Dark duos: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
Simone de Beauvoir and her even-more-famous lover Jean-Paul Sartre, darlings of feminists and the left, were loathsome characters in their personal lives as well in their politics, despite the heroic and self-aggrandizing legends they took great pains to establish.
When it first came out I tried to read a 2009 book called A Dangerous Liaison, a joint biography of the two and their relationship. It was slow going, and ultimately I could only bear to read a small portion of it, and skipped around to read smaller sections a bit at a time, finally abandoning it and going for a book review instead.
The book was meticulously researched and sourced; that wasn’t the trouble. It was almost literally unreadable because the story of the two and their twisted (a word that’s exceptionally apropos) relationship was simply too abhorrent and repellent to voluntarily wallow in.
Here are some facts about those giants of philosophy, wonderful examples of personal freedom and love without the shackles of conventional commitment, that independent feminist and her thinking man (remember, also that this review appeared in the Guardian, not known for its conservatism) [emphasis mine]:
Having got the business of God out of the way with precocious ease before they hit puberty (for de Beauvoir, He ‘ceased to exist’ at secondary school; for Sartre, God ‘vanished without explanation’ when he was 12), they launched themselves into a vortex of depravity with all the alacrity of teenagers breaking a parental curfew…
For five decades, they pursued an open partnership that allowed them to engage in ‘contingent’ relationships with others…They hoped to devise new ways of living in a godless world, unrestricted by detested bourgeois institutions. But, in reality, [biographer] Seymour-Jones demonstrates that their quest became a darker, more collusive joint enterprise through the 51 years of their partnership, with deeply unpleasant consequences for those who found themselves towed under by the viscous currents of the Sartrean ‘family’.
De Beauvoir became a glorified procuress, exploiting her profession as a teacher to seduce impressionable female pupils and then passing them on to Sartre, who had a taste for virgins. One of them, Olga Kosakiewicz, was so unbalanced by the experience that she started to self-harm. In 1938, the 30-year-old de Beauvoir seduced her student Bianca Bienenfeld. A few months later, Sartre slept with the 16-year-old Bianca in a hotel room, telling her that the chambermaid would be surprised as he had already taken another girl’s virginity the same day…
Sartre’s seemingly illogical devotion to the Soviet Union in later life is thus viewed through the prism of his passionate affair with Lena Zonina, who was almost certainly a KGB agent. His love of communism was also a replacement for Christianity. However hard Sartre tried to reconcile his devotion to individual freedom with the cyclical view of history perpetrated by Marxism, he never quite convinced his critics, among them Albert Camus. Sartre’s protestation that we should ‘judge communism by its intentions and not by its actions’ seemed grotesque in the face of between 15 and 30 million deaths in the gulag.
But it is in her depiction of de Beauvoir that Seymour-Jones really hits her stride. Although de Beauvoir believed that her relationship with Sartre was ‘the one undoubted success of my life’, Seymour-Jones gently scratches at the varnish of this statement until it flakes off like gilt from an icon. The appearance of unity was only achieved at the cost of de Beauvoir’s emotional unravelling.
The story goes on—and on—and on, a descent into a cesspool of human exploitation and, yes, evil. That these two are still lionized anywhere is an abomination, in part because one can’t look at their intellectual achievements as separate from their private lives. They wanted their lives to be examples of the strength of their philosophy, and they are—only that strength has an opposite valence from the myth they tried to erect (to a certain extent their effort to whitewash their lives was successful, though; witness how few people seem to know this story).
Another review of the book states it quite well:
Ever since their deaths in the 1980s, six years apart, there has been a seepage of disclosure and reappraisal. We have learnt the extent to which this equivocating pair were Communist fellow-travellers for a full decade after the revelations of Stalinist brutalities and the Hungarian uprising destroyed the myth for all but the most bigoted party members. We have learnt how they failed to play any significant part in wartime resistance, but managed to create a subsequent impression that they had been in on it all. Even more tellingly, we have become aware of a bubbling stew of resentment, accusations and conflicting interests and of the existence of adopted heirs (one his and one hers) squabbling over personal papers. There must, one felt, have been something amiss with the structure of their legendary and much-vaunted free union, and with their whole notion of ‘contingent’ attachments around the central one, if it all ended so squalidly – and so drenched in pills and alcohol.
