming under one person's ownership changes the situation of all others.

If I appropriate a grain of sand from Coney Island, no one else may now do as they will with that grain of sand. But there are plenty of other grains of sand left for them to do the same with. Or if not grains of sand, then other things. Alternatively, the things I do with the grain of sand I appropriate might improve the position of others, counterbalancing their loss of the liberty to use that grain. The crucial point is whether appropriation of an unowned object worsens the situation of others. ^¹⁵

This proviso is illustrative in the case of our Ex-Christian, who has committed himself to living a self-interested life in the wake of his abandonment of religion. In order to further demonstrate that short-sighted self-interest is dangerous for all involved, we now join our ex-Christian and four of his similarly amoral ex-Christian friends as they leave their homeland and strike out to create their utopia. Seeking to divorce themselves from the outside world, these five settlers (henceforth known as A, B, C, D, and E) empty their bank accounts (assume for our purposes that the money was squandered, and each are effectively penniless with a small amount of survival gear) and strike out for the undiscovered country, a verdant 100-acre enclosure surrounded on all sides by tall, impassable mountains. The journey is long and arduous, and the men finally traverse the narrow valley leading into the enclosure. It turns out to be everything they had hoped it would be: the land is arable, and there is plenty of livestock to domesticate and wood for building houses. The picturesque scene is cut short, though: as they move into the area to claim ownership of the land, a falling tree badly injures the ex-Christian (henceforth known as E), and his leg is broken. The other men confer privately and decide take advantage of E's inability to stake his claim. They divide the land up four ways: A stakes out the northeast, B takes the northwest, C and D claim ownership of southwest and southeast respectively. They do this because having more land seems to be immediately advantageous to them--they can grow fatter and more prosperous dividing one hundred acres four ways than they could if they divided it five ways. In doing so, though, they have violated Locke's proviso: E no longer has access to any land or food, whereas prior to the declarations of ownership and subsequent enclosure of the land, he would have had theoretical access to all areas still situated within the commons.

Soon, the men have built their houses and begin to sow the fields. E has barely survived by taking from the other men's crops, and sleeps beneath a rocky outcropping on an unused part of A's land. He has also become particularly fond of A's apple orchard, and A quickly realizes that his apples are being stolen. So, he erects a fence around his entire property, and soon B, C, and D have done so as well, in the process demonstrating a rare spirit of cooperativeness by sharing the task of building a contiguous fence between their lands. At this point, E can only roam the rocky outskirts of the enclosure, and the mountains are too tall to climb with his bad leg. He desperately searches for food and water, but to no avail: the other four have greedily claimed all the useable resources. As he nears the southeastern edge of D's lot, though, he notices that another fallen tree has broken part of his fence, and D hasn't yet noticed. E now reasons that he must infiltrate D's enclosure and steal some food (murdering D in the process if absolutely necessary). But he hesitates for a moment, wondering if doing so would be moral. To a fully self-interested the individual, the answer seems obvious, but E has had ample time to ponder the ill effects of unchecked consumption, and has begun to think in moral terms about his fellow settlers (inconsiderate though they may be toward him). He reflects on the situation: the other four men have, through their actions, brought about E's own imminent death, so it seems reasonable that if such were morally just, then by the same token his murder of D (if necessary) and acquisition of his property would similarly be just. We have already shown that, whether moral or not, E would as a matter of fact choose to murder D and steal his property, both because he too is (as yet irrationally) self-interested and because he has already observed that unscrupulous avarice results in material wealth and economic success. Is E correct, though, or is this merely a hunger-fueled rationalization for his impending moral transgression? Pragmatically, any moral pronouncement would be of little consequence--we have already established that E would likely observe the success of short-sighted self-interest and, being similarly oriented himself, proceed to kill D and inherit his property regardless of the ultimate moral correctness. But morality is yet an important facet of the hypothetical, because if it can be shown that E's desperate murder was morally justified by the same principle which enabled A-D to effectively starve him, it would provide an even stronger argument for a naturalistic secular morality which includes some package of minority rights (a right to life, for example).

Settler D would probably argue that it is not entirely his fault that E is starving--the mountainous walls which prevent him from leaving the enclosure also play a part, as do the other settlers. This objection does not hold up to logical scrutiny, though: if a kidnapper had instead trapped E inside of his basement, we would not excuse his actions simply because the walls of the basement also played a role in E's eventual starvation, nor would we excuse him or her if a co-conspirator had helped tie E's restraints. Similarly, we would not now absolve A-D of their active role simply because another agent had a passive one. E's role in this hypothetical can be seen as a captive of A-D; he has no other recourse, and A-D are aware that their actions are effectively starving E (if they were unaware, it would be E's duty to attempt to inform them of his predicament before resorting to thievery or murder).

What about the particular cause of E's initial inability to stake out some land? Would it have made a difference if E's loss was the result of his laziness or stupidity, rather than his having been hobbled by the falling tree? What if A had broken his leg deliberately in order to secure more land? Importantly, this aspect is immaterial--settlers A, B, C, and D have still enclosed the entirety of the land; that is the salient point here, not whether E's failure was a result of his own negligence, circumstance, or active sabotage. Barring any other unforeseen mitigating factors (which are explicitly not a part of this hypothetical; it is, however, E's duty to remain mindful of any possible natural food windfalls, lest he unnecessarily take the life of another while other resources remain useable), it seems that E has as much right to steal from, and if necessary, kill A, B, C, or D in order to secure his own survival as any of those men had to fatally deprive E by hogging all of the available resources (he also has a right to kill any who would, on A's behalf, prevent him from securing A's ill gotten wealth, such as police and private security forces^¹⁶). In order to avoid this mutually distasteful consequence, A, B, C, and D should understand that because they have no right to starve E (for endowing themselves with that right would similarly empower E to bring about their deaths), they should pitch in and contribute parts of their surplus to E, rather than to their growing guts.

This hypothetical is illustrative for the plight of the poor in a modern industrialized society. Because there is no realistic alternative to living within a society of some sort, and no way to escape the deleterious influence of capitalist resource enclosure, the modern indigent are, similar to E, captive to a collective violation of Locke's proviso. There is a crucial difference, though: there are alternatives to stealing food, such as charity soup kitchens, so many modern poor do not presently need to kill anyone else to secure that which they require to survive. In the absence of these alternatives, though, the hypothetical holds: a starving homeless individual on the streets of New York City circa 2010 would have a right to steal for food if all soup kitchens in the area suddenly close up (as they might, if everyone in the city abandoned all pretense of morality and began to live a short-sightedly self-interested life, thus forcing the abandonment of the social safety net^¹⁷). The social safety net can thus be understood to guarantee both the safety of those for whom it provides as well as those whose taxes are garnished in order to fund it.

In a modern context, each person's share in the starving individual's predicament would be lessened by the presence of so many other agents. Yet just as B, C, and D's presence in the Lockean hypothetical did nothing to mitigate A's guilt, neither would the presence of F, G, H, and so on. Wherever there is a surplus,^¹⁸ it is the narrowest collective duty of successful individuals to ensure that no one is left by the wayside in the process of gaining and utilizing wealth, when doing so inhibits the right of others to secure food or other necessities which they would have otherwise been able to utilize. In summary: not only does violence (passive or active) beget violence in practice, but any philosophical system which legitimates selfish behavior to the fatal detriment of the weak or unfortunate also empowers those same downtrodden to rise up and, violently if necessary, secure that which they require to survive. Therefore it should be known even to the rare secularist who has abandoned all pretense of morality that a progressive, humanist moral conception (such as Kant's categorical imperative, which Dawkins also cites as a useful moral principle) is in one's best interest: any other moral conception will in practice validate equivalent violence toward its holder.

While it is true that resources are not entirely limited, employment certainly is. An unemployment rate above zero renders ineffective the argument that a modern E could simply seek out gainful employment and use his earnings to acquire food (as of July 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate--that is, those who are seeking work but are unable to find it according to a fairly restrictive government criteria--is roughly 10%. The actual number of unemployed individuals is substantially higher, and among young Americans, the rate as of late September 2009 was over 50%). As long as this is impossible for some number of people, there will always be indigents in need of a safety net. The proviso touches as well on universal healthcare, which has already been practiced with sterling success in Europe (nations with a more comprehensive public healthcare system score substantially better than the U.S. in almost all statistical measures of national health). Those who are unable to afford healthcare in a system which would see them turned out of hospitals and left to die (or those who die due to lack of health insurance, which number in the tens of thousands each year in the U.S.^¹⁹) are empowered to rise up alongside the starving to secure the resources which had been unfairly divided up among the nation's A's and B's.^²⁰ The establishment of a right to healthcare raises a common question (one which could also be applied to redistributive justice), though: how would the system decide who has access to limited healthcare resources? Rationing of healthcare will take place regardless of the system's nature (whether public or private, or a combination), given a finite amount of resources to employ in caring for the sick. Though a well-maintained single payer system would reduce a substantial amount of overhead (through the elimination of costly insurance bureaucracy and subcontracting) and thus would possess greater resources to ration,^²¹ funds, as well as organs, are limited--and certainly the many nightmarish tales of European rationing are overblown. We must first ask if the free market's logic is necessarily sound in its preferred business model of healthcare resource distribution. The free market deems worthy those who are able to best survive its adversarial model of competition (or are related to those who were able to best survive it),^²² but there is nothing inherent to this model which would establish it as a morally superior means of assigning access to life-saving operations. In the opposing perspective, the market allows those most adept at exploitation (the rich) to prolong their lives while the poor and altruistic are left to die young. Similarly, it is often charged that a universal healthcare system's implied right to life (independent of capacity to pay for treatment) is arbitrary and requires state rationing, but allowing the free market to follow its own tautological assignation of worth based upon nothing more than financial success (success within the parameters of the free market, which refers only to itself as measure and not some inextricable universal human condition) is just as arbitrary. What, then, is there to recommend capitalist wealth redistribution over alternatives?

Because there is some inevitable rationing, there is also the fear that government will discourage unhealthy behavior (smoking, eating fatty foods) with an aim to save on long-term medical costs. Because all taxpayers fund the nationalized healthcare system, each of us would, in this scenario, be justified in asking others to put forth some minimum due diligence in the caretaking of their bodies. Some, who view excessively unhealthy living as a valid lifestyle choice, fear that they may no longer be able to choose obesity over fitness, emphysema over clearness of breath, or alcoholism over temperance. In a free society, should we not have prerogative to do with our bodies as we please (so long as this entails no direct harm to others)?

There are two aspects of this concern which mitigate it entirely. First, the rest of society is already charged with recouping the costs of emergency room visits for which the patient could not pay, in the current U.S. system--though this only requires that patient be stabilized, and the hospital can recover its costs from the patient through a variety of legal means (including lawsuit and the filing of a property lien). Unless the U.S. adopts a strict policy of closing the doors on impoverished patients (allowing them to perish on the hospital steps), this aspect of healthcare, like rationing, will be present in both a private and public system. Second, modes of unhealthy living are classified as disorders and diseases for an intuitive reason: they are reached as a result of addiction, depression, or physiological disorder (or environment--see the strong causative links between poverty and obesity, for example^²³), only rarely as a meaningfully rational process.

Having established a legal justification for discouraging physically damaging and thus costly behavior, it is important to note that this would be achieved through tax increases on harmful foods and the provision of wholesome foodstuffs (as well as perhaps mandatory periodic physical examinations), not the incarceration or other abuse of unhealthy individuals, even long-term offenders. An obstinately obese individual whose medical care is disproportionately costly is a problem, but one which would be rare enough (very few people, given the choice, would find obesity appealing, whereas in the past it was considered the mark of a comfortably rich individual who is able to afford such excesses) that it would not endanger any responsibly-administered system.

