Courage or wisdom ...or both?

An Elevator Pitch For Decency

Words are labels for sets of sense data or sets of sets of sense data. Categories and categories of categories are the basic blocks with which we construct thought. Words of greater and greater generality are kept in a language over the long haul if they name general patterns of phenomena that the speakers of that language have found are useful to recognize and tell others of in their struggle to survive.

Our most general words are the ones that have evolved in our language to name virtues or principles - words like "courage", "wisdom", "freedom", "love", "diligence", "honesty", and so on. They've been around for a long time. They must be useful for us in some deep way. 

We created and retained the terms “courage” and “wisdom”, for example, because they are useful. Generation after generation, we have impressed these terms on our young because the patterns of behavior that the terms describe, when they are used in tandem, guide people to respond to one of the most pervasive qualities of the physical universe itself: entropy.

In everyday experience, entropy is simply the trait of objects that gives them their constant tendency to fall apart. All life, to survive, must move against the entropy of reality all of the time. All living things have qualities like courage and wisdom written into their dna. But humans are the only species that has discovered and added a more nimble modus operandi. Culture. Courage and wisdom, taught to our young, have shaped our behavior, collectively and individually - over millennia and thus over many types of technological and environmental change - in ways that have enabled us to handle entropy in all of its many disguises.

                     

                                                Athena, Greek goddess: courageous or wise? 

The other matched pair of values that I have been able to discover to this point in my life is freedom-love. These two values, combined, have steered us toward patterns of behavior that respond, again over the long haul, to quantum uncertainty. Life is not just hard, it’s sometimes crazy. In the giant social picture, freedom and brotherly love balance each other in a manner analogous to the way courage and wisdom balance each other. Used in tandem, freedom and love steer us to patterns of behavior that maximize our odds of survival because they give us a pluralistic nation, the only real way we can insure against the hazardous quality of reality. When an unforeseeable event comes, a pluralistic society has higher odds of finding an answer to it than a more homogeneous society ever could: pluralism has more resources to draw on. If we work hard to promulgate and explicate these values to all of humanity, they will guide us to a balance of love and freedom that works for our whole species. 

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                                                    Ben Franklin (painting by Duplessis) 

Which trait was most prominent in Franklin's character: courage, wisdom, a love of freedom, or a love of his fellow citizens? 

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In any case, the point for us never to forget is that values do work, and they have worked for a long time. They are the deepest parts of our programming, the apps that guide all that we do, because they connect us to physical reality. Used in tandem, freedom and love are an effective answer to the pervasive uncertainty of life.

Finally, it is worth reiterating that the emotions that these terms sometimes stir and the blind loyalty they evoke are sometimes useful in the terms of a society's survival, but they are no guide to truth. We can be programmed to be emotional and fiercely loyal to foolishness just as easily as to virtue. Only the evolutionary usefulness of the values can guide us as we seek to write a new moral code. What works and has worked for a long time? How do you know? 

When the concept of virtue, which is but a balance of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love, is followed through its intermediate behavioral steps into reality, we see that it is a program for long term survival. Therefore, moral values are observable, testable, and replicable. Moral values are real in the empiricist sense of the term; they may be invisible to human eyes, but they steer us into the future as surely as gravity steers the movements of the planets.  

 

  
                                                              Homelessness in Washington, D.C. 



I have written in this space of how we should take our cue in building a better world society from nature herself. The principle of balance should guide all we do. What does that mean? 

In nature, there are millions of species, most of them invertebrate, interacting all of the time to create a total environment that is vigorous and evolving. Sub-environments, habitats, and niches - and the living things in them - are all interacting in ways that strengthen and support each other, including and especially at the microscopic level. It is organisms made of single cells or a few hundred cells, that is "icky", squishy things, that make all other life possible. In a single spoonful of healthy soil, there will be more individual organisms, from hundreds of different species, than there are people on the earth. 

But what does this mean for us and our redesign not of the human genome, but of human society? 

