Ray Harvey

In 1993, senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. The outcome: Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What happened next, however, is the real crime:

According to the British charity Oxfam, many of these children were forced into prostitution. Thanks to Senator Harkin — who lives in the complete luxury that capitalism (and only capitalism) brings — the lives of these children were turned into a living hell from which they will not easily recover.

The fact is no one forces the Third-World poor to work in so-called sweatshops. They choose to do it — and gladly so — because it’s the best work around.

In an exhaustive study published in the spring issue of the Journal of Labor Research, Ben Powell and David Skarbek presented the results of their survey of sweatshops in eleven Third-World countries:

In nine of the eleven countries, sweatshop wages in foreign factories located there were higher than the average. In Honduras, where almost half the working population lives on $2/day, sweatshops pay $13.10/day. Sweatshop wages are more than double the national average in Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras. The implication of this for all those naive college students (and faculty) who have been duped into becoming anti-sweatshop protesters is that they should support and encourage more direct foreign investment in the Third World if they are at all concerned about the economic well-being of the people there.

It is never the workers in countries like Honduras who protest the existence of a new factory there built by a Nike or a General Motors. The people there benefit as consumers as well as workers, since there are more (and cheaper) consumer goods manufactured and sold in their country (as well as in other parts of the world). Capital investment of this sort is infinitely superior to the alternative — foreign aid — which always empowers the governmental recipients of the “aid,” making things even worse for the private economies of “aid” recipients. Market-based capital investment is always far superior to politicized capital allocation. Moreover, if the foreign investment fails, the economic burden falls on the investors and stockholders, not the poor Third World country” (source).

There’s also this singular fact:

It isn’t fundamentally technological progress that the Third Word needs but the thing that precipitates technological progress: a culture of capitalism, without which the Third World will never dig its way out of poverty.

If you truly want to help the poor, therefore, cry for capitalism — cry for it to replace these Third-World socialist regimes and their autocratic dictators who keep their people in grinding poverty.

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey: What is your opinion of Noam Chomsky? I ask because, like everyone else in academia, I think he’s about the smartest man in the world.

Best,

D

Dear D: Which Noam Chomsky are you referring to?

The one who openly supports Hezbollah?

Or do you mean the one with proven neo-Nazi ties?

Perhaps you’re referring to Avram Noam Chomsky, so-called sage of MIT, who several times propagandized for Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge?

Perhaps you’re thinking of the hypocritical Noam Chomsky, who’s sanctioned many of the world’s other most murderous regimes?

Or perhaps you mean the Noam Chomsky who repeatedly distorts and falsifies his sources?

Do you by any chance mean the Noam Chomsky who’s simply another Marxist, telling a group, in December of 1967, that in Communist China “one finds many things that are really quite admirable” — stating furthermore:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The Noam Chomsky who then goes on to explicitly endorse Chairman Mao the murderer, calling Mao’s blood-red China a “relatively livable” and “just society,” speaking, not coincidentally, five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst famine in all of human history?

Well, perhaps this particular Noam Chomsky wasn’t aware that the sort of collectivization he supports, inherent to Marxism of any brand, was the principal cause of that horrific famine, which killed over 30 million.

Maybe, maybe.

And yet, quoting Chomsky’s own words:

I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this – and I think we should – we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.

I suppose that in the end, whichever Noam Chomsky you’re referring to, Dano, it makes little difference. A Marxist by any other name is still a Marxist — and that means this:

Chomsky is a devoted and lifelong advocate of authoritarianism and collectivism. He is for this reason an absolute enemy of individual rights and the freedom of each. And that, sir, is what I think of Noam Chomsky.

Ethics is the study of moral philosophy.

Morality is the science of human action.

First comes metaphysics, then epistemology, and then ethics.

Those are the big three of philosophy. Of them, ethics is arguably the most complicated.

Metaphysics and epistemology have a direct and immediate bearing on our most fundamental ethical questions: namely, is there such a thing as morality at all, and if so what is it made of? Can we apprehend it?

For if we didn’t actually exist — or if we did exist but weren’t actually able to know anything — there could be no question of good or bad human behavior.

We must then ask next: what, if anything, within the human condition gives rise to good and bad behavior?

And why do we act at all? Is there some one phenomena we can pinpoint that unites all these things?

The answer is yes, there is something we can pinpoint, and that something is called life.

Life is the common denominator that unites existence (metaphysics), consciousness (epistemology), and human action (ethics).

