Who are the Moral Free Riders?

In economics and political theory, free riders are people who benefit from actions of others, without doing anything to merit it. I asserted in The Moral Free Rider Problem that liberal-socialists are free riders on the social order of Western civilization, which they did not create and do not support.

Western civilization is founded upon the moral rules of conduct deriving from our Greek philosophical and Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Atheistic and agnostic liberal-socialists are moral free riders who benefit from living in a society ordered by the morality of spiritual religion, while sneering at spiritual religion and moral codes as simple-minded ignorance. At best, they do nothing to contribute to social order. Too many of them do everything in their power to discredit or to destroy the very source of social order. Without Judeo-Christian morality, they would be in the position of scientists and scholars in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia: working under orders for the collectivized National State.

To this, a reader retorted that it is conservatives and moralists who are taking the free ride. Liberals contend that all of what we consider to be modern society, with its vast improvements of living standards, is exclusively the product of the rational human mind, in a world of secular materialism and moral relativism. Progress toward human knowledge therefore is diverted by concerns about unreal things like God and moral virtues.

Liberal dogma comes from a very ancient philosophical position, first articulated in classical Greece. Plato, in the Theaetetus, quotes Protagoras as having said that man is the measure of all things, meaning that there are no such things as God, morality, or eternal truths. Each person is governed only by his pursuit of sensual pleasure and his avoidance of sensual pain. Each person makes his own standards, based solely upon the perceptions of his physical senses.

Plato, of course, takes the opposite position: the physical senses are no guides at all to truth, which exists in Ideal form, manifested only as indistinct shadows in our physical world.

Obviously, if Protagoras is our guide, the reader's retort is correct. Conservatives and moralists really would be taking a free ride on secular society and in so doing making life more difficult for everyone. Religion and morality, far from being a force for social good, would oppress human freedom and oppose scientific knowledge.

This is the message given to American students for the past century. As William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale described it, most textbooks espoused socialistic and secular doctrine, and most social sciences professors at Yale in 1951 were socialists and either agnostics or atheists. The same was true of other elite universities and had been so since the first decades of the 20th century. Professors in the social sciences don't hesitate to dismiss spiritual religion as ignorance and, in the physical sciences, to dismiss morality and religion as value judgments having no place in science.

Everything we know of history tells us that this is a false view. How then did religion and morality come to be identified with oppression and ignorance?

The first answer is the brutal Thirty Years War (1612 – 1648) that devastated Europe during Galileo’s and Newton’s era, when rival Protestant and Catholic princes fought for political control of Western Europe. This mass slaughter and destruction led Voltaire, in his 1766 satire Candide, to attack Christianity as the enemy of the people and the senseless cause of European warfare and strife. The Thirty Years War, however, was only nominally about religious differences. Fundamentally it was a struggle for political power, as modern nation-states took shape.

French intellectuals nonetheless identified the Church with autocratic political rule and suffering of the masses during the Thirty Years War. Cardinal Richelieu served as French Minister of Foreign Affairs and War early in the 1600s, and Cardinal Mazarin, as first minister in the middle 1600s.

A present-day variation on this theme is the belief of some feminists that religion was fabricated by men to subjugate women.

The second factor was French Revolutionary philosophers’ assumption in the 18th and 19th centuries that they could discover secular and materialistic laws controlling social behavior and political activity that would be analogous to Newton’s laws of gravity governing the motions of planets. Among them, Saint-Simon and Comte claimed to have discovered the Immutable Law of History that predicted inevitable historical Progress away from the age of spiritual religion and into the new scientific age of secularity, rationalism, and socialism, which Comte called The Religion of Humanity.

History tells a different story. The popular idea that religion prevented scientific inquiry is simply not correct. Ironically, the Catholic Church's preservation of learning after the fall of the Western Roman Empire was all that kept scientific inquiry alive.

The Renaissance, beginning centuries before the 18th century Enlightenment, was preeminently a period when all of the talents and energies of poets, architects, builders, sculptors, and painters were focused on glorifying God. It was the Renaissance’s flowering of new perspectives in art and literature that led to renewed interest in nature and the beginning of the physical sciences.

The most widely known and admired person in this humanist revival was Erasmus, a devout Catholic priest. One of his closest friends, humanist scholar Thomas More, died to defend his Catholic faith.

The greatest leaps of knowledge in mathematics and the physical sciences occurred in the 17th century, many decades before the revival of Greek sophists’ secular materialism by French Revolutionary philosophers. It is from this period that liberals build their religion vs. science case. Galileo is usually the only exhibit entered in evidence.

Despite the generally propagated myth, Galileo got into trouble with the Church, not because he advocated the theory that the earth revolves around the sun, but because he was a man with a colossal ego and a startling lack of judgment.

