Chapter 12                 Part C 

In the quantum worldview, events in reality cannot be pictured as coming in predetermined, reliably connected sequences of cause and effect, but they aren’t random either. All events can now be seen as governed by rules of probability. Which sub-atomic particles in reality will collide or jump to other energy levels at any given nanosecond can be described only by laws of probability, and all larger events involve entities that are made up of those sub-atomic particles. 

Normally, an event or an object that we see at our level of reality is the average of billions of quintillions of sub-atomic events. Most of the time, the events we see at our level, the macroscopic one, are the high probability macro-events, and they fit together to create the classical, Newtonian pictures and patterns that we have seen over and over and have come to expect of everyday life.

 

                                asternut butterfly beside a strange attractor graph

But quantum theory leaves open the possibility that once in a while, when enough unusual events at the sub-atomic level coincide, they cause an event at our level – a hurricane, a supernova, a tornado, an avalanche, a failed bolt in an airplane, a mutation in a bacterium, or a sillytumble (which, of course, I am making up). None of these events is "uncaused". They all have causes. The problem for the Newtonian worldview is that the causes aren't always neat sequences of earlier events. In principle, we can't predict these outcomes in advance because we can't calculate the sums of all of the influential links in the causal chain. Weird things can, and do, happen. 

And it's not just that there are too many factors involved. Even simple Newtonian systems with only two or three objects and forces acting in them evolve in ways that defy our best computer models. The possible ways in which the system may turn out depend on initial conditions of all parts of the system. Miniscule changes, some of them quantum changes, in any of these parts at any time during the unfolding may lead to any one of zillions of very different outcomes. The possibilities rapidly become, in practical mathematical terms, incalculable. 

                

                        Hurricane Dennis approaching Pensacola, Florida

We can only say after the hurricane has passed that five days before the hurricane hit, some of our models had been indicating near-certainty levels of the hurricane's making landfall on the Florida Coast. Then, the evolving odds that it was going to hit a specific site - for example, Pensacola - began to approach 60% on Friday or 95% or 99% by Sunday. Tiny jumps by particles, even some sub-atomic ones (the famous "Butterfly Effect"), right back to the hurricane's genesis off the coast of Africa, favored, and eventually selected, one outcome over all of the other possible outcomes. (3.) 

Gradually, a winning outcome-candidate emerged. But which outcome that would be was not just unknown; in advance of the event, it was unknowable. Unlike the Newtonian/Enlightenment worldview, the quantum worldview is telling us that the outcomes in real life sequences of events are, in principle, never certain, but are always, to some degree, predictable in the exact sense of that word.

                           Chapter 12                                 Part B 

But according to quantum theory, these things that I think I am seeing are temporary. If they are given enough time, they will collapse. Exactly how any one object or particle will collapse and what it will become next we cannot ever say with certainty. We can make predictions, some with very high degrees of probability to them, but we cannot “pre-know” any event with certainty no matter how clever or well-supplied with data we are. Cause and effect don't always connect. Odd things, external and internal, can, and sometimes do, interfere.  

 

                               artist's conception of giant meteor entering Earth's atmosphere

            I can't know when I go to stretch out my arm that my arm will stretch out. One day it may not. When that day will come, I can't say. I can't know that the sun will rise tomorrow or that the pen that I just bumped off of my desk will fall to the floor. A giant meteor may strike the Earth tonight. My pen may get caught in a kind of anti-gravity field which, until today, I knew nothing about.

I can't know anything for certain, ever, period. I can only calculate the probabilities that I will experience these events and objects. In usual, everyday life, I base my estimates of the probabilities of all the various experiences that I might encounter on my memories of past experiences, on generalizations formed by studying those memories, and on belief-habits acquired from my culture. My estimates are very accurate most of the time. But I can't know anything for certain.

In the terms of everyday human experience, this means that change that one can plan for is not real change. There is only one rule and that is the rule which says that there are no rules, or at least not any hard and fast ones. Or, as the old saying has it, life is full of rude awakenings.

