Morality of the angry atheist

Let's take Slavoj Zizek's March 2006 NYT piece Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for, a fairly good one:

These weird alliances confront Europe's Muslims with a difficult choice: The only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity are the "godless" atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies.

Rabbi Avi Shafran won't have any of that. In criticizing it, he immediately erects this, an instructively boilerplate case of "these 'atheists' can't be true atheists, because the 'True Atheist' strawman in my head have no morals":

To a true atheist, there can be no more ultimate meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad weather.

Or maybe meaning is something that is created by humans, so human actions can have meaning after all.

Ah, but he wants ultimate meaning, as opposed to garden-variety inferior brand meaning. Of course.

As an example of a life without morality, he gives:

Mr. Kuklinski, who was retired from life at the age of 70, claimed, utterly without remorse, to have killed more than 100 people as a Mafia enforcer; his favored methods included ice picks, crossbows, chain saws and a cyanide solution administered with a nasal-spray bottle.

The happy hit man's example might not have given pause to Professor Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. But it should have.

Because the notion that there is no higher authority than nature is precisely what enables people like Mr. Kuklinski -- and the vast majority of the killers, rapists and thieves who populate the nightly news.

Utterly unrelated to religion, values or meaning, of course.

Matter of fact, it's been known for some time now that Mafia initiation rites involve people swearing on saints. Religious symbols are used to reinforce allegiance to the Mob. That is, it's precisely by taking the symbols of "ultimate meaning" and tying them to the Mafia that it bolstered the loyalty that it did.

In his view, a purposeless process of evolution has brought us to where we stand, and our feeling that there are good deeds and evil ones is but a utilitarian quirk of natural selection -- like our proclivity to eat more than we need when food is available. And so, just as we might choose to forego a second helping of pizza if we harbor an urge to lose weight, so may we choose, for personal gain (of desires, not pounds), to loosen our embrace of a moral, ethical life. Biological advantages, after all, are not moral imperatives.

Other way around. It is highly probable that moral imperatives are biological advantages. As numerous studies have shown.

Moral feelings are just that: feelings, hard to suppress. As such, these feelings (purely "utilitarian," as if being useful was a bad thing) may have brought more good than all the pious well-wishes in the world. Believers, after all, are no strangers to hypocrisy.

In a followup, he wonders why every atheist to which he peddles his ignorance is so angry:

MORE INFORMATIVE is the atheists' anger. I think it derives from the realization of where their declared convictions perforce must lead. That would be - as per my original essay - a place where the very concepts of morality and ethics are rendered meaningless, a worldview in which a thieving, philandering, serial murdering cannibal is no less commendable a member of the species than a selfless, hard-working philanthropist. (In fact, from an evolutionist perspective, the former is probably better positioned to impart advantages to the gene pool.) It is a thought so discomfiting to an honest atheist that all it can yield him is fury.

Some atheists, no doubt, are not infuriated at all by the implications of their denial of a human calling higher than nature. They revel in the knowledge that whatever they wish to do is fine, as long as they manage not to run afoul of the man-made (and themselves inherently meaningless) laws of society. If skillful enough, they can carefully lift items from the local store, surreptitiously violate others' rights or privacy, and covertly bring harm to those they dislike or who stand in the way of their wants.

Most atheists, though - and they, I contend, are the angry ones - would never dream of doing such things. Because they know that there is right and there is wrong.

Wrong? Is it "wrong" when a dog steals a bone from his fellow canine, or when a mantis eats her mate? Of course not. But when a human being steals or hurts or kills another, it's qualitatively different. Deep down we know we are answerable to Something beyond our own natures.

Or maybe the ineffable Something(tm) we're answerable to is exactly our own nature.

Let's have an actual "evolutionist" perspective. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, 1989 and later editions, chapter 12: "Nice Guys Finish First". This gives a plausible explanation for altruism and moral sense arising not out of self-interest enlightened or un-, but from simple evolutionary advantages — that is, straightforward advantages from cooperation explain why, when there's no higher whatever, we don't all eat each other given half a chance.

Dawkins being one of the most prominent atheists in the world today, Rabbi Shafran would perhaps have read his books if he were truly trying to understand the atheism that he writes about — but is he trying? Believers — and I would contend, this includes most of the vocal ones — are, after all, generally quite willfully incurious about it, marching to the tune of "GOSH. I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAAAAAND..."

[Technorati Dawkins Shafran Zizek atheism atheist morality piety selfish gene strawmen unselfish phenotype]