Essay: Paradise, the Reward of Being Moral

[jrearden]

Paradise, the Reward of Being Moral

It is thought in some religions that when one dies, he or she is brought before God, and the nature of the life that he has led, examined. Following this, he is then sent to Heaven or to Hell in accordance with the evaluation of that life. For the man who believes in such, life on earth is a relatively brief "lobby" before the glory of a joyful Paradise or the hell of an everlasting damnation, and the purpose of this lobby is to determine to which of these one is sent.

The key question for an individual on earth who wishes to achieve the better alternative then becomes: by what standard will I be judged?

Christian morality, in particular, stresses that the good life properly involves service to others, and that being one's "brother's keeper" is the moral code for which one achieves the rewards of heaven. But there is a dear price for accepting this as one’s moral primary.

There is no power on earth greater than morality, and no variable more important to any individual man’s psychology than what moral code he accepts as true. It is essential to the life and mind of any man than that he know himself as good, and it is one important job of morality to provide this explicit conviction. In order to continue living, in order to have the energy to sustain his own life and move through his days, a man needs to believe, to whatever degree, that he is good and that his person is a value worthy of being maintained. The man who approaches the extreme of the alternate conviction, that he is evil, is (as Ayn Rand wrote) on the verge of insanity or suicide.

Morality designs the reactor, so to speak – it establishes which actions, if pursued, will grant a man the conviction of his own moral worth and the energy with which to continue his life. The reactor is built in the image of one’s moral code, one’s own action is its fuel, and the output is the knowledge that one is good and the energy with which to move through one’s days.

But man is a creature of free will – and any given man’s moral blueprint is a matter of his own choice.

If in this matchlessly important decision, a man should accept "the good of others" as his moral primary, he consigns himself to the lethargy of duty for as long as he refuses to revise this vital error. Morality, rather than a guide to the achievement of a radiantly happy existence, becomes a lead weight upon his soul, and the emotional accompaniment of his days, rather than happiness, is guilt. He has signed a blank check on his time and values which can never be fully redeemed, and which can be exercised whenever anyone other than himself might choose to cash it. Should he ever refuse such a claim, the result is a soul-draining guilt and the dangerous conviction that he is not worthy of life, i.e., not good.

No man who retains a trace of the conviction of his own value can ever wholly submit to the concept of himself as a slave. But should he attempt to do so, he is caught in the following alternative, where the achievement of rational values and their psychological corollary, happiness, become impossible:

1- He can be "good", i.e., the provider of life-sustaining values to others, and know no personal values, subordinating his desire to pursue his own values and enjoy his own life, the natural corollary of the fact that his life is indeed his own property, to the demand of any man who makes a claim on him (a claim the beggar makes only by virtue of the fact that he is not the producer). He is driven, again by the inescapable need to know his own goodness, to provide loaves for others – but feels guilty should he ever take one for himself. His soul is kept alive by the flickering candle of the conviction of his own goodness by this (irrational) standard, which is even less bright by virtue of the fact that he hates those who claim this hold on him as a matter of right;

Or,

2- He can be of immense "depravity" during his life by this (irrational) standard, not serving others in any primary sense, knowing a life of guilty egoism, allowing himself what degree of energy, of passion, of life that may penetrate the foggy murk of the morality that dominates his mind, given that he has accepted the idea that a primary concern with his own interests is a sin.1

A Rational Morality

But is the altruistic moral code right? No, of course not. It is true that Paradise is the reward of morality, but it is a Paradise for which one does not need to wait.

The 20th-century author and philosopher Ayn Rand wrote, "The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live." In this context, morality is a personal matter, not a social one. It is the tool that prepares an individual man to live his own life successfully, and it is based in the identification that one's life is one's own.

One can only begin to think about morality when this context is established. If one allows the idea of “others” to enter the courtroom during this process, nothing is gained but confusion. What is their good? How does one define the good of “others” before one has done it in regard to an individual instance? What principles regarding men as a group can be defined, before any conclusions have been reached in regard to one?3

A rational morality begins with the study of that one.

In reality, human life is individual, and belongs to its owner; no other man can rationally claim a right to that life. It is also conditional; it is the goal of keeping it in existence given its conditional nature that is a primary what-for of morality. Morality provides guidance in choosing among alternatives as one pursues the goal of one's own continued existence. A unbroken policy of choosing the moral alternative when one is presented with choice results in the personal conviction that one is good.

