Chapter 3 – Foundations for a Moral Code: Empiricism and Its Flaws

At first glance, it seems that what we most want to know is how this universe works so we can figure out how to navigate through its currents with more health and joy and less pain and misery for ourselves and our children. If we get the basics of our world right, we have a reasonable chance of figuring the other details out. If not, we’re doomed to wander off track, into harm, over and over. People who don’t make a desire for real-world effectiveness one of the primary focuses of their lives don’t pass on their values and ways of living, short-sighted as those may be. People who do want to find better ways to live pay attention to the physical universe around them and, as a result, transmit their genes and belief systems more effectively to their children, causing their beliefs to move forward and spread more efficiently over time.

So we want to understand this world and our place in it. However, as we study this problem in a general way, it becomes apparent that a deeper problem exists. We begin to wonder about the reliability of our basic information-processing system—that is, the human-brain-hardware–human-mind-software system. Can we trust the faculties we use to gather information about our world? How easily can our perceptions and any reasoning based on those perceptions be fooled by our own yearnings or fears?

                                                                    Karl Marx

Consider, for example, a girl I knew at university in 1971 whose core beliefs were all Marxist. How she yearned for Marx’s vision of the world to come true. For her, all the troubles of the world were attributable to capitalist manipulations and conspiracies, and only a world workers’ state would ever create a decent life for all people. The fact that the communist states of the world at that time were rife with corruption, for her, was always somehow due to the capitalists in other lands. The harsh living conditions and the secret police in these states were temporary measures that would be remedied as soon as the capitalist dogs had been eradicated from the earth.

She had so utterly deluded herself that I used to feel weak as I listened to her. She saw oppression in the faces of all the workers we passed as we walked the campus. I thought they just looked bored. She saw fascist symbolism in every poster of every concert being advertised on the notice boards. I saw images of rock bands trying to be provocative in order to sell tickets. She carried a list of government people whom she and her friends were going to assassinate “when the revolution comes.” Her eyes were working, but what she noticed as she walked through her day was deeply biased. I wonder where she is now. But she taught me something—how fully humans can delude themselves.

Since then, of course, Communism has failed totally; the world has learned that centrally planned economies wither. However, she was just one of many sincerely deluded people I’ve met over the years who left me wondering, “Which of my own beliefs can I trust? Can I trust my moral beliefs? Can I trust my everyday ones? Can I even trust what I see?”

A flawed view of the world can lead one to a lifetime of error and misery. Marxism’s biggest error is its assertion that everything is political. It may be that art and journalism can be shown to be influenced by the political philosophy of the journalist or artist. But for Marxists, all human activities, even artistic ones, are either Marxist work that is helping to advance the Marxist cause, or fascist work that is hindering that cause.

But science is about physical reality, the reality that underlies all political or artistic activities. If we assert, as some Marxists do, that science also must bow to the will of the people, we will inevitably begin to tell our scientists what we want them to conclude, instead of asking them what the evidence in reality seems to imply.

                         

                                                                               Trofim Lysenko

A clear example is the doctrine called Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia. In that nation in the 1920s, the official state position was that human nature itself could be altered and humans made into perfect “socialist citizens” by changing their outward behavioural traits. If they were made to act like utterly selfless socialist citizens, they would become so, even in their genetic programming. This government position required that the Darwinian view of evolution be overruled because politics must rule science.

Darwin had said that members of living species do not acquire genetic changes from having their external appearances altered; living things change their basic natures only when their gene pools are altered by the processes of genetic variation and natural selection over many generations of evolution. In its determination to create what they called “socialist citizens”, Soviet Communism required people to believe that the acquired characteristics of an organism—for example, the state of shrub being leafless as a result of its leaves having been plucked—could be inherited by that organism’s descendants. (1.) For years, Soviet agriculture was all but crippled by the party’s attempts to make its political “truism” be true in material reality, for crops and livestock, when it simply wasn’t.

  "The Scream" (Edvard Munch) (often called the iconic painting of the 20th century) 

We are living in a time of terrifying uncertainty. We now have the weapons to scorch our planet in one afternoon—so completely that the chances of our species surviving in that post-apocalyptic world are effectively zero.