Science defines life, in part, as “any kind of self-motivated, growth or development-directed behavior that is able to respond to stimuli.”

To maintain itself, life of every kind requires action.

Death, the opposite of life, is therefore the opposite of action as well: death is inertia.

Death gives life meaning in the sense that death is what life constantly strives against.

In order to live, humans must act. But not only that — humans must act in a certain way: specifically, a way that fosters life.

Quoting philosopher (and beekeeper) Richard Taylor:

“The things that nourish and give warmth and enhance life are deemed good, and those that frustrate and threaten are deemed bad.”

In this light, the moral is that which promotes one’s welfare; the immoral is that which is self-destructive.

Some philosophers, like the egregious Kurt Baier, do not approve of equating this viewpoint with morality and instead opt to call it something else: prudential.

The reason these philosophers oppose the idea of so-called prudential morality is that they all, without exception, start with a spectacularly false and deadly assumption: namely, they believe that morality must by definition be altruistic.

This assumption effectively puts happiness and well-being far out of reach and opens the doors wide for all manner of faith-based ethics and arbitrary decree, each one ultimately and equally unverifiable.

From my viewpoint, however (i.e. the prudential perspective), morality is only a means to an end: the individual and her well-being are primary, and morality is the standard by which she achieves well-being.

Thus, rather than saying “That action is immoral, or evil,” it’s more accurate to describe it this way: “That action will harm you over time.”

Such is the nature of prudential ethics.

Since the dawn of humankind, moral philosophy has been dominated by religion of one kind or another – so much so that the overwhelming preponderance of people in world history have been (mis)led into believing that morality cannot exist if God is dead.

It is a grim irony indeed, therefore, to discover after all these millennia that morality not only can exist if you kill God, but that morality can only exist if you kill God.

In the words of the late Walter G. Everett, philosopher:

Moral law is just as real as human nature, within which it has its existence. Strange, indeed, if man alone of all living beings could realize his highest welfare in disregard of the principles of his own nature! And this nature, we must remember, is what it is — is always concrete and definite. Indeed the sceptic nowhere else assumes the absence of principles through obedience to which the highest form of life can be attained. He does not assume that a lily, which requires abundant moisture and rich soil, could grow on and arid rock, nor that a polar bear could flourish in a tropical jungle. No less certain than would be the failure of such attempts, must be the failure of man to realize, in disregard of the laws of his being, the values of which he is capable. The structure of man’s nature, as conscious and spiritual, grounds laws just as real as those of his physical life, and just as truly objective (Walter G. Everett, Moral Values, 1918).

Man is the rational animal. Humans are the ethical primate, the reasoning brain the thing that distinguishes the human essence. As such, human life requires very specific things, not all of which — fulfillment and joy, for instance — are material (like food and water).

These “things” are what philosophers call values.

A value, by definition, is a thing that you want, or a thing that want to hold onto.

“When we speak of values we do so under the inspiration and from the perspective of life,” said Nietzsche.

So. Life requires values — whether shelter, love, sex, transportation, medicine, money, laughter, literature, food, drink, or anything else — and these, in turn, to obtain and maintain require action.

Thus, life requires action.

That is our first ethical crux.

As you can see, it is a crux that derives from the nature of human life here on earth, without any reference whatsoever to God.

Aristotle asked:

“What is the good?” (in his language agathon).

That to him was the foundational question of all ethics.

And in his meticulously reasoned treatise on the subject — Nicomachean Ethics — he answers in no uncertain terms:

“We may define agathon as that for the sake of which everything else is done.”

The good, then, is the end object of an action; the good is the goal.

And here we come to our second ethical crux:

The locus of the good is found in goal-directed behavior, the pursuit of values.

In philosophical terms, goal-directed behavior is also known as teleology.

And that is why certain ethical systems, like those of Mr. Aristotle and Mr. Spinoza, among others, are sometimes described as “thoroughly teleological.”

It is a term that refers to the goal-directed nature of all life, and here specifically to the fact that human good and human evil reside in the very nature of goal-directed action (or in the case of evil, its lack), which in turn resides in the nature of human survival.

Life requires action, yes, but to be more precise, life requires action that is directed toward certain life-sustaining values, which we know as goals.

All entities, sentient or insentient, have a specific essence, or nature. Only living beings, however, can pursue values, and they do so for one reason alone: staying alive.

So. The pursuit of life is teleological action. Life is goal-directed behavior.

