Trampling Out the Vintage Where the Natural Law Is Stored

I.

A historian, a psychologist, a biologist, and a business student walk into a bar. They find Mother Nature already sitting at the counter, reading. They’re all joyously surprised to see her, and eager to show off to her their superior understanding of Natural Law and their practice of its tenets in their lives.

The historian goes up to her first. “Through looking at history, I have discerned that the true imperative of Natural Law is to have as many children as possible to spread my genes through the population, causing my lineage go down in history! I have ten children with my first wife in New York, and another twelve with my second wife in Kansas.” He looks at her hopefully, expecting praise.

Mother Nature looks at him. “Ha, you’re wrong!” she says. “That’s not the true imperative!” She lifts up her hand and snaps her fingers, and all his children die of diseases. He goes away crying.

The psychologist isn’t bothered by seeing this, and goes up to her next, full of confidence. “The historian may have guessed wrong,” he says, “but I’m sure I’ve got it. The true imperative of Natural Law is to follow our instincts – and my instincts are sexual. I’ve had every sort of sex with every sort of person there is, all across the world!”

Mother Nature looks at him. “Ha, you’re wrong!” she says. “That’s not the true imperative!” She lifts up her hand and snaps her fingers, and he gets Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, loses all his memories of every sexual encounter he ever had, and becomes impotent. He goes away crying.

The biologist has been watching all of this without concern, and after the psychologist is gone, he goes right up to her. “Those two didn’t know what they were talking about,” he says, “only I have figured out the real imperative of Natural Law: it’s to become immortal! I researched years and years, and finally managed to alter my genes to cause myself to stop aging.” He smiles confidently. “And even if I’m wrong, there’s nothing you can do to me now, since I’m immune to every disease as well! I’m not afraid of you!”

Mother Nature looks at him. “Ha, you’re wrong!” she says. “That’s not the true imperative! And you’re a billion years too young to beat me at this.” She lifts up her hand and snaps her fingers, and a bear walks in the door and mauls the biologist to death, then drags the body out.

Mother Nature turns to the business student, who’s now the only one left. The business student looks a little nervous. “Well, what do you think the true imperative of Natural Law is?” she asks him.

“Um, actually, I don’t know,” says the business student, glancing at the door. “I’m sure there’s some business-related answer, but I never learned it, because I spent all my time at university getting laid instead of going to class. Though, having children or being immortal would be nice too…”

Mother Nature raises her hand and puts her fingers together…

“…but wait!” the student continues. “Even though you say having sex isn’t the true imperative, with all the time I’ve spent on it, I’ve gotten really good at oral, if I do say so myself.”

Mother Nature looks at him speculatively.

“So if you don’t kill me…” the business student offers cautiously.

“Well, what I do to you will depend on whether you speak the truth or not,” says Mother Nature, pulling up her dress.

The business student gets down under the bar.

When he comes up, Mother Nature has a big smile on her face. “Damn, boy,” she says. “You were right. That was the best oral I’ve ever had.”

“Glad to hear it,” says the business student, and turns to go. But before he gets to the door, he turns back. “By the way,” he says, “just out of curiosity, what was the real answer to what the true imperative of Natural Law is?”

“Oh, there isn’t any,” says Mother Nature.

“But…then why did you do all that to the historian, the psychologist, and the biologist?” he asks, confused.

“I just like to see the looks of horror and despair on their faces when they realize that they not only wasted their entire lives chasing meaningless goals, but in the end they failed miserably to achieve them,” she says. “Besides, I don’t even believe in law.” She turns back to reading The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century.

II.

People discern different meanings from existence’s weave, but a popular theme of those who put away their gods is that in their absence, you ought to follow the principles of Natural Law. There is some contention, however, over what exactly these principles might be.

Most people want to believe that their interpretation is the one most supported by “Reality,” and for that reason most likely to be true. Alas, the concept of Reality proves almost as slippery as that of Natural Law itself.

There are two fundamental Realities you might generally evoke when making this argument: internal reality, and external reality.