If we take nature as our guide, and transfer the biodiversity model into a memodiverse one, then we need to start to work on building a worldwide consciousness that values all kinds of people. And that does not mean that we have to guarantee every person an affluent life. But if we do make sure that they have at least adequate lives - basic food, clothes, shelter, and medical care - the hint from nature is that over the long haul that kind of society will be more flexible in handling surprises and shocks than one that is more monochrome and conforming. We need diversity in behavior, varying lifestyles, tastes in food and art, languages and so on. These varied people, if they all have been programmed to respect one another's rights, make the resilient society. Nazism, Communism, and all the monolithic styles of states keep losing out to the pluralistic ones. History says so.  

In short, it's long since past time that we took care of everyone, at least at a basic level, all over the world. We have the technology. We can rebuilt this messed up species - especially in its most basic aspect, namely its culture. And why? It's just smart business in the long haul.  

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, have a nice day anyway.     


  
                                                    homeless shelter, Boston 

Today feels like a good day to take on deconstruction and even the whole post-modern view of the world. It is a widespread view, especially in the humanities and fine arts departments of the universities in this early part of the twenty-first century.

Deconstruction has its uses. It can make us see how a work of art or an argument - even in one of the social sciences - is already biased even before we begin to read, watch, study, or listen to it. It is biased by the terms and grammar that the maker of that work chooses to use to express herself or himself. She or he will pick terms that in the end lead by what appears to be logic to the conclusions that favor and support her/his worldview. We tend to see the world in terms that allow us to keep the privileges that brought us to the point where we did the writing, filming, painting, or composing in the first place.

There is some strong logic behind this view. Deconstruction can show us where the biases in a work of art or an argument lie and can help us to see past those biases. But to what? What are we supposed to see our way clearly to?






Implicit in any deconstruction of anything is the view that the deconstructing process is a worthy one to pursue. Implicit in any critique of a work of art or an argument are hidden axioms that legitimize the sub-culture of the deconstructors.

Most troubling of all, there lie hidden in all of these deconstructions and their fans, moral codes that judge some activities to be worthy of attention and some others not. There is a lot of world out there, even if we just look at the the humanly constructed parts, and we can't give our attention to more than a tiny portion of it. So what should we choose to attend to and why? These are the questions that the subtlest of the post-moderns don't answer. This is, I think, because they know that their positions are just as biased as anyone else's.

If we are to choose among this caccophony of billions of human voices for the ones that should be running the big institutions of our global village, then we are going to have to define a basis for choosing among them. That is all a moral code really is. And if we are going to define one, then we are going to have to give a rationale for it. It does not stand by the fiat decree of a few who claim they get to be in charge because they are capable of more subtle styles of thought that the rest of us. My response is always, "Says who?" And so we come back to the fundamental debate of our time. What should be in the moral code that will enable our whole species to survive? Why do you think so?

And let me reiterate one other major point: we must make this choice. We can't abstain from choosing on this matter. The alternative is chaos. The individual in this state deteriorates into catatonia. The global village deteriorates into anarchy. Then, the bullies get to have their way. They are all that is left that seems to have any kind of a will to do something. Nietzsche's vision, and never forget that it destroyed him. We have seen what that looks like. Don't want to go there again.

What are right and wrong? Why do you say so?

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day.  

                            



One of the scariest things that the big institutions of society - Science, Religion, Politics, Academia - have done for centuries is what Joan Baez sharply criticizes in her song "Diamonds and Rust". 

(Here's the link.)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MSwBM_CbyY

In that song, she is speaking about her relationship with Bob Dylan. It was one of the paradigmatic relationships of twentieth century culture. Baez of the pure and radiant voice, Dylan, the poet of the people. That was how we saw them. 

The relationship fell apart, Baez being left with a lot of hurt that came out in this song. 

But I am drawn to the song over and over again for a different reason. For me, this relationship, I have finally figured out, is closely analogous to my relationship with the knowledge, learning, or wisdom - choose whichever term you prefer - that is offered at the universities in most of the West.