Just how far the Sartre-Beauvoir compact became a travesty of all their claims to honesty and freedom now becomes clear in this excoriating study. Carole Seymour-Jones has gained the confidence of Beauvoir’s ‘daughter’ and literary executor, and has had access to hitherto unknown letters that Beauvoir had declared to be lost; she has also got on the track of the Russian interpreter for whom the 56-year-old Sartre naively hoped to ditch Beauvoir, and of this woman’s KGB handler. She has talked to the Jewish protégée whom Beauvoir abandoned during the war, and to others in the harem (‘the family’) of inadequate women that Sartre maintained to bolster his fragile self-esteem. She tracks Beauvoir’s agonies of unreconstructed female jealousy through her letters and journals, agonies that of course she expunged from her published memoirs but which appear tellingly in her fiction. We also hear about the clandestine affair that Beauvoir maintained for many years with the pliable husband of Olga, another member of the ‘family’. Seymour-Jones’s account is indefatigably detailed and even-handed. She has mastered a great deal of French political life over many decades. She claims, in her introduction, still to admire her main subjects. One wonders how she manages to…
There is a telling moment, halfway through the book, when the author describes her two central figures as ‘glued together by their lies’. She is referring to their shifty repositioning of themselves in the years after the Occupation, but the phrase might stand equally as an epitaph for their entire life together.
Truth is so different from the fiction that the mind stands in awe of the breadth of the Orwellian reversal.
None other than Nietzsche foresaw something of the sort years earlier when he wrote “If God is dead, all is permitted.”
For centuries, the idea of God had provided a metaphysical underpinning for moral values. Without this underpinning, Nietzsche surmised, the moral values of mainstream society would eventually come to seem arbitrary and false. Already, in Nietzsche’s time, leading thinkers were questioning core values that had maintained the social order for centuries. Darwin, Marx and Dostoyevsky were discussing morality in evolutionary, economic and existential terms. Soon, morality would be revealed for what it truly was: a human invention.
What then, Nietzsche wondered? Nihilism, he answered in his final books. ”˜What does nihilism mean? The highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking; “why” finds no answer’ (The Will to Power, §2). If God is dead, everything is permitted.
De Beauvoir and Sartre lived it out, feeding on each other—and off of others more innocent than they—in the process.
On an individual level, not all atheists live the way de Beauvoir and Sartre did, of course. Most live quite moral lives. Nor are the lives of all believers morally exemplary. But a society that abandons the general underpinnings of its moral code, and one that celebrates lives such as de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s, is in big, big trouble.
[ADDENDUM: I thought I’d add some details I wrote in a comment. Sartre and de Beauvoir didn’t just seduce underage women, although that would be bad enough. They seduced her students, which was also a perversion and betrayal of her status as teacher, and she usually began it and then handed them over to him. They toyed with their feelings and abandoned them at some point after the girls had become emotionally dependent on them, causing even greater emotional harm. And if I recall correctly, Sartre and de Beauvoir could not have cared less.
More here [emphasis mine]:
…[O]n October 1, 1929, Sartre suggested their famous pact: they would have a permanent ‘essential’ love.
They would sleep together and have affairs on the side which they must describe to each other in every intimate detail.
During the first years, Sartre embarked on the arrangement with gusto. He liked to sleep with virgins, after which he rapidly lost interest.
This left the highly sexed Simone, now teaching philosophy, constantly frustrated, despite the lovers she took.
It was when she developed a relationship with one of her young female pupils that the first of her love triangles with Sartre came about.
When Sartre had a breakdown after experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, Simone asked her new lover to nurse him.
But she was not prepared for the crippling jealousy she felt when Sartre tried to seduce not only the girl but her younger sister as well.
Simone’s reaction to Sartre’s faithlessness was to sleep with another of her pupils, and when Sartre retaliated by deflowering another virgin, Simone pinched her lover’s 21-year-old boyfriend.
If this couple expected their arrangement would spare them the trials and heartache of a conventional marriage, they were wrong.
Their multiple affairs went on until World War II when Sartre was called up and their sex games had to be conducted through letters.
Left behind in Paris, Simone continued to seduce both men and women, writing titillating descriptions of her activities to Sartre behind the Maginot Line, which reveal her heartlessness and the vulnerability of her conquests…
Tragically, the lives of these girls, who were pathologically jealous of each other over their teacher’s attentions, were permanently blighted.