The first, internal reality, is the reality of direct observation – that is, the things you yourself experience and feel, that at least seem to come to your mind unmediated through other people’s writings or thoughts, your own senses, or any other filters that could distort them along the way. In a postmodern sense, then, feelings and thoughts are the only things that are real, since these are the only things that you have direct, unmediated access to.

Various conclusions can be reached by taking this reality as the primary evidence in determining Nature’s true purpose for humanity.

For example, if you believe Nature calls you to be morally good, this leads to following the dictates of your conscience in order to do good – the conclusion of Faust. In fact, even arguments for God can be made through this method – if you look into your heart and find you believe in God, then God must be real. Or if you find the greatest joy and fulfillment is achieved through helping others, then helping others must be the principal meaning in life. And so forth.

Some people, though, look into their hearts and find that very different things seem to them to be good – or at least, seem to make them happy. And thus we come to hedonism. While following conscience is about allowing internal reality to guide your interactions with external reality, hedonism is that on its head. Hedonism is all about guiding external reality to heighten your experiences of internal reality. You take some action in the external world, you experience more or less internal pleasure and happiness from it, you adjust what you are doing to maximize the experience, and repeat.

Now, there are different sorts of hedonism, in the sense there are different feelings you might want to maximize. Happiness, after all, has always been a shy and fleeting thing.

The first, most trivial form of hedonism, is to maximize physical pleasure or comfort, possibly while minimizing pain. A good example of someone whose ideas fall into this category is the Marquis de Sade, who reasoned that the true purpose of man according to Nature is to maximize happiness in the form of sexual pleasure.

Now, you might wish to maximize the amount of pleasure you can experience in a single moment (the “amplitude” of the pleasure) or alternatively the total amount of pleasure experienced over your lifetime (the “sum” of the pleasure). It should be pointed out though, that taking either of these paths to its logical conclusion implies that given the option, you must engage in the practice of so-called wireheading, in which you stimulate your brain to artificially experience maximum pleasure, constantly. (Or, as a friend pointed out to me, if that is not an option, to simply buy two kilos of heroin and overdose.) Most people though, even hedonists, tend to flinch from this conclusion, leading one to wonder whether they don’t put some value on external reality as separate from the internal after all.

But there are other types of hedonism. For example, emotional or holistic hedonism, here defined as the pursuit of interesting and intense feelings of all sorts, not only in the sexual sense. In this case, rather than maximizing the intensity of a single feeling such as sexual pleasure, you seek out many feelings of great variety. Wireheading (or overdosing on heroin) would then be precluded, since it results in only a single feeling.

The lesser form of this is novelty-seeking, searching out new experiences in order to continue to derive interest and amusement in the world. Perhaps, as some say, this is done in order to fill the void where meaning should have gone:

This lack is not a bottomless hole that nothing could ever fill, but a tiny, strangely shaped divot in your soul into which nothing could ever fit: not money, not sex, not stuff, not relationships. Nothing “takes.” Nothing counts. Nothing is ever right. Only novelty works, until it wears off.

And of course, the ultimate form of purpose derived from studying the Reality of internal experience is Buddhism. Believing the external world to be wholly illusion, they aim to divorce their internal experience from it entirely. Going in the opposite direction of hedonism, they get rid of all emotions and attachments to the world entirely in order to eliminate all pain (possibly at the cost of eliminating all pleasure).

But aren’t people only engaging in things like hedonism or novelty-seeking, you might argue, because they don’t have a true purpose, a real purpose, and that is what they are searching for? And by a real purpose, of course, you mean something that will have an effect on the world.

Which leads to our second definition of Reality: that which exists externally, in the world of matter, outside of Plato’s cave. Your perceptions of it may or may not give you a true picture of it, but as much as you are able, that is the reality you would like to influence.

Influence how, though?

The first type of external purpose you might consider is that with some direct, observable effect, which you would like to bring about to your observational satisfaction. “My goal is to become an analyst at Goldman Sachs.” Well, you either are or aren’t, and you can observe that pretty clearly. If you are, good for you. If you aren’t, then you might go about taking actions to get there (say, killing their current analysts and applying for the resultant job openings). For this type of goal, if it is a terminal goal and not just a sub-goal part of a much longer process, the outcome – success or failure – will be fairly clear. “Reality” will tell you how you are doing at it, thus in this sense this sort of goal is “Reality-based”.

