[OS] Addendum: Is Religion Moral Masturbation?
Proving the rule
See previous post for an explanation of moral masturbation.
No phrase is so benighted by misunderstanding as “the exception that proves the rule.” It is most commonly said as a magical incantation that allows you to sweep an exception under the rug. This is wrong and not useful to anyone. Among its legitimate interpretations, the phrase has two meanings. One of these meanings is uninteresting while the other is entirely sensible yet at odds with how we understand the phrase today.
The first interpretation is that the application of an exception to a situation proves the existence of a general rule—i.e., framing something as an exception implies that there is a general rule that this situation is excepted from. But this is, frankly, not very useful and also a strained read: there is nothing that is particular about that exception’s relationship to the rule—any exception would have worked. So why is this “the exception that proves the rule”? I don’t need a special sentence to tell me that we have certain ideas of normalcy for just about everything.
The second interpretation comes from an older meaning of the word “prove,” which meant to test something and discover its limits. The “exception that proves the rule” is the exception which butts up against the edges of the rule and shows its exact bounds—the rule goes this far, and not farther. That is a helpful concept.
In the previous post, I discuss what I call “moral masturbation.” The metaphor is this:
Masturbation is an escape from the need for another, from an actual relationship with someone else and all the difficulties that brings. Porn allows for the representation of action without the risk of it. Masturbation is pulling a lever instead of making love not because you are not interested in making love but because you are afraid that you’ll be unable to do it, or that they won’t make love back.
Going further: masturbation is wasted effort and wasted desire, wasted on a wafer-thin slice of pleasure. Masturbation allows you to not go on a date, or try to improve yourself in order to go onto a date. It gives you an out from the difficult part of living with other people which is living with other people. Connection, sacrifice, risk. It is, in fact, spilling on the ground for no one something someone else could want or need or love: you and all your possibilities.
So, I declare: it is the ascetic, in his steadfast refusal to jerk off, who masturbates. His whole life is daily and obsessive moral masturbation, pulling the pain-lever of moralism so they can cut out all the risky bits, so they don’t have to worry about whether, if they actually act, they’ll match up to the needs of the situation and the other person. They don’t have to risk helping anyone else, and all they have to do in return is worry.
Elsewhere, I note:
Failure is a terrible thing, deeply unsettling. It is a symbol of our impotence, frailty, and lack of control. So what if you didn’t have to fail? Or at least not as much? What if you could displace some amount of success from the external to the internal? This is something that most forms of morality and religion generally do a pretty good job of—what matters is your intention/the principle you are acting under/your ends rather than what actually happens. But only to an extent. Most forms of religion and morality still care about outcomes in some fashion or at some level. The ascetic, though, is interested in outcomes internally. All the tools for success in life are right in their hands: they only need to punish themselves enough and they are good.
There is an issue here which I elide: what is the relationship between “most forms of morality and religion” and asceticism I deride as moral masturbation? The concept of moral masturbation is supposed to help explain why there exists what I believe is a mistake about morality and ethical action, the mistake which I term asceticism in the post. But where are the bounds of this concept? What exception proves it?
The Reductive Hedonist
Under some assumptions, the critical concept of asceticism I employed in Moral Masturbation could threaten any concept of morality or altruism at all. I flirt with a position in The Freedom Trap that morality is a natural outgrowth of the feelings of shame and pride. But what if you go further, as some do, and say that this natural outgrowth is all that morality is? The central critique of moral masturbation is that the ascetic substitutes a proxy for the thing that actually matters, harming themselves and others. But what if all morality is merely a proxy, and in every case—or at any case we would still recognize as morality—is simply an immiserating, pathological shield?