One took to self-harming, another committed suicide. Most remained pathetically unfulfilled and dependent on the childless Simone, who perversely referred to them as her ‘family’.
Yet Simone had no maternal feelings for them at all. She showed no empathy even when one of them, a Jewish girl whom she seduced when she was 16, nearly lost her life at the hands of the Nazis who were advancing on Paris.
Much much more at the link, all of it abominable.]
[ADDENDUM II: By the way, I happened to go to the Wiki page of de Beauvoir and that of Sartre. There is a very brief mention of open relationships, and on de Beauvoir’s page there is a very short discussion of her relationship with two students. It doesn’t even remotely begin to express what was going on and how pervasive it was. I’m all for “innocent till proven guilty,” but de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s own letters to each other fully describe the scope and depth of their depravity. Her Wiki page nearly ignores it, and his ignores it totally as far as I can see, despite being very lengthy.]
Simone de Beauvoir and Second-Wave Feminism
“……were loathsome characters in their personal lives….”
And , as well, Karl Marx.
He was financially supported by his family and by Friedrich Engels and of course he also had a maid whom he treated like garbage.
When he died, nobody came to his funeral; he was so loathsome and repugnant that even his ideological brethren didn’t bother to show up.
Engels , like all lefties, especially very wealthy ones, ran his family’s factories in the UK. Despite his professed belief in the “labor theory of value” of he never shared his wealth with his workers or gave them any percentage of his profits.
Like all leftists and socialists he was a total hypocrite.
He simply was too busy hanging with the English aristocracy and going on their fox hunts.
Leftists really really are royalists; true believers in an anointed royal class destined – by virtue of their self anointed, self defined, intellectual superiority – to rule over the unwashed masses. Of course, they believe in this as long as they themselves are the rulers.
The European aristocracy of Olde believed that their birth rite determined their superiority. Marxist Leninists believe their intellectual superiority (as defined by themselves) demand that they rule.
I have never understood how people and voters ignore the ACTIONS and life style of potential candidates for office and just pay attention solely to their words.
This latter point is a prescription for disaster.
She also spent some time in Chicago with Nelson Algren.
https://lithub.com/when-nelson-algren-fell-in-love-with-simone-de-beauvoir/
https://t1maker.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/simone-de-beauvoir/
“Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.” Roger Scruton
Beauvoir and Sartre were despicable creaures much like the iconic Che.
While reading the first 75% of Neo’s post, I thought “If only Beauvoir and Sartre had read Dostoyevsky in their youth.”
Then there is the philosophy excerpt lumping Darwin, Marx and Dostoyevsky together in some sense concerning morality. That certainly wasn’t my takeaway from reading Dostoyevsky.
He spends a great deal on ink on Nietzsche’s ideas and nihilism living inside the head of his characters, first in deep psychological terms, then in terms of actions, and finally in terms of catastrophe. His characters are often illustrations of the ideological pathway to horror.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t a particularly nice man either. Wikipedia tries to suggest that maybe he didn’t really mean what he wrote. Or maybe he just didn’t live up to his own ideals very well.
I’m glad to hear that Sartre’s reputation as a resistance fighter has been nailed down as insubstantial.
neo: Ever do a deep dive on another existential odd couple — Hannah Arendt and the Heidegger? A Jew and a Nazi.
At least Camus holds up as a decent human being and a genuine resistance fighter.
huxley:
Oh yes, I have read quite a bit about Arendt and Heiddeger. In fact, among my 700-or-so unpublished drafts (!!) I have one that contains a section about them. Rather than wait for the day when the thing gets published, I’ll copy the relevant part here.
Arendt had a very complex relationship to her own Judaism—raised without any religion, she only become aware that she was a Jew in the context of being the target of anti-Semitism:
Wow, quite a concession. The linked article also describes her relationship with Nazi-sympathizer Heidegger, with whom she’d had an affair when she was a young student of his in Germany and whose collaboration with the Nazis (there is no other word for it) she somewhat-condemned but also rationalized away as:
As I recall, Aldous Huxley had a “modern” relationship with his first wife, Maria. She was a lesbian. She would also arrange women lovers for him, then ease them out when he tired of them.