The point of one of the seminal books of our time, "The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn, is that even in the most rigorously logical and real, material world-grounded of fields, namely Science, there are no certainties. All of the models of reality that have ever been constructed by the human mind have undergone major revisions or even total overthrow in the past. There is absolutely no reason for us to assume that any of our culture’s mental models of reality at any level of resolution – from the sub-atomic, to the human-scaled, to the cosmic – will be used by anyone to guide their research a century from now. There is nothing in the idea of an electron that is immune to being superseded by another, more useful, scientifically effective idea, any more than there was in the ideas of the ether or phlogiston - two once widely-believed scientific ideas that are now obsolete.

                                     artist's conception of atoms inside a strontium clock 

And electrons themselves? Am I saying they will cease to exist? Why, that's absurd. Actually, it isn't at all. Quantum physicists are saying something much more radical. Electrons were never there in the first place. The way we were taught to draw a solar system-like sketch of the atom in high school is only a useful model of sub-atomic reality. What is really down there cannot be drawn at all.

The waves of light that enable human beings to do what we call "seeing" are longer than the dimensions of this hypothetical "electron". "What does an electron look like?" is a meaningless question. An electron doesn't "look" like anything we can imagine, even if we could pool all of the seeing, understanding, and imagining that our species has ever done. That solar-system-like model of the atom is merely a useful model that has enabled some scientists to do calculations and then make predictions about the phenomena that these hypothetical particles will produce at the level that is observable to us if we prod those particles in certain ways that are available to us in our labs.

But no physicists really think there are hordes of little bullets whirling around down at the sub-atomic level. That model has had its uses, but we must not get attached to it. Its day is all but up. New results are defying many of the ideas and assumptions implied by that model.

However, what matters for the purposes of this book is that the quantum model of reality, even if we can't "picture" it, has profound implications for our worldview. Therefore, it also has profound implications for our ethical beliefs, values, cultural morés, and patterns of survival-oriented behavior.

Chapter 12                            World Views, New                             Part A       

The new worldview that can be used as a base for a new moral code begins in the most difficult branch of modern Science, i.e. quantum theory. Quantum theory can be translated into a worldview and then into a base for a moral code. And the moral code that can be derived from it is not really that far from one that, at least in theory, we should already be familiar with.

                         

                                                             C. S. Lewis 

The problem for centuries has been that the kind of behavior that most people in the West felt was morally right could not be integrated with what Science said was materially right. The deterministic universe that scientists have described for hundreds of years seems to imply no moral code at all. Science and Moral Philosophy have long been at loggerheads. Science went so far as to say that moral values, and even the very ideas of right and wrong, are fantasies. 

Descartes' solution was to posit two realms, one of mind/spirit and one of matter/body, and assign Moral Philosophy to govern the first and Science to govern the second. Even some fairly recent thinkers - for example, C.S. Lewis - have argued that, since our sense of right and wrong is so deeply ingrained in all of us, it must be real and so it must come from some source other than the material world. Therefore, he insisted, our deep sense of right and wrong, i.e. morality,  proves the existence of a spiritual dimension underlying all of physical reality. (1.) 

But most people in the West today do not reach Lewis' same heartening conclusion. This view of Science and Religion as being incommensurable and irreconcilable - a view being advocated by many scientists and moral philosophers alike - is not an encouraging view for most people. (This view has been dubbed "NOMA" for "non-overlapping magisteria", a term first coined by Stephen Jay Gould in 1997.) The influence of scientists and their way of thinking has kept rising in the public consciousness, and as it has, most people in the West have come to feel more and more that if, first, there is only one reality, and second, only Science can describe it, then, because Science has been silent about what right and wrong are, there really are no such things as "right" and "wrong". 

Yet, all of the signs indicate that if we don't define our moral values in modern terms, and we continue to blindly follow our old values systems, the ones that grew up in the Roman world or the medieval world or even the ones that grew up in the Enlightenment (out of the Newtonian worldview) - the inconsistent and hypocritical codes that let us march over other nations and even Nature herself - then we are going to destroy our world.