Psychoanalysis attempted to make theorizing of the mind rigorous through adherence to a few basic principles, one of the most important being the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle posited that the mind fundamentally drove towards pleasure and away from pain. This disciplined psychoanalytic reasoning by limiting the possible modes of explanation. You could not simply say, “oh, the patient has a pathology—they just harm themselves and we need to stop that.” You instead have to explain the pathology in terms of a mind that is fundamentally oriented towards pleasure and away from pain. You have to say, “the pathology is rooted in a childhood experience where the patient was greatly harmed after forgetting a routine, and so the patient associated routine with safety and missing a routine with danger.” If you adhere to the pleasure principle, every way of explaining a psychological tendency must be explained in terms of how it allows the mind to find pleasure and avoid pain. Psychoanalysis wasn’t the first to take this principle as principal—many forms of philosophical hedonism justify themselves by asserting that everything we do is already merely built upon the primary and sole motivating forces of pleasure and pain. Psychoanalysis simply attempted to apply the principle to explain psychological instances which it previously had not.
In this context, all morality could be asceticism because morality itself is a faulty proxy for pleasure. When we do certain things, we are reprimanded, shamed, or otherwise punished by others. Morality allows us to identify with our own punishment and avoid its full discomfort, and perhaps even derive some pleasure from it—justice is still being performed, even if it is upon our own back. This is, I believe, Freud’s position on the matter—the superego is a way to bring the disciplining voice of civilization and authority within ourselves, to identify with it so we are not driven mad by all its restrictions. Morality, then, might just be a way to protect ourselves from others and the risk that comes from living with them.
Perhaps as soon as you start using the psychoanalytic language of proxies and defense mechanisms, all your glistening conceptual arrays and idealist structures wither and decay under the hard blue glare of the pleasure principle. Is all morality just a way to protect yourself from the possibility of failure? Is it all some way to put a focus on something other than your actual ability to succeed or a way to live with the pain of other people?
Nietzsche might say yes, though for him the drive was power instead of pleasure (from Sam Kriss):
Nietzsche might have been weak, but he refused the comforts of resentment [like slave morality]. His entire philosophy is a image of what it would look like to really live without those comforts. Instead of festering, everything bursts outwards. Passion, violence, the terrible freedom of the man-shaped wolf. The pleasures of power as an antidote to the much more potent and seductive pleasures of suffering. . . . But the really ugly and monstrous parts of his thought—slavery, murder, wars of mass extermination breaking out across the entire world—they’re part of it too. They might have been a metaphor, but he really did believe in them. Too much of any remedy becomes a poison.
Psychological arguments tend to shuffle you in this direction. Even where you attempt to erect a barrier between the first-person practical meaning of morality and the third-person explanation of its origins, they leak into one another. Perhaps when you start using the language of psychology—once you think on its terms—no values or motivations can remain except pleasure and its derivatives. This is a useful mode of explanation, but corrosive. But it could be correct! Maybe we are meant for the Garden of Eden, immortal and thoughtless and full and without the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Maybe we all ache for a wire in our heads and maybe that is the most honest way to understand ourselves. Maybe everything else we do is just a trap we all agree to set for one another only because we can’t all together bliss out, dough-eyed lying on a padded bed. I am not entirely sure. The human mind is flexible, and all these things which feel so universal and real—morality, responsibility, dignity, virtue—might just be the participation trophies we make for ourselves once we lose hope of something more. If I watched a man burn while dopamine pumped into my head, would I find a way to call it morality?
Putting the Morality in Moral Masturbation
Unfortunately, in this subsection I will not be founding morality on strictly rational or universal grounds in such a way that leaves it impregnable to nihilistic or hedonic criticism. That, I suppose, may have to wait for a different post. Here, I merely want to point out that there are two distinct vantage points from which you can criticize the ascetic. The first is from the above, the pleasure principle: you can say that what the ascetic is really trying to do is be happy, and they’re miserable. So obviously their plan is failing and they need to try something different. Morality is just one more layer of proxy they have erected and should be revealed as such. But I don’t think that’s the best way to read my post, and I don’t believe any arguments in my post rely on such a view.
