Atheism and Morality… In Spengler's The Decline of the West, the transformation of morality into ethics is seen as yet another triumph of the city over the countryside:

Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities.  The world-city has definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless.  Henceforward, we might with some justice replace the word "soul" by the word "brain".  And, since in the Western "brain" the will to power, the tyrannical set towards the Future and purpose to organize everybody and everything, demands practical expression, ethics, as it loses touch more and more with its metaphysical past, steadily assumes a social-ethical and social-economic character.  The philosophy of the present that starts from Hegel and Schopenhauer is, so far as it represents the spirit of the age (which, e.g., Lotze and Herbart do not), a critique of society.

Earlier, he notes,

Unfruitfulness – understanding the word in all its direct seriousness – marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of historical symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the extinction of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of the great style in all things, but also quite carnally in the childlessness and "race-suicide" of the civilized and rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored – and of course not remedied – in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.

Thus the countryside's religious notion of chastity becomes, in a twisted reversal, the sterile carnality of the city, and morality succumbs to an entirely self-serving practical ethics more concerned with political than with personal virtue.

Liberated both politically and morally, man acquires a hubristic confidence in his ability to fashion ethical standards for himself.  His desires answer only to an egalitarian practicality.  The use of drugs to dull his mind, amusements to supplant his vacant intellectual life, and orgies of consumption to pacify every sensory craving are only questioned when they directly injure his person.  For him the term "consenting adults" is a masterwork of ethical reasoning, precisely because it forbids almost nothing.

What is forgotten in this transformation is the harmony attained by the old morality.  Instead there is neurosis, discontent, and anomie, delivered by man's faulty attempts to reason himself happy through the indulgence of every desire.  He reserves his moralistic fury for those who, incomprehensibly to him, question the license he has given himself.  For as sensory pleasure is all that is left to him, he lives in morbid fear of being deprived of it.

His ethical system is inherently atheistic, and exposes the problems with a purely rational ethics.  What he has can barely be called an ethics, and is more a rationalization than rational.  Its three central failings:

• It is based on the consensus of the day, a product of shared emotional impulse rather than serious examination.
• It strives for universal acclaim across diverse populations, which in turn reduces its "language" to only the ethical terminology (and standards) that the entire population can agree upon.
• It is preoccupied with immediate practical effects and avoids serious consideration of the long term consequences of questionable behavior.

Each of these failings abets the other two, but the second presents the largest problem.  Consensus and pragmatism may, within limits, still produce a workable and protective ethical system, however the pressure to tolerate more and more behaviors to broaden appeal will lead to a bias in favor of anything that gratifies someone, however abnormal or helpless the gratification.  Every ethical rule comes to be viewed according to how many people will break it and their importance within one's social milieu.

Through its quest for universal acclaim, this rootless ethics bears close resemblance to the universalist ambitions of capitalist trade to countries that condone unfriendly business practices and provide reduced protection of intellectual property (I have in mind Russia and China).  The hope of course is that increased trade will make them more like us, however it seems likelier that trade with these countries will have the opposite effect by increasing global demand for (and dependence on) products at the prices their shady markets make possible.

Pragmatism tends to indulge.  A parent intent on imbuing discipline as an abstract principle may overbear his children, but he will not do what so many parents do today by indulging them.  Indulgence pleases the parent's sense of being a loving guardian; guarding his children from want makes them happy right now.  This is surely not in any child's long-term interest, as most parents would probably agree.  One nevertheless sees it everywhere, and parental indulgence is now creeping into what is ostensibly adult life.  University culture has become an extension of adolescence, soldiers in combat are referred to as "children", and far into middle age personal responsibility has turned into personal excuse.*

So too does indulgence creep into our ethics.  We allow ourselves greater license, deprive ourselves of fewer and fewer enjoyments (to many it will seem absurd to deprive oneself of any enjoyment at all).  To what end?

I think it is the great mistake of many atheists to think that it is an easy thing to manage one's own moral health, and that difficult ethical questions can be resolved by being as tolerant of everything as possible.  Yet the transformation is so subtle that their unhappiness puzzles them.   

How the mediocre have fallen… James Lileks was fired from his job at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  FINALLY!  Well, not technically fired, but they terminated his column and assigned him to local news, which roughly translates to, "Please go find a job somewhere else you useless parasite."  To think that two days passed before I heard this wonderful news.

Lileks' Bleat (as Lileks calls his weblog) represents everything terrible that falls under the label "blogging":  the incessant chatter not of someone who has something witty, clever, or intelligent to say, but of a compulsive gabber who just likes to hear himself talk.  And talk he does:  about his shrieking, spoiled child, about the inanities he saw on TV last night, about the indolent drive-thru clerk who got his order wrong – no filters.  If his diseased synapses can produce the thought, out it comes in all its narcissistic glory.

