Chapter 2.                     Part D 

         Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to World War I had been discussing in total seriousness the very likely possibility that the new modern weapons would be useless because men would simply refuse to use them on other men. Repeating rifles, torpedoes, poison gas, machine guns, airplanes, flame throwers ...the horrors they’d cause. No. No one would be able to use them.

                                    early French postcard depicting the year 2000

   

Other writers a few years before, more sanguine about how Science would affect society, had even been speaking of a coming “Golden Age”. Science wasn’t just showing us how to build horrible weapons. It was also curing diseases, creating labor-saving machines, improving agriculture, and even inventing new forms of entertainment. Progress was steadily reaching into the lives of even the humblest citizens. Surely, goodness and mercy would follow close behind.

               

      The point is that the First World War shattered the optimism of the Golden Age prophets, but it also shattered much more deeply the confidence of the nations of the West, which had begun to believe that they had found the answers to life’s riddles. Pre-WWI, people in general in the West had come to believe that the wise men of the West were in control now: the ways of the West, with Science in the vanguard, were taking over the world, and therefore the sufferings of the past were going to gradually be reduced until they became only rare anomalies or dim memories recorded in books.

There had been wars and famines and depressions before, but the traditional ideas of God and of right and wrong, based on the Bible, had held onto the loyalties of people in the West because, firstly, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI, secondly, the ways of the West, mostly, had seemed to work, and thirdly, there really hadn’t been a serious alternative set of beliefs to consider. 

But now, with the rise of Science, all was changing. As we gained physical power, our ideas about how to handle that power began to seem more and more inadequate. Then, in the horrors of WWI, the moral systems of the Western societies seemed not just to fail but to unravel; people’s worst fears came true. Science was a monster and it was on the loose.

As Science, with its new media of communication, was giving the jingoistic, xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in modern societies more power to mold people’s minds, Science was also arming these forces and leaders with ever bigger and more terrible weapons ...while the moral philosophers and social scientists dithered. The outcome had a feeling of inevitably to it. A global arms race had become normal. Sooner or later a war of monstrous proportions had to happen.  

                           German soldier's belt buckle (standard issue) WWI 

    

Descartes’ compromise way of Christian morals being used to control scientific technologies was not working. Not only were Christians of the West performing previously unthinkable horrors, they were doing them mostly to each other. Worst of all, in every one of the warring nations, these acts were being done expressly in the name of their God. “Gott mit uns” was embossed on every German soldier’s belt buckle. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was being sung at Sunday services in every English-speaking country in the world.   

There was no doubt about it; the old beliefs and values just weren’t up to the hard tests that the new, scientific age was posing for them. In fact, the sages that many people had been looking to, namely the scientists, in all of the branches of Science, asserted that, on the subject of morality, they had nothing to say. 

Chapter 2.                     Part C 

This has been the scariest of the consequences of the rise of Science: moral confusion and indecision among our elites. It began to become serious in the West in the nineteenth century, but here we are in the twenty-first, and, if anything, the crisis of moral confidence appears to be getting worse.    

Now all of this still may sound academic and far removed from the experience of ordinary folk. But the truth is otherwise. When a society’s sages can't guide the people, then the people look elsewhere for moral leadership. When the “wise” respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with jargon and equivocation, others – some very “unwise” – jump in to fill the people’s needs.

So we ask: how did the eroding of the moral systems of the West that followed the rise of Science affect people living through real events? Let’s consider one harsh example.

        

                                            World War I (photos from the Western Front) 

         

            By the early twentieth century, the impacts of the ideas of Darwin and Freud, and of Science more generally, had arrived. Social scientists and philosophers were left scrambling to understand what new moral code, if any, was being implied for humanity by these new ways of seeing the world. Answers on every side were contradictory and confusing. Then, following too soon, in a bitter or perhaps inevitable irony, real world political events broke out of control. 1914. World War I. A major test of the moral systems of the new “scientific” societies of the West arrived.

                        

                                       World War I recruitment poster 

   

When World War I began, in the cities and towns of Europe, and in the cities of all other countries that were attached even remotely to the main belligerents, there were banners flying, troops marching, bands playing, and huge crowds of men, women, and kids all shouting for joy. A few sober people raised objections for one set of reasons or another, but they were drowned out in the din. Finally, the superior armies and ideals of “our way of life” were going to sweep aside the barbaric armies and ideals of our nation’s enemies.

