Randomness, the god of liberalism

Because liberals reject the God of the Bible (as Alan Roebuck showed recently), and because they reject the idea of any inherent moral or teleological order in the universe (because if there’s an inherent moral or teleological order then human beings are not free to believe and do whatever they want), for liberals the ultimate organizing principle of the universe is randomness. For liberals, randomness is the true source of apparent biological and spiritual progress, e.g., the progress from fish to frogs to reptiles to mammals to apes to primitive man to Aristotle to Jesus. And also for liberals, randomness is the true source of apparent “sin” and “crime.” Thus the murders this past week of college students Eve Carson in North Carolina and Lauren Burk in Alabama have been repeatedly described by the liberal media as “seemingly random attacks,” as ABC News twice described the two murders. To common sense, the usage is most strange, since “random” implies that there was no intent to commit the murders, they just happened. But of course to hold a human being up at gun point, to rob her, beat her, and shoot her dead, is not a random act in any way whatsoever. It is a most deliberate act.

Why then do the liberals persist in calling the attacks random?

They do so for the same reason that they deny the existence of the God of the Bible and of an inherent moral order in the universe. If God exists, and if an inherent moral framework of the universe exists, then human beings in all their actions are to be understood as attempting to bring themselves into harmony with that moral order, or as rejecting it, or as being indifferent to it, or as being somewhere in between. In other words, if God exists and has a purpose, then all human actions inescapably have moral significance, which is to be either relatively good or relatively bad, either more God-like or less God-like. From the theist or Christian point of view, human beings who accept this moral order and attempt to follow God are truly free. But from the anti-theist point of view, belief in such a moral order crushes human freedom.

Which leads us back to liberalism. If there is no God or inherent moral order, then there is no basis on which to say that human actions are good, bad, or indifferent. Human actions are simply expressions of impulses and desires arising at random from moment to moment, all of which are of equal value and have an equal right to freedom. True, a murder is admittedly sad for the victim and her family, because their personal preference, which is that the victim have lived a full life and not been savagely murdered, has been frustrated; and to have one’s preference frustrated is painful. Yet, notwithstanding the family’s personal heartbreak, there is no inherent moral meaning in the act of murder that caused that heartbreak. It was just a random event.

Thus, for liberals, who believe in unlimited freedom, the greatest achievements are without moral meaning, and the greatest crimes and tragedies are without moral meaning. At the same time, since liberals are human beings, and since human beings cannot actually live with total meaninglessness, liberals add their own preferred meanings onto things, by means of unprincipled exceptions to their own liberalism.

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Dimitri K. writes:

By calling murders random, liberals mean that they were not caused by any ideology. They were not caused by deliberate hatred towards whites or class hatred.

At the same time, whites are seen as acting non-randomly, moved by racism and prejudice.

Richard W. writes:

Thanks for another interesting article! I have a comment, which is that you seem to discount the ability of humans to create any moral system that is not theistic.

I am quite familiar with Buddhism (I studied it in college in some detail) and they seem to have an atheist but quite powerful moral code. Of course you do say “any inherent moral or teleological order” in your intro, and Buddhists certainly see a “moral order” in the universe, in fact they assert that the order is primary, viewing karma as being like gravity.

Moving forward into the Western tradition, did not philosophers such as Nietzsche envision a morality without god (Will to Power, etc.)? [LA replies: Obviously Nietzschean nihilism cannot form the basis of a society.]

Of course I realize most liberals are simply parodies of Western men, not actual traditional men themselves, who have inherited the thinking of the great philosophers. They are children playing in the ruins of the great thinkers, and parodying things without understanding them at all.

Finally, (and here I’m on thin ice) but were not organizations like The Humanist Association and The Ethical Culture Society set up explicitly in the first half of the 20th century to develop ethics without recourse to God? [LA replies: The last 100 years are testament to the moral and social chaos created by attempting to construct a social system on a man-centered morality. Its fullest development is seen in the post-human air-conditioned nightmare of the EU. The lesson is that the human, without something higher than the human, becomes something lower than human.]

Perhaps all these are failed systems, and certainly I don’t think that Nancy Pelosi, Bill Mahr or Randy Rhodes could explain any of them, so on practical level your criticism rings true.

But I’ve always found the Christian claim that “without God there is no morality” a bit of an over-simplification, and in my experience it is most frequently made by religious people who have never spent 10 minutes studying any tradition except their own. They are sort of the reverse of the liberals I’ve called out above. [LA replies: I am sympathetic to your concern. But I think that if we look at all the Western systems that have been non-explicitly Christian and that have been reasonably workable and decent, they were all borrowing very heavily on a Christian residue. (Remember also that liberalism is best understood as secularized Christianity.) But as the Christian residue progressively grows less and less, those societies have sunk. Again, consider the anti-European, pro-Muslim, and incipiently totalitarian EU. Consider the aggressive atheism movement led by Dawkins et al. which is rejecting the liberal tolerance that has been the basis of Western liberal society for the last two centuries and is trying to banish Christianity. ]

Despite what has been attempted I’m not sure any of it has succeeded.

I read Nietzsche very differently than many. In places one where many see him urging the abandonment of God, but his formulation was not “God Does Not Exist” but rather, “God is Dead” which implies that he did indeed live.

I believe what he was saying was not an existential claim, but a social one. That belief in God was no longer the foundation of Western thought, and that because of this we were going to be forced to suffer a “re-evaluation of all values”. Many see him advocating this—but there is also a sadness to his writing that is impossible to miss. I believe he was mourning as much as celebrating.

Thanks again for another thought provoking essay.

LA writes:

I just want to say that I’m not entirely satisfied with this blog article, as it leaves issues hanging that require further explanation. But I thought it had enough that was worthwhile in it to make it worth posting in its present form.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 11, 2008 08:49 PM | Send