Grappling With The Moral Octopus

El Chipo de Silicio (11 May 99)

	
I.  The Nature of the Beast
	
	The "Moral Octopus" is generically a certain theory of
	the nature of ethics and specifically an  annex or
	appendix to a book called _The Abolition of Man_ by C.
	S. Lewis, the Eng. Lit. figure and  Anglican apologist. 
	My joke name for it is not Lewis's, needless to say. 
	Unfortunately a lot hinges on  exactly what serious name
	we give it.  Lewis himself called it "Tao," with the
	disclaimer that he didn't  mean anything specifically
	Chinese.  Since his thesis was that the Moral Octopus is
	universal, the  disclaimer is obviously mandatory.  He
	also associated it with "Rta" in Sanskrit (which I
	believe is mainly  about ritual) and with "Torah" in the
	Hebrew Bible.  Closer to home, he consociated it with
	"Natural Law,"  which is _obscurum per obscurius_ as far
	as I am concerned.  But all these expressions seem to be 
	mentioned mostly as abbreviations.  The Octopus is in
	fact "traditional morality" as conceived by people  who
	suppose that all traditions converge on (diverge from?)
	one common morality.  Since I don't see  much merit in
	that position, I'll just call it the Octopus.
	
	The appendix to the book is there simply to indicate
	roughly what this supposed convergence  consists of,
	that is, the elementary platitudes about right and wrong
	that "everybody knows."   The fact  that there are eight
	major rubrics and not seven or eleven is unimportant. 
	The Moral Octopus is therefore  not comparable to the
	Buddhist Eightfold Way for which there are elaborate
	explanations of why exactly  these eight things go
	together and how they interact.  It was, for Lewis, just
	a sort of laundry list, and not  even a practical one to
	be taken to the cleaners; rather it was one drawn up to
	give Martians an idea of  what sort of a thing human
	"laundry" is--by examples, not by rules and definitions.
	
II.  De Divisione Temporum
	
	Lewis wrote a whole book about Martians, but _The
	Abolition of Man_ is not it.  I invoke them in  the
	standard literary way as rational creatures without
	terrestrial prejudices or even terrestrial background 
	information.  The original target audience was not
	persons remote in space, however, but persons  separated
	from CSL by a temporal sort of divide.  Like most
	schemes produced by dabblers in  metahistory, _The
	Abolition of Man_ gives us Three Ages.  With Lewis these
	are, unsurprisingly, to be  classified as Good, Bad and
	Worst.  The are (1) the Good Old Days, when everybody
	was (allegedly) a  traditional moralist.  Not, of
	course, that they all always obeyed the Octopus, but
	they all knew they  should obey it--and there was no
	question but that they knew about it.  Then came (2)
	Modern Times, which features several errors about morals
	that CSL is concerned  to correct in his little book. 
	The error most directly connected with moral zoology is
	the view that  "traditional morality" is not just all
	there is to morality, that it is not absurd to speak of
	a New Morality.   He  argues that "new" moralities are
	simply fragmentary versions of the Octopus. Other errors
	include the  view that morality is "subjective and
	trivial," the view that it can be based on reason, and
	the view that it  can be based on "instinct."   All four
	of these heresies will be considered separately below.
	
	Finally, Lewis predicts (3) the Nightmare Future.  
	This part gives him the title of the book.  What  is to
	be "abolished" turns out to be on the one hand the
	Octopus and on the other hand Free Will.   Futuristic
	"conditioners" will decide how people should behave and
	make very sure that they do so.  We  will not in days to
	come "obey" the Octopus, we will be manipulated by drugs
	or education or propaganda  so as always to do what the
	conditioners consider "right."  Though the point is not
	immediately pertinent  to the Octopus Problem, it should
	be mentioned that Lewis considers that these
	conditioners will have  severe logical problems about
	"right," a word that makes sense only in terms of the
	Octopus that they are  determined to slay.  (For CSL
	fans, by the way, it should be noted that _That Hideous
	Strength_ is by the  author's own account an imaginary
	picture of how man might be attempted to be abolished.)
	
III Cui Bono?

	What is all this in aid of?
	
	Not a hard question, of course.  Lewis is interested in
	these things only insofar as they conduce  towards
	Christojudaeanity.  To read _The Abolition of Man_ as if
	it were simply a treatise on  anthropology is not very
	clever, even though the appendix about the Octopus does
	read somewhat like  the weaker sort of anthropology,
	with verbally parallel stuff from all over the map and
	every known  century set down side by side.  To preach
	his specific variant of Eastern Mediterranean
	Monotheism,  Lewis requires that everybody feel guilty
	about having broken the moral law, having disobeyed the 
	Octopus.  THAT is the problem his sort of
	Christojudaeanity purports to be a solution to.
	
	Only his specific sort: there are a number of different
	things different tribes and ages of CJ's have  wanted to
	be "saved" from, Hell, Death, the Devil,  temporal
	enemies--as well as the Sin which is  pertinent to the
	Octopus Problem.  And Sin comes in many flavors itself,
	original and unoriginal,  collective and individual, 
	moral and amoral.  Lewis is a Protestant and Arminian
	and Victorian sort of CJ,  roughly speaking.  I
	emphasize the peculiarity and specificity of Lewis's
	mythology partly because he  himself loved to smudge
	such things up as "mere Christianity," and partly
	because of the pleasing  though superficial paradox that
	what his own religionist specificity happens to require
	is ethical  universalism.
	