To my knowledge this did not involve sixteen year-olds or mental cruelty, but maybe I’m making excuses for Uncle Aldous.
Huxley’s worst novel for my money was “The Genius and the Goddess” in which a young physicist moves in with the family of his employer, a Nobel Prize winning scientist, and the young man becomes entangled with the 15 year-old daughter and the gorgeous young wife. Basically a potboiler.
According to wiki Huxley and a co-writer put together a stage version of the book, which closed after four days on Broadway.
Huxley had some success as a Hollywood screenwriter. Perhaps “The Genius” was written with an eye for commercial potential.
As an atheist, I am quite aware that I benefit from a certain amount of “herd immunity” from the much larger believing population, which wards off the ill effects of the sorts of wacky ideas that gain currency when nobody believes in anything.
huxley:
Sartre and de Beauvoir didn’t just seduce underage women, although that would be bad enough. They seduced her students, which was also a perversion and betrayal of her status as teacher, and she usually began it and then handed them over to him. They toyed with their feelings and abandoned them at some point after the girls had become emotionally dependent on them, causing even greater emotional harm. And if I recall correctly, Sartre and de Beauvoir could not have cared less.
More here [emphasis mine]:
Much much more at the link, all of it abominable.
The best comment I ever read about Sartre’s existentialism was: With Sartre’s death he was either wrong and now knows it or he was correct and he doesn’t.
Pretty much sums it up.
neo: Thanks for the summary! So much to read, so little time.
I would be harsher on Heidegger. He was a card-carrying Nazi until the end of the war and never recanted. I’m intrigued by Heidegger and his philosophy, but his relationship to Nazism has always troubled me.
I came to Heidegger through the Landmark Forum, which can be described as “applied Heideggerianism.” As Werner Erhard was looking for a second act to the est Training, he teamed up with a Chilean whiz-kid, Fernando Flores, who had been General Secretary of the Chilean Government under Allende. Flores introduced Erhard to Heidegger’s philosophy. So there are big chunks of Heidegger in the Landmark Forum, though the participants are rarely aware of the source.
neo: Yes, Sartre and Beauvoir were definitely far worse than whatever Huxley and his wife were up to.
Bryan,
As an agnostic I get where you are coming from, but when no one belives in anything very quickly leads to where everyone believes in everything is allowed. I don’t want to go there.
Why not simply say “I don’t know?” That is agnosticism in a nutshell. I simply don’t know because I am mortal. I do know morals and ethics matter.
Neo,
The argument that not believing in God leads to a depraved acts doesn’t stand up well when you consider the numerous Catholic priests through the years who have also done depraved acts [I would say worse in some cases than De Beauvoir and Sartre]. The fact is, depraved acts [all the way to murder] are justified by people and have been for centuries with or without a belief in God. People find ways to justify their actions no matter what their political or religious beliefs.
Anecdotal evidence can always be used to make an argument one way or the other but my view is the actions of De Beauvoir and Sartre were recorded for all time because they were famous. Less famous people throughout world history have done bad things and either were never caught or were caught and punished but no one cared outside of the immediate families involved.
History has also shown there are plenty of bad people who we worship to this day. Dare I mention their names? That might wade into the politically correct waters that many conservatives hate the left for doing. [Let’s cancel De Beauvoir and Sartre!] The fact will always remain that some people in history whom we admire were not angels. That doesn’t mean we should throw out their contribution to society or history.
I have a strong stomach, usually. This was difficult. In fact, I didn’t finish it.
I’ve read some of their stuff. Utterly without attraction.
Follwing them might be a matter for frisson, which I believe is French for “cheap thrills”.
I am Christian, but I’ve never understood the argument that atheists could not be moral or altruistic.
I do understand that an atheist can ascribe awful behavior, such as what neo outlines in this post, to the philosophy of atheism; whereas a Christian who defends evil in the name of Christianity is lying. However, an atheist could also ascribe selfless and cooperative, empathetic behavior to his philosophy.
parker: Sorry if I phrased it awkwardly, but that’s what I meant. Having a community around that does believe in something allows me to “free ride” as a respectful atheist. If that community didn’t exist, my atheism wouldn’t be any different (I seem to be missing the spirituality gene, if you will), but I would have a much less stable existence.
