Rules for the Plebs

Living Well Above the Herd

There are few things more likely to stir up cynicism and disgust than “leaders” who moralistically lecture everyone about their duties and responsibilities, whilst they themselves live irresponsibly (by their own declared rules).  Hypocrisy always has a nasty smell. 

We are all familiar with “celebrities” who hector the world about poverty, global warming, and a host of other fashionable causes, only to live ostentatious lifestyles which loudly proclaim they believe themselves to be above their particular set of moralistic rules for the rest of humanity.  We are familiar with the carbon footprint of one Al Gore–dedicated warrior against global warming–whose extravagant lifestyle and business dealings put the lie to his pontificating.  Gore is a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of chap. 

The Greens in general are notorious for this kind of dissembling.  Greenpeace has hit the news recently over just such hypocrisy.

Greenpeace’s carbon footprint in mouth

By Emily Gosden

NZ Herald

One of Greenpeace’s most senior executives commutes 400km each way to work by plane, the environmental group has admitted.

Pascal Husting, the programme director at Greenpeace International, said he began “commuting between Luxembourg and Amsterdam” when he took the job in 2012 and made the round trip about twice a month.
The flights, costing 250 ($390) return, are paid by Greenpeace, even though it campaigns to cut air travel, arguing the growth in flying “is ruining our chances of stopping dangerous climate change”.

One volunteer described the arrangement as “almost unbelievable”. Another was going to cancel their donation after a series of disclosures about financial mismanagement in documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper.  Greenpeace was forced to apologise for a “serious error of judgment” last week, after it emerged it had lost 3.75 million of public donations when a member of staff tried unauthorised currency dealing. KLM airline said each round trip Husting made would generate 142kg of carbon dioxide emissions – a carbon footprint equivalent over two years to consuming 17 barrels of oil, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. . . .

Richard Lancaster, who said he’d been involved with Greenpeace since the 1980s, responded: “I volunteer with Greenpeace but work in the commercial world and if I took a job in another country I’d expect to move to where the job is … I find Pascal’s travel arrangements almost unbelievable.” Another supporter wrote: “So disappointed. Hardly had 2 pennies to rub together but have supported GP for 35+ years. Cancelling [direct debit].”

Greenpeace has campaigned to curb air travel and end “needless” domestic flights. In a briefing on aviation the group said: “In terms of damage to the climate, flying is 10 times worse than taking the train.”

Here is another example, closer to home.  Auckland City Council has been hectoring everyone for years about the need for public transport and for the public to support it, both with ever-increasing city taxes, and with their patronage.  But now it has emerged the Council is funding a private shuttle service for its staff around town because the public transport options (buses, trains) are too slow.  Let everyone else travel the slow route.  We are far too important to be reduced to travelling on buses and trains.  Yet another case of “do as I say, not as I do”.  

First it was the mayor catching the train while being followed by his ratepayer-funded chauffeur-driven car.  Now, Len Brown’s staff have been riding in special shuttles zipping around Auckland – apparently because it’s faster than the public transport they provide to ratepayers.  Council-controlled Auckland Transport has started a shuttle bus service for its staff, surprising public transport watchers.

The Herald has discovered a second shuttle at Auckland Council and plans for a third in the works.  With Auckland Transport costing its shuttle at $122,000 for a six-month trial, it could set the bill for moving council staff around Auckland close to $700,000 a year.

What should a good citizen do?  Our advice is to Ignore the pontificating moralisers who are always trying to tell others how they should live their lives.  Step out and enjoy the free air.  Eschew hypocrisy.  Christians especially should heed such advice.  We are to be merry warriors.  We are to laugh at the foibles and hypocrisies of the world.  We are to focus, first on self-government, then on our families, and our church congregations and fellowships, then upon being a good servant to our employers, and then on our neighbours–seeking to do good to all men, but especially to those of the household of faith.  We would do well to ignore the fashionable, ephemeral moralities of the world and laugh loudly at its attempts to make us feel guilty.  In reality, “they”–the moralisers–don’t believe their own press.  More fool we if we believe it, or allow ourselves to be manipulated into complying. 

Hypocritical Cant

So, What’s Wrong With . . . ?

We have all heard of “convenient Christians”–folk who seek to maintain a Christian façade when it is socially, politically, or personally convenient to do so.  But, it is all part of acting out a persona.  Such people are rightly called hypocrites, an epithet of disdain.

But far more common, yet equally despicable is the hypocrisy of Unbelievers.  It is impossible to describe adequately the tawdry hypocrisy of Unbelievers prattling on about this evil and that wrong whilst they know–and we all know–they don’t believe a word of it.  Oh, maybe they tell themselves they are true born again believers, who detest whatever particular ignominy of the day.  But in truth they have no foundation, no principles, and no ethics upon which their high dudgeon can be sustained.  At best it manifests mere cant.

Since Unbelievers reject the Living God, anything is possible and acceptable in principle.  Anything which is allegedly not acceptable or wrong or immoral is not actually, for “wrong” and “immorality” have no ultimate or operational meaning.  What is “wrong” to one is “right” to another.  One man’s treasure is another’s rubbish.  Who knows?  Who cares? 