The second kind of external goals are those that you do not expect to see the result of within your lifetime. These cannot be “Reality-based” in the sense of seeing their completion yourself. But you might judge based on historical evidence that through your actions you have made them likely to ultimately result. Thus, these sorts of longer-term goals also seem fairly viable as life-purposes based on Reality.

Popular among these goals are ones that cause shifts in long-term human-population outcomes, such as founding religious movements, or causing other ideological or demographic shifts. Other goals in this category involve the completion long term-projects: building companies, terraforming planets, discovering scientific principles, etc.

There is an extremely popular sub-type of long-term goal that involves propagating of yourself, in various forms. Actually, this is more often less of a simple completion goal, in which the propagation happens for a certain length of time after which it no longer matters, but a kind of “forever” goal with no termination point, which I will discuss in more detail in the next section.

For now, let me go through the different forms in which you might desire to propagate yourself. First, you might wish to propagate your ideas, as Nietzsche does (I quote here the Kaufmann translation):

I am often asked why, after all, I write in German: nowhere am I read worse than in the fatherland. But who knows in the end whether I even wish to be read today? To create things on which time tests its teeth in vain: in form, in substance, to strive for a little immortality – I have never yet been modest enough to demand less of myself.

You might merely want your ideology to persist, or else you might wish your ideas to spread, eventually coming to affect the entirety of human thought. Alternatively, you might simply want to be remembered for doing some deed, such as winning a war, building an empire, starting an Instagram account, or what have you.

Second, you might want your bloodline to persist, so that there will always be some line of genetic heritage tracing back from a living being (perhaps a human, perhaps not) to you yourself, even as all memory of you is lost to history. With genetic engineering, however, this goal looks less and less achievable – since ultimately, who will want to have natural babies, when they can just genetically engineer their children to be optimal? (Or for people, say, the Amish, who do continue to have natural babies, how will they be able to compete in a world where everyone else is a genius athlete? Or from the perspective of governments, will letting people add their own sub-optimal DNA to the next generation be desirable? Sooner or later, I expect there will be laws against it, if only for economy’s sake (labor costs;).)

Lastly, you might want to persist in the truest sense – not as ideas or as bloodline, but as yourself. That is, you might desire immortality, and make the purpose of your life to seek it. A purpose that, to the best of my knowledge, no one so far has been successful in. But technology improves every day, and there’s always a first time. And difficulty, it seems to me, is no a priori reason for a purpose to be invalid.

This concludes my discussion of common life-purposes that can reasonably claim to be “Reality-based,” defined either internally or externally. And most purposes do seem to claim this. Though still, it might be interesting to ask, what sorts of purposes lay no claim to having any basis in Reality but nevertheless attract followers? To avoid getting too off-topic, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

III.

An additional distinction must be made in both categories of purpose: that is, their relevant time-horizons.

Some purposes, such as the purpose of propagating yourself, your ideas, or your lineage, do not generally have expiration dates. You may simply want these vestiges of yourself survive as long as possible, the longer the better. Or else, there may only be meaning if they survive forever – until the heat death of the universe, or beyond even that, transcending the physical bounds of the universe itself. These are the true “forever” purposes. These may not be very likely to succeed, but even a small possibility of success might be worth a Hail Mary shot.

Long-term goals can also take this form. You may simply want humanity to survive forever. Or you may want to bring about a kingdom of heaven on earth (or some other kingdom on some other planet), that once created, should last forever and ever.

This longest of time horizons is of course contrasted with purposes with finite time horizons. For example, does the übermensch need to come about and then exist forever? Or does there only need to be one übermensch, born once, and the purpose is fulfilled? Does a scientific discovery need to be made and then remembered forever? Or made only once, and then, whether it’s forgotten or not after that is irrelevant? If a castle is built once, if it then ultimately crumbles long after they are dead, is that of consequence to the builders?

