Punishment

Kant tells us one of the foremost demands of morality is to treat men as ends in themselves, never as means to our own ends. If he is right, then the state that punishes lawbreakers to set an example, using them as a means to achieve law and order, thereby makes itself into a towering example of immorality.

Commerce and reason

“Men make it such a point of honour to be fit for business that they forget to examine whether business is fit for a man.”—George Savile

As rational thought comes to be associated more and more over time with commerce, the sort of words that represent the non-commercial goals of mankind come to be heard less and less often in rational discourse. Such words are now found primarily in trite sentiments on greeting cards, in the emotionally overheated ranting of religious demagogues, in self-help manuals.

If I propose to have a calm and reasonable discussion about the question of what, for me, might constitute a life well lived, I get no more than a trite, dismissive remark. If I attempt to enlist the help of friends in calm and reasonable contemplation about the human condition, I get no more than an incredulous stare. No one believes anymore that such idle questions are amenable to reason. And, in any case, no one has time to discuss them. We are too busy with our commercial endeavors.

What all this busy commercial activity amounts to, effectively, is the implicit assertion that the question of what constitutes the best life for man has already been decisively and definitively answered—and that this decisive and definitive answer, which applies universally to everyone, is the life of commerce. Of course we allow for the fact that each individual has his or her own preferences. These are accounted for by determining which particular sort of productive activity the person engages in, and which particular assortment of consumer goods he purchases. What no longer makes sense to us is an extended discussion of these preferences. Such a discussion now makes no more sense than an extended discussion of one's favorite color, or one's favorite flavor of ice cream. The general character of the best life for mankind has, allegedly, now been decisively and definitively decided, and the particulars in each individual case are merely a matter of personal preference. Such personal preferences might be disclosed, but certainly not rationally discussed or debated.

To rule the notion of virtue out of order in rational discourse is, effectively, to concede by default that all our existing attitudes and behaviors are virtuous. It removes the possibility of examining our own behavior and criticizing ourselves. By convincing ourselves that there is no true and rational standard by which to order our lives, we in effect concede that the false and irrational standard by which we presently order our lives is the true and rational one. The discussion of the good life will probably never rise to the level of pristine rationality found, say, in the proofs of Euclidean geometry. But it also need not be abandoned to the trite, vague, superficial and unsubstantiated sentiments of greeting cards, religious demagogues and self-help manuals.

Relocating to Nirvana

Thomas Hobbes expresses the modern bourgeois mentality well when he says, “The felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis uitimus, utmost aim, nor summum bonum.” We moderns are always restlessly producing and consuming. We are never satisfied. In fact we don't even have the faintest idea of what would satisfy us. The only thing we know for certain is that it would be preceded by the word "more."

In the fifties, Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert began experimenting with the hallucinogens psilocybin and LSD. He concluded that the state of mind to which the drugs took him was most certainly the summum bonum. He then sought more reliable ways to reach this state of mind. Alpert’s quest eventually led him to India, where he studied Yoga and Buddhism. Alpert concluded that the “Nirvana” referred to in Indian texts is essentially the same as the “high” produced by LSD and psilocybin, just reached by different means. The Indian method of achieving Nirvana was, he decided, superior. Drugs presented the inevitable problem of “coming down.”

In addition to this practical problem, however, there is a deeper theoretical one. Perhaps the tripper experiences the same Nirvana as the Eastern mystic, but he doesn’t really understand how or why. An appropriate analogy is the jet airplane. The jet takes us from one place to another quickly. But it doesn’t give us an understanding of the world in which the two places are situated, or the vastness of the distance separating them. The tripper is a tourist in Nirvana. The guru has relocated.

In Protestant theology, there was once a debate between salvation by faith and salvation by works. Salvation by works won. And this victory has become deeply entrenched in our nominally secular culture. We now unquestioningly privilege material works over psychological satisfaction. Insofar as our society makes use of psychology at all, it is primarily to return nonproductive people to the workforce. The idea that a nonproductive life, a life of contemplation and reverence, might be the higher form of life, has lost its plausibility in the Western world.