                             48th Highland Regiment getting ready to leave Toronto 

Exhorted in speeches by their leaders and by writers in the media to stand up for their homelands, the men of Italy, Germany, France, Britain, Austro-Hungary, and Russia, along with all of their allies, accepted the jingoistic stories that were being told in their newspapers and signed up to fight. Competing “narratives” about Europe and its history had finally brought the European tribes into head-on confrontation.

                        

                                          Canadian World War I recruitment poster 

                                 

                                 

                              German poster (depicting Britain as a global spider) 

                                                 

            My country, Canada, in 1914, was part of the British Empire, and Canadians were just as gung-ho as any of the loyal subjects in London, England. Young men leapt out of the crowds lining the streets to march in step with the parades of soldiers going by. Many of them were worried that by the time they got through their training and over to Europe, the fighting would be over. Girls clustered around guys in uniform who came back to visit their workplaces or colleges or even high schools before shipping out. Old ladies out shopping, by 1916, would spit on any young man of military age who was not in uniform.

               

        Long before the horrible casualties began to mount, World War I was huge in the historians’ terms even from its very beginning because, for the first time in history, modern, scientific weapons and technologies were going to be used to kill men in assembly line ways. The whole process was going to be made as efficient as the new, scientifically-designed factories: scientific technologies, arranged in efficient sequences and supervised by experts. Now we would see what Science could do.

               

            We saw.

Consider just one telling statistic: the British Army lost more casualties –  60,000 wounded, missing, and killed – in the first six days of the Battle of the Somme than the British Army had lost in all of its recorded history, all over the world, up until that week. France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, the U.S., and all of the others got hit with similar experiences, over and over, for four long years.

            In the end, nine million combatants were dead, three times that many permanently scarred. And those were just the combatants. How many civilians? No one really knows. Every country on Earth was touched (or should we say "wrenched"?), either directly or indirectly. Of the 600,000+ Canadians (from a population of eight million) who went over to Europe to fight, one in nine died there. (65,000+)

Chapter 2.                               Part B 

In the meantime, attacks aimed specifically at the social sciences are made by philosophers like John Searle. Taking still another tack, he argues that physical sciences can be rigorous, but social ones cannot. Social sciences have to talk about things that are too vaguely defined, and therefore, Searle claims, the conclusions that studies in the social sciences produce can’t lead to nomothetic, i.e. law-like, general conclusions at all. (3.). (He and several other critics of social science are well countered in Harold Kincaid’s book “Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences”.) (4.)

                                                              John Searle 

In response to these criticisms, some social scientists have striven to put more objectivity and empirical rigor into what they do. But they do admit that the studies done in their fields are often difficult to replicate because relevant background conditions to the phenomena being studied can’t be re-set. For example, how could we get a tribe to go back to living as fishers when the fish species they once lived off of are gone? Could we get a modern nation, or even a small sub-group in it, to live without their cell phones? 

Even a social scientist’s looking at a group of people changes those people. Some of the morés of the people being studied then get altered or cease to exist. Social scientists also admit that the models which guide their research can’t be expressed in neatly logical terms so the phenomena that the researchers describe are often not reducible to formulas. In addition, many of the ways in which a researcher's own biases may influence what she looks for and how she sees the data seem impossible to forestall, no matter how carefully the studies are designed. Finally, many human customs only make sense when they are viewed in the context in which the humans being studied normally live. Outside of their contexts, human actions often look pointless. In the Aztec's markets, which kiosks sold batteries? Before they went overseas, where did the Crusaders get their typhus shots? 

Thus, social scientists admit that they often must settle for a “single print” of any phenomenon that they wish to study. Societies vary so widely in their beliefs and morés and keep changing even as we look. There are a lot of prints to study and more coming all the time; we'll never catch up. And for that matter, how can any social scientist, who grew up largely inside of one culture, ever claim to look objectively at another culture?

Others in the social sciences have taken a more aggressive stance. They have argued that no science, not even Physics, is truly objective. Complex, culturally-acquired biases shape all human thinking, even, they say, the thinking of the physicists and chemists. 

