You are right to liken the inoculation against disease with the religious inoculation against cold self-interest. I believe we are to promote the welfare of others without actively sacrificing our own. I'm grateful to live in a time when we aren't plagued by such illnesses.
I definitely agree with this article that vaccinating babies is one of the best and noblest works of humanity, and I would be seriously worried for our future if I also agreed with you that developing the universal values to support this kind of goal requires a "moral inoculation" with Christianity. I personally am an atheist raised by atheists, and I definitely feel like I got "inoculated" with the idea of the inherent value of human life without a religious context. More broadly, I disagree that this kind of universality requires a Christian moral foundation: Ashoka was preaching universal compassion in the Mauryan empire after he converted to Buddhism over two centuries before Jesus, and even variolation specifically was developed in non-Christian cultures first.
Thank you for your interesting and thoughtful response, as well as for reading carefully.
As you know from the note I tagged you in, I was anxious about posting this. I don't have a lot of subscribers (*and fewer now), but what I know of the ones I have is that they mainly fall into one of two camps: Pro-technological progress folks who are generally optimistic about the trajectory of human history and who like sciency things. These are like the folks who are also your readers. This camp also tends to be religious "nones," and often quite hostile to religion--especially Christianity--while also being pretty ignorant of it. The other camp is traditionalists who like things about faith and about community. These folks are mainly coming my way via Librarian of Celaeno. In terms of what opinions are the loudest in this camp, there's a lot of anti-vaccination sentiment. So I knew that lots of my (few) readers would find something to find objectionable about this essay. So don't worry for a second about being one of those people. I'm glad you're here.
I'll address the other content of your comment in a separate comment of my own.
So, I am a Christian, and I think that the fundamental claims of Christianity are true. I was an atheist for some time but came back to the faith in my 40s. So there's that background to what I'm going to say next:
I think that valuing all human lives is unique, and a Christian belief, but not unique to Christianity. Buddhism is a good example of a non-Christian tradition that places a similar value on human lives. (Quick aside: I know a popular counterargument for the claim that Christianity sees all lives as equally and inherently valuable is that many Christians have behaved very violently towards others. This is also true of many Buddhists. Religions can make moral claims, and believers can still act in ways that contravene those claims. This does not mean that the claims are absent from the religion, just that adherents, ah, don't always adhere to them.) But it is certainly not the case that human cultures universally come up with this idea of inherent worth for all humans. Almost all cultures define in-group and out-group members, where in-group members have value and out-group members do not, or have much less. This in-group/out-group value distinction is written into most religions. It also seems to be more consistent with human evolution: our fellow primates make in-group/out-group distinctions with fatal consequences for out-groupers, as do most (all?) other mammals. (*I'm not going to compare to non-mammals, because I think that's too distantly related to be relevant to the evolution of complex social behaviors.)
For a long time, and especially when I was an atheist, I thought that eventually all cultures would embrace "universal" values like that all human lives are equally and incommensurately valuable. I thought that material well-being (or its absence) was the reason that people had different beliefs on these universal values, and (arrogantly) that once everyone had similar levels of material wealth as, say, Westerners did in the post-WW2 period, they'd all come around to that set of values. This is, of course, not what happened. (Alice Evans at the Substack The Great Gender Divergence has a lot of really interesting data on divergent values on things like human rights, and their dissociation from economics and education. Highly recommend this Substack: https://www.ggd.world/ )
Self-centeredness (which includes thinking your own/your in-group's lives are way more valuable than those of others) comes naturally. Placing others' lives on the same level of value as your own does not. This is like a human invention*, and not an obvious one. Like any other piece of knowledge, this can easily be lost.
If it were the case that atheists were inoculating little baby atheists they were raising with the idea of inherent value of human life successfully, I would be less concerned. Certainly, it seems like your parents did an excellent job with all the good work you do.** I am not sure that atheism is up to that task, though. There isn't a logical argument for "love your neighbor" or "forgive your enemies," but even if there were, that's not how our deep, foundational beliefs are formed. Foundational beliefs are more like a story, or a poem. (Or, you could say, "like a myth, or a prayer.") They're also transmitted person-to-person, generation to generation. This foundational belief in human value is, I think, fragile and easy to lose. And neither of us want that.
*So yeah, as a Christian I think "love your neighbor as yourself, where neighbor = everyone, even your enemies" is not a human invention, that it's so unexpected and works so well that it is divine. But you could get to the same conclusion about how essential it is by treating just as a human invention that's non-obvious like variolation--which was discovered, and also lost, more than once over history.
**And "ye shall know them by their fruits," and "everyone who is not against us is for us," my friend, so, happy to have you on the team. :)
And yet indifference to the welfare of babies has been extremely common among people across cultures and over history. Since I feel the same way you do (obviously), it was that observation about the seeming-universality of love for babies in the modern world contrasted with the historic reality that many people in many cultures were at minimum indifferent to babies, if not actively cruel to them that led me to this essay. And of course I fear that modern societies are becoming more indifferent to the welfare of babies as we lose connections with the cultural ideals that trained us to love all babies. I see this creeping indifference to babies both in some liberal narratives about about childless people being happier, and in some vitalist* (*I think I'm using that term correctly--I'm not an expert on US political nomenclature) conservative narratives about moral obligations only existing towards one's own kin.
Fantastically well written and researched!
Thank you! And thank you for reading.
You are right to liken the inoculation against disease with the religious inoculation against cold self-interest. I believe we are to promote the welfare of others without actively sacrificing our own. I'm grateful to live in a time when we aren't plagued by such illnesses.
Interesting, very interesting!
Excellent research and writing.
