Questions are often raised about the Fireaxe theory either during discussions I have with others or when I'm re-reading or writing essays for the newsletter. Since many of the questions do not require long answers I'll handle some of them here and in future editions of The Burning Blade. Feel free to send in your questions.

Regarding Ideological neutrality:

Q. How can you call people moral cowards if your stance is "ideologically neutral"?

A. In a number of editions of The Burning Blade I've referred to the leaders of my country and other influential people as "moral cowards" due to their failure to live up to their own moral code, or at least what I would perceive as being their moral code. I have to admit that it is difficult to label anyone as a hypocrite in this regard since most people will simply twist their moral code and actions into whatever shapes that are necessary to forge agreement between the two. However, when it comes to the conduct of the war in Iraq and the recent war in Lebanon it would seem that the case for moral cowardice is pretty clear cut. Torture and infanticide simply cannot be argued away. To take a pragmatic approach, that those actions, while regrettable, are being done for the greater good, does not change the fact that they are immoral, it only seeks to rationalize them.

The second part of the question is more interesting, and that is: can anyone proclaiming to be ideologically neutral go around calling others "moral cowards"? My answer to this is that morality is not necessarily dependent on ideology. To say that there are no morals without ideology is to make the same mistake as saying that there are no morals without a god. The general argument for this fallacious claim is that morals are absolutes regarding human behavior and that this implies that there must be a creator and arbiter of those absolutes. Thus there must be a god. This type of argument capitulates rapidly for the usual reasons associated with claiming that there exist absolutes, and that is that those who claim that there are absolutes are completely unable to demonstrate them. Believers in absolutes will usually resort to fallacies such as shifting the burden of proof ("prove that there are no absolutes") or by stating the most reprehensible thing they can think of and forcing you to either agree that it is "evil" or that you in some way condone the horrible act by saying that it is not. ("So, you don't believe that 9/11 was evil? So you think that it was okay then? So, it's alright to murder thousands of innocent people!")

In the absence of any proof of moral absolutes there is no other conclusion but that all moral codes are a product of moral relativism, and no, that's not and excluded middle fallacy, it's just a tautology. The key issue is deducing the purpose of morality, and for that the Fireaxe theory comes in handy. I think that it is clear that ideologies grew out of simpler, more ancient moral codes, such as the code of Hammurabi, and that the more complex that they became the more those codes required abstract concepts, such as gods, life after death, and faith, to hold them together. Also, in the days before the separation of church and state, the moral code was the law and vice-versa, and so the moral code essentially dictated how a society functioned. In this regard, the survival of a society was very much dependent on its moral code. If that code made people happy and more productive, the society would thrive, but if it did the opposite, the society would likely collapse. In this way, morality follows the rules of natural selection in that those who follow a successful moral code and thrive will pass it on to their children and those who follow failed codes do not tend to pass them on. Therefore, the purpose of morality is to ensure the survival of a morally behaving society.

This definition of morality is not dependent on an ideology or a god, instead it is grounded in objective reality. Extending this logic it is clear that having an "absolute", or rather, an unchanging moral code is potentially detrimental to a society since it will be unable to adjust to widespread changes in the world which alter the rules of survival. History bears this out as cultures with strict moral codes often have a very short lifespan, usually less that two generations before dying out or become much less strict, when compared to more flexible cultures. It is for this reason that successful and enduring religions are surprisingly flexible when it comes to morality despite claims that they are based on absolutes. While holy texts are said to be the unerring word of a god they must always be interpreted by humans, and humans differ greatly in their interpretation of scripture. Furthermore, the texts themselves are often full of obvious contradictions and can be seen as giving widely differing advice for similar situations depending on which part of the texts you read. The many books of the Bible show this clearly, and there is no more starker difference in morality than that between the Old and New Testaments. The god of the Old Testament is harsh, strict, and often brutal while the god of the New Testament is tolerant and forgiving. Is one supposed to love thine enemies or destroy them? It all depends on which part of the Bible you read. The Bible can support war and the Bible can support peace. By being both ambiguous and occasionally duplicitous, scripture can be flexible when it needs to be yet still claim to be morally absolute. Being open to interpretation in this manner is a survival advantage for an ideology.