But there is hope. We have a new worldview. The question is: "Can we derive from it a new code of values?" Let's see what we can do with the worldview of the New Physics.

            Quantum theory is the most complete explanation that we have of reality. It correctly predicts all of our observations of the universe, some of which, until well into the twentieth century, had stymied scientists. But the world view which quantum theory offers is a strange one, especially for the Western style of mind. In the world today, only a very few can do the math involved in quantum theory, but its most fundamental principle is not hard to state.

            In fact, the overarching principle of quantum theory can be stated very easily: reality is flux. But grasping what those words mean is another matter. To say that everything is in a constant state of flux is inadequate. Rather we must say that change is reality. For example, the "things" we think we see, with their surfaces and masses and colors, are illusions. According to physicists, an “object” is only an area in space-time where interfering quintillions of waves of sub-atomic fields are detectable to our senses, and so to human consciousness. These temporary arrangements of particles and fields act on our (temporarily stable) sense organs in such a way as to produce impressions of solidness, weight, shape, texture, and colors and so on in our (temporarily stable) brains. (2.) 

Chapter 11.                     Part K 

Discussing and interpreting the moral implications of the new worldview offered by the New Physics will be the business of my next two chapters. I will present a moral code and an argument for it that is not as all-encompassing as Hegel’s, but is more useful. The theory of morality presented in the remainder of this book offers some firmer measures by which to judge our actions.  

                                                      

                

                                                                    Karl Popper 

On the other hand, it will not satisfy the demands of the most exacting philosophers, such as, for example, Karl Popper and his disciples. (4.) Popper loved the physical sciences and considered them to be models of what Science should be, but he found Biology disappointing because he felt its foundational theories (notably the Theory of Evolution) could not be tested in neat, clear ways to see whether they could be falsified. He then wrote the social sciences off pretty much completely.

Popper argued that only theories which can be tested in ways that risk their being falsified deserve to be called “Science”. He was deeply impressed by the Theory of Relativity, for example, because it was formulated in such a way that it could be tested definitively. If it had failed to predict Eddington's observations of the stars visible during a full solar eclipse, then the theory would have to be viewed as a failure. But it succeeded brilliantly, and Einstein's international reputation soared. 

      

Biology is not that neat. The Theory of Evolution can only be tested in ways that, if successful, may make it seem more likely to be true. In his early work, Popper did not even want to call Biology a “science”. But gradually, over years, he came to concede that some theories could make probabilistic, Bayesian kinds of predictions, rather than neat, causally linked ones, and still be rigorous enough to be properly called "scientific". The psychological theories of Adler and the historical ones of Marx weren’t that kind of useful, but Popper came to see that the Theory of Evolution was. (5.)

We accept now that the history of life does not proceed by cause-effect steps as they are pictured under the Enlightenment worldview. Instead life proceeds forward through time like a river with many branches and tributaries connecting to the main channel. The difference is that life flows "uphill". It flows against the gradient of entropy, opportunistically searching for new habitats in which some new species or new way of life may take root, adapt, and flourish. This is a better, more helpful metaphor for describing how life moves across time.

Under this model, the life flow keep bifurcating. Some forks get detoured and some get blocked completely and die out. Whether a given branch will be present further on in the natural history of the world is dependent on many odds-governed factors such as changing climates, the rates of evolution of other species (especially those that are its food, its competion, and its predators), and so on. But the whole system keeps expanding relentlessly as is shown by the way the amount of biomass on this planet has been increasing since life began here about three billion years ago.

The model of human cultural evolution presented in the rest of this book will not satisfy Popper's most rigorous early demands, but it will do what we need it to do. It will give us categories that will lead us, via logic and evidence, to guidelines that we can use to steer our path, as a species, toward better odds of surviving over the long haul.

Notes 

1.Fox, Matthew Allen; "The Accessible Hegel"; Humanity Books;    2005.