Short-term goals also usually have finite time horizons. Generally, their time-frame only persists at most to the end of the goal-seeker’s life.

These one-time-suffices goals might also theoretically extend into the past as well as into the future – you might need only prove that the goal has already been achieved at some point in history, so that you no longer need to bring it about in the future.

And I will also note that the longest-term goals do not necessarily take the most precedence. “Forever-like” goals might be secondary goals of these one-time goals: for example, humanity must continue to exist in order for humans to discover the secrets of the universe, or humans need to be present for some of them to transform into übermenschen. Since you don’t know how long it might take for these secrets to be discovered or this transformation to take place, taking actions to ensure the continued existence of humanity in the long term might be a good strategy, even if the latter are the true goals.

There is a third type of goal, neither long-term, not yet quite short-term. These are continual goals. Much of hedonism falls into this category. These are goals that can be pursued, achieved, or failed to achieve, at any given moment – and pursued independently in that moment from their pursuit in any other moment.

Pleasure in one moment is independent from pleasure in the next, emotion one day from emotion in the next, etc. For this sort of time horizon, past and future cease to matter – in a sense, even death ceases to matter since it lies beyond the time-horizon, as in the stoic conclusions of Marcus Aurelius (I quote the Hays translation):

The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don’t have?

Utilitarian consequentialism, which calls for the minimization of suffering, also falls into this category, along with other codes of ethics or virtue which must be continuously followed.

And if ever the possibility of infinite life were once achieved, immortality might become such a goal, as the process of continually securing it would be perpetual. Most, though, might ask, why live forever, if not for pursuing some greater purpose?; just as they now ask, why live even for finite time, if not – ?

The ultimate version of taking this frame-by-frame time-horizon is to unbind your soul entirely, choosing your very goal itself anew every given moment. This choice, however, has certain obvious drawbacks.

IV.

Which of these many possible Reality-based goals, then, is the true imperative of Natural Law?

Going by experiential reality, you might come to the Marquis de Sade’s conclusions (I quote the Seaver and Wainhouse translation):

…now that, brought closer to Nature by the quantity of prejudices we have recently obliterated, we listen only to Nature’s voice, we are fully convinced that if anything were criminal, it would be to resist the penchants she inspires in us, rather than to come to grips with them. We are persuaded that lust, being a product of those penchants, is not to be stifled…

That is, Nature tells you to follow your passions.

Going by external reality, and taking the longest time horizon possible, Nature is evolution, and evolution’s purpose for you is to propagate your DNA. Thus, you might conclude that the purpose Nature set for you is to continue your lineage. In the short term, this means to have lots of children – exactly the opposite of the Marquis de Sade’s conclusions (he recommends having no children, in order to have more time for having sex).

So, does Nature call us to propagate humanity and spread our genes, leaving our biological mark upon external reality? Does it call us to hedonism, honing the pleasures of our internal reality? Does it ask us to think in the long term, acting to affect the outcomes of a billion years hence? Or to live entirely in the moment, with no thought for what will happen after our death? What does Nature want of us?

Friend, I must ask you to stop for a moment and consider this question instead – what makes you think Nature wants anything at all?

The Marquis de Sade rails against the stupidity of believing in the Christian god, but it seems to me, he has stepped outside of one circle only to back immediately into another. He has forsworn the old God, only to turn and bow immediately to another Goddess. The same could be said for those who turn away from the Christian imperative to “be fruitful and multiply,” only to discover the same imperative, only this time given to them by “Evolution” instead.

Why, though, make Nature your deity? An analysis of Reality can certainly tell you how to achieve your goals. It can tell you your progress on your goals. But why in heaven and earth should it be able to tell you what those goals should be?

Why should you not treat Nature as you would any other obstacle in life – something to be taken into account, but ultimately overcome, in the pursuit of something greater? If God is dead, and we killed him – by the law of the fremen, are not we now the Gods? Shouldn’t Nature, then, have to listen to us, rather than the other way around?