For a number of years the Church had raised no serious objections to Galileo’s heliocentric theory, so long as he expressed it as one of the several theories explaining movements of the planets and did not present it as the only true doctrine. But for Galileo this wasn’t enough.

In 1623, Galileo's long-time personal friend Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. Barberini had always championed Galileo’s right to express his theories and gave his blessings for Galileo to publish a discussion of the theories of planetary motion. Galileo then repaid his friend’s support by ridiculing him publicly.

Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It is cast as a conversation among three gentlemen, one of whom is given the name Simplicio (or simpleton). The arguments, even the exact words, attributed to Simplicio were known to all as the arguments advanced by Galileo’s old friend Barberini. Galileo was, in effect, declaring to the world that the new Pope was a fool and that the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church was ridiculous nonsense. He had punched the Church in the nose and dared the Church to hit back.

Unfortunately for him, Galileo’s ridicule came at a time when the Roman Catholic Church was under attack, and Europe was ablaze with the Thirty Years War between Protestant and Catholic states. His action was comparable to France’s diplomatic stab-in-the-back of the U.S. at the United Nations after Al Queda’s 9/11/01 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center buildings.

Given the prevailing state of war and its struggle for survival, the Church was remarkably restrained in giving Galileo a choice between excommunication and cessation of further writing on the subject. Galileo accepted the ban on writing and remained a Catholic until his death.

As a final note, at the time, Galileo had no conclusive evidence to support the view that only the Copernican theory was correct. A rival theory by noted astronomer Tycho Brahe had as much evidence in its favor and was as accurate in its predictions as Galileo’s. We now know, in fact, that Galileo’s assertion that the planets travel in circular orbits was incorrect.

Note also that the greatest of all the 17th century mathematical geniuses was Isaac Newton, whose laws of motion and the equations for predicting gravity’s effects on movements of heavenly bodies, not to mention invention of calculus and the physics of optics and light, were the foundations of modern science. Newton was a life-long, devout Christian who never questioned the existence of God. Nor was publication of his work proscribed by the Church.

Liberals can only make the case that believers in spiritual religion have argued against secular materialism, not that religion has suppressed scholarship or scientific investigation. Today the shoe is really on the other foot. It is liberals who attempt to suppress spiritual religion and personal morality.

A final point of considerable importance is liberal-socialism’s antagonism toward private property and corporate enterprise. Think, for example, of the knee-jerk reaction from liberals that the Bush administration invaded Iraq solely to enrich corporations like Halliburton. It is impossible to reconcile this with my critic’s assertion that the great successes of modern economic and technical society are the product of liberal-socialist rationalism and its amorality.

Since the early 19th century, especially in Karl Marx’s works at mid-century, liberals have preached that private property and Big Business are oppressors of the workers and are the chief bulwarks against perfection of human society in a socialist political state. Wars, crime, poverty, and other social ills are said to be the product of private business activity, whose profits represent the stolen part of labor’s full wages.

Moreover, liberal-socialist theoreticians like Max Weber and R. H. Tawney have linked the rise of capitalism (taking that term as a synonym for private property and corporate enterprise) to what they term the Protestant Ethic. This Christian ethic is criticized by liberals, because it is highly individualistic and thus at odds with socialist collectivism.

The facts, of course, are that the industrial revolution was just getting a full head of steam at the time that Saint-Simon and Comte were promulgating the secular religion of socialism. From that time forward, the living standards of the whole world, especially of the West, have risen far faster than ever before in history. And that improvement, until after World War II, was overwhelmingly the result of individualistic initiative by entrepreneurs in Christian societies. Far more than half the world’s industry and commerce in that period was accounted for by the two greatest Christian nations, England and the United States.

Contrary to my reader’s retort, demonstrating that secular materialism has benefited humanity, let alone that it is the sole source of scientific knowledge and economic well-being is an impossible task.

The bitter fruit of liberalism's secular materialism has been, not social harmony and prosperity, but the mass murders of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Russia, Hitler's National Socialist Germany, Mao's Red China, and Castro's Cuba. Without the moral restraints of our Judeo-Christian heritage, on rulers and ruled, there would be precious little science and improvement of living standards. The implosion of Soviet Russia and the slow withering of socialist France and Germany make this clear for all who will see.

Thomas E. Brewton had the extraordinary good fortune to study political philosophy under Eric Voegelin and Constitutional law under Walter Berns. His website is The View from 1776.

.....agnostic liberal-socialists are moral free riders who benefit from living in a society ordered by the morality of spiritual religion, while sneering at spiritual religion and moral codes as simple-minded ignorance. At best, they do nothing to contribute to social order. Too many of them do everything in their power to discredit or to destroy the very source of social order.....

