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.

Do you think that sex with children is wrong? Is this in the Bible?

Well, there's this:

Matthew 18:6:
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

Yeah, but the question remains. From whence do you derive those high minded ideals, if not from an obligation to answer to something or someone greater than yourself. I don't buy the "we owe it to each other" or "for the good of the community" notions either. As a fellow human being, acting without constraint of some sort, I don't owe you squat.

Oh, you can try and rely on the force of law or the barrel of a gun or the goodwill of your neighbor, but that usually doesn't get one very far. Without something to back it all up who's to say what's moral and just, and what isn't? The secular state's definition can change on a judge's whim (judicial tyranny) or a vote of the majority (mob rule), which is why our constitution, and the fundamental rights enumerated therein, are declared to be derived from our creator and are therefore immutable (so long as we can keep liberal judges from coming up with reasons why they are not).

offend one of these little ones

Not sure I read sex into that.

Here's how God put it for men having sex with men.

"You shall not lie with a male as those who lie with a female; it is an abomination."

So, which is worse, according to the Bible?

This is self-serving santimonious nonsense. All societies, including pagan societies have "morality." Even highly social animals like chimps and dogs have behavior that could be described as moral. What we in 21st Century America consider morality has more in common with the ancient Greek concepts than that of the morality of the ancient Jewish tribes described in the Bible. The fact that 20th Century Communists, who were also atheists, did terrible things did does not mean that the this was due to their lack of God-faith; Christians have done terrible things to pagans, Jews, and other Christians throughout the history of Christianity and in the name of Christ. Muslims, whose faith derived from Jewish and Christian teachings, think morality consists of killing and enslaving Jews, Christians, and other "infidels." A better explanation for the source of morality is natural law, from the encyclopedia article I like to above:

The Natural Law tradition, from the Greeks to the present day, explicitly holds that all rational persons know what kinds of actions morality prohibits, requires, discourages, encourages, and allows. They also hold that reason endorses acting morally. Some hold that it is irrational to act immorally, but all hold that it is never irrational to act morally. Even religious thinkers in this tradition, such as Aquinas, hold that morality is known to all those whose behavior is subject to moral judgment, whether or not they know of the revelations of Christianity.

This is pretty interesting - I am very interested in this topic, but I think the author isn't focussed on whether to make a political point or make observations on the world of ideas. For example, labeling secularists as "liberals" seems manipulative considering there are plenty of secularists who do not fit today's definition of liberal.

You said:
"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".

Answer
Morality as seen in historical fact.

A Godless Germany brought Hitler to power, once they replaced God with nationalism, and a dictator who believed himself to be god, the devils ruled.

Morality is the good as outlined in the Bible.
The absence of good intentions, leave only the bad.

The Ten commandements, are what kept Men focused on The Golden Rule, as Jesus outlined, Do unto to others as you would have them do unto you. That is of course, if one follows the Ten Commandments, and not the rule of barbarians such as Hitler, Stalin, and the like.

Communism has always led to the evil dictators, The Ten commandments certainly was not the moral compass of these types.

God's laws are the difference, as outlined in the Old and New Testament, not in the book of Magik, or Mein Kampf.

I do not judge anyone who has your stance, I pray for them,
to have more of the Good in years to come, through Spirtual enlightenment.

Ops4 God Bless America!

Then there's

Numbers

31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

31:18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

What you are describing is the liberal philosophy of moral relativism.

I happen to agree with the moral code that you've described here. If someone were to describe a moral code that neither of us agreed with, on what basis would you be able to define it as wrong? What authority can you rely on to say this individual's or group of people's choices are good and that group of people's choices are bad?

Is a rapist only wrong because he has violated some cultural moray or is there something inherently and objectively wrong with the act of rape itself? Where is the moral authority to condemn this act derived from? Why is it not merely one of those choices that gives meaning to someone's life? On what basis can you declare something to be absolutely and objectively wrong?

I'm not questioning whether or not you believe this to be absolutely wrong, I'm just asking where you think the moral authority to declare it so comes from.