One can have morals without subscribing to an ideology and thus one can call others moral cowards while still remaining ideologically neutral. Even an atheist, such as myself, can not only have morals, but hold them strongly, meaning that I tend to stick to mine in the face of changing cultural trends. To me, the September eleventh terrorist attacks did not change the world, they only brought home the threat that most people in the world live under to those who believed that they were comfortably secure from such a violent death. To me the attacks were a moral challenge which asked those in my country if we could remain faithful to our high ideals while ensuring that the attacks would never happen again. In my opinion, we, as a country, have failed, and failed pretty miserably. While there have been no follow-up attacks, in the United States at least, our high ideals have been trashed both at home and abroad, and watching the right of habeas corpus get discarded by the paranoid cowards who lead my country was as sick of a sight as I ever want to see. Now, I must say that I am not naïve. I know that there are dangers lurking in the world and that we need to be vigilant against them. But I do not forget that I live in danger every day due to the rights I insist upon and the freedoms that I enjoy. I know that giving people the right to buy both guns and liquor at the same time increases the chances that I, or someone that I know, will be injured or killed, but I will gladly accept the risks along with the rights to which all my fellow Americans are entitled. To me the far greater danger is the threat to my nation as a result of moral regression out of fear rather than that from any enemy. A lot of people have forgotten what true strength and courage really are.

Acting morally is not easy, and as any believer will tell you, devotion means nothing if it is never put to the test. It is from this position, of one who knows that he is putting his life more at risk by doing so yet thinking that the benefits outweigh the risks, that I insist that those leading my country do so morally, and when they fail, I reserve the right to call them moral cowards. Maybe if enough people do so the result will be positive and our leaders will be able to make the difficult choices.

Q. If you are conditioned by an ideology from birth can you truly be ideologically neutral?

A. In theory, yes. In practice, the ideal of true ideological neutrality is probably unattainable. Does this nullify everything that I've written about the Fireaxe theory? Of course not, it just means that I'm not infallible and that there may exist systemic problems that are caused by my ideological upbringing. By this I mean that although I strive to see issues from all angles and resolve inconsistencies in my arguments, the ideological conditioning which I've received could be creating blind spots in that vision even though I no longer embrace an ideology. One cannot simply "undo" one's conditioning, and discarding a belief in a god or ideal does not leave one a blank slate. The well conditioned parts of one's neural circuitry are mostly fixed in place and the best that one can do is try to observe one's self when thinking or acting along well conditioned lines. By being so aware, one can catch one's self in assumptions and strive to rethink things along alternate lines.

Self-examination is essential for any academic or, I would add, artistic pursuit. When you know yourself, it enables you to see your own tendencies and prejudices better, which is one reason why The Burning Blade contains some often revealing and intimate pieces regarding its author and his personal life, and not always in a positive light. Examining one's self can be therapeutic, and criticizing one's self can set one along the path to growth. All that is truly effective in psychotherapy involves enabling a client to see himself and see his own mistakes so that he can make adjustments. Being able to be your own analyst is both helpful and cost effective.

As an artist I need to grow in order to produce creative new works. As an amateur social-psychological theorist I need to examine and re-examine my theories to make sure that they are sound. In both cases, opening up my works to criticism from myself and others helps to make my subsequent works stronger. However, whether or not this makes either my art or my theories better or more correct is, regrettably, a matter of opinion. I say that because at my day job, there does exist such things as right and wrong. No, I don't work at a church. My day job involves both computer programming and hard science, and thus, right and wrong are not value judgments, they are objective evaluations that everyone can see. If I don't get the code which I write correct, it will fail to compile, or it will crash, or it will not give the correct answer when it runs. It doesn't matter how confident I feel about the code when I write it, or what methodology I use, or how many times I've debugged it, if it's right it works, if it's wrong it doesn't. Emotions mean nothing. I can be optimistic or pessimistic, I can be excited or depressed, I can threaten my computer or I can plead with it to make my code work, but nothing that I feel inside will affect the final product of what I've written. The computer, the math, and the physics objectively judge the validity of my work and tell me when it is right or wrong. I'd love to have the same sort of feedback for the Fireaxe theory, but it is far away from any objective testing in present form and exhaustive testing for many parts of it would probably border on the unethical anyway. As a result the Fireaxe theory can only be judged by the hopelessly subjective world of popular opinion, and given how harsh the theory is towards ideology and especially towards hope it does not test well with audiences. For this reason it generally appears to be wrong.

In my opinion I have not gotten anywhere near sufficient feedback on the Fireaxe theory to be confident in the many conjectures that I've made using it. I'm also not sufficiently well read to speak with authority on the numerous subjects that the Fireaxe theory touches and I doubt that I ever could be even if I did nothing but read for years. So for now I will try to flesh it out as best that I can and decide what direction to take with it in the future. So far it's given me some very useful insights as to how the world works, which has benefited me directly, but I can't say that it has let me penetrate as deep into the murkiness of our modern world, or as deep into the opacity of my own mind, as I would like or need.

Q. Isn't truth in the eye of the beholder? That is, don't we seek out and eventually find a worldview that suits our psychological conditioning?

A. First to explain that bit of mumbo-jumbo. It essentially suggests that the way in which we view the world reflects our natural tendencies and upbringing. In other words, optimistic people will tend to have a worldview where everything works out for the better, people raised in a strict environment will tend to have a world view based around laws and order, and so forth. In essence, objective truth is unattainable and how we see the world reveals more about us than it does about reality.