Montage, you said:
As a class, you can’t universally count those persons as persons who believe/d in God (at least, not as the words “belief” and “God” are understood in Catholicism).
I’m confident some of them did/do, of course. And yet they still did wicked things anyway, just as you describe. I don’t deny that persons can believe in God and still do great evil.
But I do want to add some nuance. Your reply to Neo could be construed to mean that belief in God had no value at all with respect to reducing evil behavior. I think that’s incorrect.
Belief in God (as understood by orthodox Jews and Christians) is no guarantee against wicked immorality. But, setting aside my own confidence in God’s supernatural activity and arguing solely from natural psychology, I think an orthodox understanding of God does helps to reduce grave wickedness. I think it has at least a marginal effect among the segment of the population who are the most congenitally-uncomfortable with cognitive dissonance.
Discomfort with cognitive dissonance varies from person to person, of course. But where present in conjunction with orthodox Theism, it naturally serves to curb the enthusiasm with which people embrace evil.
Now, that’s an imperfect safeguard. But heterodox belief is even less of a safeguard! There are exceptions, to be sure, but most of the pervert priests and their coverup-artist bishops were/are what’s usually called “theological liberals” (a euphemism for heretics who hide behind ambiguous expression).
Sure, they “believe in God” (if by “God” you mean something that makes us all feel vaguely connected to the bigness of the universe). They believe each and every item in the Creed (if you don’t mind that they redefine all the individual terms of that Creed in anachronistic ways). They hold that the Magisterium of the Church teaches moral truth (with the caveat that no teaching on morals is held to be a simple or settled matter, its uninterrupted consistency for twenty prior centuries notwithstanding).
If these slippery sods were overly troubled by cognitive dissonance, they’d have resigned their priesthood, gotten primary-school teaching certificates, and moved to California. But since they aren’t particularly troubled by it, they remain priests, guard their language to retain plausible deniability, insinuate themselves into priestly-formation programs, and prey on young seminarians. It’s been an ongoing problem for roughly a century now.
Anyway, I’m not trying to shift the topic to a bunch of papist inside baseball!
All I wanted to say is: YES, belief in God is no guarantee against wicked behavior, because Humans Aren’t Vulcans. But that doesn’t mean it is of NO value for anyone. Belief in God can steer some persons away from evil, provided “belief in God” (and the accompanying moral code) are understood the way they were understood by the Apostle Paul or St. Thomas Aquinas.
(But, of course, if they’re understood in some alternative way, more characteristic of Francesco Coccopalmerio or Joseph Bernardin, all bets are off. Since a large swath of the predator priests you referenced fall into that category, they’re of minimal use as a test-case of the moral value of Theism. For one’s beliefs to have an impact on one’s behavior, it helps to, y’know, actually believe them!)
Montage:
No one here said “not believing in God leads to depraved acts.” In fact, I specifically said otherwise when I wrote:
I also wrote:
By the way, Catholic priests do not abuse children at a higher rate than other clergy, and clergy do not abuse children more often than teachers do. In fact, the evidence is that clergy abuse children less often than teachers do, and Catholic priests abuse children at around the same rates as clergy of other denominations. (See this, for example, and I have read similar statistics before).
One important question would be: do religious people generally commit fewer crimes? The evidence is strong that they commit fewer crimes. That evidence is not anecdotal; it is statistical:
But to get back to Sartre and de Beauvoir. In the case of an abusive member of the Christian or Jewish clergy, the abusive person does not use religion as a justification for the abuse, or if he (or she, although it tends to be “he”) does he’s pretty nuts. On the other hand, Sartre and de Beauvoir seem to have believed that their philosophy freed them to do whatever they wanted, freed from moral constraints about things like sexually abusing underage women. They lived out Nietzsche’s idea that if God is dead, all is permitted. They did what they wanted, and it didn’t go against their belief system, unlike the situation with Catholic priests.
Neo, I see what you’re saying about justification of abuse. That is true with regards to current priests who aren’t using religion or Biblical text to justify their actions. But going further back in history slavery was justified by some Christians. In my opinion slavery is a worst form of abuse. As of course is war. So my larger point is whether or not ‘God is dead’ or not has not prevented some pretty awful things in history. That said I am not dismissing Sartre or de Beauvoir’s behavior. Just giving it context. History as you know is rarely black and white.