2.Hamilton, Edith; "Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and    Heroes"; Warner Books, pp. 16-19; 1969. 

3. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/731/731-h/731-h.html

4. Popper, Karl; "Science: Conjectures and Refutations"; in Curd, Martin and J.A. Cover; "Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues"; W.W. Norton and Co.; 1998.

5. http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211_1.html

            Chapter 11.                          Part J 

         At this point, it is important to stress that whether political correctness approves of the obvious conclusion that we are heading toward or not, it is there to be drawn and so should be stated explicitly. The worldview and the resulting social system of the Enlightenment got results. Like no other ever had. It just “worked” in the sense that the European societies which operated under it kept increasing their economic outputs, their populations and, more tellingly, their control of the energy flows and physical resources of this planet. However, it is also important to stress that the Westernizing process very often wasn't even close to just. Western domination of this planet did happen, but in most of the West here in the twenty-first century, we are ready to admit that while it had good consequences, it had lots of evil excesses as well.

                                             naval gun factory; Coventry, England; c. 1902

   

The conclusion to be drawn from these facts is that this Enlightenment worldview/paradigm, with the moral code that attends it, is no longer an adequate code for us to live by. It is ready for another update. In the midst of its successes, it has also produced huge problems, such as the oppression of women and minorities, technology-enhanced wars, colonialism, social inequities, nuclear weapons, and pollution levels that will destroy the ecosystem of the Earth if we don’t fix them. Some of these problems look like they are out of control, and, even scarier, the Enlightenment worldview appears to have run out of ideas for ways to solve them.

The crucial point of this long discussion of the rise of the West is that worldviews give rise to values systems and values systems give rise to morés. The morés then cluster to form a culture or "way of life" that has a survival index in the real world. Furthermore, some morés and habits of living, when they come to be believed and practiced by the majority of a society's citizens, increase a tribe’s survival odds more than others do. By our morés and our patterns of behavior, we interface with physical reality. Then, if the values are tuned to our current reality, we thrive.

But I stress again that the worldviews, values, morés, and behavior patterns that we humans live by are not all, as cultural relativism claims, of equal value and are not in place in our way of life because of random inclinations flitting through, and sometimes lodging in, our brains. This book offers a more rigorous model for understanding what is going on here.

Of course, other civilizations in other parts of the world and in other eras have also had eras during which they were in ascendancy. In fact, many economic and political signs indicate that the dominance of the West may be ending. The new worldview that Science is offering, and the values-morés system that it fosters, are so different from the ones out of which the successes of the West grew that cultures of the West, as they try to adjust, sometimes seem to be on the brink of self-destructing. Our hope is that the outdated parts of the Western worldview will not be replaced by ones that simply lead to new forms of injustice, but that instead humanity will finally enter a period of peaceful integration of all human cultures. With the problems and hazards that we have before us now, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for our species if we go down any other path.

        

Thus, before I close this chapter, I must reiterate one earlier point. As we watch the worldview, values, morés, and culture of the West and the world evolve, one of the things we must not do is get carried away and conclude that the rising worldview - the worldview of the New Physics, the one by which the thinking in the West and the rest of the world is being transformed - leaves us without any moral values whatsoever.

Some interpreters of the New Physics offer a worldview in which each person's "reality" is chosen and shaped by that person, and therefore, any moral code is only what a bunch people living in a given area agree on for the time being, and no moral code is based in empirical reality. By this view, no moral code is anything more than a taste, like a preference for strawberry ice cream over chocolate. That thinking makes war the only arbiter for disputes, an option we can't afford to choose. That thinking also seriously misinterprets what the New Physics is telling us, as we shall see.    