Though the initial resource acquisition was unjust, what can we say about the descendants' inheritance of those resources? The intervening years' property exchanges and bequeathments from one generation to the next do nothing to alter the equation, whether or not the exchanges were just (one cannot, for example, pawn stolen jewelry even if both parties--the thief and the buyer--agree to a fair price). Neither do present offers of employment reduce the responsibility of A-D. E has nothing to trade except his labor and is functionally unable to participate in any enclosure economy. Were he to enter into an agreement with A to exchange some of his labor for a number of A's surplus apples, he would not have done so as a free and equal actor, but rather a starving and desperate subject. The threat of starvation is such that E would be willing to perform essentially any task in order to survive, opening him up for capitalist exploitation.^²⁴ E's theoretical access to the economy is immaterial; he requires a starting largesse to have meaningful participation in it, so the principle remains unchanged. A's unwillingness to provide that incepting resource and thus, a genuine opportunity (rather than the illusion of such), would result in E's eventual starvation in any case as he refuses to afford him a sufficient number of apples to replace even the calories he has burned tending the orchard (whereas prior to enclosure, he would have been free to cultivate it in such a way that he gains more energy than he loses, much as a third-world farmer today is bound by the globalized system to what is essentially wage slavery, which prevents the farming of local crops for sustenance). On the other hand, were A willing to grant E a number of apples sufficient to go beyond merely replacing that energy which E has lost tending the orchard, he would not be acting in a purely self-interested capacity as a pessimistic religionist would define it, even if he derives great pleasure from the fruits of E's labor (assume A is extraordinarily lazy and takes great pleasure in having E pick the apples), because with E starving, it would be possible for him to pay less for his services--frantic, E would agree to any arrangement even if it provided him with only temporary sustenance. On the other hand, if A derives pleasure from paying E enough to keep him comfortably alive, and he otherwise would not care about E's survival, then we have rendered self-interest meaningless and indistinct from rational altruism (a charity fetishist is from this perspective indistinct from any other, even though his or her sexual pleasure is derived from doing good, rather than some other paraphilia). The incidental purity of A's intentions are less important than the outcome of his actions;^²⁵ the deliberateness of his character is only useful in establishing that he is in fact aware that E is starving, and recall that it is E's responsibility to first make this known before resorting to more violent measures.

The unjustness of the original property acquisitions would, according to Nozick, taint every ensuing exchange. If the original division of property was unjust, then every subsequent system which has perpetuated that arrangement is equally unjust. In this respect, the notion of an unfettered free market is without internal logic, and given to disproportionately rewarding those who abuse it. It is argued by free market economists that undeserving, abusive, or monopolistic business entities will be spurned by the public (who upon discovery of wrongdoing will take their business elsewhere), but this presumes a preexisting standard of living which would not be present in a society with an historically unfettered free market, nor in a society in which feudal or monarchic systems with extant wealth disparity gave way to economic liberalization and state capitalism without some prior wealth redistribution to level the playing field before the game began (thus the very same aristocrats who ascended to power by divine revelation, racial hagiography, or plain brutality now hold the wealth and guide the course of nations, and the market is the thread which bridged the old days with the new).^²⁶

Consumers can only make informed choices about product if they are neither desperate nor impoverished. Even assuming that it is possible for buyers to wield this level of power, the end result is materially the same as would be found through government controls: assuming a fully rational, fully empowered and fully moral public (for such is required in the free market ideology), corporations which are found to abuse human rights or market principles would be passed over without fail.^²⁷ There is, however, one principal difference between the approaches: in the case of a free market, many consumers must suffer and die at an entity's hands before its public trial can commence (similarly, the environment must be damaged irreversibly--through anthropogenic climate change, for example, the effects of which were revealed in 2009 to be permanent for at least a century^²⁸--before environmentalism and green products become a compelling option from a profit standpoint^²⁹). Over time, corporations would likely come to observe some package of rules voluntarily, for fear of being rejected as their forebears had, but again: perfect adherence to these principles is indistinguishable from the preexistence of government regulations.^³⁰ In many respects, the free market upholds socialism as its own end goal, the star product of the free market of ideas.^³¹

The extent of resource redistribution beyond that which merely keeps E comfortably alive (not malnourished) is another difficult question, which the Lockean Proviso alone is not prepared to answer circa 2010. However, a recent finding by the American Association for the Advancement of Science provides an argument for the abolition of, at the very least, abject poverty: young children growing up in very poor families experience an inordinate amount of stressors, which hamper their brain development (this is in addition to other environmental factors associated with poverty, such as poor nutrition). The developmental detriments were especially noted in the areas of language and memory (pattern recognition)--two crucial aspects of an individual's ability to succeed in the market. The stressors act to restrict developing synaptic connections and reduce blood flow, resulting in a handicap which will follow the child throughout his or her life (the effects are irreversible once the brain reaches a certain point). Although programs which focus on parental communication and the child's behavior offer some benefit, Professor Jack Shonkoff, director of Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child, argues that only the eradication of poverty is adequate to fully eliminate its poisonous effect.^³² If it is morally permissible for the poor to resort to killing in order to redress hypothetical total resource inequality, we must then ask if it is morally permissible for them to resort to lesser crime (stealing) in order to redress lesser resource inequality. For those who consider taxation tantamount to stealing, government redistribution of wealth is one such lesser crime.

It is only the fear of vigilantism which prevents the poor from periodically extracting the wealth which any notion of fairness would demand was always theirs. Better that we vote for sufficient redistribution than allow the poor, justly yet unsupervised, to take it of their own accord. Yet the capital-holders are not being asked to redistribute voluntarily merely because failure to do so will result in a factual reprisal--they are being asked to act altruistically because failure to do so will result in a moral reprisal. It is not A's knowledge of the fatal (for himself) consequences of his avarice which legitimate E's violence, but rather his knowledge of the fatal consequences such avarice will have for E. Similarly, stealing from a violent store owner wouldn't legitimate the use of force to prevent theft, even if the thief knew of the owner's tendencies. It is only the active violence of A's action which legitimate E's reprisal. If foreknowledge of the consequences necessarily legitimated the reactor's conscious implementation of those consequences, then any manner of punishment would be legitimate, because committing the punishable act would be tantamount to a free and equal acceptance of the punishment's terms. Thus the act of stealing a pack of gum would amount to legally and morally binding consent to have one's hands chopped off, if such was the publicly known sentence for thievery. In this way, the rational choice logic of the free market must necessarily be applicable to crime and punishment. Capitalist wealth redistribution essentially consigns some individuals to death based upon the circumstances of their birth and their luck in avoiding calamity. Any such debilitating calamities cannot be seen as mere calamities, because the moment a financial downturn becomes something other than the fault of those who suffer it, the "decision" to starve could not be seen as the result of a free and equal decision-making process, and thus its worst consequences are not rightly felt by the sufferer alone. Returning to the Vodounist boy who was injured by a falling tree, free market logic would require that he made the decision to stand there deliberately with full knowledge of the possible consequences, and so his injuries would be little more than a consequence of his mindful decision--nothing which would require any soul-searching by his father (thus the market is incompatible with the pursuit of inquisitive, meaningful religion).

Yet if we could not take any risks, no matter how small, entrepreneurial ventures would never take place--creativity would be stifled if the risk of failure was a loss of all resources and consequently, death. The knowledge of a safety net allows new capitalists to prosper, in combination with the contradictory view that participation in an immoral corporation's edicts is permissible if one is merely following orders. Here is another free market conundrum: the low-level employees who would be most harmed by a moral boycott of a misbehaving corporation are effectively held hostage by the management--in return for the moral protection of the command structure (the ever-ready excuse "I'm just doing my job"), the workers elicit sympathy among would-be reformers ("boycott this pollution-spewing factory, and I will no longer be able to feed my children") which sabotages any attempt to even passively adhere to moral standards (refusing to patronize an environmentally destructive business). This is most commonly seen in the argument that an increase in regulation standards will result in a loss of menial jobs as corporate heads seek to cut costs in response to the more exacting guidelines. Yet this argument is immediately insincere: free market logic dictates that the menial workers were taking a risk working for a known polluter, and so should have predicted their precarious situation. At the same time, those menial workers have a diminished incentive to behave honestly: as a prison guard, for example, has a powerful disincentive to advocate measures to reduce or rule-out jail sentences for nonviolent offenders, even though he or she may understand that excessive sentences are counter-productive at best. Ensure these menial workers, though, that the incidental loss of his job would not result in starvation or destitution, and they may be more apt to think clearly.^³³

The enclosure hypothetical also illustrates a salient component of leftist thought: regulation of the economy is distinct from regulation of one's private life because the economy must necessarily deal with scarcity, whereas questions of non-economic private interaction such as sex (returning to the topic of homophobia and sexual prejudice) never do. Freely acquiring private property leads to insufficient and less good for others in a modern capitalist society; freely acquiring sex, even as part of a committed monogamous relationship, will always leave plenty for others. Consent can be freely given for private sexual arrangements which appear to harm one party (sadism and masochism) because there is no undue economic pressure to take part in them,^³⁴ whereas it cannot be given in cases of economic arrangement which appears to (and perhaps does) harm one party (the sale of one's non-vital organs for money, which would place an undue burden on the poor to risk their safety for survival). Thus regulation of the economy is encouraged, and regulation of sexual norms is discouraged. The close association of economic and personal freedom is a nonsensical one, given that the economy deals with survival and the personal deals solely with recreation. The general right to take part in consensual sex acts does not have a logical association with the right to survive in an unnecessarily opulent way while jeopardizing the right of others to survive even in a meager way.

Finally, meaningful freedom of conscience requires not an absolute freedom of economic choice, but rather a minimum standard of living, and thus, government intervention in the economy. For this reason, the position of market supporters is untenable--their close association of economic freedom with personal freedom is baseless and given only to promoting the personal freedom to degrade and damage oneself in order to survive. The failure of the state to provide alternatives (in the form of a social safety net) will always allow for exploitation, whether it is legal and above-board, as in the case of a theoretical legalized organ-selling program, or illegal and under the table, as in the case of a theoretical organ-selling black market. Economic freedom is not, as Friedman argued, necessary for democracy; rather, is inimical to it.

In the end, the absolute lack of coherent justification renders the market arrangement immoral. It follows from this declaration that some form of economic cooperation is necessary to curb the potential for lethal abuse. Whether this is achieved by autonomous worker collectives or state ownership of the means of production, a hard shift leftward is required for the horizon of a sustainable future to come in to view.

There is another class of crime which seems to be validated by a purely self-interested perspective: those in which no one, not even the victim, realizes that a crime has taken place. These include "victimless crimes" (such as the act of engaging in sodomy in a municipality where it is deemed illegal), in which no victim is aware of the action because no one has actually been harmed by it in any meaningful sense. These are excluded for a reason: we are presently discussing the aptness of religion in stopping an individual from acting in a malicious and hurtful way toward others; where there is neither malice nor harm (but mere controversy) an immoral action could not be said to have taken place. There is another class of crime, though, in which the victim is unaware yet still demonstrably worse off for the criminal's action. See for example the efforts of an expert scammer or a clever embezzlement scheme which is never detected by anyone but the illicitly enriched criminal--the victim remains forever unaware that the embezzled money should have gone to him or her. If no one else is ever made aware that a crime has been committed, then the embezzler would not be able to derive from his self-interest a reason not to go ahead and steal the money--no one else would realize that the crime is easier to commit than they had previously suspected, and would therefore be no more likely to embezzle from him in return.