I definitely agree with this article that vaccinating babies is one of the best and noblest works of humanity, and I would be seriously worried for our future if I also agreed with you that developing the universal values to support this kind of goal requires a "moral inoculation" with Christianity. I personally am an atheist raised by atheists, and I definitely feel like I got "inoculated" with the idea of the inherent value of human life without a religious context. More broadly, I disagree that this kind of universality requires a Christian moral foundation: Ashoka was preaching universal compassion in the Mauryan empire after he converted to Buddhism over two centuries before Jesus, and even variolation specifically was developed in non-Christian cultures first.
Thank you for your interesting and thoughtful response, as well as for reading carefully.
As you know from the note I tagged you in, I was anxious about posting this. I don't have a lot of subscribers (*and fewer now), but what I know of the ones I have is that they mainly fall into one of two camps: Pro-technological progress folks who are generally optimistic about the trajectory of human history and who like sciency things. These are like the folks who are also your readers. This camp also tends to be religious "nones," and often quite hostile to religion--especially Christianity--while also being pretty ignorant of it. The other camp is traditionalists who like things about faith and about community. These folks are mainly coming my way via Librarian of Celaeno. In terms of what opinions are the loudest in this camp, there's a lot of anti-vaccination sentiment. So I knew that lots of my (few) readers would find something to find objectionable about this essay. So don't worry for a second about being one of those people. I'm glad you're here.
I'll address the other content of your comment in a separate comment of my own.
So, I am a Christian, and I think that the fundamental claims of Christianity are true. I was an atheist for some time but came back to the faith in my 40s. So there's that background to what I'm going to say next:
I think that valuing all human lives is unique, and a Christian belief, but not unique to Christianity. Buddhism is a good example of a non-Christian tradition that places a similar value on human lives. (Quick aside: I know a popular counterargument for the claim that Christianity sees all lives as equally and inherently valuable is that many Christians have behaved very violently towards others. This is also true of many Buddhists. Religions can make moral claims, and believers can still act in ways that contravene those claims. This does not mean that the claims are absent from the religion, just that adherents, ah, don't always adhere to them.) But it is certainly not the case that human cultures universally come up with this idea of inherent worth for all humans. Almost all cultures define in-group and out-group members, where in-group members have value and out-group members do not, or have much less. This in-group/out-group value distinction is written into most religions. It also seems to be more consistent with human evolution: our fellow primates make in-group/out-group distinctions with fatal consequences for out-groupers, as do most (all?) other mammals. (*I'm not going to compare to non-mammals, because I think that's too distantly related to be relevant to the evolution of complex social behaviors.)
For a long time, and especially when I was an atheist, I thought that eventually all cultures would embrace "universal" values like that all human lives are equally and incommensurately valuable. I thought that material well-being (or its absence) was the reason that people had different beliefs on these universal values, and (arrogantly) that once everyone had similar levels of material wealth as, say, Westerners did in the post-WW2 period, they'd all come around to that set of values. This is, of course, not what happened. (Alice Evans at the Substack The Great Gender Divergence has a lot of really interesting data on divergent values on things like human rights, and their dissociation from economics and education. Highly recommend this Substack: https://www.ggd.world/ )
Self-centeredness (which includes thinking your own/your in-group's lives are way more valuable than those of others) comes naturally. Placing others' lives on the same level of value as your own does not. This is like a human invention*, and not an obvious one. Like any other piece of knowledge, this can easily be lost.
If it were the case that atheists were inoculating little baby atheists they were raising with the idea of inherent value of human life successfully, I would be less concerned. Certainly, it seems like your parents did an excellent job with all the good work you do.** I am not sure that atheism is up to that task, though. There isn't a logical argument for "love your neighbor" or "forgive your enemies," but even if there were, that's not how our deep, foundational beliefs are formed. Foundational beliefs are more like a story, or a poem. (Or, you could say, "like a myth, or a prayer.") They're also transmitted person-to-person, generation to generation. This foundational belief in human value is, I think, fragile and easy to lose. And neither of us want that.
*So yeah, as a Christian I think "love your neighbor as yourself, where neighbor = everyone, even your enemies" is not a human invention, that it's so unexpected and works so well that it is divine. But you could get to the same conclusion about how essential it is by treating just as a human invention that's non-obvious like variolation--which was discovered, and also lost, more than once over history.
**And "ye shall know them by their fruits," and "everyone who is not against us is for us," my friend, so, happy to have you on the team. :)
People who are cruel to babies are the worst of all humans, and those who are indifferent to them simply mystify me.
And yet indifference to the welfare of babies has been extremely common among people across cultures and over history. Since I feel the same way you do (obviously), it was that observation about the seeming-universality of love for babies in the modern world contrasted with the historic reality that many people in many cultures were at minimum indifferent to babies, if not actively cruel to them that led me to this essay. And of course I fear that modern societies are becoming more indifferent to the welfare of babies as we lose connections with the cultural ideals that trained us to love all babies. I see this creeping indifference to babies both in some liberal narratives about about childless people being happier, and in some vitalist* (*I think I'm using that term correctly--I'm not an expert on US political nomenclature) conservative narratives about moral obligations only existing towards one's own kin.
Anyway, thank you for reading and for sharing.
Doctrix, I really liked how you weaved the two subjects. I have thoughts that I need to elaborate. So I will come back with them.
PS: yes, I still like you ;)
Thanks! I'll be looking forward to hearing what you have to say. And thanks for still being my buddy! ;)
Awesome post - that latter part reads a lot like the first chapter in Ramawamy’s new book.
Thank you! And I'll have to check that book out.