Why would I say so? 

The lines in the song that trouble me most are the ones that say the following: 



Now you're telling me that you're not nostalgic,
Well, give me another word for it.
You were so good with words, 
And at keeping things vague. 

I could use some of that vagueness now, it all comes back too clearly, 
Yes, I loved you dearly, 
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust, 
I've already paid. 



The point for Baez was that she'd had it with the post-modernist talk that enabled Dylan over and over her to treat her as somehow second-class, as lesser in importance to his pursuit of an ever shifting definition of who he was and how his art was supposed to be evolving. She just needed to be loved, and when she felt that most acutely, mostly, he wasn't there. 

How does that scenario parallel my situation with the universities? 

I don't expect or need them to love me, but I despair over the way that the smartest of the smart, or at least, they're supposed to be, keep dodging the question of moral realism. They are masters of keeping things vague.  

In their academic castles, they are not able to give the masses of young people who march dutifully through their halls year after year, the thing they crave most deeply: an explanation of what right and wrong are, an answer to what the philosophers for thousands of years have been calling the question of this human experience, namely "What is a good life?" In fact, in every discipline, the doctoral candidates and their advisers insist that the question can't be answered. 

The natural scientists choose to ignore the question altogether, and if pressed to answer, will say that it is not a question that science can answer. Its terms are vague, not physically specifiable, and, thus, it is best ignored. There are more pressing questions that science can answer to be dealt with.  

The commerce graduates seek to take the best ideas of physical science and turn them into goods and services. After all, none of the rest of society's citizens could do any of what they do, if there were no wealth to pay for it. So? If one can create that wealth for the rest, then one deserves a healthy slice of it for oneself. 

The social scientists go a step further and insist that science won't ever answer that question. They say every society makes its own culture-answer to that question and every answer is true in its own context. In short, there are no universal moral truths, and there can never be any. 

The fine arts people seek only to pursue their individual ideas of art. The world can like it or not. The unwashed philistines in those other sectors of society are not worth worrying about. 

I sympathize with them all. I believe I understand them all. But my studies of history tell me with crystal clarity that we have to solve this puzzle, and answer this question. In the past, fragmentation of society has produced new sub-cultures and some become species with populations of their own and they drift into less and less understanding of each other and ...so war. Centuries of blood "watering our fields" as the French national anthem puts the matter. 

Yes, that was our answer for centuries. No, we can't keep using it. 

I reiterate: the question really is "Are we truly a rational species?" Can reason give us control over the processes of our own history? Can we stop the madness?

It seems very clear to me that reason must tackle the question of what right is or we're going to travel the same path again.  

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day.  

 

                       
                                                                             Ernest Rutherford 


"All science is either physics or stamp collecting." Or at least, that was the opinion of the first great experimental physicist of the modern age, namely Ernest Rutherford. The large majority of scientists in the commonly called "natural sciences" - namely Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, and Medicine - feel much the same as Rutherford did. 

The term "social science", for them, is an unfortunate oxymoron used in ordinary discourse, but what is done in Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, etc. - for most physicists, chemists, and biologists - is not science. "Social science" lacks rigor. It lacks models that describe reality in mathematical terms, models that can be tested, data that can be replicated by any researcher anywhere, no matter what his or her worldview or biases. For physical scientists, truth is not a matter of opinion and is not a social construct that varies from culture to culture. In fact, for physical scientists, such talk is nonsense. Reality is what it is. 

I bring up this matter today because I want to exhort the thinkers in my readership - including both kinds of scientists, and the artists, writers and philosophers and even the economists - to get into the game. The real game. The most urgent task in front of our thinking species in this century is to bring all human endeavors under one theoretical - and moral - umbrella. Finding indisputable evidence of the existence of the Higgs Boson or writing a libretto for a new rock opera - or any human activity in between - all of these pale in comparison to our figuring out what right and wrong really are.

I repeat: if this moral realism task looks hard to you, think about the alternative. 