Personally I think the difference is what one does when no one is looking. In other words, when you have virtually no chance of being caught. Without God, it doesn't matter what you do then. No one's the wiser even if it is wrong. If you believe in God then it does matter.

If you find someone's wallet with lots of money a rational thinker knows there's no way for the person to know you have it and therefore can keep the money without fear - Finders keepers, losers weepers... They made a mistake and you benefit. All very reasonable.

With God, it is wrong to keep what is not yours unless there is no effective way of returning it to it's rightful owner. It is a moral call based on your actions that know one else can ever know about if you choose.

And even though no one knows why something happened the way it did other peoples lives are still affected by your actions.

All societies, including pagan societies have "morality."

The key word there is "societies," implying civilization. Human beings are perfectly capable of living in brutal chaos, and so we should be looking at what distinguishes civilization from its opposite, and at what causes civilizations to fall. You make a distinction of ancient Greeks versus Christianity, as if that counters a point of the author's, but it seems to me the author agrees with you. Whether a moral tradition takes Christian faith or Greek virtue as a basis is not as important as that the rational secularist denies the existence or pertinence of either.

The rise of Marxism/Communism is indeed a failure of modern reason to adequately understand transcendant values. This is the same root cause for the appeasing instincts that currently weaken the West.

How do you know abortion, slavery, pedophilia, genocide,human sacrifice are wrong when not only does the Bible not condemn them, it actually encourages them (See Hosea 13, Exodus 21, Numbers 31 and the whole book of Joshua for example)

Plus if not being religious makes you immoral how do you explain

1) Atheist/Agnostic are ~15% of the population yet make up just 0.2% of the prison population

2) From 1991 to 2001, The Number of the non-religious doubled in number while at the same time the number calling themselves Christians declined by 10% this decline in Christianity is especially seen in young people.

Yet the even though the younger generations are the most unchristian violent crime rate has declined through this period, as well as The pregnancy rate for unmarried women has continuously declined through the 1990s and the abortion rate dropped by about 25 percent for both married and unmarried women through the 1990s , The teen Pregnancy Rate Reached a Record Low, More Teenagers are saying no to sex and Drug use by teenagers continues to decline.

If lack of religion caused those things, Then why as there are more & more non-religious people are those things in decline instead of increasing

3) Born Again Christians are just as likely to divorce as are Non-Christians

In today's post-structuralist, post-Clinton era of moral relativism influenced children of divorced families, might I suggest a walk through the nearest public middle school? On second thought, make that observe the students as they leave the school - I don't want to feel guilty is you are mugged inside the school.

Please ask your self how many "children" look like anything sexual would offend them?

And thanks to the Liberals in the NEA, socialism impaired faculty, ad nauseam, the same inquiring observation outside the elementary school will also possibly disturb you, as it has many others.

As Adams said, we have a form of government suited only for a deeply moral and religious people.

"We in heap big trouble". Tonto.

You proceed from the false assumption that when I say "God" or "Higher Power" I mean the Bible and only the Bible.

My point is actually fairly simple. If you don't believe in a "Higher Power" than there is no basis to declare anything to be absolutely right or absolutely wrong.

The Rights defined in the Constitution of the United States trace their roots back to a belief in God. The whole of what we call "morality" and even "ethics" is rooted entirely in a belief in God. Any secular source that you can find traces its premise back to a belief in God. So if you remove the premise of the existence of God the entire foundation upon which morality is defined collapses.

Therefore it is ironic to hear atheists declare that something violates morality-- a thing that according to their defining characteristic does not exist, or at best is relativistic and malleable construct of self-aware animals.

Been thinking the same for a while. Some atheists are quite ethical and moral but their teachings cannot be transmitted across generations. Only organized religion can do this. It doesn't do a perfect job but only organized religion can do this. Ethical atheism leads to pot smoking, libertarianism, libertinism and amoral hedonism in the next generations.

"Those who believe in nothing end up believing in anything"

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