My previous does rely on certain tools cribbed from the old, semi-abandoned, definitively out-of-style house of psychoanalysis. It is not clear to me, though, that such tools require the whole edifice for use. One datum in favor of this is that our very modern, very reasonable therapy still holds many such tools over from that time of cocaine-addicted crackpot psychoanalysis. Much of the grand theory has been swept out from under them, but the idea of a fetish, for instance, where one thing takes on the value of another, is still in use. We still talk about a “sense of self,” and even sometimes term it the “ego,” but we no longer gain it through our separation from our mothers and the pain of having to scream for milk and communicate ourselves to the world. You can have the concept without the genealogy, if it still does work.
The notion of a fetish requires a desire, a natural object of that desire, and a proxy for that desire which becomes a new object of it. The mechanics of the concept work as long as you have a desire, an object of it you deem “natural,” and a proxy. For moral masturbation: the desire is morality; the natural object of it I leave largely undefined, but is something like doing something for the sake of others; and the proxy is the feeling of conflicting desires and deprivation.
Now, onto religion.
Religion as Masturbation
From a moral perspective, this post requires certain necessary prior beliefs to be applicable. For those who believe that the foundation of morality is in the divine commands as listed in one’s chosen relevant works and interpreted by one’s chosen religious institutions (or oneself), this post is not applicable, as they have no daylight between religion and morality. However, if one thinks that the foundation of morality is non-divine and that instead religion—as practiced, as used, as institution in the world and affecting the world—must justify itself against that foundation, then the post is applicable.
From an epistemological perspective, one can come to this post from various perspective. There are two basic axes: first, one can believe in the existence a particular god or general divinity, or one can be unsure of such an existence, or one can be sure that no god exists; second, one can believe or disbelieve that morality pertains to a relationship to that god and its various modalities of existence. It seems to me that if one can show religion is not a fetish even if one believes that morality does not care about the god that does not exist, then, a fortiori, it is not a fetish under any other prior belief. So let us presume that morality does not care about the god who does not exist. What is to be said, practically, of religion in a secular world?
Let’s make the case that religion could be a fetish, and more, that it could be moral masturbation.
Religious practice generally includes ritual, reading of religious works, listening to people discuss and discussing yourself religious works, and abiding by certain rules prescribed by religion. All of these are ways to offload the discomfort of failure onto things you have more control over. Ritual, specific rules, and learning are all not morality. They give things you can do that are supposedly good but (in many cases) help no one, just like scrolling through bad news on the toilet. Sure, now you’re in the same room as other people, but you’re not doing anything. You say the words right, as you’ve said them a million times before, and you’ve ‘done’ something ‘good.’
You’re not helping anyone. You have displaced the glory of all that is good onto something that doesn’t exist and then you have displaced your desire to act good onto praising and following the rules of that nonexistent being. There are some rules which regulate your interactions with others, but all the particularities of religion which contrast with plain, secular morality are particular fetishes and proxies and masturbations. You refrain from boiling a calf in its mother’s milk and… what? You feel good about that? Like you actually did something? Everything that distinguishes religion from morality just blurs your vision of what is actually good.
Religion as Practice
The first observation about the world that might prick our ears up about the argument above is that morality is socially useful and religion is close to a human universal. Under most moral theories, morally good acts either definitionally or at least tend to benefit the community, depending on the theory at play. While it is not necessarily the case that cultural adaptations are beneficial to communities, we generally expect them to be useful at least to some conditions. Adaptations that crop up all over the place, such as religious practice, would seem unlikely to be maladaptive.
We might further note that atheism is popular not among poorer communities where defecting from common goods causes more harm to others, but rather among richer communities that have more ‘room’ for defection from common goods. Indeed, religious communes tend to last longer than secular ones.
There are many theories which would explain all of these findings, but one particularly parsimonious explanation is that religions are accumulated systems which have shown, over time, their effectiveness at holding people together in communities and encouraging them to act pro-socially, at least within their community (see, e.g., the Crusades).
