Under all its countless guises, variations and adaptations, that doctrine—best designated as the morality of altruism—has come from prehistoric swamps to New York City, unchanged. In savage societies, men practiced the ritual of human sacrifices, immolating individual men on sacrificial altars, for the sake of what they regarded as their collective, tribal good. Today, they are still doing it, only the agony is slower and the slaughter greater—but the doctrine that demands it and sanctions it, is the same doctrine of moral cannibalism.
The philosophers preserved it, by leaving the subject of morality to the mystics—or by consigning it to the province of subjective feelings, which means: to the mystics—or by the vehement rejection of reason’s capacity to deal with moral values and the branding of all value-judgments as “unscientific,” which means: the reaffirmation and perpetuation of the mystics’ monopoly on morality—or, worst of all, by accepting the mystics’ moral code in its irrational entirety, then translating it into earthly terms and propagating it in the name of reason.
The convolutions of this last attempt provide what is, perhaps, the most grotesquely terrible chapter in the history of Western thought The political “me-too-ism,” abjectly displayed by the “conservatives” of today toward their brazenly socialistic adversaries, is only the result and the feeble reflection of the ethical “me-too-ism” displayed by the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by the alleged champions of reason, toward the Witch Doctors of morality.
Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, the champion of science, advocated a “rational,” “scientific” social system based on the total subjugation of the individual to the collective, including a “Religion of Humanity” which substituted Society for the Gods or gods who collect the blood of sacrificial victims. It is not astonishing that Comte was the comer of the term Altruism, which means: the placing of others above self, of their interests above one’s own.
Nietzsche’s rebellion against altruism consisted of replacing the sacrifice of oneself to others by the sacrifice of others to oneself. He proclaimed that the ideal man is moved, not by reason, but by his “blood,” by his innate instincts, feelings and will to power—that he is predestined by birth to rule others and sacrifice them to himself, while they are predestined by birth to be his victims and slaves—that reason, logic, principles are futile and debilitating, that morality is useless, that the “superman” is “beyond good and evil,” that he is a “beast of prey” whose ultimate standard is nothing but his own whim. Thus Nietzsche’s rejection of the Witch Doctor consisted of elevating Attila into a moral ideal—which meant: a double surrender of morality to the Witch Doctor.
Jeremy Bentham, the champion of capitalism, defended it by proclaiming “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as its moral justification—and propounded a “hedonistic calculus” for men’s moral guidance, which enunciated the principle that before taking any action one must consider all the possible forms and amounts of happiness and unhappiness to accrue to all the people possibly to be affected by the consequences of one’s action (including oneself as one unit among the dozens or hundreds or millions), one must compute them all, then act accordingly and sacrifice the “hedonistic” minority to the majority.
Herbert Spencer, another champion of capitalism, chose to decide that the theory of evolution and of adaptation to environment was the key to man’s morality—and declared that the moral justification of capitalism was the survival of the species, of the human race; that whoever was of no value to the race, had to perish; that man’s morality consisted of adapting oneself to one’s social environment, and seeking one’s own happiness in the welfare of society; and that the automatic processes of evolution would eventually obliterate the distinction between selfishness and unselfishness.
And when Karl Marx, the most consistent translator of the altruist morality into practical action and political theory, advocated a society where all would be sacrificed to all, starting with the immediate immolation of the able, the intelligent, the successful and the wealthy—whatever opposition he did encounter, nobody opposed him on moral grounds. Predominantly, he was granted the status of a noble, but impractical, idealist.
The great treason of the philosophers was that they, the thinkers, defaulted on the responsibility of providing a rational society with a code of rational morality. They, whose job it was to discover and define man’s moral values, stared at the brilliant torrent of man’s released energy and had nothing better to offer for its guidance than the Witch Doctor’s morality of human sacrifices—of self-denial, self-abasement, self-immolation—of suffering, guilt and death.
The failure of philosophers to challenge the Witch Doctor’s morality, has cost them their kingdom: philosophy. The relationship of reason and morality is reciprocal: the man who accepts the role of a sacrificial animal, will not achieve the self-confidence necessary to uphold the validity of his mind—the man who doubts the validity of his mind, will not achieve the self-esteem necessary to uphold the value of his person and to discover the moral premises that make man’s value possible.
The intellectuals share the philosophers’ guilt. The intellectuals—all those whose professions deal with the “humanities” and require a firm philosophical base—have known for a long time that no such base existed. They knew that they were functioning in a philosophical vacuum and that the currency they were passing was rubber checks which would bounce, some day, wrecking their culture.
One can never know, only surmise, what tragedies, despair and silent devastation have been going on for over a century in the invisible underground of the intellectual professions—in the souls of their practitioners—nor what incalculable potential of human ability and integrity perished in those hidden, lonely conflicts. The young minds who came to the field of the intellect with the inarticulate sense of a crusade, seeking rational answers to the problems of achieving a meaningful human existence, found a philosophical con game in place of guidance and leadership. Some of them gave up the field of ideas, in hopeless, indignant frustration, and vanished into the silence of subjectivity. Others gave in, and saw their eagerness turn into bitterness, their quest into apathy, their crusade into a cynical racket. They condemned themselves to the chronic anxiety of a con man dreading exposure when they accepted the roles of enlightened leaders, while knowing that their knowledge rested on nothing but fog and that its only validation was somebody’s feelings.
They, the standard bearers of the mind, found themselves dreading reason as an enemy, logic as a pursuer, thought as an avenger. They, the proponents of ideas, found themselves clinging to the belief that ideas were impotent: their choice was the futility of a charlatan or the guilt of a traitor. They were not mediocrities when they began their careers; they were pretentious mediocrities when they ended. The exceptions are growing rarer with every generation. No one can accept with psychological impunity the function of a Witch Doctor under the banner of the intellect.
With nothing but quicksands to stand on—the shifting mixture of Witch-doctory and Attila-ism as their philosophical base—the intellectuals were unable to grasp, to identify or to evaluate the historical drama taking place before them: the industrial revolution and capitalism. They were like men who did not see the splendor of a rocket bursting over their heads, because their eyes were lowered in guilt. It was their job to see and to explain—to a society of men stumbling dazedly out of a primeval dungeon—the cause and the meaning of the events that were sweeping them faster and farther than the motion of all the centuries behind them. The intellectuals did not choose to see.
The men in the other professions were not able to step back and observe. If some men found themselves leaving their farms for a chance to work in a factory, that was all they knew. If their children now had a chance to survive beyond the age of ten (child mortality had been about fifty percent in the pre-capitalist era), they were not able to identify the cause. They could not tell why the periodic famines—that had been striking every twenty years to wipe out the “surplus” population which pre-capitalist economies could not feed—now came to an end, as did the carnages of religious wars, nor why fear seemed to be lifting away from people’s voices and from the streets of growing cities, nor why an enormous exultation was suddenly sweeping the world. The intellectuals did not choose to tell them.
The intellectuals, or their predominant majority, remained centuries behind their time: still seeking the favor of noble protectors, some of them were bewailing the “vulgarity” of commercial pursuits, scoffing at those whose wealth was “new,” and, simultaneously, blaming these new wealth-makers for all the poverty inherited from the centuries ruled by the owners of nobly “non-commercial” wealth. Others were denouncing machines as “inhuman,” and factories as a blemish on the beauty of the countryside (where gallows had formerly stood at the crossroads). Still others were calling for a movement “back to nature,” to the handicrafts, to the Middle Ages. And some were attacking scientists for inquiring into forbidden “mysteries” and interfering with God’s design.