That formulation is entirely Aristotelian, yet it can easily be validated without any reference at all to Aristotle: for we can see all around us in nature, and in ourselves, that life requires goal-directed action.

Indeed, as mentioned previously, science defines life as, in part, “goal-directed behavior.”

The essence (or identity) of a living thing determines how that particular thing must behave in order to maintain its life.

“In this way, a good X is that X which fulfills its nature.”

This is also a thoroughly Aristotelian formulation.

It is also why it is not inappropriate to say, for instance: “That sturdy cottonwood is a good tree.”

Or: “That fast greyhound is a good greyhound.”

And conversely: “That lame horse is a bad horse.”

The cottonwood and the greyhound are good because they have fulfilled their nature; the lame horse is bad because it has not.

These, though, are not moral pronouncements, not quite.

There is in them, however, a close connection to morality, and for this reason I believe that even a religious person can glimpse here, at last, how it is that good and evil are indeed secular and rooted exclusively in life on earth.

The final component required for demonstrating morality as a human gauge by which we live in this natural world is the faculty of choice.

There can be no good or evil if there is no choice.

Life requires action: crux one.

The good is that which fulfills its nature: crux two.

Humans (a species that lives primarily by its reasoning brain) must choose to fulfill its nature: crux three.

And that is why humans, the rational animal, are also the ethical animal.

Choice is the sine-qua-non of moral philosophy because chosen action is the exact opposite of automatic action, and automatic action is neither moral nor immoral but amoral: blame or praise can only belong to an act that is willed.

Reason must be willed.

As a matter of fact, the very locus of choice is in the uniquely human faculty of reason.

“Reason,” said John Milton, “is also choice.”

And:

“You have been given reason, which can distinguish between bad and good.”

Said Dante.

Reason does not operate instinctively. We choose to activate it, or not, and that choice determines all our others.

When we analyze will with all the tools that modern psychology brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or inattention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of will is really effort of attention; the strain in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, i.e. the strain of keeping attention focused (Rollo May, Love and Will, 1969).

And that, finally, is the answer the overwhelming question: “How can there be good and evil without God?”

Because whether God exists or doesn’t, the human brain does not operate instinctively. It needs a standard, a guide.

Which is precisely what morality provides.

Thought precedes action; action sustains life; and life, as Goethe taught us, is a process of valuing.

The process of valuing is the thing that grounds morality in this world, here and now.

Morality is required by the nature of the human brain itself.

Quoting G.H. von Wright:

The attributes, which go along with meaningful use of the phrase the good of ‘x’, may be called biological in a broad sense. They are used as attributes of being, of whom it is meaningful to say that they have life.

There is, among rightwingers predominantly, though not exclusively, a rather persistent misconception that the United States is at its roots a religious nation.

This is demonstrably false, and rather easy to verify, as we shall see in a moment, but first let us note that the subject is significant (and becoming more so) not because of any particular issue I or anyone else may have with religion qua religion, but rather because the true founding premise of this country cannot survive upon a religious base.

That founding premise is the principle of individual rights.

The United States, as we’ve noted before, is the only country in the history of the world founded explicitly and principally upon individual rights.

This means that if you choose to worship a Christian God, you are free to do so.

It means that if you choose to worship a Pagan God, you are free to do so.

It means that if you choose to worship no God at all, you are free to do so.

In this country, you are free to do anything you wish, provided you do not infringe upon the equal rights of any other person.

Your rights stop where another’s begin. In this way, rights are compossible — i.e. they are compatible and do not conflict.

Such is the nature of individual rights.

The reason rights cannot survive a religious grounding is that religion, by definition, is built upon faith, whereas rights, as I discuss in my book, are the exact opposite: they are demonstrably rooted in the human quiddity — namely, the faculty of volition, moral agency, and human individuation.

From a philosophical perspective, a religious defense of rights is woefully unequipped to withstand the onslaught of secular attacks, as recent history has proven, and indeed it is this as much as anything else that has eroded the principle of rights down to virtual non-existence: the most prominent defenders of rights have sought to defend rights from a religious rather than philosophic premise, and rights have suffered incalculably from it.

So much so, in fact, that the concept of individual rights is understood by only the slimmest minority of people, and that is why the subject of rights has all but vanished from political discourse today.

Religion must be separated from rights if rights are to survive.

It is a fact that neither the word “God” nor the word “Christ” appears anywhere in the United States Constitution. When asked why, Alexander Hamilton replied wryly: “We forgot.”

