Epilogue: the Morlocks and Me

A reader asks: “Mr Wright – when you were an atheist, did you write Morlock fiction? Why or why not?”

I most certainly did not write Morlock fiction during my atheist days. (Ironically, the one short story I penned that was clearly nihilist in theme and tone, “Silence in the Night”, was one I wrote after my conversion, not before.)

While I was not a Christian, I was a Stoic, and I upheld and promoted the classical virtues (fortitude, moderation, temperance, justice) as well as the Enlightenment virtues (reason, liberty, individualism, liberty) — and I was also a Romantic. I believed and still believe in True Love.  I believed and still believe life is worth living, that reason allows one to discover truth, that truth is better than lies, that logic is better than illogical, beauty than ugliness, life than death.

If anything, I was a more vituperative enemy of the modern culture of death than I am now: I provoked considerable scorn and wrath and Jihadist ire from the Left for suggesting in one book written while I was an atheist that self-control of the passions, especially in the realm of the sexual passions, was a rational and honorable virtue. They had never met an atheist who believed in virtue before, and so their heads exploded.

Another book I wrote when I was an atheist suggested that life was worth living, and that our mission in life was to order our passions, reasons, and appetites to reflect reality and to follow justice — to do what is in one’s own enlightened self-interest and to avoid what is self-destructive. I was saying nothing other than what a Houyhnhnm would say. One reviewer cautioned readers that my book was a work of Christian apologetic.

Again, I recall a private conversation where I pointed out that abortion was against the Darwinian imperative to reproduce the species. Any race, tribe, or clan that had a genetic weakness favoring abortion of its own young would in a few generations be out produced by any race, tribe, or clan lacking that weakness, and their greater numbers would give them a greater talent pool to draw upon. My argument was that any moral code which failed to promote survival was in the long run self destructive, because it was a moral code that would eventually edit itself out of history. My interlocutor accused me of being a Bible-bashing Godbotherer and a Fundie.

This is why I often say that not just Christians are involved in the culture war.

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