There is a fairly obvious theory of causation here. In fact, it’s in the name: practice. Religion can operate as a habituation or education in moral concepts and routines. Religion, done well, is a particularly effective process of inculcating moral habits and frames of mind. You are to be consistently thinking about righteousness, doing certain things in praise of the good, and so on. Religious practice should be in large part the habituation of various virtues and praising them.
Of course, you may notice my hedges: “done well,” “should be,” “can operate.” Classifying religion as masturbation or practice is a thin, thin line—it is a particularist, fact-intensive inquiry. Does this religion do well for us? Does it inculcate proper virtues? Does it teach people to respect their fellow persons? Does it provide the community with strong social ties and beneficial common goods? Does it lead to goodness? The line between masturbation and practice is highly practical. Ask: is this helping anyone? Not to paper over discomfort or retreat from responsibility, but to be good.
I hope this post helped show the contours of moral masturbation, to the extent that any remained both clouded by indeterminacy and also still of interest to my small rabble of viewers.
All of this is a bit moot if you either believe in the divine morality of your religion or think that consequentialist religion is insulting. It may be that a lie should not lead to goodness, and that if a religion’s metaphysical claims are not true (or at least not provably true in the manner we expect other claims to be), then it is farcical to litigate its goodness. That may be correct, but the charge of masturbation relies upon effect, not truth. One must only litigate the issue at hand, so to speak.
I will leave this topic with one last thought: why has religion become less popular? And where it is less popular, why has it become so much more relaxed, almost deracinated (see consequentialist religion)? There are three routes for explanation: idealist (religion’s own contradictions force it to fall apart at some level of ideational development, and we are just now reaching that point); progressive (we have learned to think scientifically and progressed to a time in our history where backwards myths no longer convince us); and material (the problems religion solved are no longer our main problems, and the way religion solved those problems is creating new problems for us). In keeping with the roughly materialistic theme of this pair of posts, I’d like to expand on the third. Here is Scott Alexander on liberalism:
Robert Frost says “A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel”. Ha ha ha.
And yet, outside of Saudi Arabia you’ll have a hard time finding a country that doesn’t at least pay lip service to liberal ideas. Stranger still, many of those then go on to actually implement them, either voluntarily or after succumbing to strange pressures they don’t understand. In particular, the history of the past few hundred years in the United States has been a history of decreasing censorship and increasing tolerance.
Contra the Reactionaries, feminism isn’t an exception to that, it’s a casualty of it. 1970s feminists were saying that all women need to rise up and smash the patriarchy, possibly with literal smashing-implements. 2010s feminists are saying that if some women want to be housewives, that’s great and their own choice because in a liberal society everyone should be free to pursue their own self-actualization.
And that has corresponded to spectacular successes of the specific causes liberals like to push, like feminism, civil rights, gay marriage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel. And yet when liberals enter quarrels, they always win. Isn’t that interesting?
. . .
Liberalism does not conquer by fire and sword. Liberalism conquers by communities of people who agree to play by the rules, slowly growing until eventually an equilibrium is disturbed. Its battle cry is not “Death to the unbelievers!” but “If you’re nice, you can join our cuddle pile!”
But some people, through lack of imagination, fail to find this battle cry sufficiently fear-inspiring.
Liberalism has an uneasy relationship with religion. If morality is the good, barring nothing, and religion is often a metaphorical or habitual relationship with the good, we can see why religion can be a source of intolerance.
Liberalism manifests to deal with a more mobile, interconnected world with more upside in cooperation than conflict—once you can grow your economy at 2% every year, conquest becomes less attractive. Instead of soldiers and zealots, you want talent and workers. And it’s helpful if they can all work together. People generally like to get richer, no matter what the modernity-skeptics say, so liberalism creeps further and further and just keeps winning. Chauvinists think the petty liberals are weak and unwilling to stand up for themselves, and then the liberals outproduce their plane factories by almost a factor of three.
So, is religion a pathology? A habit held over from times when it worked well? Or is it more capacious than that, more adaptive? What is religion? Much to consider.