Having misappropriated the funds successfully and without detection, the embezzler now ponders what to do with this extra wealth. He sets his sights on a new Lamborghini, but quickly realizes that, on his data entry clerk salary, a new Lamborghini would be sure to arouse the suspicion of his neighbors, and unless he can concoct a very convincing story of a wealthy aunt's death or some other massive inheritance, they would still come to understand that his influx of wealth was from an illicit source, such as embezzlement. He may choose to invest the money, but putting it through official channels risks incurring government suspicion. If he runs it through a criminal money laundering organization or uses it to purchase items on the black market, he may think that he can evade any such attention, and he may well be right--but in doing so he exposes himself and risks being embezzled (or robbed) in turn by criminals who are likely much more experienced (and ruthless) than he is. In reality, the only safe, clandestine way for the embezzler to spend such a windfall is to hide it under his mattress and make only the most prudent of inauspicious purchases with it. Thus it seems that any crime which has been committed without the knowledge of a single observer would yield insufficient rewards for a self-interested thief to risk getting caught and punished over.

There is also the issue of a criminal who is for all intents and purposes immune to the crime he or she commits and is therefore unconcerned with how many others observe the crime and then choose to follow suit. For example, a large, physically powerful rapist has little reason to worry about the ill societal effects of his rape on a young woman: even if others around him observe that he has gotten away with the crime and consequently feel that it is more likely that they can do the same, there is still very little chance that he will be the victim of any rape so facilitated. But here we have reached another important point, which is that crimes cannot be compartmentalized in such a way. If others see that the rapist has gotten away, they would likely reason that they too can go unpunished for similar (but perhaps not identical) crimes, not all of which are prohibitively difficult to commit against the rapist. The rape victim may, for example, complain to others about the inability of the police to catch to her rapist, and one of them may happen to have aspirations toward armed robbery or assault. This incensed acquaintance would likely realize that if the police are less capable of apprehending a rapist, they are likely also less capable of apprehending a mugger. The rapist should then be aware that his short-sighted self-interest would inspire not only crimes of the exact type he committed, but other classes of violent crimes from which he is less capable of protecting himself (for example, his size would do little to protect him from a well-placed gunshot).

The self-interested rapist immediately retorts: "Perhaps I judge the risk worth it. All of us, in some way, find it necessary to take some risks in living a normal life. I place a high value on my sexual satisfaction, and as such I am willing to increase my own personal risk by a trifling amount in order to satiate it." Here, the rapist is making the fallacious assumption that all risk is equal--he is correct in stating that no activity is entirely risk-free, but risk can, and should, be minimized. Necessary risk, such as that which invites a possible environmental accident (walking under tree, for example), is distinct from unnecessary risk, such as that which invites a self-defense reprisal from another (needlessly attacking an armed individual, for example); we are not captive to either type, but the rapist conflates the two in attempting to justify his unnecessary risk and reveals his thinking to be ultimately short-sighted. Followed to its ultimate conclusion, his argument would invalidate traffic safety laws for the reason that they cannot guarantee total safety to all drivers.

There is another class of ex-Christian whose deconversion is perhaps troubling: a willingly sociopathic atheist who is aware that misanthropy is against his or her self-interest but either does not care, or cannot stop the destructive impulses. This ex-Christian willingly lives an immoral and hence self-destructive life, abandoning all preconceptions of morality and even base self-interest. Could it be argued that one form of irrational thought (his or her once-held religion) would have stopped this individual from engaging in this particular irrational behavior (genuine self-destruction being inextricably irrational, except in cases of altruism)?

The problem here is that this kind of religious thought is not transmitted irrationally--its precepts must be read and understood, though they themselves are not based upon logical principles, and checked against one's own rationally-derived beliefs (here, that it is not in one's interests to wantonly harm others). Religious thought alone cannot facilitate rational behavior, although it can facilitate irrational behavior (recall that it is uniquely useful in justifying aggression and atrocity, because in those cases the religious thought, still purely irrational, is being accepted at face value and not being checked against one's own intuitive conception of self-interest. There is only base, irrational action, no hesitant rumination that perhaps we are not sure that god in on our side.) There is in fact no purely irrational method to instill within any atheist or theist the desire to live according to a rational precept which facilitates a socially progressive moral code (by which one consciously seeks to minimize the suffering of others), except through methods which are either impossible for a mere human to experience (a transcendent religious experience in which god alters one's thought patterns) or in violation of the right to self-determination (forcefully drugging or imprisoning uncontrollably violent offenders is only moral after they have offended in some way and when there is no other option, for example). So a person committed to living in an irrational way would not be swayed, even by religious principles derived from a purely irrational source. In this respect, the ex-Christian's self-destructive, harmful behavior could not be conceived of as a "choice" at all, but rather the product of a chemical imbalance or some environmental factor.

What can be done, then? In the case of an ex-Christian who becomes chemically imbalanced and begins to harm others, there is only medication and perhaps forced institutionalization in extreme cases. In the case of an ex-Christian who has been driven to act out due to some environmental factor--crushing poverty, for example--there is only one thing for it: a collective attempt by the rest of society to alleviate such conditions to the best of its ability. This effort does not need to hinge on an altruistic or humanist spirit which all would not necessarily hold, but can be justified by our own self-interest alone: as learned individuals who have come to realize that short-sighted avarice has profoundly negative consequences for us, we would understand that there is much value to a social safety net, particularly in its ability to remind those most dangerous of the downtrodden--individuals who in desperation feel that they have nothing left to lose--that in fact they will always have something, no matter how modest, to forsake in the quest of self-destruction. Similarly, a criminal who is not averse to a jail sentence is likely also one who is able to exploit the anarchic structure of the nation's underfunded jails in order to prey upon the rest of its population. A guaranteed right to be free of oppression and brutalization in jail would remove the desire that these opportunists have to go to jail (or at least their lack of aversion to it), if such can be said to exist.^³⁵

Also contained within this class is the sort of faux-atheist who is still religiously-oriented yet has become angry or disenchanted with god itself (or merely god's particular brand of cosmic justice). We have dealt with this particular mode of disenchantment before, and found it to be particularly dangerous yet short-lived--these disaffected religionists still possess the moralist belief in some sort of cosmic justice yet have abandoned it as imperfect, placing themselves above the conceptual overseer of that cosmic justice rather than discarding the system itself. As this belief is impossibly hubristic, it shouldn't last long; as it is also not the product of a genuine rejection of faith and conscious orientation toward misanthropy, the holder wouldn't be considered an ex-Christian sociopath at all, but rather a disillusioned Christian sociopath (in spite of any claims otherwise--the use of secularism or science as a mantra does not necessarily indicate genuine secularism or science. Similarly, a religionist would be quick to criticize a fellow believer who only uses religion as talk therapy or to cover malfeasance and harm with a sheen of wholesomeness).

We have endeavored to show here that general morality is inevitable, even in the case of an individual who claims to have derived his or her morality exclusively from a religious doctrine but has lost faith and subsequently taken up the mantra of pure self-interest. Historically, arguments from self-interest are not uncommon, and have been employed in the service of many progressive notions. The wall of separation is buttressed by one such argument--it is in the interest of all religious minorities (they are all minorities in some way) to support the independence of the state from religion. More generally, the American aversion to most forms of overt majoritarianism stems, at least to some degree, from the collective fear among current power holders that they may one day be the minority (or that the minority, sufficiently oppressed, will come looking for them). There are many other effective arguments for these principles, but self-interest alone should be sufficient to convince forward-thinking egoists that some happiness and security is a courtesy of others, and so self-interest must at times necessarily translate into a collective interest in the wellbeing of those around us.

Admittedly, this is not sufficient to show that everyone would take the correct course of action according to his or her own self-interest. Much more needs to be done to encourage a civil consciousness, but finally eradicating the ghosts of primordial mysticism is a necessary first step. It is also not to say that the secular (or, more accurately, the nominally secular--the secular-in-name-only) cannot breed regression or violence, of course. In his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," Noam Chomsky criticizes the Orwellian employment of misinformation by American intellectuals (among them Arthur Schlesinger, Henry Kissinger, and Walt Rostow) to justify the Vietnam War:

There is much more that can be said about this topic, but, without continuing, I would simply like to emphasize that, as is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent. Obviously, one must learn from social and behavioral science whatever one can; obviously, these fields should be pursued as seriously as possible. But it will be quite unfortunate, and highly dangerous, if they are not accepted and judged on their merits and according to their actual, not pretended, accomplishments. In particular, if there is a body of theory, well-tested and verified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs or the resolution of domestic or international conflict, its existence has been kept a well-guarded secret. In the case of Vietnam, if those who feel themselves to be experts have access to principles or information that would justify what the American government is doing in that unfortunate country, they have been singularly ineffective in making this fact known. To anyone who has any familiarity with the social and behavioral sciences (or the "policy sciences"), the claim that there are certain considerations and principles too deep for the outsider to comprehend is simply an absurdity, unworthy of comment.^³⁶

Unfortunately, it is a simple fact of history that Chomsky's astute warning was not heeded--the U.S. has again preoccupied itself with the waging of an ill-advised foreign war. The reason, in large part, is predicted by Chomsky's last sentence: secular intellectual arguments, which should be the most common and therefore the easiest to refute, are too often assumed (and deliberately portrayed to be) too difficult or complex for the uninitiated to understand. But as Chomsky notes, this assertion is without merit: given even a casual education in the principles of argument and justification, any observer could have noted, for example, that the Iraq War was not justified as a preventive invasion because there was no indication that Hussein was ready to strike at the U.S. or a neighboring country, nor any rigorous proof that he was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Any sufficiently educated observer could have checked the given justification against the intuitive principles he or she would have already derived from a rational self-interest thought experiment: we would not attack and kill another even if we believe the individual to be both armed and a possible future threat (after all, anyone not being physically restrained is a possible future threat, and may well be armed)--we would instead require some indication that there is an imminent threat, and adequate proof that the threat is actionable. That the case for invasion was deliberately fabricated,^³⁷ rather than the result of a genuine intelligence failure, is immaterial; the case as it was offered was insufficient justification for invasion in and of itself.

Why, then, was this perspective not widely held during the run-up to invasion? Why weren't the nation's leaders, or the intellectual mercenaries they employed (Robert Novak, Charles Krauthammer, conservative-slanted think tanks and advisory boards such as the Heritage Foundation, and innumerable others), taken to task for their outright mendacity, by the public or by the opposition party? The answer, to a large degree, is a vagary of our current political discourse: a nihilistic milieu in which all moral argument is reduced to sophistry, and thus intellectual refutation of popular logic and "common sense" is discouraged, even where it plainly goes against our own self-interest (as the Iraq War certainly did). This phenomenon was seen in the administration's unashamed persistence in trumpeting the publicly invalidated elements of their case for war (aided at the onset by propagandists such as the Rendon Group, a public relations firm which has received million of dollars in contracts and which created the anti-Hussein Iraqi National Congress, now employed by the military as a vetting service to ensure that embedded journalists do not portray the wars in an unfavorable light), as well as George W. Bush's continued insistence that history will vindicate the invasion as wise and expedient.

Moreover, in the process of achieving its political goals, the Bush administration went farther than any other in ensuring that party loyalists took positions within the government. The administration even broke federal law by politicizing hiring practices at the Department of Justice, according to a 2006 investigation by the Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility. From the report:

The documentary evidence and witness interviews also support the conclusion that two members of the 2006 Screening Committee, Esther Slater McDonald and Michael Elston, took political or ideological affiliations into account in deselecting candidates in violation of Department policy and federal law. For example, the evidence showed that McDonald wrote disparaging statements about candidates' liberal and Democratic Party affiliations on the applications she reviewed and that she voted to deselect candidates on that basis.

