It is said that self-seeking hypocrites used these virtuous sentiments to delude their followers and achieve personal ends. Doubtless, there have been such and a great many of them. But they never caused the bloody terrors caused by the purest “idealists.” The worst butchers were the most sincere. Robespierre asked and wished nothing for himself. Lenin asked and wished nothing for himself. But the record of Attila is that of an amateur compared to theirs. At the apex of every great tragedy of mankind there stands the figure of an incorruptible altruist. Yet, after every disaster men have said: “The ideal was right, but Robespierre was the wrong man to put it into practice,” (or Torquemada, or Cromwell, or Lenin, or Hitler, or Stalin) and have gone on to try it again.
But what is one to think of creatures who are willing, century after century, to bear every form of agony, every kind of martyrdom, for the sake of that which they consider as their moral ideal? Are they creatures devoid of moral instinct? Is not the determination to act according to one’s conception of right, no matter what the price, precisely the attribute of a high moral sense? Men have been robbed, enslaved, tortured, slaughtered in the name of altruism. They have accepted, forgiven, and borne it, because their ideal demanded it of them. The price they have paid in unspeakable suffering should have granted them, at least, a badge of virtue.
But the nature of their ideal has robbed them even of this earned honor.
A true premise, once accepted, leads to a greater truth and a clearer knowledge with each subsequent step deduced from it. A false premise leads to a greater falsehood and a blacker evil, until, followed to its ultimate conclusion, it brings total destruction, as it must. The spiritual tragedy of mankind has now reached this last step. The spectacle of horror which the world presents at this moment has never been equaled and cannot be surpassed. This is the end of the blind alley of men’s thinking. And there is no way out—save all the way back, to the beginning, to the first principle which permitted men to be led into this.
The ideal of altruism has now taken its ultimate toll. We are the witnesses of its climax. We see mankind destroying itself before our eyes. We see the price it is paying. We glance back at its history and we see the price it has paid. But we look on and say: “This noble ideal is beyond human nature, because men are imperfect and evil.”
Isn’t it time to stop and to question that noble ideal instead?
September 6, 1943
Axiom
Moral law is a code of right and wrong. The moral law of man must be based on his nature as man. This is implicit by definition. That which is right and proper to man must be right and proper to man. A moral code not based on man’s nature would have to be stated like this: that which is right and proper to man is that which is improper and impossible to him. Whatever such a statement might be, it is not a statement of morality, but of total evil, by its own terms. It leaves man no choice but to acknowledge himself as evil by nature, in which case no morality is possible to him, or to destroy himself. ([
Note added later:
] “In order to exist I must be evil. If I do not wish to be evil, I must not exist. Existence is evil.” This is where I’ll discuss the morality of altruism.)
What is man’s nature? The definitive factor must be that which is peculiar to man, that which distinguishes him from all other entities, objects or creatures. The attribute peculiar to man is the rational faculty. It is that which, in all known nature, is possessed only by man.
([Note added later:
] Define the rational faculty here. Truth to the facts of the outside world.)
Man exists. He is alive. He is distinguished from all other existing objects and living creatures by the faculty of reason. He is a rational being.
Every species of living creature survives through the exercise of that attribute which is its particular, distinguishing faculty. All its other attributes are adapted to the mode of existence set by the one which is its means of survival. If it were otherwise, if two fundamental attributes of a creature, both essential to its nature and to its survival, were in irreconcilable conflict
([note added later:
] nail
this
down)—the creature would have to perish. The attributes and nature of a bird are set by the determining factor of flight as its means of survival. The attributes and nature of a tiger are set by the determining factor of predatory hunting as its means of survival. That which in art is style, that which in music is leitmotif—the central theme, the basic principle, the determining conception which sets and rules every detail of the whole—is, in living nature, the creature’s means of survival.
Man survives through the exercise of his rational faculty.
That is his sole means of survival.
Man comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force guided by instinct. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle, and no instinct to guide him. He cannot obtain sustenance for his body except through the exercise of his rational faculty. He must plant his food or hunt it. Planting requires a long, consistent process of thought—of observation and logical deduction. Hunting requires weapons; man cannot hunt with his hands, his quarries are his superiors in speed or force, and making weapons requires a process of thought. Man could not survive even as an herbivorous creature by picking fruit and berries at random. He has no instinct to tell him which plants are beneficial to him and which are a deadly poison. He can learn it only by conscious experimentation or by the observation of other living creatures who do not touch poisonous plants—a procedure which, in either case, is a process of thought.
([Note added later:
] Here the transition from the material to the spiritual.)
From these simplest primary necessities on through his every other need, his clothes, his shelter, his philosophy, on to his greatest achievements, from the flint and arrowhead to a modern skyscraper, everything man is and everything he has comes from a single attribute—the function of his reasoning mind. The Empire State Building was not erected by instinct.
But it is the nature of the rational faculty that it implies choice and the possibility of error. Instinct is infallible within the limits of its sphere. Nature gives an animal both the means and the method of survival; he cannot do wrong in his method; he does what he must; if he is confronted by a fact outside the provisions of his instinct, he can do nothing and he perishes. (This can be observed in any country road: wild creatures that run from the approach of man or horse do not run from a speeding automobile; instinct has not armed them against an automobile, as it has not armed cows off railroad tracks. The formulation of an abstraction—such as the rule that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time—is not done by instinct.)
([Note added later:
] He is given the tool; the nature of the tool sets the method of its use, but man must discover that method. Reason applies to nature—and to himself.)