Reality is not a voice speaking directly into your head, saying “Do X!” (unless you are schizophrenic, in which case, I’m sorry if this post seems redundant to you, I’ll make the next one more interesting so please don’t stop reading my blog just for that). Reality, that is to say, what you observe either directly or through the accumulated observations of others (“historical evidence”), can tell you what you ought to do in order to achieve X, but not what X should be. Reality is not a person. Reality does not value in the sense people do. Reality may indicate that in order to live longer you should avoid living next to active volcanoes, or that in order to have your bloodline survive longer you should have more children. But it equally tells you that in order to die quickly you might be well served by jumping into a volcano, or that in order to cause your genes to disappear from the population you ought to crash all your daughters’ dates wearing shirts with swearing rainbow-vomiting unicorns while brandishing your AR-15’s in a threatening manner.

But isn’t living longer better than dying sooner? Isn’t propagating your genes (or your species) better than causing them to die out? But by what standard? The choice to want more rather than less, longer rather than shorter, must already have been made before Reality can be of some assistance in the process.

What really is Natural Law, then? Is it like the laws of men? Or like the laws of physics? Are we morally obliged to follow it? Are we recommended to follow it? Or is it something to be avoided, if at all possible?

First, consider human laws. These fall into two general categories: those that are arbitrary, and those that are concessions to non-human forces that human societies are grudgingly obliged to recognize in order to get along. As an example of the first, consider minimum drinking age in the US. Why should the drinking age be 21? Why not 20? Why not 50? Why not have no minimum drinking age at all, like Sierra Leone? Or ban alcohol altogether, like Yemen? And in fact, many people under the age of 21 do drink alcohol in the US, they just do it illegally, proving that the people of the US could change this law at any time without the heavens falling down upon their heads.

On the other hand, consider the US prohibition against patenting perpetual motion machines. Is this rule kept in place by big oil, a conspiracy to keep all the hopeful little perpetual motion startups from getting off the ground? No – this rule is a recognition of a higher law: a physical law. Even if the rule were removed, perpetual motion machine makers would not suddenly top the stock charts, dominating the energy markets nationwide. The second law of thermodynamics is what is really stopping people, not the US government. The rule is simply there to keep the US government from inconveniencing itself with nonsense by meddling in the physically impossible.

Which of these, then, is Natural Law closer to? Surely, it is the second. Natural Laws are those that human governments cannot avoid following, no matter what they put in their law code, and thus do best by recognizing formally in order to avoid running into problems later. In fact, governments might greatly prefer to legislate themselves perpetual motion machines, if only changing human law could change the reality. But, to paraphrase Carlyle, no government can vote themselves perpetual motion machines. They can, however, vote themselves any drinking age they please.

Natural Laws, then, are not of the “ought” variety, but rather of the “is” variety.

But, you might argue, drinking age can still be a natural concept, even if where to put it is somewhat arbitrary. After all, aren’t children’s maturing brains too fragile, causing them to be damaged by excessive alcohol consumption? Isn’t that a scientific fact – a Natural Law, if you please?

Sure – but then the fact of having a minimum drinking age is not itself the Natural Law. The Natural Law is the tradeoff between lower drinking age and increased brain damage in the population. The Natural Law tells you that you can raise your drinking age and get less brain damage, or lower it and get more brain damage, but not which of those you should choose. Does the happiness people receive from drinking alcohol outweigh the costs of the potential brain damage? Or do the costs the brain damage lays on the medical system outweigh the restrictions on individual liberty? Or even, if you like, is allowing college students the social happiness that comes with drinking alcohol sadly necessary in order to let them kill themselves off through their own stupidity at a rate sufficient to maintain a fair number of open college spots?

Natural Law cannot answer. Natural Law is not a purpose. It is not a set of guidelines. It is not a strategy, nor even a full set of rules of the game. It is the chessboard, and the way each piece moves – but not the conditions to win. But the win condition is natural, you might argue – obviously, you win by having pieces left at the end. Sure, but what piece? Why the king? Why not the queen? Or a pawn? Or at least two pawns and either a bishop or a rook? And can they be anywhere, or do they have to be occupying two of the four corners, and one of the center squares?