We also found that Elston, the head of the 2006 Committee, failed to take appropriate action when he learned that McDonald was routinely deselecting candidates on the basis of what she perceived to be the candidates' liberal affiliations. The evidence also showed that Elston himself deselected some candidates – and allowed the deselection of others – based on impermissible considerations. Despite his initial denial in our interview that he did not consider such inappropriate factors, he later admitted in the interview that he may have deselected candidates in a few instances due to their affiliation with certain causes. In addition, Elston was unable to give a credible reason as to why specific highly qualified candidates with liberal or Democratic credentials were deselected.^³⁸

The politicization of these government agencies is part of an overarching attempt to stifle debate within government agencies in specific and among the general public as a whole. This form of politicization is ruinous, yet not all partisanship is equally damaging--that which fights for, say, the political recognition of a proven scientific theory is not politicization in the same sense. Al Gore writes in The Assault on Reason that this institutional bias has contributed to a deterioration of public discourse, which in turn resulted in a government unwilling to heed scientists' warnings about global climate change and the imminent severity of Hurricane Katrina, among other looming disasters. Gore points out that these matters of science go beyond morality: even within a perspective which holds a right to habeas corpus to be debatable, scientific observations such as those which inform the long-established imminence of global climate change are empirical, and to the extent that these matters inform public policy, denial of fact serves no one. It is not propaganda, for example, to maintain that deregulation leads to excessive pollution and global climate change, even though there are those who question this relationship--it is an acknowledgement of truth, partisan though it may be. Thus the salient difference between propaganda and good argument is not one of partisanship, because partisan statements can be true; the difference is in either position's adherence to a shared reality. This has caused those who cling to propaganda to claim that reality is not ultimately shared.^³⁹

If the international stage could be thought of as a biology classroom about to enter its unit on evolution, then the Iraq War was our dalliance with "teaching the debate"^⁴⁰ (except of course that the cost is far dearer than even a generation of misinformed students). The case for invasion was built upon creationist-level misinformation, disseminated to willing recipients through a biased media (Sunday school in one instance, a news media which regularly plays host to administration or industry talking points in the other^⁴¹), and given hesitant acquiescence by those who knew better (opposition politicians, parent-teacher association members). When a mistake has been caught in this solipsistic climate, it is often better for the mistaken to maintain his or her innocence even in the face of damning evidence, and to argue that, while detractors have their version of truth, the accused maintains another. This is especially true where government is concerned: admitting that a policy has failed is unlikely to be politically expedient to one's party. This sort of absolute relativism is profoundly injurious--uncertainty and inquisitiveness are necessary for a scientific worldview, but "open-mindedness" of this stripe is deliberately calculated in order to legitimize a form of thinking which is flatly contradictory (it is, to put it succinctly, a form of insincere moral relativism employed in the service of unfounded moral absolutist ideology).^⁴² Perhaps an advisor to President Bush put it best in his conversation with New York Times columnist Ron Suskind. Suskind recalled in 2004:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."^⁴³

The abstruse religiosity of the Bush administration, now a storied affair confirmed by a wide range of former associates and operatives, was, first and foremost, a rhetorical device meant to provide an aura of uprightness to policies which would prove to be neither pragmatic nor divinely-inspired. Whether Bush had a genuine messianic complex is impossible to discern and even less relevant to policy, given the watchful eye of his coterie (especially Dick Cheney, who wielded an unprecedented amount of power for a Vice President, and who was too Machiavellian to have plausibly believed in the President's transcendent righteousness^⁴⁴), but as an image-creating device it succeeded in winning votes. Therein lies its greatest danger: faith as an exhortation to withhold judgment serves only those whose judgment is questionable.

The media's pre-war reporting certainly didn't help matters: even The New York Times admitted that, rather disseminate information in an unbiased fashion, it colluded with the Bush administration in the wake of September 11^th.^⁴⁵ This widespread media bias rendered the search for an independent, unbiased source of information difficult. But in spite of this, there were voices decrying the shift in policy toward a preemptive notion of war (what Bush-era Under Secretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith called "anticipatory self-defense").^⁴⁶ Given that most Americans now seem to understand that it would have been in the nation's best interest to heed those voices and exercise utmost caution in the use of controlled aggression in Iraq, why weren't these warnings heeded at the time? Perhaps because they were taken as simply that: polite warnings, which can be taken under advisement and then discounted as merely one perspective among many, rather than facets of an outlook which has been built upon a demonstrably superior justification.

The recognition that transcendent (and universal) religious moral systems cannot exist would not lead to this sort of epistemological defeatism--as we have shown, our own self-interest, coupled with the comprehensive refutation of logically impossible solipsistic scenarios, would only strengthen our inclination to evaluate material facts and seek out the truth as determined skeptics. We have an interest in not tolerating such willful deception (and the unnecessary violence it produces) as that which led us into Iraq, and with no ability to reduce all argument to sophistry, we have the weaponry--the irrefutable lessons of our rational thought experiment--to fight it. These irrefutable lessons lead us to two corollaries to the idea of relativism: first, religious conceptions of universality are wrong because they are baseless and contradictory, not because they are universal; and second, relativism in the service of absolutist ideologies is absolutist relativism (or moral nihilism, the idea that no action is preferable to any other in a moral context), not the sort of relativism held by genuine relativists, which is understood to be conditional on the real observed differences between societies. Insofar as the real differences are not observed, relativism no longer applies. Yet the counterfeit relativism employed by absolutism apologists holds that a single disagreement negates not only the fact in dispute but empirical reality as a whole. If nothing is agreeable, then nothing (neither torture nor preemptive war) is disagreeable.

Full moral relativism requires the assumption that all foreign governments were the formative result of consensual, rational deliberation, but if even our own law cannot claim this--that it is fully just--then who are we to presume that another's might? If plurality requires moral nihilism on the national stage, then it requires moral nihilism within the U.S.--there are competing worldviews within this nation as well as among nations. The affirmed belief of one U.S. citizen that murder is permissible would constrain our judgment of murderers if the national policy of one nation to commit genocide against a segment of its population likewise constrains a collective judgment against them. Nations are but a heterogeneous collection of citizens, no more inherently rational and morally unassailable than any single person. To attribute all foreign governmental and societal action to the sacrosanct machinations of culture is to forget the local dissenters who speak, albeit in a different language, of the common principles of secularism and mutual respect (even where such dissent is criminalized), as well as the profound malleability of culture over time. We speak to individuals, not nations or ideas: national and cultural lines are arbitrary, and exceptionalism (in this case, manifested as the fallacy known as outgroup homogeneity--the idea that other communities are not diverse) cannot reduce the many commonalities present among as well as within groups. As political theorist Marcus Raskin wrote in Liberalism: The Genius of American Ideals,

It is important to note that multiculturalism does not guarantee liberation from patriarchy or various forms of cultural injustice, personal oppression, or group injustice. In other words, respect for other cultures does not mean blind acceptance of them and their tendencies, which may contain strong doses of domination and oppression, such as crude or refined modes of domination women have faced in virtually every culture and religion. Instead, within each culture it is necessary to find those elements of advocacy and confrontation that championed human liberation but may have been suppressed. It is absurd to think that feelings of liberation are not universally found, just as it is foolish to believe that Western civilization is an immaculate conception that needs no correction.^⁴⁷

We have seen that a rational form of self-interest would lead not to a depraved hedonism, but to a rapid abandonment of prurient self-regard in favor of a socially conscious consideration for the well-being of others. This theory emphasizes the capability of citizens to utilize rational choice, but leaves room for emotions and other instinctual modes of thought. As Bertrand Russell writes,

in fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.^⁴⁸

Only a momentary rationality is necessary in this case, because in one's more irrational times he or she could readily recall the clear, intuitive principles which were derived from the thought experiment (and the sharing of others' experiences). We do not require a Kantian level of detachment from our contingencies as in the Rawlsian Original Position; in fact, our observations are informed by our placement among the social strata (though their honest application to the current arrangement would lead to policies which eliminate the inequalities within society). The rich maintain a markedly different sort of self-interest (a somewhat passive social consciousness meant to ensure that lower classes do not find themselves in a position to justifiably rise up, according to the Lockean Proviso thought experiment) to that of the poor (an active, pragmatic self-interest meant to ensure day to day survival and to secure equalizing concessions from the rich).^⁴⁹ It presumes some inequitable distribution of resources--this has always been the case historically; on the other hand, a hypothetical community with an arrangement favoring the equitable distribution of resources would require only minimal fine-tuning.

Instinct, in this sense, is the common desire to live and pass along one's genes, a forceful biological orientation which, even overemphasized as the sole concern of a moral viewpoint, begs for a cessation of the destructive tendency to blame nature for ostensibly rational failures. Short-sighted self-interest must go far beyond Russell's admission that instinct and reason are unopposed; it assumes the opposition of instinct and reason and willfully conflates of the two. Where reason fails, instinct must likewise fail, but a philosophy of short-sighted self-interest only plays at one or the other, casting long shadows on the development of a long-term rationality. But what is rationality?

An action can be considered rational if it harms neither oneself nor others. An action may also be rational if it harms oneself with the aim of minimizing or thwarting harm of another individual. All other actions (harming oneself to no greater benefit for others, and harming others in a non-self-defense context in order to benefit oneself) are irrational. Thus it can be rational, in a community lacking any manner of safety net, to sacrifice oneself for others, but never to force uninvolved others to frivolously sacrifice themselves for an individual's benefit.^⁵⁰ This extends to the political sphere: it is rational to vote against one's short-term interest if the aim is altruistic, but not if the aim is poorly understood or the vote is cast in support of a measure to harm or marginalize others. The rich can then rationally vote for progressive taxation, but the poor cannot rationally vote for, say, tax cuts for the rich. The former is altruistic (though not as altruistic as possible, and perhaps not even meaningfully altruistic, if such a progressive taxation scheme is used to fund wars rather than genuine poverty relief efforts), the latter is not.

Certain voluntary associations may also serve to obscure long-term rationality, and should thus be opposed. One such association is the corporation, which left unchecked results in quick profits and long-term catastrophe. By functioning as a legal entity which is solely motivated by short-term monetary interests and which works to protect shareholders from personal liability, corporations obscure the plain rationality (in terms of ethical and instinctual support for long-term preservation of the environment, among other things) of those who take part in them, and reinforce a short-sighted profit motive at its expense. This irrationality is amplified in effect by deregulation, a policy which marked the tenure (1987-2006) of Alan Greenspan (a follower of Ayn Rand) as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. In the wake of the 2008 housing market collapse and economic downturn, Greenspan conceded at a Capitol Hill hearing that his faith in the free market had been misplaced. Long a champion of deregulation, Greenspan now admits that a lack of standards (during the housing boom, less than 1% of mortgages were subjected to the Home Owner Equity Protection Act, a 1994 law meant to prohibit misleading lending practices) and over-reliance on the purported rational self-interest of lending institutions to ensure a stable long-term equity for shareholders have led to an economic crisis (one which finally culminated in the emergency government bailout). His parting suggestion--a rule which would require companies in the business of selling mortgage-backed securities to hold a number of the same--is an explicit plea for laws which foster a longer-term form of self-interest in these businesses.^⁵¹

The rejection of the mystical sphere also touches on theories of moral relativism. It is conceivable that the recognition of materialism as correct would lead us to calculate philosophies such as Objectivism, which is built upon a materialistic (in all senses of the word) foundation. However, objective reality is not objective morality; Ayn Rand's ethical foundation was not built upon consensus, but rather relied upon the perceived lack of coercion in the practice of laissez-faire capitalism (that is, the unfettered free market). Objectivism is explicitly rejected, in the end, as being against our own self-interest; it is in fact the rather objective truth that we reside among others which fuels this rejection of Rand's brand of short-sighted self-interest.^⁵² It may also be assumed that because our basic self-interest, common to all individuals throughout the world, leads directly to a particular political outlook, that we are espousing a form of moral absolutism. To some degree, that is correct: insofar as pluralism and the experience of the secular world are common to all societies, certain universal principles should be intuitively useful for members of those societies (including reciprocity and minority rights).

