Consider The Trespasser

A dead simple view on morality

Photo courtesy of Katrin Bolovtsova

I’ve become bored with people arguing over what is morally correct. Because the truth is, I think they’re all pretty much wrong. Even the ones I agree with.

I, like any good semi-educated white man, have spent many years wondering and philosophizing over what “correct” morality is and where I can find it. That’s pretty much what white people do — we get comfortable and then we sit around and think. And when it comes to answers, we can’t tell if they come from philosophy, or religion, or mathematics, or what. And I guess I’ve stopped asking. Or, in a way, I’ve stopped caring. Because this search of ours is endless and, like string theory physics, doesn’t even seem to be making progress.

I get irritated when I see Christians argue that something is “morally right” without a real, practical reason. What I mean by that is, “The Bible says so” is not a good enough reason. If you can’t map your Bible lesson onto a real-life example or story, your citation doesn’t hold much water — it’s just a claim that makes you feel good. But I get equally, or actually way more, irritated with progressive-minded people who claim ridiculous things like “housing is a human right.” It’s like, okay, surely you aren’t going to cite the Bible, but please at least tell me where that idea came from.
Tell me how you plan to pay for that human right in dollars. Because most human rights don’t require anyone else to actively provide something to you. In fact that’s not what a right is.

You can’t just make a moral claim as if it’s self-evidently correct and the obvious solution to all of our troubles. You have to be able to explain why it works, not just why it feels good. What these people have in common, I realize, is that neither of them understands that medication has side effects. Moral concerns have real-life concerns attached to them; you can’t fix something without breaking something else, and you can’t just say “them’s the rules” without naming the consequences of the rules. If you claim that something is good, you have to prove that it’s good by showing your work. If you don’t have any work, you shouldn’t be making any claims.

And what else I realize, is that the reason I’m so unsatisfied in my quest for correct morality is that it doesn’t seem to exist. There is no ultimate authority on what is Good and Correct, and there never will be. But that’s not satisfying either. So I’ve come to a very simple understanding of morality that I think scales across time and circumstance.

Consider the trespasser. People aren’t allowed to go onto other people’s land uninvited, particularly if there is signage indicating such a rule.

If you’re a left-minded person, you might think, well, property is an overrated concept, and what exactly are you so jealously guarding your land from, and isn’t that stolen land anyway? And the answer to all of those concerns is, yes, you’re correct. At least in some sense.

But one also has to consider other questions. Questions like, would you want to live in a world with no property laws? Are you also aware that without property laws, we would all just kill each other over land? Are you also aware that, without the concept of private property, you and your children are always one angry tribe leader away from being raped and killed on any given day of any given year? Because that’s how the world sans property laws works. The strong take from those who can’t hold off the strong. Land belongs to whoever wants it more; resources belong to those who will kill for them.

And I don’t think you’d particularly care to live that way, now would you. There’s a reason that “post-apocalyptic” is the genre that describes stories in those kinds of settings. Property laws are a solution to the problem of endless death and suffering in the human wilderness. Humans have reached a consensus, across time, and property laws are that consensus. They are not necessarily a declaration that property is some capital-lettered thing, like an Inherent Human Right or that it’s Inherently “Good” by some nebulous God-given definition carved in stone that Moses brought down from the mountain. They are merely a system that human beings have come up with that keeps us from murdering each other over the best trees and bushes and streams.

In fact that’s an essential point: our most important laws don’t work because they are carved into stone; they were carved into stone because they work. When something is declared a human right, what’s really being said is “this seems to work, based on experience.” Which, again, is why people with no experience shouldn’t be declaring human rights. I wrote a series of ramblings during adolescence about various human issues that, only a few years later, disgusted me in how pathetically stupid and short-sighted they were.

I think this is the fundamental truth of morality: it’s practical thinking, distilled over millennia by very wise people through trial and error, and parlayed into stories that resonate with us. And the reason they resonate with us is because there’s something inside us that says, yes, that feels true. That feels like how life actually is and how the human experience actually works. In other words, morality is practicality disguised as morality. Or at least, good morality is. Bad morality is just wishful thinking or selfishness disguised as good morality.

And if that paragraph made sense to you, you could be a very wise and fair thinker and probably a leader.

Good morality, in other words, is that which works across time to foster human civilization and cooperation. It can change and adapt based on time, circumstance, culture, and technology. But given that most flourishing cultures agree on a lot of big issues, there seems to be no escaping the notion that there are big moral ideas that, based on how practical they are, can be considered good. Universally good, you might say. But again, not in some abstract, “God literally said so” way, but in a “this clearly works, so we would be idiots not to keep doing it” way.

If you strip away all of the posturing, politics, and self-righteousness, if you strip away all of the belief systems that people defend as part of their own identity, you find that every moral issue just becomes a practical issue. The real question isn’t what’s “correct,” because that has no provable answer. That information isn’t located anywhere. The real question is what we, a group of people, can live with across time. That’s really the only question that matters or has ever mattered. If we, as a people, reached a consensus that we could live with rape and its consequences, we would just make it legal. But we can’t. The repercussions are too messy, too severe, and too painful to witness. Rape ruins people’s lives and offers upside for only one person. So it remains illegal.