R.C.
Thanks for the comment. A lot to think about.
They were bad people. I realized this even when I was young, at least insofar as Sartre was concerned, as I witnessed him stick up for the Soviet Union in any and all circumstance.
Sartre was followed by Michel Foucault, whose primary ambition at first was just to be more hip, more difficult to read and thus difficult to refute. He was a bald-headed gay man who greatly enjoyed the practice of sadomasochism, as a masochist, saying that you could never really understand the “map of your body” until you’d been subject to helpless pain while tied up.
He was an advocate for the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom he interviewed in France, who perhaps in his imperious manner and severe charisma amounted to the leather daddy of Michel’s dreams.
To what extent the masochism of much postmodern secular humanism in some way flows from Foucault’s predilections remains a matter of forbidden debate.
And that latter day Communist, Picasso, wasn’t exactly a resistance hero. Matisse, OTOH, did far better and it improved my opinion of him. Of course, the effective French Resistance was largely a British creation, not the great national movement de Gaulle made it out to be. I visited the resistance museum in Paris and found it sparse and shoddy.
Not to be too hard on artists and philosophers, I believe Schrödinger had a similar arrangement. He was also unhappy at Cambridge where he spent time in WWII, both too gay and too straightlaced for his tastes.
Montage:
That slavery was justified by “some Christians” has very little meaning. I’ll tell you why. First of all, it is justified by no Christians today, as far as I know. Or vanishingly few, who would be roundly condemned by other Christians. But, far more importantly, the fight to end slavery in Africa was a Christian endeavor (please see this). Also, the abolitionist movement was spearheaded by Christians.
De Beauvoir and Friedan, both Stalinists, supplied feminism with its deepest, darkest soul. Communism, Nazism, Feminism, three of kind.
Chuck: I based my Huxley comment on nineties biography, “Huxley in Hollywood” by David King Dunaway, which definitely made for spicier reading than the staid two-vol set by Sybille Bedford I had read previously.
Checking the web I see that Dunaway’s claim for Huxley’s unconventional marriage was in dispute at the New York Review of Books:
David Dunaway begins with a tabloid tale. Maria, Aldous Huxley’s first wife, was a lesbian who invited “women Aldous might like” to tea, “then booked the restaurant and, in some cases, the motel.” No instances are cited. He tells us, further, that when an attractive female was introduced, Maria regarded her with as much predatory interest as did Aldous; but no evidence of an adulterous liaison by either of them is forthcoming. “Maria had arranged a sexy encounter” for her husband, Dunaway goes on, and, true to the author’s hit-and-run manner, he provides neither any specifics about it nor even any indication that it in fact took place.
–Robert Craft, “Making Hay with Huxley”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/05/31/making-hay-with-huxley/
I’m not so sure. Huxley always moved in a fast set of creative, unconventional people.
Although I take Craft’s later point that Huxley was a handsome, charming and famous man — he wouldn’t have had that much trouble attracting lovers on his own if he wished. However, my impression is that Huxley was devoted to his work as a writer and the daily routines to support that life. I question whether Huxley would have expended much energy chasing down women and managing affairs if his wife were willing to do it for him. That part rang true for me.
Dennis Prager has a very relevant PJM post:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-question-that-explains-almost-everything/
The question that explains almost everything. For believers, perhaps “Do you believe in God?” For secularists (including atheists, agnostics, humanists, etc.) he suggests some possible policy questions on Trump, abortion, gays.
For society: “What in life gives you the most meaning?”
Others like CS Lewis have noted that there is a “God shaped space” in everybody’s heart, which is filled with something. Lewis notes that most folk who do not believe in God, instead believe in socialism, communism, libertarianism, or some other ideals. Today I’m sure he would add feminism and climate alarmism. Filling their belief space in their hearts, what is giving them meaning.
I used to claim I was agnostic. But I came to understand and believe in “Good” and “Evil” — which are absolutes, and which come from somewhere. That somewhere is God. Without God, nobody’s actions are “Evil” = “against God” = “against Good”.
Civilizations, and societies, which believe in God, good, and evil, are more likely to have more folk more often doing more good, and fewer folk doing evil / immoral stuff. That’s one of the only Truths available from a lot of “political science” and sociology, altho so many professors don’t like it. The “smart elite” aspire to the freedom ideals of Sartre, free from the restriction against doing evil.