Beyond those principles derived directly from the commonality of pluralism and secularism, though, there is much room for variance given a lack of transcendent authority by which to judge alien cultural practices, a fact which places most secular ethical theories (and this one) firmly within the aegis of an explicitly restricted form of moral relativism. It is commonly understood that most utterances of the word relativism are themselves accompanied by a caveat: relativism is not meant to consign all possible cultural practices as beyond the purview of a citizen of the West (or any other region) to judge. In the first place, certain abuses (such as genocide) are taken as anathema to even the staunchest of relativists. This line in the sand may at first glance seem arbitrary; after all, if we cannot judge in the case of something comparatively harmless, such as a higher tax rate in Scandinavian countries, we likewise couldn't derive any authority to label more troubling customs, such as female genital mutilation (practiced with alarming frequency in many African nations and, like many instances of violence against women, influenced by local superstitions and a general belief in witchcraft, as well as poverty and desperation^⁵³), immoral--except through our own, inextricably subjective, Western viewpoint.

Passing judgment is especially difficult wherever the victimized party appears to have given consent to be victimized, such as in the case of arranged marriages. If that consent was given as a free and equal actor, then it seems that we would have no more recourse for objection in the case of girls betrothed at 13 than we would in the case of an abusive sadomasochistic relationship which is nonetheless freely engaged by both parties. Of course, the problem of arranged marriages is that the consent is not given within an unfettered, consequence-free decision-making process. It is possible that consent would still widely be given if young Indian girls could freely opt out of the engagement (and undoubtedly many can), but in any case the unpopularity of a practice alone cannot make it immoral--even if most Africans were opposed to female genital mutilation, such a majority vote would not necessarily render the practice unjustifiable, considering that unchecked majoritarianism is just as dangerous and baseless as totalitarianism.

Can we then derive from the commonality of pluralism and experience of the secular a justification for extending Western notions of harm to all peoples? And perhaps more pressingly, what do we do about it if we can?

If abuses such as arranged marriage were occurring on U.S. soil, we could pass a law banning such activity, as we have done. But in this more vexing instance, it is occurring within nations which are outside of U.S. jurisdiction, so we cannot simply pass a law to ban the practice. Unilateral coercive action would be neither feasible (given the prohibitive number of countries playing host to objectionable practices throughout the world) nor helpful (given the tendency of indigenous peoples to resist such campaigns, often violently). Indirect actions, such as trade embargoes and sanctions, typically only bring suffering and starvation to that society's most vulnerable and force its government to do business with a black market (see Iraq). There is still the immediate question, though: is the eradication of specific abhorrent practices worth such outcomes? If, for example, there was a growing culture of female genital mutilation within the U.S., would it be worth the possible social upheaval caused by a massive crackdown? We would be quick to reply in the affirmative; after all, the government's actions to bring about the end of segregation were worth it, in spite of the sometimes violent reaction of white southerners (and it is worth it to maintain the legality of abortion, in spite of the occasional clinic bombing). Perhaps the same could be said of female genital mutilation as it is practiced in Angola? Perhaps the resentment of the locals, and any violence it engenders, is simply the worthwhile cost of ridding the world of one more morally abhorrent custom?

One salient difference should be readily apparent: it was far easier to mobilize the National Guard to enforce integration than it would be for any one nation to single-handedly stop the practice of genital mutilation as it occurs in Africa. This is because the U.S. is but one nation, whose judgments against other nations are tantamount to a single citizen's unilateral judgment against another. Any action engendered by such a judgment would not only be difficult to carry out in a culture of offenders, but would also qualify as vigilantism, which is both illegal and immoral in cases which do not involve direct self-defense or defense of others. However, vigilantism in the service of stopping genital mutilation would likely be considered justified under that principle, as it would be in the case of genocide,^⁵⁴ so we will use the example of arranged marriages here. While it would be justified for an interested to party to kill (if necessary) an individual about to perform genital mutilation on an incapacitated African woman, it would be immoral to similarly accost those who are responsible for an arranged marriage. What can be done in reaction to practices which are immoral, but are ill served by unilateral intervention?

If we continue with the analogy of states as single moral actors, we would need to conceive of an international force not unlike the U.N. (though not the U.N. itself, which has historically acted magnanimously only in comparison to its most intractable member states), which is entered into by all nations^⁵⁵ and which is given the power to curb the worst of such abuses (much as the central government did during desegregation). A great number of nations would never consider joining, depending of course on the final form of the government and which other nations backed it, but most would come to realize that voluntary membership is worth the cost (as most Americans realize that citizenship is worth maintaining despite occasional disagreement with government policy). Those nations which remain intractable would still be required to follow the law, which would remain intuitively minimal: only the worst of the abusive cultural practices would be worth an official action (widespread female genital mutilation which is either legal or widely goes unpunished); practices such as arranged marriages would be discouraged more delicately through the standardizing effect of global awareness, participation in the world government, the alleviation of poverty,^⁵⁶ and the cessation of predatory economic and political practices by developed nations. This would weaken existing oppressive regimes and preclude the formation of many, but not all, others. Much as the free market is indistinguishable from government intervention when we assume a high degree of rationality and morality, the anarchistic inter-nation milieu tends toward a strengthened singular authority when we assume the inhabitants of individual states (and thus the states themselves) act morally and rationally.

This may be a frightening prospect to some (see the many foreboding references to the "new world order"), but if the power of this theoretical organization were to be checked in a similar way to our own central government, the great majority of such fears would disappear. Because we do not take the corruption or overgrowth of our own government as a reason to dismantle it entirely, we should not take the fear of a corrupt one world governing body as a reason to support the fractionalized, anarchistic international status quo (a status quo which is rapidly deteriorating). This status quo, not coincidentally, is reinforced by U.S. actions: since the mid-1980s, Washington has owed substantial dues to the U.N. and continues to withhold payment for political reasons, and since 1976 has used its right to veto more than the United Kingdom, France, China, and U.S.S.R./Russia combined.^⁵⁷ What sort of resolutions have the U.S. been so eager to veto? Primarily, it has vetoed those which are critical of either Israel or the United States. Among the aims of these vetoed resolutions are:

Perhaps most telling was President Bush's 2005 appointment of John Bolton to the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. A contemporary CNN article quotes Bolton, who in 1994 had said that "there is no such thing as the United Nations" and "If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."^⁵⁹

In keeping with the analogy of states as individual citizens, our intractability on the world's stage is akin to that of a gun-harboring survivalist or Branch Davidian who sees conspiracy of authority where none exist and jealously guards the stranglehold on his or her bespoke subjects. While we may be legally recalcitrant, our assumed enduring moral membership in the world's community has not yet elevated the U.S. to Unabomber status, though recent practices, and the attempts to justify them by tying morality to legality (see the following chapter's discussion on the "just following orders" justification), call this moral commitment into question. This assumption of morality by other peoples has been highly magnanimous insofar as it is actually responsible for the tolerance of U.S. actions abroad--perhaps fear and intimidation are the primary cause, rather than magnanimity; in either case, an increasing frequency of illegal and immoral actions will soon lead to pronounced impatience. The U.S. may spend far more than any other nation on its military, but a last stand against a provoked international army is not in anyone's interest.

First and foremost, it is consistency which we are missing. The exceptionalist viewpoint renders any attempt at morality or legality irrelevant, but assuming that exceptionalism is finally discarded and consistency is achieved, what sort of moral philosophy should underpin the United States legal code? In order to answer this, we must ask what sort of moral philosophy should underpin our own actions as individual citizens. A comprehensive naturalistic philosophical framework may resemble the following:

This comes as close as possible to an objective truth and moral realism (philosophical theories which hold that moral statements are either true or false, not conditional) as is possible without a theoretical mystical revelation. As mystical revelations are unattainable, any potentially universal statement of human rights must be predicated on a commonality of experience and elimination of meaningful alternatives (see Chapter 9). With this in mind, a provisional objectivity is attainable by observation and reason, but what can be done with this pronouncement (whether it is to be imposed violently on transgressive societies, instated more peacefully through conscientious globalism and poverty-fighting initiatives, or neither) is another matter. Though the naturalistic framework is applicable to the society of its beholder, can it be applied to those who have not beheld it, and perhaps cannot or will not do so?

Recent years have illustrated all too explicitly the idea that the United States is in no position to unilaterally foist its ideals upon nations which may not be prepared to accept them, but this does not consign conscientious thinkers to the sidelines in all cases. A conscientious world government (one bound by the trinity of principles outlined in the last chapter: harm, self-defense, and reciprocity) which represents all global citizens most closely resembles a legitimate international authority and can most effectively combat global poverty and exploitation, while still preserving indigenous culture and social mores. It is ever a balancing act, but the false extremes of ethnocentrism and abandonment of others to genocide misses a simple fact: our imperialistic past has to varying degrees enabled such genocide, and so abandonment is not a moral alternative even if internationalism is potentially exploitative. That it is potentially moral is sufficient.

We have established a useful criterion by which to evaluate the morality of violence through the only metric a disillusioned, amoral former religionist would necessarily possess: self-interest. It was applied writ large to the case of the Iraq War, but it is worth asking whether one's self-interest precludes unnecessary violence as an option for nation-states in the same way that it does for individuals. It may, at first glance, be considered valid from a self-interest perspective to take over another nation through force (or to otherwise abrogate its sovereignty) in order to secure some material wealth or other concession. Given a powerful enough military presence and something approaching a consensus at home, would it be possible for an invading nation to get off scot-free, or for the invasion to have been worth the sacrifices?

We must first define what we mean by "self-interest" as it applies to nation-states. War typically benefits the defense industry and sitting politicians, but many others will have to bear the costs in terms of capital, human and otherwise. Because there is no conceivable aggressive war which would benefit everyone in a nation, we will consider the interests of those profiting from the waging of war as adequate, given that they were able to convince enough of the populace that war was in their best interests as well. As we have already asked, though, how would they have convinced those who would actually be waging the war? No argument would convince even a purely self-interested rational individual that invasion of Iraq was in America's collective interest, and so pseudo-arguments were employed by the administration: alarmist plays on the collective fear of terrorism in the wake of 9/11, exploitation of nationalism and patriotism, and even the idealist hope of a flourishing democracy in the Middle East (which may seem rational or even altruistic at first, but history has shown that democracy mandated by foreign entity at gunpoint is rarely lasting or stable democracy, if such was ever an actual goal). If there was a prevailing sentiment, born out of our own self-interested moral calculus, that government should frame its rationale in a reciprocal way, then such sentiments would have had little traction and the likely outcome would have been hesitance, and a patient wait for weapons inspectors to ensure that Hussein was indeed a threat. And because the war couldn't be justified through any intuitive principle, a suspicious public would have likely been more inquisitive in asking, "who benefits from the invasion, and why?" For any war save a purely defensive one, the answer to this question must be "too few." In the end, defensive wars are just only because a nation is composed of people, each possessing an individual right to self-defense which coalesces into a collective right to self-defense under the aegis of a duly-appointed regional authority. The difference is one of mere scale, and justified only in response to a threat of comparable enormity.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are instructive here in another way: the U.S. military is by far the largest in the world, and yet is not capable of effectively handling guerilla fighters. The naysayer would of course be quick to point out that the effectiveness of the occupation may be hamstrung by our commitment to human rights in the course of waging war (such as it is--see the next chapter). Were we to lose ourselves in violent bloody reprisals, we might destroy the insurgency, but such a sweeping victory would likely require us to kill or enslave most able-bodied Iraqis as well, given that crackdowns of this stripe rarely engender a cooperative and appreciative spirit among locals. In this respect, the same lessons which would prevent a rational self-interested person from indiscriminately firing into crowds on the off chance the bullet injures or kills someone out to do him or her harm would also have prevented us from exercising force in Iraq.

We have indicted the architects of the Iraq War for their part in atrocity, but have not yet spoke of the soldiers themselves. Typically, they are excused as being mere pawns in a grander political game, unable to refuse a legally given order and punished for any attempts at dissent. Yet this defense has profound implications for any moral system with organizational hierarchies. As we are interested not only in god but the army which carries the deity's name (or which carries any other equivalently irrational banner into battle), it is reasonable to devote a chapter to an analysis of the pawn's role in the overarching game, and to ask whether it is even playable without them.

