Sam Harris is creating a bright shiny new Objective Morality

[Svein Olav Nyberg]

At 17:57 -0700 9/5/10, Daniel Davis wrote:
>>Our atheists are pious people indeed.
>
>You're right. But it was easy for me to forget, watching the atheists
>battle the nonsense of the religious apologists, that they would likely
>be just as eager to bow and serve as the religious, and would find a way
>to do so without supernatural intervention.

The difference is really not all that great:

1. Descriptive superstition
2. Normative superstition

It is easier to reveal a descriptive superstition, since you have 
--or at least seem to have-- tangible, objective references for 
comparison. For the latter, it's almost a free-for-all as long as the 
norms are sufficiently general and coherent.

For my own sake, I'd rather believe in ghosts than believe in 
Ideology, if such a choice was forced upon me. After all, which 
superstition makes the most damage? The descriptive or the normative 
superstition?


>It seems that the will to servitude comes first, and some nonsense will
>be found to support it. Or maybe it is just how that will is inculcated
>into the young through it's societal pervasiveness. Any grand speculation
>on the will to servitude? Any speculation on why we have not got it?

As you've noticed, I changed the name of the magazine and web site 
from "non serviam" to "i-studies". Why? Well, in part it was actually 
a convincing argument from you, Dan Davis, that the "I will not 
serve" that "non serviam" means is not really primary. In its very 
insistent form, it just becomes an ideology of its own -an ideology 
of reaction- a form of delayed and prolonged teenage rebellion. 
Heathy enough as a starting point, perhaps, but not a place to stay, 
to be stuck.

And there are indeed cases where "Stirnerian egoism" point towards 
doing others a service, period. Stirner himself gives an example of 
how a child has power over him with its smile. Being a parent now, I 
know that power very well, and it is a power neither I nor Stirner 
sought or seek release from.

It is a power I grant from my inside, from my egoism, and not an 
ideological monster or a feeling that has to be explained away as 
some kind of hidden advantage calculation the way the Randians do it. 
Stirnerian egoism is not the same as the Randian advantage calculus, 
and never was.

  = = =

As for appeals to "evolutionary biology", that seems to work to no 
other end than propping up already existing prejudices. The 
sociobiologists explain what they like by appeals to how they imagine 
evolution has worked, and the things they do *not* find, but would 
have liked to find, they justify by some weird kind of "deduction" 
from how they think evolution should have done it, had evolution done 
its job properly.

But you nevertheless have a point here:

>And for evolutionary pressure, it's hard to top the the millenia of witch
>hunts, crusades, and forced conversions. If there is anything genetic to
>being an unbeliever, the differential evolutionary pressure on believers
>and unbelievers would be huge.

There might not be a specific "unbeliever gene", but there might very 
well be a gene coding for degree of conformity.
-- 

Svein Olav Nyberg
http://i-studies.com/i/

   "Did you ever contribute anything to the
    happiness of Mankind?"

   "Yes, I myself have been happy!"

                 - John Henry Mackay