            Chapter 11.                   Part I          

         Lesser sideshows in the swirls of history happen. These are analogous to the similar sideshows that happen in the biological history of this planet. Species and sub-species meet, compete,  mingle, and then thrive or die off. But the largest trends are still clearly discernible. The dinosaurs are gone. And so it also goes in human history. A viable new species of society keeps emerging in what must properly be called a "synthesis". In a compromise, two opposing parties each give a bit of what they like in order to get a bit more of what they want. But what happened at the end of the Romantic upheaval was what Hegel called a "synthesis", a melding between a thesis and its antithesis. And we can go beyond Hegel and say that it wasn't a synthesis that the contemporary attempts at a "science of history" - most notably those of Hegel and Marx - had foreseen. Rather, as conditions changed and old cultural ways became obsolete, a new species of society arose: modern democracy, which can be both representative and participatory.

                  

                                               Occupy Wall Street protesters, New York, 2011

            The very idea of democracy evolved till it saw the protecting of the human rights of every individual citizen as the most important reason for its own existence. All of this from the melding of Christian respect for the value of every single human being, Roman respect for order, discipline, and results and Greek love of the abstract and the seer who can question the forces that be, even those of the material world. Representative democracy based on universal suffrage was the logical goal of the Renaissance and Enlightenment worldviews being applied by human societies to themselves. The Romantic Age simply showed that the adjusting and fine-tuning takes a while. And it goes on.   

In the meantime, what of the Enlightenment worldview? Inside its favorite realm, Science, it was still entirely in place and, in fact, was getting stronger. The Romantic Revolt left it untouched, even invigorated. Science came to be envisioned, by scientists and many in the public, as the best way to fix the ills of society. Science would give us progress and, eventually, even a social order that worked, i.e. one that progressed materially while staying stable socially. 

Under the scientific worldview, as both Newton and Laplace had said, all events were to be seen as results of previous events that had been their causes, and every single event and object came, in an inescapable way, like a link in a chain that went right back to the starting up of the universe. The giant universal machine was ticking down in a purely mechanical way, like a giant clock. 

While the Romantic Revolt ran its radical course, governments, industries, businesses, armies, schools, and nearly all of the other institutions in society were quietly being organized and equipped along the lines suggested by the Enlightenment world view. The more workable of the Romantic ideals (e.g. relief for the poor, protection of children) were absorbed into the Enlightenment worldview as it kept gaining adherents and spreading until it reigned, first in the West, then gradually in more and more of the rest of the world.

    

                                           Crewe locomotive works; England; around 1890

              Chapter 11.                             Part H 

         Other societies which also operated under world views that portrayed humans as having little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, around the planet, was the one which we call “scientific”, the Enlightenment view.

         The one significant interruption in the spread of the values of the Enlightenment is the era called the "Romantic Age". The meaning of this time is still being debated, but in my model which sees a kind of cultural evolution in the record of human history, there are only a couple of interesting points to note about the Romantic Age (roughly, the mid-1700's to the mid-1800's).

 

                                                 "Abbey in an Oak Forest" by C.D. Friedrich 

                                    (showing imagination and emotion of the Romantic Age) 

First, it reaffirmed and expanded the value of the individual when the Enlightenment had gone too far and made duty - to the family, the group, or the state - seem like the only “reasonable” value, the one that should motivate all human beings as they chose their actions. Romanticism asserted forcefully and passionately that the individual had an even greater duty to his own soul. I have dreams, ideas, and feelings that are uniquely mine, and I have a right to them. Paradoxically, this philosophy of individualism can be very useful for a whole society when it is spread over millions of citizens and over decades and generations, because even though most of the dreamers allowed to rove free produce little that is of any practical use to the larger community, and some become criminals, a few create beautiful, brilliant things that pay huge material, political, and artistic dividends.

    

                                    drawing of guillotining during French Revolution

In the second place, however, we should note that as a political philosophy, Romanticism produced some painful excesses. The citizens in France and elsewhere were indeed passionate about their ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but they did not know how to administer a large, populous state and so, in a short while, they fell into disorder and then simply traded one autocrat for another. Their struggle to reach an "enlightened" view of what human beings are in their deepest nature, and how a system of government that resonates with that nature might be instituted among humans, took longer than one generation to evolve. But it did come, or, rather, the French began evolving resolutely toward it and are still evolving as I write, as are all modern states. 