Furthermore, even if we escape the holocaust of nuclear war, we are steadily polluting our planet. We’re aware of this, but we can’t seem to stop, even though the vast majority of the scientists who study the earth and its ecosystems say that the point of no return is rapidly approaching. To people who have studied the earth and its systems, the risk of environmental collapse is even more frightening than that of nuclear war.

Large numbers of us, in the meantime, “lack all conviction.” Without a moral code to guide us—one that we truly believe is founded in the real world—we are like deer on the highway, paralyzed in the headlights, seemingly incapable of comprehending our peril.

Most reasonable, informed people today know these things. In fact, we are so weary of hearing what are called the “dire predictions” that we don’t want to think about them anymore. Or we think, get scared, then go out with our friends to get inebriated. There seems to be little else one ordinary person or even clusters of rich and powerful persons can do. The problems are too big and too insidious for us—individually or collectively. Shut it out. Forget about it. Try to live decently. Hope for the best.

For me, none of these answers are good enough. To ignore all of the evidence and arguments and resign myself to the “inevitable” is to give in to a whole way of thinking I cannot accept. That way of thinking suggests that the events of human lives are determined by forces that are beyond human control.

I disagree. I have to. I believe true philosophers must.

Whether we are discussing the cynicism of people who focus on events in their personal lives or the cynicism of people who study human history, or cynicism at any level in between, I have to tell these cynics bluntly, “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this debate because you wouldn’t be here.”

 

                                    Albert Camus, French philosopher (1913–1960)

As Albert Camus sees it, suicide is the most sincere of all acts.⁶ Its only equal in sincerity is the living of a genuine life. A genuine person stays on in this world by conscious choice, not by inertia. A genuine person is still here because he or she chooses to be. Insincere people may claim to be totally disillusioned with this world and other people in it, but that simply can’t be the case if they are still alive and talking. These people are only partitioning up their minds, for the time being, into the manageable compartments of cynicism. But the disillusionment they feel now—on any scale, personal to global—is going to seem minor compared with that which they will one day feel with themselves, one day when their fragile partitions begin to give way. 

And it doesn’t have to be that way, as we shall see.

So, to sum up our case so far, what have we shown? First, that science has undercut and eroded the old beliefs in God and the old codes of right and wrong. Second, that because of our ongoing need just to manage our lives and, even more importantly, because of our recently acquired and constantly growing need to manage wisely the physical powers that science has put into our hands, we must replace the moral code we no longer believe in with one we do believe in. Perhaps then we will have a chance—a chance to live, go on, and get past our present peril.

If we can work out a moral code we truly believe in, will it lead us on to a renewed belief in a Supreme Being? That question is one I will set aside for now, but I will deal with it in the last chapter of this book. For now, let’s set our sights on trying to begin to build a new moral code for this era, so that finally we may confront and quell “the worst” among us. And the worst in us.

Notes

1. Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Journal of General Psychology, 10 (1934). http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/heathwood/pdf/benedict_relativism.pdf.

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996).

3. John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

4. Harold Kincaid, Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

5. Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999).

6. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 11.

                 

                                British Army bulldozer burying bodies at Bergen-Belsen (Apr. 1945)

 

                 

                                       British soldiers forcing German guards to load bodies

Following the First World War, to exacerbate the moral confusion and despair, the man-made horrors of the twentieth century began to mount. They are so many and so ugly. The Russian Revolution and Civil War. The worldwide Depression. World War II, six times as destructive as World War I. Hitler’s camps. Stalin’s camps. And on and on. But we don’t need to describe any more. The point is that these were the actions of a species that had gained great physical power at the same time as it lost its moral compass or, more plainly, its ability to handle that power responsibly.

 

The big question, “What is right?” keeps echoing in an empty hall, and the big fears that go with it have only grown. Where will the code that we need to guide our behaviour in international affairs, business, or even everyday matters come from now?

From the nation to the person, some coherent code must be in place in order for us to function, even if that code is mostly programmed into the subconscious. People without any basic operating code in place can’t act at all. They are called catatonic. The problem today is that, for millions of people all over the world, the old moral codes that used to guide all human thought and action are fading. World War I was the first in a series of real-world shocks that have deeply rocked all of our beliefs—beliefs about the value of our science and, even more deeply, beliefs about our codes of right and wrong.