The Jeffersonian “wall of separation” was actually originated by a Baptist minister named Roger Williams, who fought mightily to remove religion from government and vice-versa. Thomas Jefferson fully sanctioned this idea — all rightwing propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding — when, in 1801, he wrote the following in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Church:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore man to all of his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

Please note the First Amendment echoes there. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

And Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust of the United States.”

Note also in Jefferson’s native state of Virginia, the 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which he and his friend James Madison helped draft, read, in part:

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions of belief….”

John Adams: “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” (Article 11, Treaty of Tripoli).

James Madison: “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

James Madison: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise…. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution” (Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments).

In a letter from 1819, James Madison wrote that “the number, the industry and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church and state.”

In an undated essay, Madison also wrote the following: “Strongly guarded is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States.”

Benjamin Franklin: “My parents had given me betimes religious impressions, and I received from my infancy a pious education in the principles of Calvinism. But scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt Revelation itself” (p. 66 of Ben Franklin’s autobiography).

Thomas Paine: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and of my own part, I disbelieve them all” (The Age of Reason, p. 89).

Thomas Paine: “All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit…. The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this think called revelation, or revealed religion…. What is it the Bible teaches us? Rapine, cruelty, and murder…. Loving of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has beside no meaning. Those who preach the doctrine of loving their enemies are in general prosecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches” (The Age of Reason).

George Washington: “I oppose the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution…. [Every American should] worship according to the dictates of his own heart.”

In 1783, George Washington rejoiced that in this country “the light of truth and reason had triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition.”

John Adams: “Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it’” (Letter to Charles Cushing, October 19, 1756).

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams wrote: “I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”

Also from John Adams: “The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity…. Thirteen governments [referring to the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without pretence [sic] of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”

Reverend Jedidiah Champion, closing his Sunday service with a prayer in 1797, said this: “O, Lord: wilt Thou bestow upon the Vice President [Thomas Jefferson] a double portion of They grace, for Thou knowest he needs it.”

Reverend Timothy Dwight, 1798, said: “Why should the religious support the philosophers, the atheists, like Thomas Jefferson?”

Reverend William Linn opposed Thomas Jefferson in print for “his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures; or in other words his rejection of the Christian Religion …”

“And if,” continues the God-fearing Reverend, “this opposer of Christianity [were to become President it would] destroy religion, introduce immorality and loosen all the bonds of society.”

New York clergyman, Dr. John Mason publicly referred to Thomas Jefferson as “a confirmed infidel and lacks so much as a decent respect for the faith and worship of Christians.”

New England Palladium (a popular newspaper): “Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion, our churches will be prostrated, and some infamous prostitute, under the title of Reason, will preside in the sanctuaries now devoted to worship of the Most High.”

The Christian Federalist: “Can serious and reflecting men look about them and doubt that if Jefferson is elected president, those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin — which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence — defend our property from plunder and devastation, and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will not be trampled upon and exploded?”

Thomas Jefferson was repeatedly called by clergymen “a howling atheist,” and even accused of “libel against Christ.”

Ask yourself: if he was devoutly religious, why was he slandered so? And why did he edit out all the miracles in his copy of the New Testament?

Thomas Jefferson: “An amendment was proposed by inserting the words ‘Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’ but was rejected by a great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and the Infidel of every denomination” (From Thomas Jefferson’s biography; please mark well those last words: “Infidel” meant “unbeliever,” which in turn meant “atheist”).

Thomas Jefferson: “Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions…. The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no harm for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” (Notes on the State of Virginia).

Thomas Jefferson: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classes with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter” (From the margins of Jefferson’s Bible).

Thomas Jefferson: “They [the clergy who denounced him] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition of their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the alter of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (i.e. any faith forced upon us).

Thomas Jefferson: “I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity [has become] the most perverted system that ever shone on man. Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter …”

Thomas Jefferson giving advice to his nephew: “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than the blindfolded fear…. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue on the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Our rights have no dependence on religious opinions.”

Faith and force are the antithesis of reason and rights. Rights do not depend upon religion or God or gods but just the opposite: rights are an inherent part of the human faculty of rationality. Rights are how we survive here and now, on this earth, and they exist without any reference whatsoever to a religious ideology.

Until that principle is fully grasped, rights are every bit as endangered by conservatives as they are by liberals — and that’s saying a lot.