A man’s greatest value, which allows all of a potential myriad of others to develop, is his own existence. He is properly his own top value, and the continuing, value-filled experience of his existence is properly his primary goal. The 'moral reactor' of a man who holds this as his code of ethics is on a firm and rationally engineered foundation, its blueprints approved by reality and in harmony with the truth that his life is his own. Should it be fueled by moral action, he knows his own goodness and has no shortage of energy with which to live his days. He energetically and creatively seeks values, whether money, love or any rational goal he directs his focus toward; he knows that he is good and deserves such. He greedily seeks to take from each moment of existence every iota of joy of which he is capable, knowing that he deserves no less.

For one who accepts this standard, one that is objective and grounded in reality and reason, morality is personal and essentially means: rationality. Morality is the exercise of reason on his own behalf, in all the decisions that face him, in the context of the goal that is the continuation of his own life and the enjoyment of that life to the greatest degree of which he is capable. It is reason, the faculty that identifies what is, that establishes the best course to achieving his values and to the highest return on any investment in time, matter or spirit that he may make.4 His eyes are open and his thought is active in the service of his own life. The alternative, irrationality, means: that one’s sight is suspended, one’s reason is cut off, and that the achievement of one’s own values and happiness are hampered, to whatever degree.

(Note that being immoral by a rational standard does not make sense in any context, neither in the short-term nor the long – there is no value to gain, no prize to win. The immoral man is in constant anxiety from avoiding the sight of his own eyes and undercutting the reach of his own intellect; to whatever degree, he avoids the grasp of the universe that he cannot escape and lives, so far as he continues to persist in the irrational, in an anxiety-ridden earthly Hell as he drags himself through his days. And for what? For nothing.)

For a man to open his own eyes, and for that sight to be in the service of his own existence, is the psychological habit of the good man’s earthly Paradise. He is good and knows himself as such, given his nature and the nature of existence. He honors his own sight above all things, he knows that he is a value worth maintaining, and his days are powered by the energy of that conviction. He knows happiness, the psychological consequence of achieving rational values, the first of which is his own soul. He is thoroughly good – not because he will be rewarded by God in Heaven, but because he is rewarded with Heaven, i.e., life, values and the rapture of a joy based in the noncontradictory awareness corollary to a devotion to reason, here, now, on earth.

Life on earth is not a “lobby” before an imagined Heaven – it is Heaven itself. The key to achieving it lies in clearly defining what moral code accords with reality, reason and the right – i.e., building the reactor properly, fueling it with moral action, knowing oneself as good thereby, and knowing sunlit days filled with the value-hungry energy of that conviction.

Paradise is indeed the reward of being moral – and the good man carries Paradise with him wherever he goes.

(December 2005)

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1. And (2) is without question the course he will take, if any trace of rationality and humanity, i.e. any remnant of the honoring the hero within him, remains alive. (And if God is forgiving, and would without question grant amnesty for all acts performed during his life were a man to request it at its end, it is even more logical to simply pursue this course of guilty egoism, harvesting from life, so far as he may, the enjoyment of violating the displaced moral code that infects his soul, to whatever degree, and confess on his deathbed.)

2. If he should attempt to reject morality entirely, if he should attempt to abandon any desire to know himself as good, he becomes psychologically dead, and existential death is simply a matter of time.

3. An other-based morality, that states “the good is the good of others”, displaces the issue down a potentially infinite progression –as though the subject whose analysis we seek, noticing we are after him, hides himself behind a door, and when we grasp the knob to again find him, he hides himself behind another, down an unending line. If he is identified, we are again lost – for it is not him we are seeking now, but “others”. The answer is to stop such displacement and focus on the individual, the life of whom serves as an objective ground of the inquiry.

4. A rational man will seek the greatest degree of emotional “return on investment” that is possible to him; he will seek to know the greatest degree of happiness and joy that it is within his power to achieve in his days. Given that he has the option of flourishing, he will always choose to do so, just as he would exchange one dollar for ten rather than for five.

[BaalChatzaf]

4. A rational man will seek the greatest degree of emotional “return on investment” that is possible to him; he will seek to know the greatest degree of happiness and joy that it is within his power to achieve in his days. Given that he has the option of flourishing, he will always choose to do so, just as he would exchange one dollar for ten rather than for five.

Compare and contrast this with Pascals Wager.

Ba'al Chatzaf