Lando

The notion that an atheist can claim moral indignation is laughable.

All morality stems originally from a belief in God. America based its entire belief that we have a right to declare our liberty from England on a belief in God.

An atheist actually believes that all human life is a timer that rings when we become worm food. That we are even aware of our own existence is a fluke of science that would be cruel but for the fact that cruelty is a delusion that necessitates a belief in God.

They are "truly moral free riders" because they try to use morality, which at its core mandates a belief in a higher power, to persuade others to buy into their point of view.

The word morals simply means customs. It derives from the Latin. With shared morals a community can be cohesive and expect compliance. The strength of Judeo Christian moral tradition is not only that it is based on revealed text but also that very bright people have studies, refined, and transmitted the tradition over centuries.

by contrast the American justics system cannot agree what the law is, so how can anyone obey it?

I asserted in The Moral Free Rider Problem that liberal-socialists are free riders on the social order of Western civilization, which they did not create and do not support.

Love your analogy! Given that they are equivalent of the "free passage" rail-ridding HOBOs of the '20s and '30s and the be afforded the same treatment when found by railroad security in the rail-yard or a siding.

Good morning.

Your post is nothing but sanctimonious BS. I stopped believing in God when I was a child. Does that make me an immoral man? I do my best to minimize the harm I do these days and I do my best to not judge other's failings (not successfully, I'm afraid to say),but you say I am not moral because I don't believe in a supreme being.

If I were religious I would say that hypocrisy is a sin. You are being hypocritical when you say that atheists try to use morality to persuade others to buy into their point of view when you are doing the same thing.

Define morality for us. If you say a belief in a deity is the basis of morality then tell us which deity. I say one's actions define one's morality not whether they feel the need for a supreme power.

Michael Frazier

I'm not trying to be sanctimonious, its just a little philosophy 101.

You obviously have a sense of right and wrong. Where does this come from? Where is the original source for right and wrong or good and evil?

All of the notions of right and wrong, good and evil trace themselves back through history to a belief in God and a greater purpose to human life than participating in the food chain. When an atheist appeals on moral grounds, the appeal is to centuries of tradition created by a belief in a deity.

If there is no God, no Creator, no Supreme Being, then there is no plan, purpose, or design to any of our lives other than what we choose it to be until we die and become worm food.

Following a moral code is humbling yourself to something that you place more value in than your own wants. What is an atheist humbling himself to and why?

(For the record, in rereading my first post it is harsher than I realized. I listened to Laura Ingraham the other day and heard the debate about how the cross at the war memorial in San Diego insults and degrades "foxhole atheists" so the acidic nature of my original post is probably the fallout from that.)

I would assert that you are the very definition of a moral free rider. You claim to have a Godless personal moral code which is at least equal to that of us sanctimonious BSers. But, rather than us trying to explain morality to you, perhaps you could tell us from whence you derive your superior code, as it obviously closely parallels those found in most religious texts.

While sectarian wars and purges have undoubtedly occurred, the greatest atrocities ever committed by mankind have been at the hands of those who, in their own minds, have transcended the need to answer to a higher power. I commend to you the last graph of this most excellent article.

Choices include: service to the community; making family and friends' lives better; scientific curiosity; saving the whales; a sense of the enormity of the universe and the insignificance of one person within it. There are lots of choices of moral code that give meaning to peoples' lives which neither involve nor require supernatural explanations.

You are incorrect, sir. While none of the above involve supernatural beings, all of them require faith. They are just as much religions as Buddhism is.

Service to the community. Why? One must have a belief (not any factual data, because such data does not exist) that your service somehow makes life "better" in the community (another subjective). Scientific curiosity? Based on the assumption (i.e. faith) that all of the workings of the world are penetrable to rationality (I happen to believe so, but I am self-aware enough to recognize this as an act of faith). Saving the whales, enormity of the universe, ditto...

The most basic logical process, the syllogism, requires two assumed premises to reach a single conclusion. At some point, if you go far enough back, you will reach an assumption as premise.

The sad fact is that rationality fails as a basis for morality in that most of the most important tenets of moral behavior are based on traditions that have worked in the aggregate rather than on an individual basis. Living a moral life is no guarrantee of success, but a society that is moral has a far better chance of prospering than one that isn't. Yet the basis of rationality-based morality is most often the indivdiual. Thus the individual, choosing on the basis of his "rational" interests, has no motive to choose those options which are vital to society but undesirable to himself. This is why these "moralities" do not lead to valid societies. F.A. Hayek explains this in much greater detail in his book The Fatal Conceit. If you haven't read it, might I suggest it as food for thought...

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