Natural Law is a means, and not an end. Choosing a purpose by humanizing Nature as if she were a goddess, saying, this is what she causes, therefore this is what she wants us to do, is like treating ocean currents as a navigation map that tells you not only your route, but your destination as well. Ocean currents are caused by nature, and if left alone, will bring a ship left adrift in the ocean along certain paths. Does this then mean that the purpose of ships, in accordance with Natural Law, is to trace out the paths of ocean currents? That any ship should only go in the direction it is steered toward by these currents?

The idea is ridiculous. People build ships to go to destinations of their own choosing. As Natural Laws, of course, ocean currents must be taken into account. They cannot be disregarded in favor of using whatever other method of sailing you please. As Carlyle says:

Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting. The ship may vote this and that, above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely constitutional manner: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigor by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can, by voting or without voting, ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot, the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again; the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy-councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with most chaotic “admonition;” you will be flung half frozen on the Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into shivers by your iceberg councillors, and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never get round Cape Horn at all! Unanimity on board ship;—yes indeed, the ship’s crew may be very unanimous, which doubtless, for the time being, will be very comfortable to the ship’s crew, and to their Phantasm Captain if they have one: but if the tack they unanimously steer upon is guiding them into the belly of the Abyss, it will not profit them much!—Ships accordingly do not use the ballot-box at all; and they reject the Phantasm species of Captains: one wishes much some other Entities—since all entities lie under the same rigorous set of laws—could be brought to show as much wisdom, and sense at least of self-preservation, the first command of Nature. Phantasm Captains with unanimous votings: this is considered to be all the law and all the prophets, at present.

But this by no means proves that Nature is telling you not to go around Cape Horn.

A captain who ignores the currents or the weather will quickly go off-course – not because Nature is trying to guide him along her own designs, but because ships, like chess-pieces, must observe certain rules, the so-called Natural Law. Only by taking these rules into account, can a ship make it to its real destination. But Natural Law does not go so far as to decide that destination itself – it is merely another factor that must either be used to your advantage or overcome in order to achieve your real purpose.

V.

How, then, ought you to evaluate goals, if not by the standard of Natural Law?

That, I think, is the true question that must be answered. I will not attempt here to design new standards from scratch, but in parting, here are a couple of standards you might consider.

First, you might take into account how robust your goal is to new truths about the universe and Reality that could come to light in the future. That is, what surprises might Reality throw your way, without you having to rethink your life purpose?

For example, what if it turns out that we are all living in a simulation?

As is argued elsewhere, utilitarian consequentialism might just as easily apply to simulated beings as to real ones. Most hedonism too, should also continue to be justified, since subjective experience is still just as potent whether it is real or simulated. External goals, on the other hand, become more open to question. Does it matter whether your genes persist, if there are simulators somewhere out there who could pull up your genetic material at any time and make a whole different universe filled with only your children or clones? What if you could know such a universe existed? Would that change your desire to have children here and now? Or consider the goal of propagating your ideas – would it still matter if the simulators had recorded your ideas outside of time? Would scientific discovery still matter, if you were only discovering the rules that were placed on the simulation containing you by outside forces?

Which brings us to the question of outside influences in general. Would your purpose still be valid, if someone else had tricked you into choosing it? What if the simulators had set up evolution to work the way it does in order to cause humans to want to have more children, falsely believing this to be the path of Natural Law, when in fact the simulators actually just wanted their simulation to have more humans in it for their own purposes (perhaps, publishing in an alien-simulator journal that only accepted universes above a certain sentient population-floor)? Would you still have children then? Or if you are a hedonist, what if other people had tricked you into seeking pleasure not for your own sake, but merely to add to their own experiences that of corrupting the youth, à la Lord Henry? Would you still wish to be a hedonist?

And one final consideration – what would become of your purpose, if, say, you happened upon the discovery that the entire universe were a simulation created solely to generate porn for the simulators to view? Would you embrace your simulator-given purpose? Would you rebel against it, knowing there must be some higher meaning in this world, even if you must obtain it elsewhere than from your creators? Or would you, as I imagine the Marquis de Sade would, do just what you were going to do anyways, but get off on the thought that aliens are watching you do it?