Freedom is important for individuals, and for society. But not unlimited freedom. The proper boundaries of freedom to act are those where the actions are evil.
It’s not always in a society’s net benefit to punish those who do evil, but it’s bad for society to idolize or support such persons — it’s elite distributed Kool-Aid poison.
For them that don’t have football, there’s always religion.
–“Night Moves” (the Gene Hackman film)
Nice retorts Neo.
I had read that slavery in France in the 1600’s or 1700’s when the Catholic church ruled, had strict laws governing it. In addition to prohibiting beatings, slave owners were not allowed to work their slaves on weekends. This time was available to slaves to work for cash employment. If they managed to save up enough cash they could buy their own freedom, at the current market price, and many did.
Other historians push back that French colonies were not very particular about enforcing those laws.
Obviously, I’m no apologist for slavery, but the topic is slightly more gray than I would have guessed.
Neo, thanks for taking time to post the information about Catholic Priests. Although it is certainly horrible that any Priest has sexually abused any child, their rates of abuse are exaggerated in our culture, as you state. Maybe because celibacy seems like such an odd thing to so many?
I agree with Neo’s point that de Beauvoir and Sartre were selfish, unempathetic people who had a sick view of humanity and left a wake of human destruction as their legacy. For those defending them, it sounds a bit like, “Yeah, but Hitler was a vegan who treated his dog very well.” In the realms of science and invention it makes sense to separate the personal life of the discoverer from his or her work. Had Dr. Jonas Salk been an ax murderer I think the proper course of action would have been to still employ his vaccine to eradicate polio. However, philosophers, politicians, teachers, religious leaders… They earn their bread advising others how to live. Examination of their personal lives is not only appropriate, it is essential. Had Dr. Salk taken his own vaccine and developed polio, one would be using sound judgement to not follow his instruction to take it oneself. De Beauvoir and Sartre were teaching and preaching a philosophy that they claimed was better than the prevailing wisdom of the day. What happened to their lives and those around them when they “took their own medicine?”
Regarding atheists living a moral life…
Ants and bees are great examples of living things that are not religious who do altruistic things for the good of their communities. Why couldn’t an atheist come to a similar conclusion based on the same reasons Mother Nature has bred those traits into other animals through evolution?
An atheist marries and has children. It doesn’t break a commandment of a god to commit adultery, or not provide for his family, or educate his children, but what will the consequences be to him? He risks destroying his relationship with his wife. He risks losing money and possessions to her in a divorce proceeding. If he does not raise his kids to be hard working and responsible and diligent he may have to continue to support them in his dotage; meaning there will be fewer funds available for his personal enjoyment… Also, society may look unfavorably upon him, jeopardizing his ability to earn a living. Which almost certainly would have happened to de Beauvoir and Sartre had their personal histories become public.
One can see how even a bachelor, atheist fireman would charge into a burning building to save others. Yes, if he dies his existence ceases, entirely, but if the sacrifice of one helps more than one live doesn’t that make sense? One could argue it is even more likely an atheist will do that, vs. one who believes in an afterlife. If there is an afterlife, the folks who perish in the building fire are fine anyway. Why bother to save their mortal lives? To an atheist, their moral lives are all they have, so maximizing the number of humans who enjoy a mortal existence is sound reasoning. If evolution tilted that way we would have an innate desire to help others survive. Evolution should have weeded out most of the selfish folk and kept them from breeding.
And, if a religious fireman is only doing his job because he is afraid of punishment from a god, is he much of a religious man?
Has anyone here read any of Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy? (Age of Reason, The Reprieve, Iron in the Soul/Troubled Sleep) If so, would you recommend reading it?
I’ve always found C.S. Lewis and Dennis Prager suspect in their rush to cheerlead for the Judeo-Christian ethos.
Humans survive better with meaning in their lives. True. But that would indicate we have a meaning-shaped hole, not necessarily a God-shaped hole, unless one defines God as meaning.
I’ve put in my time as a Catholic and later as a born-again Christian, so I have some idea how Christianity works. I’m now back to being a free-thinking agnostic, which is a relief. I still have affection for Christianity but it is such a bizarre belief system. If there is a God, I can’t believe he set things up specifically as Christianity tells us.