Under this view, moral relativism is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the whole body of social science research, or all research in all fields, for that matter. We can try to observe and study human societies and the belief systems that they instill in their members, but we can’t pretend to do such work "objectively". We come to it with eyes already looking to focus on the details that fit in with the models and values that we absorbed as children. Each researcher's model of what human society is - or could be, or should be - lies deeper than his/her ability to articulate thoughts in words or even simply to observe. Our bias can’t be suspended; it pre-ordains our ability to think at all.    

This is the stance called "social constructivism". In its view, you use thought-filters that you absorbed from your culture (parents, siblings, teachers, etc.), and with these tools, you string together sense data that you have been taught are the ones that "matter" until, moment by moment, you form a picture of "reality". But the whole of reality is much more detailed and complex than the set of sights and sounds that you are paying attention to. And others, especially others from other cultures, construct their own pictures of reality.  Some of those pictures will be radically different from yours, but still quite workable.

In support of this claim, social scientists point out that while careful descriptions of events in a given society are possible, and even generalizations about apparent connections between events in that society are possible, law-like statements about how moral codes and morés for all humans in all societies work continue to elude us. 

Some social scientists go so far as to claim that there aren’t any “facts” in any of our descriptions of the events of the past, or perhaps even of the events happening around us now, social or physical. There are only various “narratives” from various cultures and individuals, any one of them as valid as any other one. At the highest level of generality then – that is, on what morality is – many social scientists not only have had nothing to say; they insist that nothing "factual" - i.e. nothing  “objectively true” - can be said.

           

                                                       Marvin Harris 

This argument called the “Science Wars” continues to rage. We can’t go into even five percent of it here. But the point for us is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack conviction. They can read about "honor killings", and remark calmly, "Well, that's their culture." In fact, to many thinkers in the humanities and social sciences today, all convictions are temporary and local. (A more recent, sensible, and useful compromise position is taken by Marvin Harris in "Theories of Culture in Post-Modern Times".) (5.)   

Chapter 2           Why We Have To Find A New Moral System        

Part A 

                               

                                                  William Butler Yeats 

                                             

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere

 The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

 The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

 Are full of passionate intensity.”                 

           (from “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats, 1919)

When our idea of God began to erode so did our ideas of right and wrong, and when those ideas began to erode, we became the society that Yeats described in his great poem “The Second Coming”. We live in a time in which some of the most immoral of citizens are filled with “passionate intensity”: fraud artists call themselves "entrepreneurs”; Mafia thugs claim sincerely that they are just soldiers in one more kind of war; warmongers tout their indispensability. In other words, these people see themselves as moral people, heroic ones even. Meanwhile, some of what should be society's best citizens “lack all conviction”.    

For example, it would seem logical that people in the Science-driven countries of the West, in looking for moral direction, should turn to their experts, the scientists, and most especially, the ones who specialize in the study of human societies, their values systems, and the morés they spawn: things like the actions that people perform, the statements, oral and written, that people make about which acts are “good”, and the rationales that they give to justify their actions. In the West, these experts are our sociologists and cultural anthropologists. 

But social scientists in the West have no moral direction to offer their fellow citizens. In fact, they have given up on trying to define right and wrong. In their writings, they question whether “values” exist in any real way at all. Ruth Benedict, the American anthropologist, put it succinctly: "Morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits." (1.)    

Some even go over to the offence and question what it is that Science is seeking. Are scientists seeking the "truth" about "reality" or what exactly? The varied answers to this question are all parts of a raging controversy in the universities of the world right now.

                                 

                                                        Thomas Kuhn 

     

In “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, Thomas Kuhn argued that the whole activity called “science” is a process that is not strictly rational. It does not move forward in a steady march of improving knowledge. In Kuhn's view, science always moves from a less useful picture of the world to a more useful one by unpredictable leaps, rather than in a gradual, rational expanding of human knowledge. He called these leaps "paradigm shifts".  

Paradigm shifts occur for individuals, communities, and nations as each individual who “gets it” has her moment of insight and then experiences a leap of understanding that makes her see reality in a new and radically different way. A kind of “conversion experience” that then steers her into a sect of fellow believers. Whatever else it is, Science - says Kuhn - is not merely rational. It is driven as much by unconscious and social factors as by conscious, logical, "rational" ones. Not surprisingly, Kuhn’s work has provoked many responses, pro and con. (2.)