  

                                photo of aftermath of Battle of Gettysburg, 1863

In the U.S., the idealism of the American version of the Romantic Revolt, in its attempts to integrate the Enlightenment ideals of reason and order with Romantic ideals that asserted the value of the individual, produced some painful excesses: genocide of the native people, enslavement of millions of Africans, and, one of History's worst horrors, the U.S. Civil War. 

America had to undergo some very hard adjustments before she began to integrate the Christian belief in the worth of every individual with the respect for the law that enables individuals to live together in peace. But the slaves were freed, and the government began to compensate the native tribes (with reserves of land and with cash) and take them into the American mainstream (with opportunities for Western-style educations), or rather, to be more honest, the Americans began moving toward these ideals more and more determinedly, and continue to do so right into this era.

            Thus, in the larger picture of all of these events, the upheaval called the Romantic Age wrote into the Western values system a greater willingness to compromise and a deeper respect for the ways of compromise, i.e. the institutions of democracy. The institutions of democracy, people learned, were what was guiding them toward balance and so keeping their various states from devolving into chaos. Democracy was, and is, our best hope for creating institutions by which people may use reason and debate instead of war to find a timely balance in each new generation between the security-loving conservatism of the establishment and the heated passions of the reformers. 

Chapter 11.                      Part G 

                                        

                                                         Renaissance pocket watch 

            Thus, a more tolerant Renaissance society rose out of the new ideas that melded respect for the individual and even exaltation in the creative potential of the human condition with an equal respect for the inherent worth and rights of other citizens. Science requires both if it is to flourish.

In Renaissance thinking, a man could be all of moral, venturesome, independent, and patriotic. The ideas of Greece, Rome, and Christianity could be blended in a way that was  practicable and consistent. The new system of ideas worked, and it was exciting because it was empowering.

                                                

                                                     replica of Gutenberg's printing press

   The growing Renaissance focus on the rights of the individual produced some excesses (e.g. the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War), but these were gradually tamed. When the dust settled, one thing was perfectly clear: there would be no going back to the medieval ways of thinking. The way forward was to live by reason, or more accurately, to live by the most reasonable interpretations of Reason's darling child, Science and its material worldview. Material acts done right did glorify God. In this frame of mind, the West settled into the era called the “Enlightenment”.

 

                       Duc d'Enghien at the Battle of Rocroi, Thirty Years War 

            To most of the people alive at the time, it wasn’t at all obvious that the Church's traditional views were deficient in any way, or that the views of the Enlightenment scientists, like Galileo, were better ones. But decades of experience in which people who lived by the ways of individualism, science, and inductive reasoning outperformed those who lived by the old ways (based on blind obedience to authorities whose authority came from texts that were not to be analyzed or criticized) gradually won over more and more of the citizens in each new generation.              

                                                

                                                                           William Harvey

            Some of the new beliefs were anathema to medieval thinkers – but the new beliefs worked. They enabled this "enlightened" sub-culture within society to solve problems (e.g. navigate the oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and, especially, make deadlier and deadlier weapons). This new sub-culture within Europe's nations was therefore able to increase its community of followers and its range of influence at a rate that the old church and aristocracy, in the end, could not match. As was noted above, Science keeps getting new followers because the miracles of Science can be replicated over and over again; Science works.

                                                

                                   

                                                           Antoine Lavoisier with his wife Marie

            This scientific way of thinking was further employed by geniuses like Newton, Harvey, Faraday, Lavoisier, etc. Its gurus piled up successes in the hard market of physical results. Of those who resisted the new way, some were converted by reason, some went down in military defeats, some worked out compromises, and some just got old and died, still resisting the new ways and preaching the old ones to smaller and smaller audiences. The Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

            Other societies which also operated under world views that portrayed humans as having little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, around the planet, was the one which we call “scientific”, the Enlightenment view.