So let me reiterate: the worst fact about our moral dilemma in the twenty-first century is that, collectively, the gurus of science, though able to achieve amazing things in the realms of machines, chemicals, medicines, and much more, have had nothing to say about how we should or should not be using these technologies. Many of them even go so far as to claim that should is a word that has no meaning in science.

It seems bitterly unfair that the same science that eroded our moral beliefs offered nothing to put in their place. But what seems far more cruelly, diabolically ironic is that at the same time as science was destroying our religious and moral beliefs, it was putting into our hands technologies of such destructive power that the question that arises is whether any individual or group of individuals could ever be moral enough to handle them responsibly.

As science, with the help of its new communication media, was giving the jingoistic, xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in modern societies more power to mould people’s minds, it 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 inevitability to it. A global arms race was becoming normal. Sooner or later a war of monstrous proportions had to happen.

 

                                 German soldier’s belt buckle (standard issue), WWI

Descartes’s method, based on compromise, of using Christian morals to control scientific technologies was not working. Not only were Christians of the West carrying out previously unthinkable horrors, they were doing so mostly to one another. 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, there was nothing that science could say.

In the meantime, by the end of the fighting, the political, religious, and business leaders in every sector of society appeared to be out of answers. They continued spouting the platitudes that had got their nations into the horror to begin with. Their moral systems seemed to be bankrupt. Paralyzing doubt began to haunt people in every level of society, from the rich and powerful to the middle classes to the poor.

If the morals of the West had led to this, people could not help but think, maybe science was right about the Bible. Maybe the moral beliefs that it recommended had all been a fraud. Maybe there were no moral rules at all. Darwin’s model of the living world had portrayed “nature red in tooth and claw.” Survival of the fittest—that seemed to be the only credible model left. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world.

Before the scientific revolution began to erode God out of the thinking of the majority of citizens in the West, even if people hadn’t been able to grasp why bad things sometimes happened in the world or why bad people sometimes got ahead in spite of, and even because of, the suffering of others, people could still believe God had his reasons and the code of right and wrong still held. God was watching. Matters would be sorted out in time. The liars, manipulators, thieves, bullies, and killers would get their just deserts in time. We just had to be patient and have faith. The people, in large majority, believed the authorities’ official spiel.

But World War I was just too big. With the scale of the destruction, the pathetic reasons given to justify it, and the amorality of science gnawing at their belief systems, more and more people began to suspect and fear that, just as science had said, there was no God, the Bible was a collection of myths, their leaders were a bunch of deluded incompetents, and the old moral system was a sham. And then, things got worse. 

                               demonstration against the Treaty of Versailles, Berlin, 1919

Long before the horrible casualties began to mount, World War I was huge in the historians’ views 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 entire process was going to be made as efficient as the new, scientifically designed and equipped 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—sixty thousand wounded, missing, and killed—in the first six days of the Battle of the Somme than it had lost in all of its recorded history, all over the world, up until that week. France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, the United States, and all of the other countries involved were hit with similar losses, over and over, for four long years.

In the end, nine million combatants were dead, with 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 we should say wrenched, either directly or indirectly. Over six hundred thousand Canadians (from a population of eight million) enlisted in the armed forces, and out of the four hundred twenty thousand who actually fought in Europe, over sixty-five thousand died.

Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to the war discussed 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, modern torpedoes, poison gas, machine guns, airplanes, flame throwers—the horrors they’d cause were unimaginable. No. No one would be willing to use them.

                             Early 20th-century 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 labour-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 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 they had found the answers to life’s riddles. Pre-WWI, people in the West had come to believe that their wise men were in control: the ways of the West, with science in the vanguard, were taking over the world, and thus the sufferings of the past would gradually be reduced until they became only 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 retained the loyalties of people in the West because, first, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI, second, the ways of the West had for the most part seemed to work, and third, there 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 increasingly inadequate. Then, in the horrors of WWI, the moral systems of 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. 

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 its people, they look elsewhere for moral leadership. When the so-called wise respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with jargon and equivocation, others—some of them very unwise—jump in to fill people’s needs.