I can understand this perspective coming from someone who has never practiced hard science or experienced the humbling way in which the real world can lay waste to one's best theorizing. But there is objectivity in the world and the truth isn't simply a matter of opinion. However, in many cases the answer to a certain problem can simply not be known in advance and thus we are left with "worldviews" or rather, different perceptive strategies, for reducing large amounts of information into a manageable sum which can be analyzed and used towards predicting the future. In this sense it is correct that we will tend towards perceptive strategies that match with our inherent psychological conditioning. This is because our conditioning determines what our minds are good at doing and our perceptive framework will reflect our strengths and weaknesses. However, it is also true that the objective reality of the world can cause our perceptive strategies to change if reality refuses to match how we predict it will be. The trouble is that this is often not the case. It must be pointed out that our perceptive strategies will only lend themselves to change if they are both internally consistent and are reliably dependent upon facts.

Internal consistency may seem like a given, but the human mind is fully capable of holding two completely contradictory ideas and seeing no conflict between them. This tendency is common among people who were raised in a strict religious environment, such as Catholicism, and is referred to as "cognitive dissonance". For example, a person can believe that only bad things happen to them and nod his head knowingly every time something goes wrong in his life. The same person can also believe that whenever something good happens to him, that it was because his god is rewarding him for his faithfulness. Note that there is no back and forth consistency between these two conflicting beliefs, that is, if something bad happens to the person, he will never say that it was because his god was punishing him, and if something good happens to him, the person will never admit that good things do happen to him simply by accident. It must have been his god. This inconsistent perceptual strategy is completely resistant to change. No matter what happens, the outcome can be explained with one belief or the other with perfect agreement with the perceptual system. The absence of change also impedes the individual's growth, although it does reward the ideology when the person's faithfulness leads him to support it. Thus, when it comes to personal growth, it is important for one to find and remove any instances of cognitive dissonance in one's perceptual strategy and to keep an eye out for inconsistencies and hypocrisy in one's thinking. I suggest to all believers that discarding religion is a good start in this regard as religion is full of meaningless adages that explain nothing but which serve to soothe a doubting soul and make one more dependent upon irrational beliefs.

Reliable dependency on facts also seems like a given, but the human mind is very dependent upon strength of signal when conditioning is being laid down, and the strongest signals in the mind come from intense emotions rather than factual certainty. It is here that self discipline in one's thoughts is critical. One has to be mindful of one's own psychological tendencies to embrace things which are presented in a way that appeal to emotions rather than those which are presented with a rigorous review of the supporting facts. Being disciplined in this way prevents emotionally supported ideas from displacing factually supported ones in the mind. It also ensures that one's beliefs are based on the weight of the evidence and that facts are competing evenly with other facts. Now, many ideologies embrace self-discipline as a tool for its members that helps them to remain devout and faithful against the appeals of rival ideologies. It helps one's faith to be able to turn ones ruthless critical faculties upon ideas which contradict those currently held. However, there is also a second side to this discipline, one that most ideologies decline to teach, and that is that one's current perceptual strategy must be structured in a way so that it can only stand upon facts and cannot rest upon emotionally established beliefs. This discipline of self-criticism is important because most of us adopted our ideological thinking when we were at an age where we did not know enough about the world to tell facts from opinion with reasonable certainty. Thus, an ideology can impose itself upon a young mind through emotional arguments, and then teach that mind to be disciplined and resistant to the same types of emotional arguments that established it in the first place. Although this is inherently hypocritical, it is effective because it makes a mind nearly impenetrable. Such a mind can debunk emotionally based arguments through disciplined thinking and fact based arguments simply do not have the strength to overcome that mind's beliefs since they were established through strong emotional conditioning long before. Furthermore, people are not always aware of why and how they believe the things that they do. Often people only have a general perception of why they believe something, a perception that is associated with a strong feeling if the belief is well supported, or a weak feeling if it is not. It is here where beliefs established with facts and those established with emotions can become confused. If one feels that a belief is well established, they will sometimes assume that it is well supported by reliable facts, even if one does not remember them, and then argue to that effect whether they are right or not. Thus, one needs the discipline of being able to question how one believes the things that one does and to make changes to those beliefs when they are no longer adequately supported. One cannot simply rely on how one feels about a certain perception, one must be able to back it up with facts or concede that such a belief needs to be further investigated.

If one can force one's perceptual strategy to be both internally consistent and reliably dependent on facts, then the act of being exposed to the world and making predictions about it will slowly bring one's perceptual strategy more in line with reality rather than with one's own ideological conditioning. In simpler terms this is called gaining wisdom, but not everyone grows wiser as they get older. The key to getting wiser is to make sure that your brain is able to function efficiently as a perceptive tool which brings your body into equilibrium with the rest of the world and not as a tool which is being used to ensuring the survival of an ideology.