Facts and Truth in Morals: "Humankind cannot bear much Reality" (T. S. Eliot)

                                                                           orc

 

    The form of misconceiving objects is so similar to the form of misconceiving states of affairs, as the subject-predicate form is involved in both cases. Compare these examples:

 

·       S1 – A vixen is a female fox.

·       S2 – The Jews are a parasitic, malevolent race that through adaptation has come to seem like they belong to the human race but whose collective purposes include scheming to destroy the human race.

·       S3 – Black Africans are members of the human race who as a whole possess significantly more limited intellectual, moral, and cultural capacities, and at the same time heightened sexual and violent potency.

·       S4 – A witch is a woman with magical powers given to her by Satan to cause suffering on earth.

 

     If S4 is true and if, as most medieval people thought, witches really existed, then burning them at the stake would be a logical thing to do. We don’t burn witches at the stake because we don’t believe witches are real. It seems that some of our most important actions, morally speaking, are based on judgments of fact. S4 expresses a definition, which expresses an idea of Jewish people, and it happens to be false – well, not so much false as insane perhaps. Such creatures do not exist in the world. If they did, then perhaps the Nazi worldview wouldn’t have been so insane. But they don’t. Were the Nazis merely guilty of getting the facts wrong?

        A lexical definition expresses the generalized, abstracted meaning of terms as used by the speakers of a language. Language users typically – not always – agree on the range of uses for the words of their language. The philosophy of Hell would have it that conceptual statements like those above are self-evident by convention alone: thus, relative to a language community, it is true by definition that a fox is a female vixen, a line is the shortest distance between two points, a Jew is a malevolent simulacrum of a human being, and a black African is an intellectually, morally, and culturally inferior human being. Given that a member of the language community knows or is in a position to know the definitions, he could be said to ‘know’ that a vixen is a female fox, a Jew is malevolent, etc., but in contrast to knowing that ‘the sun is shining now’ is false, nothing here is known about the world outside language; he only knows the conventions as to how the words are used in his language. Different languages, of course, would attach different meanings – here especially to ‘Jew’ and ‘black African.’

        It is confusing to think that ‘being a female’ and ‘being a fox’ are facts about ‘being a vixen’: they are criteria that tell us what a vixen is. That is what the expression of a concept does. Extend this logic to S2: it is confusing to think that ‘being malevolent and parasitic’ as well as ‘belonging to a different race (race being understood in analogy to our ‘species’)’ and ‘having the purpose of destroying other races’ are contingent facts about ‘being a Jew’; they function rather criteria that tell the users of that language what a Jew is. Now this concept of ‘Jew’ is not only different from the many sub-conceptualizations of ‘Jew’ (e.g. attempts by orthodox parties in Israeli to define ‘Jew’ more precisely); it is a different concept altogether, one that has about as much contact with real Jews as Tolkien’s orcs have with confederate soldiers in the Civil War (from the Northern point of view). 

       People are free to imagine malevolent races – usually for all kinds of bad reasons. The problem arises when in this case real people are seen in the light of such fantastic concepts, are seen as exemplifications of them – worse, if Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is right about this, the fantastic concepts have been part of the cognitive framework of a culture, as the general fantastic concept ‘Jew’ seems to have been for medieval culture and a fantastic racial sub-conceptualization was for Nazi culture. And given that the ‘deviousness’ of mythological Jews was built into the fantastic concept, no evidence of the real humanity of the Jewish people being murdered and tormented in unimaginable ways counted in the eyes of their mostly deluded tormentors except as evidence of deviousness. (I say ‘mostly’ to leave open the possibility that some of these tormentors recognized the mythological nature of the fantastic concept and just enjoyed the evil as an end in itself.)

       Or, it is as though Germans in WWII would have been seen as orcs to be killed without mercy in the spirit of ridding the world of an utterly malevolent, deformed, non-human race: as in fact they were seen by some, perhaps including ‘Bomber Harris’; and some Germans did their best to transform themselves into something non-human. Like the concept of ‘orc,’ the Nazi fantasy concept of ‘Jew’ or the WWII concept of German are empty sets, at least in the actual world we live in. Seen in dry epistemological terms, the disconnect with reality is best described like this: concepts were formed based on fantasy without contact with the real world, and then the fantasy concepts were applied axiomatically to the real world. In terms of the epistemology of Hell, of course, one would have to say: that given that there is no real world (Nelson Goodman), there is nothing but logical constraint on concept formation (internal coherence). Thus there is no fact of the matter about ‘Jews’ or ‘black Africans’ or any other demonized or degraded group. Anything else would be a limit on human autonomy! Outrageous. If the metaphysics of Hell cannot purely logically be refuted logically, this at least seems to be a definitive moral refutation of it.

       We demean or caricature that which we want to destroy and our reasons for wanting to destroy it have nothing to do with the caricatures we create to rationalize the destruction. 

    Of course creating or popularizing evil fantasy concepts is the stock and trade of the Trump cult: immigrants are vermin poisoning good American blood. We can’t seem to eradicate this kind of thinking from the world. We hear from the MAGA world it is protected by free speech.