Loitering remains illegal in many places because it infringes upon people’s desire to have peace of mind and peaceable assembly — and we have reached a consensus that people, including business owners, want those things more often than they don’t want them. Jaywalking was outlawed not to punish you for being efficient, but because we have reached a consensus that people prefer order on public roads more than they prefer disorder. These laws are morality codified — or, in other words, they are practicality codified. They keep an amount of order and happiness that people can live with, and are willing to accept the tradeoffs for.

And when the consensus changes, we touch the wheel gently and steer the ship.

Now you might say, well if morality is merely a practical concern, then why do religious people, for example the quintessential punching bag of Christian Conservatives, so adamantly defend their views? In fact they defend them so staunchly that it looks like blind obedience — unthinking, naive obedience.

Well, let me answer that question with a question. Has there ever been any moral system that you’ve read about that produced more stable civilizations across time than Christianity? I don’t think there has. The most stable countries you can think of were literally founded with a quill in one hand and a Bible in the other. And I suspect that even Jefferson and Franklin saw religion for what it was: even if not true, a straightforwardly useful moral system for organizing a people. They saw in Christianity the wisdom of the elders — the elders being the people who wrote the stories that, true or not, became the single most canonical communication device in the history of our species.

Even Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most secular-minded person you could possibly imagine, considers himself a cultural Christian. Why does he do that? Because it works. It works better than believing in nothing and making up rules based on what sounds good to you personally.

So when Christian Conservatives, a group that is easy to revile and make fun of, defend their precious book, sure it may be partially out of ignorance and the laziness of not really thinking for themselves. But it also comes from a sense of faith. People who trust the Bible might seem naive, but at least they’re humble enough to accept that someone, either their ancestors or God, is smarter than they are. There’s a humility in that, even if that humility is combined with intellectual laziness.

And besides, that staunch and unthinking defense of morality can be applied to other groups, too. I’ve never been attacked so ruthlessly as I have been by brainwashed Wokesters after saying things they disagreed with. They were outright hateful, and couldn’t even defend why they believed what they believed other than by saying “these are the rules now because they’re the ones we like.” They, on the other hand, were arrogant enough to think you can rewrite the entire Western code of conduct and End User License Agreement on a whim. They aren’t humble enough to admit someone might know better than them. They don’t care what works, they care what sounds good.

Immigration, for another example, shouldn’t be treated as a moral issue. Because that imposes unrealistic high-minded standards and expectations upon it that reality simply cannot meet. You would love to give refuge to all of the world’s lost and needy, you’d love to feed and clothe all of those escaping from persecution in a third-world country. Most human beings agree on that. Yes, most human beings agree on that. But, as Konstantin Kisin says, if ten thousand people break into your house seeking refuge, it’s no longer a moral issue. You simply cannot help that many people without destroying the very system those people are escaping to.

We shouldn’t reconsider sexual modesty because it’s “correct” in the abstract. We should reconsider it because, without it, our young people and their relationships have become worse in almost every measurable way. Near-total sexual liberation has been an absolute disaster for the civilization that you claim to care about — whether you have religious or philosophical reasons to like that or not. Just like letting a child have sweets and make his own meal plans does not produce a well-nourished and healthy teenager.

As much as they may be fun to read, the moral philosophers like Nietzsche just aren’t really that important. Nietzsche’s ideas are titillating, but they’re moral parlor tricks — clever but not useful. And in fact they are so dangerously, cleverly self-serving that they are actively misinterpreted by people who think of themselves as the center of the world. These ideas are mere intellectual play; they don’t actually make any attempt to be a practical moral system. They might give some individual somewhere a new moral idea to follow, but they aren’t scalable. Mostly because they make the average person feel awful about himself. Or they would, if the average person knew he was the average person.

A few years ago I read a large portion of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, his attempt at the practical application of utilitarianism, and I couldn’t even finish it. His sentences are 176 words long with 15 commas and 4 semicolons; they’re so complicated that you can’t explain them. And if you can’t explain something or show it in stories, you can’t use it. If something requires endless reconsiderations and what-ifs, you can’t use it. No matter how good it sounds.

Which is why I’ve given up on the whole “philosophy of morality” thing. If you can’t use an idea to tell stories, it isn’t transmissible at scale and therefore isn’t really worth pursuing in the first place. Stories are the best transmission mechanism we have for human wisdom, and there is nothing in second place.

And the history of a given country is a story. The history of the world is a story. And only a fool, an absolute fool, would ignore such an available and clear story. Only a fool would ignore the history of what has worked and what hasn’t.

The problem civilized humans are faced with is how to remain civilized. And that question can only be answered by a moral system that is practicality disguised as morality. Something practicable at the individual level and infinitely scalable. I think Christian principles are the best thing we’ve ever come up with, but I’ll settle for anything that does the job equally well or better. There are no complicated intersectional questions or ever-changing criteria, like with Wokeness, and there are no absurd calculations to perform like with utilitarianism. There is just a collection of stories that feel accurate to what the human experience is like, and function as an actual recipe for making yourself and others happier.

A moral idea is something that gets humans to cooperate across time; that which humans can live with. And we have enough of those tested at this point that we should probably slow down on trying to invent new ones.

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” - C.S. Lewis