Chapter 1.                 Part F 

         If we just consider these three scientific theories - Galileo's, Darwin's, and Freud's - then, what can we say have been their consequences? Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, for most people, removed the biblical God from their picture of the cosmos. They didn’t need him in their model of the universe. Darwin removed God as the creator of life. He even reduced humans to just one more kind of animal. And Freud made humans look like sick animals, easily deluded by their own aggressive, lustful, self-absorbed thoughts. (Donald Palmer's book articulates this idea well.) (7.)

         Science has not proved that the existence of God is impossible or that a universal moral code is impossible. But over the past four centuries, Science has severely shaken the traditional idea of God and thus, inevitably, the traditional ideas of morality. (The two are deeply intertwined, as we shall see.) However, let me stress again that what does not follow is that there is no God or that every form of theism and every form of moral code are mere wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what God is and what the fact of His existence should mean for us in how we live our daily lives, an understanding that incorporates some subtler ideas of God and Science into a single, coherent picture of what we believe is real.

  

         But for now, we can say that Science has almost totally leveled the old, pre-Enlightenment ways of conceiving of these things. And let us make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the vast majority of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how this world works had the inevitable consequence of removing our society’s confidence in its moral code, our ideas of what right and wrong are and how we should try to act – toward the world in general, but especially toward each other. If the moral rules we're supposed to follow aren’t God’s rules, whose rules are they? Human authorities' rules? Which human authorities? Who are they to be telling me what to do?

         Now the point may seem to most people in the West to be a rather trivial one anyway. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? Explaining in more detail why humans all over, sometimes at deep, subconscious levels, are struggling to cope with this loss, even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts and feelings that they are having, will be the business of the next chapter.

Notes 

 1. Hanawalt, Barbara; “Growing Up in Medieval London”; Oxford University Press; 1993; p. 55.

 2.“Life Expectancy”; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectation 

 3. Descartes, Rene; “The Passions of the Soul”, articles 211, 212;   

     http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfbits/despass3.pdf.

 4. Descartes, Rene; “Meditations on First Philosophy” Meditations 3. and 4.;                                      http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations

 5. Freud, Sigmund; “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis”

    (James Strachey, editor); W.W. Norton and Co.; 1966; p. 353. 

 6. Delude, Catharine; “Researchers show that memories reside in specific brain cells"; 
     http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.

 7. Palmer, Donald; "Does The Center Hold?"; the Mayfield Publishing Company; 1991; p. 56. 

Chapter 1.                            Part E 

                                                                Sigmund Freud 

            Now all of this seems bad enough, but it gets worse. The third big shock came when Science began to understand the workings of the human brain. Human beings had long felt that there are many things in this world that cannot be explained in physical terms because they had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, they had dreams and feelings, and outside in physical reality, they sometimes even saw or did things, that – by logic alone – made no sense. Cruel or lustful acts and thoughts were bad enough. But at least they seemed somewhat predictable, given humans’ “sinful” nature. From long experience, we've come to know our human drives, so we can accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, violence, and murder as “natural”. But people also have much weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re wide awake, that are, by the laws of Physics, and even common sense, not possible. 

         Why do people have dreams, and a few even have waking visions, of angels or of demons, hovering in the air, or of talking cats on mountain tops, bathed in orange light and standing on their back feet? Night after night, we dream not just cruel or lustful dreams, but also many more that are simply absurd. Furthermore, even some people wide awake see angels, demons, and miracles. For centuries, if a person saw or did something that afterward he himself could not make sense of, the widely accepted explanation was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or had made him do the deed. "The devil made me do it." Much of normal human experience, apparently, lies beyond Science and even common sense.

         When Freud came along, his big contribution to human knowledge was simply the proposition that all of these perceptions come from inside the brain of the person having the dream or vision. Thus, visions and miracles can be easily explained. They come from stored up memories being combined and re-combined, to form symbolic narratives that are driven by deep, unconscious needs, needs that the visionary isn’t aware of because they are buried so deeply that he can’t consciously access them, no matter how he tries. Under stress, his brain can transmit images into his optic nerves, which is the opposite of what usually happens. Even wide awake, we can see what in physical reality is not there.