However, there’s no doubt in my mind that Christianity fills the meaning-shaped hole well and is more constructive than the meanings the Left has offered. But that doesn’t make Christianity true nor does it prove the existence of God.
I consider Islam and Mormonism entirely bogus religions but clearly both provide meaning for their followers, who largely benefit from that meaning.
The historically recent attempts of secularists to find meaning and build lives without God have not worked well on a mass scale, but it may not always be so. Quite a lot of religions came and went before we found ones that worked reasonably well.
LOL
The Catholic church was was infiltrated by swarms of homosexual men in the 60’s and 70’s who went there to roost, and who were enabled to do so by precursors who had already gotten their nose under the tent, and then used various psychological theories popular at the time in order to justify allowing males with known dispositions to go on to receive holy orders.
“As long as they remain celibate, what’s the problem with their having that orientation?” Yeah, what bullshit. Didn’t work out that way, and it doesn’t work that way when you start off with an intrinsic disorder.
The figures for abuse compiled by commissioned Church reports reveal that 80% were same sex, male on male, in orientation.
The population of Catholic clergymen went from having approximately twice the number of homosexuals populating the priesthood as compared to the general population in the 1950’s, to about six times in the 1980’s.
The personal histories of these perpetrators showed that nothing short of expulsion or prison would stop them: Not treatment centers, not transfers, and certainly not some “fear of God”.
Since the seminary acceptance rules have been changed back to more traditional standards, the rates of abuse have been plummeting … despite the fact that the episcopate is still very “gay”, and seeking to undermine the new standards.
Only a clown who had witnessed all this, could continue to believe that there is no likely risk of serious harm occurring to the interests of a healthy heterosexual society as a result of mainstreaming homosexuals into critical institutions.
And only a clown could believe that these persons who nested in the Church any more believed in the God of the scriptures, than the Cambridge spies believed in England and patriotism.
I’m not sure there is a God, but if there is not then I am sure there is no Mother Nature that is anything but a meaningless process which occasionally exhibits some signs of local order to those incidentally conscious entities that the blind environmental filtration process have conditioned to seek it.
But to your question:
There is nothing stopping a social insect from behaving the way it was programmed to behave when dealing with another of its swarm.
It just doesn’t deserve any credit, for doing so.
I’m sure that atheists can be moral in exactly the same way. They just don’t deserve any human credit for it when they do.
DNW,
I meant “Mother Nature” as a stand in for the emotionless and consciousless inexorable march of evolution. I think we are making the same point; a drone bee’s behavior is individually unselfish, but benefits the hive and ensures the birth and maturation of more bees.
I differ with you, however, in that I think anyone behaving kindly or unselfishly towards another deserves “human credit.”
As far as I can tell, to say “I believe in God,” is almost meaningless. What’s important is whether you believe in a God who set down a set of rules for you to follow, and who, someday, somehow, will judge you on whether you have, or have not followed them. If you don’t, as far as I’m concerned, you might as well be an atheist.
The mass shootings, the estranged husband-wife and children shootings, the high school and junior high school teachers having sex with their students, and all the other eruptions of the “Crazy Years” we are witnessing are all evidence of people who are thinking “There is no right or wrong, there is no judgement, therefore I can do, and should do, whatever I want.”
The Las Vegas mass murder is a perfect example. No physical brain abnormalities, no membership in a murderous religion or cult, no sign of anti-outdoor concert or anti-country music hatred. What’s then the motive? It seems to me pretty clear — if there is no God, if there is no ultimate reward and punishment, why shouldn’t you carry out your basest desires, then shoot yourself?
@ Saunders,
I think that your reasoning basically holds up. And most honest morals nihilists [those who are persuaded that morality cannot be deduced from objective imperatives] do as well. Hence, although they may suggest that we behave in what have traditionally been viewed as moral or even “altruistic” (a relatively new and somewhat invented term) ways, they are reduced to strategies that rely on emotion and behavioral conditioning.
The question then, is not why can’t someone act altruistically, but rather “why should they, if they don’t feel like it”?
And of course one can act generously and supportively of those one finds congenial, and still go sailing about on long ships to foreign locales and enjoy massacring the farmers and monks one catches unawares.