But the swollen repository of fatuity and vanity that is the Bleat is merely a throat-clearing exercise for this gargantuan bore.  There is also:

• His podcast (any bore must have one of those), formerly a cancelled radio show
• An online matchbook museum – Lileks loves any crappy old kitsch from the past, and his matchbooks are but a prefatory excerpt of Lileks' vast and perverse copro-nostalgia, with which his web site bulges
• A meandering pseudo-period serial called Joe Ohio that reads like Garrison Keillor fan fiction
• Homemade copy-and-paste electronica with "funny" sound bites that every nerd with a Mac seems compelled to make
• About a billion other web pages full of miscellaneous useless garbage

And of course his precious column, which used to be a weekly called "The Backfence" but was changed to the shorter and possibly even more insufferable "The Daily Quirk".  Here's a sample:

I like Pepto-Bismol. There. I said it. When I have a gut full of battery acid and barbed-wire shards, I reach for the big pink bottle, and I glug it straight. You feel it descending on your stomach lining, like a curtain falling on a bad play. It never seems to cure anything, but it's a comfort; I always have a bottle in reserve, and it's Maximum Strength, too, baby. Sure, it's overkill, but once they admitted the existence of Maximum Strength, Regular was off the table. I think Maximum was like their private reserve, something they bottled for popes and astronauts. Now we all have access, and I'm not going back.*

One might say that Lileks glugs clichés straight, to be absorbed by the tumorous biomass that sits in place of his brain, and which through some miracle of processed writing results in paragraphs like the above.  If writing could smell boring, this would.

As I have long said, if nothing else weblogs will finally rid us of local columnists, those largely unread, untalented yokels who are asked to supply copy – virtually anything will do – to fill the space above the car and lawnmower ads in the newspaper's back pages.  The irony then is that Lileks is two, two bores in one, with both his own local column and his own weblog – and finally the Star Tribune realized that his fans could just read his weblog (for which the Star Tribune doesn't have to pay him).  Perhaps room was being made for a recipe column or reprints of old Ann Landers letters.

Unlike Steven Den Beste, Lileks does his best to dry his tears before announcing his terrible news, but I think I detect an echo of the incontinent, panicked sobbing that must have filled his weekend:

My column will end a week from this Friday. (There’s a series of pieces I can’t wait to write.) [Please try –Udolpho] After that, it's just-the-facts-ma'am - and I'll no longer be telecommuting, either. This means I will start burning my share of hydrocarbons like a good American. Hell, I may leave the vehicle running all day outside the building just to make up for lost time. Maybe I will put a green roof on the car to balance things out. Some turf, some switchgrass. It's murder on the paint but we all must do our part.

Well, don't we all feel sorry for you, you have to drive into work now, here, let it all out in one big snotty bawl.  You fucking loser.

Think I'm being hard on Professor Purpleprick?  Here is another passage from the same weblog entry:

If I can get my column back and / or a nice big Online gig, that would be a satisfactory conclusion. Reporting on internet start-ups as opposed to joining an internet start-up – eh, not so much.

 

And let that be the last time the phrase "not so much" is used here. It’s old. We’ve all had a jolly laugh, but I heard Jeff Foxworthy use it on an oil-change commercial, which is like the UN-approved international standard for something being over.

Desperately he tries to scrabble back up the edifice of his minor career – his self-indulgent lifestyle demands that no humiliation be spared.  He even knows he writes in tired clichés and just doesn't care.  "Not so much" was stale at least five years ago.  Here comes the sentence surgeon with his buzzsaw, chopping out everything but the malignant tissue and looking pleased with himself doing it.  Christ, the man is lame.

The good news is that being at the office all day will make it easier for his wife to conceal the torrid affair she is having from this misshapen twerp.  As seen here:

Speaking of which, don't forget to turn in your old Coke bottles for the deposit.

I'm not the only one to conclude that Lileks' assignment to local news is the equivalent to giving his office to the new intern and making him work out of a folding chair in the lobby.  One fan writes,

As someone who was always baffled by how the Strib used Lileks – from the "Backfence" to the "Quirk", with no long(er) form feature writing or, better yet, off-beat right-wing political punditry in between – this "reassignment" smells like the familiar tactic of humiliating someone to the point they leave on their own.

Be baffled no longer, Brian Lambert.  Lileks is simply a terrible writer, easily replaced with "Quote for Today" or "150 Years Ago" fillers.  Failing that, passages of Lorem Ipsum.