         Most of our memories may not be recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, his brain holds all he has ever experienced, all of the sense data that have ever been fed into it via eyes, ears, etc. How they will affect his moment-by-moment flow of consciousness can’t be exactly predicted in advance. But the patterns in these "paranormal" experiences coincide too often and too closely with the subject’s personal issues for us to believe that those experiences are somehow independent of the mental states that preceded them. The sciences of the mind have shown us convincingly that we can literally see what we want to see.

         While at first, Freud and his followers were considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they could get results. Their model could explain all of human behavior, they could make good probability predictions about how individuals with certain backgrounds would act in specific future situations, and they began to cure people of neuroses and psychoses that, in earlier times, would have been pronounced hopeless.

         Then, as research on the human brain advanced, other researchers showed that the model which portrays all of a person’s experiences as being stored in his brain, even though he can’t recall the experiences at will, is literally true. Patients willing to stay conscious during neurosurgery, and to let researchers place tiny electrodes on their brains, are able, when a milliamp current is turned on, to recall all kinds of memories in detail, memories of which they ordinarily have no conscious awareness. (6.)

         Freud went much further with his psycho-sexual explanations of all or nearly all of the motives that drive human behavior. Much of what he had to say has today been discredited; the vast majority of little girls are not consumed with a desire to grow a penis. But the big impact of what he had to say remains. Those parts of human experience that for so long had seemed to defy logic and common sense turned out to have a rational explanation. The dreams and visions were, and are, figments of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place at all. No more miracles.

Chapter 1.                   Part D 

         Some scientists have also been deeply religious people whose scientific findings have clashed with their religious beliefs. The history of Science is filled with accounts of people who felt they had to drop their faith in the Bible, usually after much personal anguish, in order to continue to pursue Science. However, what their torments mean to our argument today is nothing. Their anguish does not have any bearing on what Science considers to be knowledge; only the evidence does.               

                 

                                                       Charles Darwin

         In the mid 1800’s, Darwin hit the faithful and the institutions and beliefs by which they lived their lives with the biggest of all of the jolts. He gave an excellent scientific explanation for life itself. Life, by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, had evolved on Earth from a few simple cells over the course of millions, or perhaps billions, of years. 

         Darwin had the theory, and he had the evidence to support it. The models of genetic variation and natural selection can explain all the life forms on Earth in all their many subtle variations. The fossils in the rocks all over the world show the steps by which life developed and spread. Chemical and physical evidence gives consistent, predictable results that clearly support Darwin’s theory. Life, in all its complex forms on this Earth, developed from a few simple cells, by gradual increments, over millions of years.

         Where was the Bible then? Genesis puts the creation of all that is into a time scale of six days. The Theory of Evolution basically says that this model is ridiculous. Furthermore, the theory seems to imply that natural physical processes – ones that can be observed, predicted, and even manipulated – can account for all of the phenomena in reality, living and non-living. For scientists, the concept of God is not needed in their discussion of what this universe is or what human beings are. It isn’t even relevant.

         The Theory of Evolution was a shock of such magnitude that the church authorities and most of the faithful who listen to them are still reeling from it and still lashing out at it. The scientists who believe that it does give a true picture of reality find these attacks annoying and silly. The evidence is there. Mounds of it. What evidence is there for the alternate explanation? One old book, written by a bunch of priests with vested interests and sinecure jobs to protect, making claims about events that they did not witness, events that can’t be replicated, examined, or tested. It just isn’t Science.

         In fact, how can the “faithful” - who, every day, get most of the comforts of their way of life from things that scientists have found - be such ingrates? It's a sure bet that however much they may want to attack and criticize the whole activity called “Science”, they don’t want to starve and they don’t want their electric power turned off. They certainly don’t want to be eating tainted food, shivering in a hovel by a wood fire, watching their children die of mysterious, inscrutable “swamp vapors”.    

         On the other hand, the point of this book is to show that the full description of both sides of this nasty quarrel is much more complex than what the last couple of paragraphs portray. But for now we can sum up this small section on the Theory of Evolution by saying that Darwin’s theory, for most thinking people, floored the Bible for the count. He had found a theory that explained the greatest of the mysteries of our human experience, and he had assembled the evidence to back up that theory.

         The Bible had been reduced, apparently, to a collection of myths and poems, with some bits of one ancient tribe’s history woven in. God was like Zeus or Wotan. A fiction created by a gang of theocrats who played on human fears in order to rule the masses.