We suspect that more than the odd couple know this to be the case.  That is why Unbelievers are so shrill about their moralities and their principles and their ethics.
  Here is the nub of their hypocrisy.  On the one hand, they will sonorously inform us that there are no absolutes, no ultimate ethical standards–only what seems good for the moment.  On the other, they will rail and rant against this “wrong” and that “evil”. 

Alison Mau is the go-to girl for enlightenment these days.  Alison is a crusading bi-sexual.  She was asked recently for her august assessment of the state of sexism in New Zealand these days.

Television presenter Ali Mau said she believed benevolent sexism (that is, holding doors open for women) was predominantly “an older generation thing” that would probably die out with her parents’ generation, or perhaps with her own generation.  “These people who protest that it’s chivalrous – I think there’s some deep-seated sexism there.”

Sexism?  And your issue is?  Sexism or non-sexism, Alison–it’s all rubbish, nothingness, meaningless.  As you yourself have proclaimed publicly innumerable times–“If it feels right, do it”.  There is nothing holy in any absolute sense whatever.  Only opinions, preferences, cant, and prejudice.  For you to speak or think or imply otherwise is rank hypocrisy.  Get a life and grow up.  Become a serious, truthful, non-hypocritical Unbeliever.  Spare us all this high moral dudgeon. 

Whilst we may laugh at Mau’s foibles and fashionable “principles” the same reality holds true for much more serious stuff.  Take rape for example.  How can Unbelief be in any way consistent or truthful or believable in its condemnation of it.  Nature does not support such a condemnation.  Reason, unhinged from any absolute moral standards, is a wax nose to be twisted into any shape of convenience. It cannot condemn outright or in any absolute sense.  Reason depends upon premises, and the premises of Unbelief will admit no moral absolutes of any kind.  

The media and the Commentariat have been agog over some young barbarians getting girls drunk, then raping them whilst they are insensate.  At one very important level their moral outrage testifies to this truth: that they are made in God’s image and are accountable to Him and His law.  Their outrage testifies to the Living God and His creation of all things and His absolute ethical demands of mankind.  They cannot help but speak out against such horrors (at least for the moment). 

But in their professed Unbelief they cannot ground their opprobrium and outrage in anything meaningful.  Unbelief is forced to acknowledge that it can rise no higher than what will be, will be.  There is no morality involved.  There is only might making right.  And in this case the barbarians had the might, so they had the right.  That’s the best Unbelief can offer.

So, our call to all those who are morally outraged at date rape is simple.  Lay aside your hypocrisy.  Either bow in humility before your Creator and accept all of His law for your life or stop moralising about things which you have no foundation or basis to condemn. 

If Unbelief is right, stop hypocritically moralising and be consistent with your atheistic assumptions.  If it is not right, and your hypocrisy is disgusting to you, then repent and return to your Creator in the days that remain for you upon the earth.

Letter from the UK

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton – review

A banal and impudent argument for the uses of religion

Terry Eagleton
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 12 January 2012 10.00 GMT

The novels of Graham Greene are full of reluctant Christians, men and women who would like to be rid of God but find themselves stuck with him like some lethal addiction. There are, however, reluctant atheists as well, people who long to dunk themselves in the baptismal font but can’t quite bring themselves to believe. . . .

Such reluctant non-belief goes back a long way. Machiavelli thought religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful way of terrorising the mob. Voltaire rejected the God of Christianity, but was anxious not to infect his servants with his own scepticism. Atheism was fine for the elite, but might breed dissent among the masses. . . .  There was one God for the rich and another for the poor. Edward Gibbon, one of the most notorious sceptics of all time, held that the religious doctrines he despised could still be socially useful. So does the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas today.

Diderot, a doyen of the French Enlightenment, wrote that the Christian gospel might have been a less gloomy affair if Jesus had fondled the breasts of the bridesmaids at Cana and caressed the buttocks of St John.
Yet he, too, believed that religion was essential for social unity. Matthew Arnold feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, an out-and-out materialist, designed an ideal society complete with secular versions of God, priests, sacraments, prayer and feast days.

There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. “I don’t believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should” is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensable to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn’t be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion “sporadically useful, interesting and consoling”, which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one’s life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion “teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober”, as well as instructing us in “the charms of community”. It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton’s well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to “promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community”. It is really a version of the Big Society. . . .

Religious faith is reduced to a set of banal moral tags. We are invited to contemplate St Joseph in order to learn “how to face the trials of the workplace with a modest and uncomplaining temper”. Not even the Walmart management have thought of that one. As a role model for resplendent virtue, we are offered not St Francis of Assisi but Warren Buffett.
What the book does, in short, is hijack other people’s beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an astonishingly impudent enterprise. It is also strikingly unoriginal. Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer.

The late Christopher Hitchens, who some people think is now discovering that his broadside God Is Not Great was slightly off the mark, would have scorned any such project. He did not consider that religion was a convenient fiction. He thought it was disgusting. Now there’s something believers can get their teeth into …

• Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right is published by Yale.