2Recall for example the quote from Representative Baxley, "People say you can't legislate morality. Absolutely wrong. All laws assert somebody's values. We say, for example, you can't kill somebody." There is also the theistic conflation of evolution with so-called "Darwinism," an effort to discredit a proven (and continually reinforced, most recently by the discovery of a 4,000,000-year-old Ardipithecus radmidus hominid fossil) phenomenon by associating it with a more fallible and ever controversial individual (fewer than half of all Americans regard evolution as correct, placing the U.S. far below every other comparable nation). Carl Safina writes in the New York Times,

"Darwinism" implies an ideology adhering to one man's dictates, like Marxism. And "isms" (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. "Darwinism" implies that biological scientists "believe in" Darwin's "theory." It's as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.

Source: Carl Safina, "Darwinism Must Die so that Evolution May Live," 9 February 2009, accessed on the website of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/science/10essa.html, 13 February 2009.

Darwin remains a divisive figure in the U.S. A 2009 film about Darwin's life and work, titled Creation, has failed to find an American distributor due to the persistent opposition to his discoveries among the deeply religious American public. The film has received adequate reviews and has found a distributor in all other regions. Contrast this with the treatment of Ben Stein's 2008 anti-evolution documentary (a term used loosely here) Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which opened to more screens than any other documentary film before it. Critically maligned, the film attempts to trace the roots of Nazism to Darwinism through the use of misquotes and misleading interviews (among other dishonesties).

4Darrell J. Fasching, "Stories of War and Peace: Sacred, Secular, and Holy," War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare, Ed. Sara Munson Deats, Lagretta Tallent Lenker, and Merry G. Perry (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004), 19-42.

More recently, an International Committee of the Red Cross report found that C.I.A. medical officers violated medical ethics and committed what amounted to torture in the course of overseeing interrogations at U.S.-run secret prisons. Joby Warrick and Julie Tate write in The Washington Post that

Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site yesterday. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: "I look after your body only because we need you for information."

The report also found that prisoners were threatened with violence against their wives and children (this was later confirmed by a 2004 C.I.A. Inspector General report on torture released on August 24, 2009, which also revealed that mock executions and threats of death were illegally used to intimidate detainees; however, it was already known that at least one threat of harm against family members--against the children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed--was already carried out by interrogators), H.I.V. infection, and sodomy (a separate Physicians for Human Rights report found that sodomy was more than a threat, and had been performed with broom handles and flashlights; detainees also report being forced to drink urine--their own, as well as that of the guards). Source: Joby Warrick and Julie Tate, "Report Calls CIA Detainee Treatment 'Inhuman'," 7 April 2009, accessed on the website of The Washington Times at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/06/AR2009040603654.html, 10 April 2009.

For the modern complicit medical officer, the process of "doubling" is still available in an essentially unchanged form. An equivalent "biomedical narrative" may found in the above quote: a dehumanization of the detainee which casts them as living information sources to be bled dry by any means available, whether this means inflicting pain or keeping them alive for a few days longer, can be used by medical officers in exactly the same way that the Aryan mythological view of Jews as subhuman disease-carriers was used by Nazi death camp supervisors to reconcile their morally inexcusable actions with their self-image as a morally upright individual. Indeed, the former Guantánamo Bay Chief of Neuropsychiatry, William Henry Anderson, wrote a 2004 article in which he equated terrorism with cancer and advocated the killing of 100,000 Muslim "zealots" he considers irredeemable. The Public Record quotes a relevant passage of the article, which was originally published in the Intelligencer:

No, the zealots are another kind of person. They may be thought of as cells of a social body that have undergone malignant change.

Let us consider terrorism with an analogy from medicine -- that of terrorism as a cancer. There are about 1.4 billion Muslims in the world. Embedded within this healthy body are, perhaps, 100,000 people who are eager and active in pursuit of the goal of killing us. Just as successful treatment of cancer requires killing of the malignant cells, we will need to kill this small minority, since we have no evidence that they can be induced to change their minds.

Source: Jeffrey Kaye, "Former Top Gitmo Psychiatrist Called for Extermination of "Muslim Zealots"," 2 September 2009, accessed on the website of The Public Record at http://pubrecord.org/nation/4520/former-gitmo-psychologist-called/, 5 September 2009.

17In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan worked diligently to undermine the social safety net, often with fatal results. Peter Dreir writes on the website of the affordable housing advocacy organization National Housing Initiative that Reagan's efforts were destructive:

The most dramatic cut in domestic spending during the Reagan years was for low-income housing subsidies. Reagan appointed a housing task force dominated by politically connected developers, landlords and bankers. In 1982 the task force released a report that called for "free and deregulated" markets as an alternative to government assistance – advice Reagan followed. In his first year in office Reagan halved the budget for public housing and Section 8 to about $17.5 billion. And for the next few years he sought to eliminate federal housing assistance to the poor altogether.

In the 1980s the proportion of the eligible poor who received federal housing subsidies declined. In 1970 there were 300,000 more low-cost rental units (6.5 million) than low-income renter households (6.2 million). By 1985 the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a disparity of 3.3 million units.

Another of Reagan's enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of a year. Many were Vietnam veterans, children and laid-off workers.

In early 1984 on Good Morning America, Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement saying that "people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice."

Part of this surge in homelessness was caused by a cut in Social Security funds for the mentally disabled, many of whom, as a consequence, froze to death on the streets (when pressed, Reagan referred to these individuals as "retarded" and insinuated that they chose to freeze--how retarded individuals could have responsibly made this choice was never explained). These homeless, as well as the many who continue to freeze to death (often because nearby shelters have closed), have, by the arguments raised in this chapter, a direct self-defense recourse against anyone in the vicinity. Source: Peter Dreier, "Reagan's Legacy: Homelessness in America," May/June 2004, accessed on the website of National Housing Institute at http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/135/reagan.html

19Ellen Nolte and C. Martin McKee compiled data pertaining to the rates of amenable mortality (that is, deaths which are considered amenable to healthcare) in Health Affairs and found that the United States has the worst rate of amenable mortality in the O.E.C.D. and the lowest improvement in that statistic between 1997-98 and 2002-03:

The decline in amenable mortality in all countries averaged 16 percent over this period. The United States was an outlier, with a decline of only 4 percent. If the United States could reduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved in the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year by the end of the study period.

… although ranking fifteenth in 1997-98 and performing considerably better than Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Portugal, by 2002-03 the United States had the highest rate of amenable mortality, just above Ireland and the United Kingdom but far above countries such as France, Japan, and Australia.

Source: Ellen Nolte and C. Martin McKee, "Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis," January/February 2008, accessed on the website of Physicians for a National Health Program at http://www.pnhp.org/news/2008/january/united_states_has_wo.php, 12 August 2009. Ellipses in original.

Roughly 45,000 Americans die each year due to a lack of health insurance. This works out to one individual every twelve minutes.

For an example of insurance company callousness, look to Guardian Life Insurance Company, which in October 2009 cancelled an entire line of coverage in order to avoid paying out for a single subscriber. In an e-mail, one executive referred to these cancelled patients as "dogs" and implied that they could be sacrificed for the corporation's material benefit.

20The 2008 economic downturn has hit U.S. medical patients extraordinarily hard. A Wall Street Journal article details the story of those employed by Archway and Mother's Cookie Company, which in October went out of business immediately and without prior notice by management. One employee induced labor before her due date, hoping that her company insurance would cover the delivery before the policy's termination. This was not to be: she and others were stuck with the full cost of medical care because the company was self-insured and had terminated its own plan (the Cobra temporary insurance plans for laid-off employees don't apply in such cases), and did not have enough funds left over after declaring bankruptcy. Source: Ianthe Duggan, "The Human Toll of the Credit Crunch," 6 December 2008, accessed on the website of The Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122852525037084565.html, 7 December 2008.

The downturn has also led to an increase in sales of herbal remedies, which are being used in lieu of increasingly unaffordable medical procedures. Alternative medicines such as herbal supplements are cheaper in part because they require neither government approval nor rigorous testing of their long-term effects (though it should be noted that F.D.A. approval itself is not a guarantee of safety, given the organization's close connections to industry insiders and lobbyists). Some homeopathic remedies are harmful in ways which reach beyond their use as a replacement of more effective standard medical procedures: fritillary bulbs, for example, have been linked with higher concentrations of cancer-causing metals. As is often the case, children are the victims: the American Academy of Pediatrics found in 2008 that an increasing number of children are being given such alternative remedies. Source: Lindsey Tanner, "With Economy Sour, Consumers Sweet on Herbal Meds," 13 January 2009, accessed on the website of Yahoo! News at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090113/ap_on_he_me/meltdown_supplement_sales, 13 January 2009.

Statistics from The American Journal of Medicine point to an increasingly common inability to pay for medical procedures: in 2001, 46% of bankruptcies in the U.S. were due primarily to medical bills; in 2007, the proportion had increased to 62%:

Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%. In logistic regression analysis controlling for demographic factors, the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.

A separate 2005 Harvard study found that three quarters of those who were forced to declare bankruptcy had health insurance at the onset (the ease with which one can see their coverage dropped or denied for essentially any condition is a symptom of the powerful grip health insurance providers have on the federal government). Source: David U. Himmelstein et. al., "Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study," 5 June 2009, accessed on the website of The American Journal of Medicine at http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(09)00404-5/abstract, 5 June 2009.

In 2009, a Senate Commerce Committee inquiry found that consumers were being forced to pay billions of dollars worth of expenses which should have been covered by their insurance plans. According to David S. Hilzenrath, writing for the Washington Post:

At a committee hearing yesterday, three health-care specialists testified that insurers go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for sick people, use deliberately incomprehensible documents to mislead consumers about their benefits, and sell "junk" policies that do not cover needed care.

…

The star witness at the hearing was a former public relations executive for major health insurers whose testimony boiled down to this: Don't trust the insurers.

"The industry and its backers are using fear tactics, as they did in 1994, to tar a transparent and accountable -- publicly accountable -- health-care option," said Wendell Potter, who until early last year was vice president for corporate communications at the big insurer Cigna.

Source: David S. Hilzenrath, "Denate Panel Hears of Health Insurers' Wrongs," 25 June 2009, accessed on the website of The Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/24/ AR2009062401636.html, 10 August 2009.

Wendell Potter's story, retold here by Paul Harris in The Guardian newspaper, is singularly compelling:

It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia.

Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.

Source: Pail Harris, "Whistleblower Tells of America's Hidden Nightmare for its Sick Poor," 26 July 2009, accessed on the website of The Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/26/us-healthcare-obama-barack-change, 12 August 2009.

For a disconcerting firsthand description of one such free medical clinic (which is compared unfavorably to third world conditions), see the August 16, 2009 article "At Free Clinic, Scenes from the Third World," by Steve Lopez on the website of The Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez16-2009aug16,0,3959652.column.

22In "For Want of a Dentist," The Washington Post's Mary Otto describes how an $80 tooth extraction ballooned into a $250,000 (failed) attempt to save a young Maryland boy's life from a spreading infection. 12-year-old Deamonte Driver lacked both dental insurance and Medicaid coverage, though at any rate his mother was unable to locate a dentist who would accept Medicaid (in 2005, fewer than one third of children covered by Maryland's Medicaid program received dental care, numbers which are comparable to other states' dental care statistics; additionally, "Fewer than 16 percent of Maryland's Medicaid children received restorative services -- such as filling cavities"). Deamonte was, in the end, a victim of rationing (page 3):

In spite of such modern innovations as the fluoridation of drinking water, tooth decay is still the single most common childhood disease nationwide, five times as common as asthma, experts say. Poor children are more than twice as likely to have cavities as their more affluent peers, research shows, but far less likely to get treatment.