It is man’s distinction that he is given the means, but not the method of survival. He must discover the method himself. The process of discovery is a long series of steps—of observation, deduction, conclusion. The possibility of error hangs over every step. Nothing guarantees in advance the correctness of his deductions. It is up to him. One error in the process grows with each succeeding step—until, if pursued far enough, it leads to the final proof of error, to destruction. Man’s life ultimately depends upon every conclusion within his brain.
The process of deduction is a succession of answers to questions, on a single basic pattern: “Yes” or “No.” The possibility of differentiating between a “yes” or a “no” is the capacity of choice. Choice is the ultimatum of man’s existence. The process of differentiating is an act of choice. The rational process is a succession of such acts. The first commandment of an animal’s survival is only: “Act or perish.” The act is prescribed. The first commandment of man’s survival carries a fateful responsibility: “Choose right before acting or perish.”
But the responsibility goes deeper than that. It is not only that man survives through the rational faculty which functions through constant choice. It is that he also has the choice of exercising his rational faculty or not. He can make an error in judgment. He can act against his own judgment. He can suspend all judgment.
([Note added later:
] Explain what it means to act without judgment.) An animal cannot act against his instinct nor suspend it. He enjoys a safety man can never have—the invariable operation of his means of survival. He cannot act against his own nature. Man can. Man can stop his source of existence. Man can choose not to act as a rational being. Man can choose not to function as a man. His destruction will be the ultimate price—but it will not be the immediate consequence. The rational faculty operates through time. It does not grant man the safety of an immediate retribution for error. The greater man’s knowledge, the more complex the factors involved in any given act—the longer the interval before the consequences of that act become evident to him. At any moment of his existence, man lives with the possibility of acting as an agent of his own destruction.
Just as man must discover the methods that permit him to obtain sustenance from the physical world, so he must discover the methods that permit his means of survival—his rational faculty—to function. Nothing is granted to him automatically, neither the results of the operation of his reason nor even the operation itself. He must discover the rules which that operation requires. He must direct his actions by these rules. He must learn to act in accordance with his nature as a rational being.
Man cannot give life to himself. But its preservation and continuation are up to him. Life is given to him—survival is not.
Man cannot change his nature. But its realization and fulfillment are up to him. Being a man is given to him—remaining a man is not. He is the only creature who can slip beneath his own stature. He is man only so long as he functions in accordance with the nature of a rational being. When he chooses to function otherwise, he is no longer man. There is no proper name for the thing which he then becomes. It is not an animal—it does not possess the animal’s equipment of survival. It cannot survive, but it has that interval of time at its disposal before the consequences of its choice catch up with it, an interval as a prelude to destruction, a process of disintegration like a slow-rotting disease. Thus it exists for a while—a thing of corruption and death.
A flea does not have the responsibility of remaining a flea. It can be nothing else. A tiger does not have the responsibility of remaining a tiger. Man must remain man through his own choice. Nature guarantees him nothing, not even his own nature. Such is the penalty and the honor of being a rational creature.
([Note added later:
] Careful here. It may be [asked]: well, if his nature is something relative, arbitrary—how can you base morality on his nature? His nature must be achieved by him. The process here, in effect, is this: man is raw material when he is born; nature tells him: “Go ahead, create yourself. You can become the lord of existence—if you wish—by understanding your own nature and by acting upon it. Or you can destroy yourself. The choice is yours.”)
Such is the origin of man’s moral faculty.
The moral faculty—the ability to distinguish between right and wrong—is implicit in the rational faculty. The act of choice is the act of establishing values: the accepted and the rejected. Yes or no, right or wrong, good or evil.
([Note added later:
] Unwarranted jump. A transition is needed.)
A moral code is man’s statement of the principles that permit him to function as man. It is his protection against becoming his own destroyer. It is his code of rules for the preservation of that entity of consciousness which we call his soul or his spirit.
The first, most earnest, most crucial question man asks of himself is: Am I right? An animal cannot conceive of such a question. Man cannot escape it. In one form or another, it rings through his whole life. It sets the leitmotif of his existence—the style of his soul. No matter what he has accepted as his conception of the “good” and no matter how often he betrays it, his desire to remain good has the fierce intensity of a primary instinct. His quest for moral justification has a quality of desperate urgency. Men have died willingly for an ideal. It is said, of such cases, that their moral instinct was stronger than their instinct of self-preservation.
([Note added later:
]
This is
their instinct of self-preservation.) This is not true. The fact is that men—whether they have consciously stated it or not—know that their moral instinct is the first condition of their self-preservation.
All moral systems speak of spiritual death as penalty for immorality. This statement contains all the dangers and possibilities of deception inherent in any half-truth. Man is urged to save his soul at the price of his physical destruction—an unwarranted contraposition. It is true that man destroys his spirit in breaking the principles of morality. But the whole truth is much wider than that. The whole truth is that man cannot preserve his body unless he preserves his soul. His spiritual survival precedes his physical survival-the last is not possible without the first. And if man is placed in a situation where he must choose between spiritual evil or physical death, he chooses the last, because the choice is death in either case; only, in the first case, it is a dreadful form of slow disintegration which no man can choose once he has understood it. The moral man is the one who understands.
([Note added later:
] This is where altruism cut man’s soul off from his physical reality.)
But if a moral code is a necessity of man’s survival, what happens when his code is in opposition to his survival? Then man finds himself in a state of perpetual internal war—a civil war against himself. This is the state in which he has lived for centuries. Let us now clear away the wreckage—and the rubbish.