	His views are not, to be sure, completely peculiar.  In
	Islam the Mu`tazilites held quite similar  views,
	although those views were mostly destined to die out and
	not flourish like Lewis's, which now  infest a number of
	denominations of Christojudaeans whose more ancient
	adherents would have wanted  nothing to do with such
	stuff.  Also, the Mu`tazilites were more theological
	than Lewis (and most modern  CJ's).  They really did
	care about God, just as they said.  Taking that attitude
	seriously seems to have  become almost impossible to
	understand nowadays, even amongst "religious" people. 
	The result is that  originally theological ideas are
	wildly misunderstood when read as anthropology.  Notable
	among such  misreadings are two very closely connected
	with the Octopus Problem, namely "original sin" and
	"free  will."
	
	The Octopus Problem, for Lewis, was exactly to convince
	people that EVERYBODY is guilty of  original sin and
	that EVERYBODY possesses free will.  This is not quite
	the same as the problem faced  by every
	(Pelagian/Arminian) CJ apologist in every age and land. 
	She need only convince her actual  listeners that these
	generalities apply to them personally.  Maintaining them
	in the abstract, and therefore  as anthropological
	propositions rather than pastoral theology, would be
	only a very optional matter for  her.  But that matter
	is what Lewis's book is centrally about.
	
IV.  The Anthropological Octopus
	
	Lewis does not come before us in _The Abolition of Man_
	with an announcement that he will first  establish the
	credentials of the Octopus and then sell us
	Christojudaeanity.  Although it is obvious to  everybody
	where he is headed and there is no question of deceit,
	nevertheless he claims that the  Octopus exists quite
	independently of "religion," and most of his snippets
	are not from CJ sources.  Since  what he vends is not
	religion or theology, what is it?  I've already given
	away my view that it is attempted  anthropology, but we
	must consider one other possibility.  Might it not be
	philosophy?
	
	I think the answer is a very obvious NO, but I allow
	that my views on what philosophy is like are  eminently
	contestable.  Whatever Lewis is "really" doing, it
	certainly looks like he is doing something  "empirical" 
	or even "scientific" when he presents the Octopus. 
	"Here, ladies and gentlemen, are the  FACTS about
	traditional morality." says Lewis in effect. 
	"Modernizers may tell you that there a zillion 
	different moralities in the world, as many as there are
	tribes or even as many as there are individuals, but  if
	you set aside the gaudy but superficial differences
	about sexual behavior and religious ritual, you'll see 
	that everybody pretty much agrees about right and wrong,
	at least up until just the other century when  certain
	European ex-Christians started making up _Ersatz_
	moralities."  (Spoofing is hard for me to  resist, but I
	think that's a tolerably accurate statement of the enemy
	position.)
	
	Now before we worry about whether that position is
	sound or silly, I think we may agree about its 
	"empirical" nature, loosely speaking.  Lewis is not
	trying to REASON us into agreeing with him, he is 
	simply pointing and saying "Look at that!"  Such
	behavior is not, by my lights, philosophical.  More 
	importantly, there is a long tradition of talking about
	ethics philosophically, and although it contains all 
	sorts of discrepant things, it does not abound in
	anything very much like this.  Neither Plato nor
	Aristotle  nor the Stoics nor the earlier or middle
	Christojudaeans nor Averroes nor the social-contract
	liberals nor  the human-rights liberals nor the
	Utilitarian liberals nor the democratic liberals adopted
	this "Just look!"  approach to  ethics.  Indeed, I think
	it could hardly have been adopted by anybody before
	about 1850  when enough comparative and historical
	material had been compiled and historical and
	comparative  thinking had come in.  And that sort of
	thinking, applied to this sort of subject matter, seems
	to me well  described as "anthropological."
	
	The closest thing to it I know if in a really old book
	is Herodotus, whose famous story about the  Greeks
	shocked at the Indians who ate their dead and the
	Indians shocked at the idea of burying them  uses
	Lewis's sort of material to point in exactly the "wrong"
	direction, towards an extreme "cultural  relativism"
	where Custom is completely arbitrary and can take almost
	any form.  After that there is the  famous epigram in
	Montaigne and then not much until "modern" (sc.
	Enlightenment) times.
	
	This reflection brings us to another point which,
	though very plain, ought to be spelled out.  Lewis  is
	not the first "modern" writer to use this sort of
	material, and the ones who were first to use it were 
	writing in the other direction.  In addition to being
	"anthropological," Octopus Ethics is "reactionary" in
	the  strictest sense: it is set forth in response to
	somebody else's innovation.  Naturally everybody who
	ever  scribbled about ethics at all was well aware that
	foreigners had lots of strange habits, but that
	knowledge  does not appear to have had anything much to
	do with what they scribbled.  When it did start to
	matter, it  mattered in what Lewis would consider the
	wrong direction, it initiated a tendency he wrote to
	correct.   His writing may at times resemble older
	material, but it must be read with a key distinction
	always in  mind: though he may seem to agree with older
	writers, he is writing to refute a position they had
	simply  never heard of.  Ignorance is one thing and
	opposition quite another.  Whenever modern authors
	profess  to be 'conservative" or "traditional," this
	quite elementary reflection should come in at once and 
	problematize their fancied continuity with intellectual
	predecessors.