Serious and costly medical consequences are "not uncommon," said Norman Tinanoff, chief of pediatric dentistry at the University of Maryland Dental School in Baltimore. For instance, Deamonte's bill for two weeks at Children's alone was expected to be between $200,000 and $250,000.

The federal government requires states to provide oral health services to children through Medicaid programs, but the shortage of dentists who will treat indigent patients remains a major barrier to care, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Source: Mary Otto, "For Want of a Dentist," 28 February 2007, accessed on the website of The Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/27/AR2007022702116.html, 12 August 2009.

28One particularly frightening prospect is the release of green house gasses from methane-rich ice deposits beneath the floor of the Arctic Ocean. These hydrates are being melted by oceanic currents, which have increased in temperature significantly due to anthropogenic climate change. Scientists confirmed in August 2009 that several megatons of methane had been released from a small survey area of the Arctic, though none of it had yet reached the atmosphere (instead, much of it is being converted into carbon dioxide, dissolving into the water and increasing its acidity--also environmentally damaging). Larger deposits, however, may be robust enough to reach the surface and contribute significantly to climate change. Source: Michael Marshall, "As Arctic Ocean Warms, Megatonnes of Methane Bubble Up," 17 August 2009, accessed on the website of New Scientist at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17625-as-arctic-ocean-warms-megatonnes-of-methane-bubble-up.html, 18 August 2009.

The increasing acidity of Earth's oceans, along with other forms of pollution, rising carbon levels, and environmental changes, has had a catastrophic impact on coral reefs. Writing for The Guardian, David Adam summarizes the scientific consensus concerning the future of these fragile yet important ecosystems:

Within just a few decades, experts are warning, the tropical reefs strung around the middle of our planet like a jewelled corset will reduce to rubble. Giant piles of slime-covered rubbish will litter the sea bed and spell in large distressing letters for the rest of foreseeable time: Humans Were Here.

"The future is horrific," says Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist who is widely regarded as the world's foremost expert on coral reefs. "There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise. If, and when, they go, they will take with them about one-third of the world's marine biodiversity. Then there is a domino effect, as reefs fail so will other ecosystems. This is the path of a mass extinction event, when most life, especially tropical marine life, goes extinct."

The damage done thus far is considered irreversible: "[coral expert Alex Rogers] says carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are already over the safe limits for coral reefs. And even the most ambitious political targets for carbon cuts, based on limiting temperature rise to 2C, are insufficient." Source: David Adam, "Why Coral Reefs Face a Catastrophic Future," 2 September 2009, accessed on the website of The Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/02/coral-catastrophic-future, 2 September 2009. Brackets not in original.

29In this respect, the free market trusts with our long-term safety the consumer mob, a famously fickle and malleable group which lacks access to, and the motivation to pursue, environmental studies which have use as a source of data for the creation of preventive regulation (leading to an eventual tragedy of the commons). One such study, commissioned by the Global Humanitarian Forum, found that the effects of global climate change (which contributes to starvation, disease, and environmental catastrophe) kill 315,000 people per year and impact the lives of 325 million, numbers which are expected to rise sharply in the coming years. Further, economic losses caused by climate change ($125 billion each year) exceed the amount of aid rich nations contribute to developing ones, which suffer the worst effects of climate change while contributing the least to it (Reuters: "The report says developing countries bear more than nine-tenths of the human and economic burden of climate change, while the 50 poorest countries contribute less than 1% of the carbon emissions that are heating up the planet."). The report concludes that efforts to combat this urgent problem in developing countries must be increased 100-fold in order to make a meaningful impact. Though the study is not entirely scientifically rigorous and claims a wide margin of error, it utilized existing data in order to formulate the estimate. Source: "Climate Change Causes 315,000 Deaths a Year-Report," 29 May 2009, accessed on the website of Reuters at http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLS1002309, 29 May 2009.

A government dominated by market interests will also be reticent to act environmentally: in July 2009, the Obama White House declassified a series of satellite photographs which had been kept secret by the Bush administration. Suzanne Goldberg and Damian Carrington write in The Guardian that several of the photos provide stark evidence of the effects of climate change:

One particularly striking set of images - selected from the 1,000 photographs released - includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice - a record loss - were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse.

Source: Suzanne Goldberg and Damian Carrington, "Revealed: The Secret of Global Warming Bush Tried to Hide," 26 July 2009, accessed on the website of The Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/ 2009/jul/26/climate-change-obama-administration, 28 July 2009.

30The concept of states' rights may be interchanged with corporations in the above example. Empowering individual states to abrogate primary national rights would result in an exodus from them, and then a late stage re-adoption of the political principle which its citizens sought to find elsewhere, in order to entice the expatriates to return. This is assuming of course that a substantial number of its citizens chose to behave morally and enact some form of boycott on the state's leadership. In the meantime, though, its poorest citizens--those with little ability to leave--would be effectively trapped, if not provided with some federal means of transportation to neighboring states with more inclusive laws. Assuming such transportation was willingly provided by the government, we have arrived at an outcome which is materially no different than if the state had been barred from restricting access to essential services in the first place, except that it is more expensive and allows state officials to reduce their personal complicity in the provision of controversial services (abortion would be the most relevant example--see South Dakota's several attempts at banning the practice, as well as the February 2009 passage of an outright abortion ban in North Dakota's House of Representatives) by one degree. Even this latter advantage is inconsequential, as state resources would necessarily be put toward coordinating with any federal relocation measures. So, instead of allowing abortions in South Dakota, states' rights supporters who feel that abortion should be a universal right would have state officials loading young women onto busses in order to have an abortion elsewhere--hardly a conscience-clearing degree of autonomy.

31It was a similar idea which caused Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) to oppose a national health insurance plan which would include a public option:

Nelson's problem, he told CQ, is that the public plan would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans. "At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game," Nelson said. Including a public option in a health plan, he said, was a "deal breaker."

Senator Nelson receives substantial donations from the private insurance industry. Source: "Ben Nelson Plans to Oppose Public Health Plan," 2 May 2009, accessed on the website of The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/01/ben-nelson-plans-to-oppos_n_194907.html, 2 May 2009.

The strong correlation between a Senator's opposition to a public healthcare option and the proportion of his or her campaign contributions which were given by healthcare industry political action committees may explain Nelson's reticence. Nate Silver compiled the financial data for all 99 Senators (Al Franken was still noticeably missing at that point) from 1989 to 2009 and found that "Senators in favor of a public option have received, on average, $335,308 or 1.8 percent of their total campaign contributions from health industry PACs. Senators opposed to it have received an average of $486,629 or 3.5 percent." (Additionally, more than a million dollars per day has been spent by healthcare lobbyists in 2009.) Source: Nate Silver, "On Health Care, Who's Hooked on Special Interest Money?," 16 June 2009, accessed on the website of FiveThirtyEight at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/on-health-care-whos-hooked-on-special.html, 17 June 2009.

Members of the media are similarly biased, due to the commonality of what is known as an "interlocking directorate": the practice of high-level corporate board members working for both media corporations and healthcare corporations, the source of a conflict of interest which often results in skewed healthcare reporting. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that the expected bias was indeed present:

A recent FAIR study of nine major media corporations and their major outlets, Disney (ABC), General Electric (NBC), CBS, Time Warner (CNN, Time), News Corporation (Fox), New York Times Co., Washington Post Co.(Newsweek), Tribune Co. (Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times) and Gannett (USA Today) found connections to six different insurance companies. Five out of the nine media corporations studied shared a director with an insurance company; two insurance companies--Chubb and Berkshire Hathaway--were represented by more than one media corporation director.

…

In all, though healthcare reform has been mentioned thousands of times in the output of these media corporations' major outlets, single-payer was mentioned in only 164 articles or news segments from January 1 through June 30, 2009; over 70 percent of these mentions did not include the voice of a single-payer advocate. Over 45 percent of the pieces that did include a single-payer advocate were episodes of the Ed Show, an MSNBC program whose host, Ed Shultz, frequently advocates for single-payer healthcare. Without the Ed Show, just 19 percent of articles or news segments that mentioned single-payer would have included an actual advocate of the plan.

Source: Kate Murphy, "Single-Payer & Interlocking Directorates," August 2009, accessed on the website of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting at http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3845, 13 August 2009. Ellipses not in original.

32Clive Cookson, "Poverty Mars Formation of Infant Brains," 16 February 2008, accessed on the website of Financial Times at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fb7535b4-dc30-11dc-bc82-0000779fd2ac.html, 3 November 2008.

A newer study, this one undertaken by the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health, found that pollution can also inhibit brain development in fetuses. Pregnant women who were exposed to greater amounts of pollution during the final months of their pregnancy gave birth to children (tested at age five) who scored an average of five I.Q. points lower than children with minimal levels of pollutant exposure during development. From an Associated Press article on the topic:

While future research is needed to confirm the new results, the findings suggest exposure to air pollution before birth could have the same harmful effects on the developing brain as exposure to lead, said Patrick Breysse, an environmental health specialist at Johns Hopkins' school of public health.

And along with other environmental harms and disadvantages low-income children are exposed to, it could help explain why they often do worse academically than children from wealthier families, Breysse said.

Source: "Lower IQ Scores Linked to Prenatal Pollution," 20 July 2009, accessed on the website of MSNBC at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32008291/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/, 20 July 2009.

Finally, it has been revealed that corporal punishment lowers a child's I.Q. by several points, also through stress-related factors. Even a minimal form of physical discipline, such as spanking, is significantly deleterious.

37The Downing Street Memo, a leaked document in which British officials complain of Bush's willingness to alter intelligence to fit the U.S. policy goal of regime change in Iraq, was made public in 2005. The responses by Bush and Blair were instructive: McClellan, then White House spokesman, claimed that he had not read the memo yet was certain it was inaccurate; Blair simply reiterated that the memo changed nothing about the case for invasion and that it was Hussein who forced the Coalition to act. Secretary of State Colin Powell's reluctance to push the case for war is further proof that intelligence was deliberately skewed: Powell assembled his own team to review the information prepared by Paul Wolfowitz, excised dozens of pages from an early draft of the speech he later would present to the United Nations Security Council, and at one point labeled the case for war "bullshit." (Powell, who had previously made efforts to whitewash the My Lai Massacre, is evidently no stranger to acting immorally in the course of his duty.) Source: Suzanne Goldberg and Richard Norton-Taylor, "Powell's Doubts over CIA Intelligence on Iraq Prompted Him to Set Up Secret Review," 2 June 2003, accessed on the website of The Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2003/jun/02/usa.iraq, 20 October 2008.

Moreover, there existed a plan to attack Iraq before September 11^th even occurred. In Vanity Fair's "An Oral History of the Bush White House: Politics and Power," Richard Clarke recalls (page 3):

That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we've got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him--at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him--like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said--I'll never forget this--There just aren't enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we're, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.

And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn't seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise. It really didn't, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.

Source: Cullen Murphy and Todd Purnum, "An Oral History of the Bush White House: Politics and Power," February 2009, accessed on the website of Vanity Fair at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/ 02/bush-oral-history200902, 15 January 2009.

38"An Investigation of Allegations of Politicized Hiring in the Department of Justice Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program," 24 June 2008, accessed on the website of The U.S. Department of Justice at http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/s0806/final.pdf, 4 November 2008.

It has also come to light that a Bush appointee named Bradley Schlozman, "who supervised civil rights and voting rights lawyers, broke the law by considering political affiliations in deciding who can serve." The inspector general's report found that Schlozman referred to his justice department supervisees as "mold spores," "commies" and "crazy libs." In a 2003 e-mail, he spoke of plans to "gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section." 63 of the 65 lawyers hired during his tenure were conservatives. Schlozman was able to do this, the report notes, because of a lack of proper oversight. Source: David Savage, "Bush Appointee Saw Justice Lawyers as 'Commies,' 'Crazy Libs,' Report Says," 13 January 2009, accessed on the website of The Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-justice14-2009jan14,0,3129787.story, 13 January 2009.