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

 

                                               World War I, photo 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 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. In 1914, World War I arrived, and it became a major test of the moral systems of the new “scientific” societies of the West.

                                    

                                                   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, banners flew, troops marched, bands played, and huge crowds of men, women, and children all shouted for joy. A few sober people raised objections for one set of reasons or another, but they were drowned out in the din. In every nation involved, people fell easily into viewing the human race as being made up of "us" and "them", as people tend to do in wartime, and people easily began to say to their neighbors that, finally, the superior armies and ideals of their way of life were going to sweep aside the barbaric, backward armies and ideals of their nation’s enemies.

                              The 48th Highland Regiment preparing 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 their allies, accepted the jingoistic stories 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.

                               

                                                   Anti-German propaganda poster

My country, Canada, was part of the British Empire in 1914, and Canadians were just as eager as any of the loyal subjects in London, England. Young men leaped 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 men 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.

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 discuss things that are too vaguely defined, and therefore, Searle claims, the conclusions that studies in the social sciences produce can’t be nomothetic—that is, lawlike—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: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research.⁴)

                              

                                                                 John Searle 

In response to these criticisms, some social scientists have striven to be more objective and empirically rigorous in their work. 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 reset. For example, how could a tribe to go back to living as fishers when the fish species they once lived off are gone? Could we get a modern nation, or even a small subgroup in it, to live without their cell phones?

Even a social scientist’s examination of a group of people changes those people. In the process, some of the morés of the people being studied become altered or cease to exist. Social scientists also admit that the models guiding their research can’t be expressed in neatly logical terms so the phenomena 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 make sense only 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 markets, which kiosks sold batteries? Before they went overseas, where did the Crusaders get their typhus shots?

                                                 Crusaders       (image by Pjero) 

Thus, social scientists admit they often must settle for a single print of any phenomenon they wish to study. Societies vary widely in their beliefs and morés and keep changing even as we examine them. There are a great number 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.

Thus, they argue that the overarching position called 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 they instill in their members, but we can’t pretend to do such work objectively. We come to it with eyes already focusing on the details that fit with the models and values we absorbed as children. Each researcher’s model of what human society is—or could be, or should be—lies deeper than his or her ability to articulate thoughts in words or even simply to observe. Our biases can’t be suspended; they prefigure our ability to think at all.

This is the stance called social constructivism. In its view, thought filters are absorbed from our culture (parents, siblings, teachers, etc.), and with these tools, we string together sense data—the ones that we have been told matter—until, moment by moment, we form a picture of “reality.” But the whole of reality is much more detailed and complex than the set of sights and sounds we are paying attention to. And other people, especially those from other cultures, construct their own pictures of reality. Some of those pictures will be radically different from ours, but still quite workable. People from other cultures have mores and ways of seeing reality that differ from our ways, but their ways do work for them.

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, lawlike 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 there aren’t any “facts” in any of our descriptions of the events of the past, or even of the events happening around us now. There are only sets of details selected by us, but guided by the values we learned as children, and we string these details that we do notice together to form various narratives, any one of them as valid as any other one. At the highest level of generality on what morality is, then, many social scientists not only have had nothing to say, they insist that nothing “factual”—that is, nothing objectively true—can be said. Each of us is trapped inside of her or his version of reality, and there is nothing we can do about that. Even science is just a set of opinions that seem to be working …for now. 

This argument called the Science Wars continues to rage. There’s not enough space here to go into even 5 percent of it. But the point for us is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack conviction. They can read about honour 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. (One more recent, sensible, and useful compromise position is taken by Marvin Harris in Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times.)⁵

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 worsening.

Chapter 2 – Why We Have to Find a New Moral System

                                                                William Butler Yeats.

Things fall apart; the centre 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 merely soldiers in one more kind of war; warmongers tout their indispensability. In other words, these people see themselves as moral people, even heroic ones. 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 value systems, and the morés they spawn. These include the actions people perform, the oral and written statements they make about which acts are “good,” and the rationales 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? If not, what exactly are they seeking? 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 realm of activities called science consists of 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 expansion 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 is not merely rational, says Kuhn. 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