Dear Editor...

I recently wrote this letter to the editor at this online magazine re: there "100 most dangerous questions in science":

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_print.html

Here is my letter to them. They have (oddly) yet to publish it...

Dear Edge Editor,

With respect to your 2006 issue of “Dangerous Ideas” in science, I would like to humbly suggest that every single one of your contributors missed the single most dangerous idea to modernity. This omission is so heinous – due to the pervasiveness of this particular idea in our “culture”, that as an educated reader I feel duty bound to point it out and hopefully as an educated publisher you will feel obligated to print this constructive yet earnest critique.

It is no small problem that this idea was missed. It is, in fact, the most dangerous idea to any period of time in which humans still exist and that all philosopher’s to one extent or another have sought to solve. Even worse, it is an idea that all of your contributors have been educated to believe implicitly and largely unreflectively. Many of your worthy contributors sensed this idea deep in their subconscious and struggled to articulate it in their responses. It is something that Nietzsche posed directly in his work “Beyond Good and Evil”, and that Kant before him tried desperately to solve what “is” solely in order to prove that this idea was false:

Morality does not exist.

What do I mean? There is no justifiable basis for any moral adjudication in any sense. Any action is as right or wrong as any other and no one can tell you otherwise and be speaking the truth.

If danger means the apprehension of the possibility of impending physical or mental harm, then this is the single most dangerous idea to humankind for it is the Pandora’s box which enables any human to justify their wants upon another by liberating their dogmatic belief they even require justification to act beyond: because I want to. For it is true beyond a shadow of a doubt, despite that fact that you may feel my observation (my “idea”) is banal and commonplace, that you must admit every human being of every time acts as if there is a justifiable morality, despite that there is none. Including, most notably, all of your contributors.

All humans go through a similar thought process: What should I so today? I guess I’ll cut the grass. Why? Because I / my wife / my city wants me to. Why? Because justification-X is good. Why is X good? Hardly anyone gets to this last proposition. Ultimately all one can admit is “Because I say so” is the final arbiter of why it is good or bad to do anything. This is obviously false. It is a proposition so obvious that all two year olds know it and after multiple failed attempts at understanding why adults justify the things they do the poor children have to be duped to cohere with the view of any society. It always boils down to: because I (the power at hand) says so. And they don’t justify it anymore than that because they can’t. Not in the same way we justify mathematical or logical propositions, or even scientific propositions. Oh we can do surveys that say “95% of people don’t like murder”. That doesn’t make it wrong a priori, or even probably.

Some came close to seeing this – they speculated if we actually have free will or not. So what? Nothing would functionally change if the majority of the populace believed that. People would still go to jail. We may just rationalize the reasons differently. But probably not as the self-aware, free willed, moral self is as natural a self-generated illusion as it is valuable. They wondered if democracy may in some way fail. Of course it may – it has in every other time it was tried – what is that different about now? America is not indestructible nor is it that important.

But they failed to understand the tacit supposition at the root of all of their “dangerous ideas”: what if all society for all time as we know it has no base? No moral truth with which to fall back upon. What if no moral justifications are possible and all moral rules are ultimately arbitrary impositions?

And they are. Nothing can be more dangerous than this as nothing can potentially cause that much harm to that many people. And in not noticing this, your contributors failed to understand the challenge that Nietzsche has provided to intellectuals of every field.

You may have read my dangerous idea and said “of course!” Anthropology observed that years ago. But no they didn’t – cultural anthropologists assume “because no one can actually prove that doing anything is good or evil, right or wrong, and we observe morality to be culturally based with no objective standard for adjudication, therefore we have no moral right to tell any other culture what to do.”

But that is an incorrect inference! If there is nothing morally wrong or right, then you cannot infer that “we have no moral right to tell any other culture what to do” or that anyone has or does not have a moral justification to or not do anything. The truth is anyone can do whatever they want and if there is no justifiable morality we cannot tell them they ought to truthfully stop, only that we don’t like it and we will impose our views upon them in resistance.

This is the terrible truth that Nietzsche unleashed and that paved the way for the Nazi regime. And it only took 30-50 years or so to come to fruition. They took this truth and said, “If there is no moral right or wrong, then the strong will rule. And we are the strong.” And we all know what proceeded from that. Sure, the “west” beat them in overtly political terms, but in educational terms the west has bought into the idea of moral relativism wholesale with all of its dangerous implications.

When the majority of people actually believe this and it comes to its fullest extent, no one will be safe. And Nietzsche’s plan to destroy the “slave” morality of democracy and Christianity will have succeeded.