Schlozman was also involved in actively sabotaging Democratic politicians through the misuse of his office:

He also clearly pushed the U.S. attorney in Kansas City to bring a series of politically-motivated legal actions, including a bogus prosecution of a Democratic candidate for mayor of Kansas City. When the sitting U.S. attorney began to balk at some of Schlozman's more cockeyed political shenanigans, Schlozman pressured him out of office and assumed the post himself.

He later perjured himself before the Senate Judiciary Committee by making false statements regarding his actions in the Justice Department. Nothing has come of this--Attorney General Holder declined to bring charges against Schlozman. Source: Scott Horton, "Schlozman Walks," 14 September 2009, accessed on the website of Harper's at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/09/hbc-90005704, 18 September 2009.

39This attitude is often manifested in calls to reign in the perceived leftist bias of academia and the intelligentsia. In 2009, Republican Senator Tom Coburn proposed that the National Science Foundation cease funding political science programs and studies, arguing that political science is not strictly scientific and ought to be left up to "pundits and voters" (though such programs make up less than 1% of the N.S.F. budget, Republicans have repeatedly called for their removal). Coburn's complaints go beyond a preference for the so-called hard sciences, and reveal an ulterior motive: combating the proliferation of problematic facts and figures, mostly those concerning human rights and other areas of weakness for Republicans. His office cited several examples of frivolous and unscientific studies; among them was a 2008 study which found that human rights abuses were on the rise throughout the world, largely due to U.S. actions after September 11^th and in waging the War on Terror (in addition to pressuring allies to cooperate with rights-abusing programs, the U.S. set a bad example which facilitated torture elsewhere). Though politically inconvenient, this study is an accurate reflection of reality as it exists on planet Earth, and would not have likely been formulated by a network news pundit (and Republicans are certainly aware of this). Source: David Glenn, "Senator Proposes an End to Federal Support for Political Science," 7 October 2009, accessed on the website of The Chronicle of Higher Education at http://chronicle.com/article/Senator-Proposes-an-End-to/48746/, 9 October 2009.

41David Barstow of The New York Times writes of the use of retired military officers as "military analysts" (read: spokesmen for the Pentagon or defense contractors) on cable news channels:

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

…

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse -- an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Though Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative work, the story was largely suppressed by the same news organizations it criticized and went unnoticed by the public. Source: David Barstow, "Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand," 20 April 2008, accessed on the website of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html, 30 April 2008. Ellipses not in original.

For a rather egregious example of this collusion, look to the case of retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, one of the analysts referred to in Barstow's piece. In April 2009, McInerney was invited on Fox News and asked to speak about the hostage situation in Somalia. McInerney bizarrely recommended the use of F-22 Raptors, the notoriously expensive (each plane costs $350 million and requires nearly $50,000 maintenance for every hour of flight; the high price tag can be attributed to its flawed design, which did not adequately protect the body from environmental factors, such as rain) and recently-cancelled fighter jet, for thwarting pirate attacks and attempted hijackings. McInerney is a board member of several military contractors and former employee of the F-22-producing contractor Northrop Grumman.

Finally, a leaked memo from The News Herald (a Panama City, Florida newspaper) encapsulates the hesitant attitude of journalists concerning thorough coverage of the War on Terror:

DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails and the like.... DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT. The only exception is if the U.S. hits an orphanage, school or similar facility and kills scores or hundreds of children.

Source: "Fox: Civilian Casualties Not News," 11 November 2001, accessed on the website of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting at http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1668, 7 May 2009. Ellipses in original.

42Chomsky criticizes the U.S.'s crassly manipulative use of both absolutism (the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and relativism (legal obstructions which have allowed the U.S. to avoid observing the terms of universalizing treaties), with the former serving as a golem-like weapon to be employed against the enemy of the hour and the latter as the sacred phrase to shut it down when it inevitably turns toward its master. In "The United States and the 'Challenge of Relativity'," Chomsky writes:

The U.S. officially recognizes that "deliberate impeding of the delivery of food and medical supplies" to civilian populations constitutes "violations of international humanitarian law," and "reaffirms that those who commit or order the commission of such acts will be held individually responsible in respect of such acts." The reference is to Bosnia-Herzegovina. The President of the United States is plainly "individually responsible" for such "violations of international humanitarian law." Or would be, were it not for the "general tacit agreements" about selective enforcement, which reign with such absolute power among Western relativists that the simple facts are virtually unmentionable.

Source: Noam Chomsky, "The United States and the "Challenge of Relativity"," November 1998, accessed on the website of Chomsky.info at http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199811--.htm, 3 March 2009.

44While Cheney may have worked to moderate Bush's religious impulse, Donald Rumsfeld on more than one occasion fed it. Leaked cover sheets for highly classified Worldwide Intelligence Updates, documents containing high-level intelligence briefings to be presented to the President, were emblazoned with a combination of bible quotes and militaristic imagery. Among the included quotes:

"Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear Him, On those who hope for His loving kindness, To deliver their soul from death." (over triumphant images of celebrating Iraqis)
"Open the gates that the righteous may enter, The nation that keeps faith." (over the image of an American tank passing under the Swords of Qādisīyah arch in Baghdad)
"It is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men." (over a picture of Saddam Hussein)

Source: "AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED," May 2009, accessed on the website of GQ at http://men.style.com/ gq/features/landing?id=content_9217, 17 May 2009.

Former French President Jacque Chirac additionally maintains that President Bush privately remarked to him in 2003 that Gog and Magog, precursors to the end of days in Biblical legend, had appeared in the Middle East. Bush had apparently made the reference to appeal to Chirac's Christianity in asking for his country's cooperation in the impending Iraq invasion, which he saw as divinely mandated. These comments are in line with previous remarks Bush has made to world leaders.

51Edmund L. Andrews, “Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation," 23 October 2008, accessed on the website of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html, 34 October 2008.

See also the New York Times article “The Reckoning – Bush's Philosophy Stoked the Mortgage Bonfire," which details the genesis of the crisis in the Bush administration's free-market ideology of deregulation, which, mantra-like, informed all political decisions despite intermittent warnings from high-level financial sector officials and economists. Several officials publicly admitted their mistake, after the crash became too large to ignore. True to form, though, these expressions of regret have a ring of insincerity (the behavior of government regulators toward contractors in Iraq, which we will explore in subsequent chapters, is a phenomena which similarly illustrates the cycle of willfully irrational deregulation and subsequent token apologies and insufficient post-calamity regulatory gestures):

“There is no question we did not recognize the severity of the problems," said Al Hubbard, Mr. Bush's former chief economics adviser, who left the White House in December 2007. “Had we, we would have attacked them."

Looking back, Keith B. Hennessey, Mr. Bush's current chief economics adviser, says he and his colleagues did the best they could “with the information we had at the time." But Mr. Hennessey did say he regretted that the administration did not pay more heed to the dangers of easy lending practices. And both Mr. Paulson and his predecessor, John W. Snow, say the housing push went too far.

“The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs," Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost."

Source: Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton, “The Reckoning – Bush's Philosophy Stoked the Mortgage Bonfire," 20 December 2008, accessed on the website of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/business/21admin.html, 3 January 2009.

Further evidence that private lending institutions, rather than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (whose attempts to make loans affordable to low-income families have been blamed by economic conservatives--including Phil Gramm, whose 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a post-Depression measure to regulate speculation and financial sector dealings--for causing insolvency), hold the lion's share of responsibility for the economic crisis can be found in the following statistics:

More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.

Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.

Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.

Further, the President's Working Group on Financial Markets reported that “a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for U.S. subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into 2007," was the cause of the financial crisis. Source: David Goldstein and Kevin G. Hall, “Private Sector Loans, Not Fannie or Freddie, Triggered Crisis," 12 October 2008, accessed on the website of McClatchy at http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html, 7 January 2009.

The Institute for Policy Studies found that, despite laying off more than 160,000 employees and receiving billions in federal bailout funds, executives at these firms “enjoyed a combined increase in the value of their stock options of nearly $90 million." One reason for this growing wealth disparity, their 2009 “Executive Excess" report finds, is a lack of regulation:

These 20 CEOs averaged 85 times more pay than the regulators who direct the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. These two agencies, many analysts agree, have largely lacked the experienced and committed staff they need to protect average Americans from financial industry recklessness.

“The lure of lucrative private sector jobs doesn't just siphon off talent from public service," says Sam Pizzigati, an IPS Associate Fellow and report co-author. “It also breeds corrosive and ever-present conflicts of interest: Why 'get tough,' as a regulator, on a firm that could be your future employer?"

Source: Sarah Anderson et. al., “America's Bailout Barons," 2 September 2009, accessed on the website of Institute for Policy Studies at http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2009, 2 September 2009.

In October 2009, former Goldman-Sachs employee Adam Storch, 29, was hired by the Securities and Exchange Commission to be the new chief of the S.E.C. enforcement apparatus.

In addition, it has come to light that executives for nine bailout-receiving banks were paid more than $30 billion in bonuses in 2008. Though the government has asserted some control over executive compensation in bailout-receiving corporations, executives are still overpaid: in October 2009, the Obama administration approved a $10.5 million annual salary for Robert Benmosche, the new chief executive officer of A.I.G.

53Roughly 1,000 children in two Nigerian states (of 36) have been killed as a result of accusations of witchcraft in the past decade. The number is on the rise due to the increasing influence of evangelical Christianity in Africa. An Associated Press article explains that harsh conditions exacerbate the problem for society's most vulnerable:

Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of “witch children" reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files.

Some of the churches involved are renegade local branches of international franchises. Their parishioners take literally the Biblical exhortation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

“It is an outrage what they are allowing to take place in the name of Christianity," said Gary Foxcroft, head of nonprofit Stepping Stones Nigeria.

For their part, the families are often extremely poor, and sometimes even relieved to have one less mouth to feed. Poverty, conflict and poor education lay the foundation for accusations, which are then triggered by the death of a relative, the loss of a job or the denunciation of a pastor on the make, said Martin Dawes, a spokesman for the United Nations Children's Fund.

“When communities come under pressure, they look for scapegoats," he said. “It plays into traditional beliefs that someone is responsible for a negative change ... and children are defenseless."

Source: Katharine Houreld, “Churches Denouce African Children as Witches," 17 October 2009, accessed on the website of The Associated Press at http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jDt1GxKR-VHAg1Lq3LcUNx2-Y0YwD9BD96180, 17 October 2009. Ellipses in original.

56The importance of poverty alleviation, combined with education's modernizing influence, cannot be overstated. Much of the world's genuinely abhorrent practices are born of a combination of desperation and superstition, with religious traditionalism historically diminishing as conditions improve and a population becomes empowered (notable outliers: the U.S. and Kuwait). This places those who uphold religious traditionalism as an end goal above all other concerns on the side of those who uphold market freedom and its attendant inequality of opportunity as laudable aspects of an economic system. For this reason, it is perhaps not surprising that the World Bank published Mind, Heart, and Soul in the Fight Against Poverty, a book which analyzes the role of religiosity in private poverty relief efforts throughout the world and concludes (page 276):

Every one of the world's great faith traditions contains a core moral and ethical underpinning confirming that life should be just and fair--that every human being deserves respect and dignity. Enormous progress on these goals is possible, but we must mobilize faith-based energy and moral authority on the world stage if we hope to make them a reality.

It is with some irony that the authors cite several poverty relief movements and their criticisms of the World Bank's own structural adjustment policies (economic liberalization as a condition for nations to receive loans; this has the effect of increasing income inequality in borrower nations and inhibiting access to safety net programs, as well as reorienting the economy toward what amounts to indentured servitude--this is known as dependency theory) and simultaneously advocate for greater cooperation between these groups and other international organizations. Source: Katherine Marshall and Lucy Keough, Mind, Heart, and Soul in the Fight Against Poverty (World Bank Publications, 2004).