         Chapter 11.                            Part F 

         The loss of much of the Roman's practical skill, especially their administrative abilities, along with a lack of any strong form of practical focus, kept Europe from growing dominant worldwide until the Renaissance. Then these more worldly values were re-born due to a number of factors familiar to scholars (i.e. the fall of Constantinople, the rise of Science, the discovery of the America’s, etc.). Or perhaps, in another, more causally-focused view, we could say that the Christian way, which required every citizen to respect every other citizen, built Western society's levels of overall economic and social efficiency up to a critical mass that made the flowering of Western civilization now called the “Renaissance” inevitable. The new hybrid values system worked and grew its population, and then worked even better. Greek theoretical knowledge, Roman practical skills, in a Christian social mileu.

                                                            Hanseatic League city of Lubeck 

            Western culture finally integrated its most fundamental values systems, Classical and Christian. It took over a thousand years for people who lived lives that focused on worldly matters, instead of only on seeking salvation in the world after death, to be seen as admirable, moral, Christian citizens in the eyes of the community. Artists, architects, even merchants and conquistadores did the things they did as ways of glorifying  glorify God. And in evolutionary terms, we must not forget, a thousand years is almost nothing.

         Handling and mastering the physical world, by Commerce, Science, and Art gradually became acceptable as a way to serve God. The world views, values, morés and behavior patterns - i.e. the total culture package of Christianity, with the value it placed on every individual human being - was finally integrated in a functional way with the knowledge, both abstract and practical, that had been passed down from the ancient Greeks and Romans. That breakthrough unleashed a deluge. Individuals who rose above society's conventions (in "inspired" ways) began to prove that they could be very valuable to the greater community, even if, at first, they did upset the order sought by less daring people. 

            It is interesting to note at least once in this book the intricacies of the socio-historical process. Even societies which seem to have reached equilibrium always contain a few individuals who restlessly test their society’s accepted worldview, values, and morés. These people and their disciples are often the young, which tells us that adolescent revolt plays a vital role in the evolution of society.

         However, what is more important to understand is that many people in the rest of society see these new thinkers and their followers as delinquents, and only a very few see them as great men. What is even more important to see is that the numbers involved on each side really don't matter. What does matter is whether the new thinkers’ ideas attract at least a few followers and whether the ideas work, which is to say, whether the followers of the new ideas then live better than the rest of the society.

            A society, like any living thing, needs to be opportunistic, constantly testing and searching for ways to grow, even though many of its citizens may bitterly resent the means by which it does so and may do all within their power to quell the process. Often they can, but not always. For Western society, until the more practically effective features of its Classical values were integrated with its more respectful, humane Christian ones, Europeans just did not love or support thinkers with ideas and morés that focused on life in this material world. 

                        Le Roy marine chronometer (which enabled precise navigation at sea) 

            Artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs are, by their very nature, eccentric. They don't support the status quo, they threaten it. But the dreamers are the ones who move the rest of society forward toward newer, better ways of doing things. They only really flourish in a society that is not just tolerant of, but proud of, its eccentrics. In a truly dynamic society, cleverness is melded with kindness, which means acceptance of the different. In short, European culture needed a thousand years to even begin to “get its act together" and meld all of its values into a single, smoothly functioning whole.

         A society, to survive, must use resources and grow in the times when it has opportunities to do so, or it will lose out later when events in the physical universe grow harsher or when the competition gets fiercer. How do new, improved ways of doing things become established ways of doing things? One means is by war, as has been mentioned, but the peaceful mechanism can work, and it is seen in tolerant societies when the people who use new ways are allowed to do so undisturbed, and they then just live better. At that point, the majority begins to pay attention to the eccentrics whose ways work.

         Then, in that tolerant society, other citizens, by their own choice, begin to try out and take up the new useful, effective ways. Gradually, more and more choose not to be left behind in what is obviously becoming a stagnant cultural backwater. This market-driven way is the way of peaceful evolution, the alternative to the war-driven one. Worldwide, we have taken a long time to reach it, but, as a species, we are almost there.