On board the Titanic, after she struck the iceberg, the men in the boiler rooms got orders to draw the fires; this means they were to remove all of the coal that was currently burning under the boilers and making steam for the engines. The fear was that if icy seawater hit the boilers, they would crack and explode. (There were six boiler rooms containing 29 boilers on Titanic.) 

We know from survivors testimonies that in at least one of the boiler rooms the stokers worked like devils and managed to get the fires drawn and out. They did have some seepage of seawater coming in, but their pumps were working smoothly. Their floor was beginning to tilt, but that was not their concern. They just did their duty and did it well. Then, the Titanic shifted a bit, tilted a bit more, and a wall of seawater a meter high came over their partitions. 

In the shadow of the tilting partitions of the twenty first century, have a nice day anyway.  


  

     

 
                              UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C., Canada  (aerial view from south) 



I need to say, readers, that I have gone back to university - again - at 66. I sometimes think there is a sado-masochistic relationship going on between myself and my education. I suffer in universities, and I have been to three of them for long stints over the years. I grow desperate listening to the talk I hear in academia. I have since I was 17 when I first went to University of Alberta in Edmonton so long ago. "Why would this be?" you ask. Good question.

Our desperate - yes, I say "desperate" - problem in this century is learning to live with the scientific technology that we have created and not end up blowing ourselves up or cooking our planet or using our technology in some other careless way that dooms our whole species to extinction, sudden and merciful or long and agonizing. This is the theme of so much of our best modern literature. Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles", in particular, comes to mind. He warned of our being overwhelmed by our technology a long time ago. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley contains a similar warning. These authors knew that we are facing self-inflicted catastrophe - though they had no answers.

And yet, and yet .... What do I get at the uni.? Same old answers.

"Moral relativism."

"Ideas of right and wrong are culturally determined."

"There are no universal moral standards."

  
                             

WE WILL DIE IF WE CONTINUE TO THINK THIS WAY. 


Sorry. A whole sentence in large font capitals is rude. I'm just tired and disillusioned once again. But why wouldn't I be? The supposedly smartest people we have and they dodge the question of our times like daydreamy adolescents or outright cowards.

If History tells us nothing else, it tells us this: it is utterly human to slip into chauvinistic, jingoistic, xenophobic ways of thinking. We have done it, in all societies, over and over again. From that point, our sliding down the long, greasy slope into war with those we fear, and feel superior to, History shows, is as natural as our learning to talk.

But, though war has been our species' way of toughening ourselves for centuries, our science and the technology that it has given us have made this practice unsustainable. We have to find another way.

My point in this blog is to claim that there is another way. I am trying to show that way. 

We can make a solid logical case for moral realism, for a moral code that is grounded in material reality and so can work for all of us. One that is built up from the foundations of the cosmos. It's there. If you read my earlier posts giving the latest draft of my book, which I have posted in pieces over the months since the summer, you can read what I think that code should contain and why I think so. I also invite you again to send me an email with your contributions to what you think a new moral code for our whole species should contain.

<drwendell49@gmail.ca> 














I am very serious in this. It is axiomatic for me that a new moral code for humanity must be built up democratically. We'll gather opinions, perhaps over decades, millions of them if we have to, and have public debates online, and keep refining our code till we distill it down to a few basic principles that can effectively guide us all to live together in peace. People will accept it, buy into it, practice it, and teach it to their kids because it will make sense. The logic of it will be unassailable. It will, most importantly, tell every human being "You are worthy. You have an inalienable right to be yourself and to choose your own way in this life as long as you are not directly harming anyone else."  

Yes, it is a Western democratic view, but I point out again: democracy works. Its processes are hard, long, and slow, but it works. It makes strength and happiness over the long haul.

So I'll close by pointing out one more time: if this seems hard to you, think about the alternative. 

I come today to one of the harder issues for me: what new values do we need to write, or what older ones do we need to affirm in order to move into a rational relationship with our planet? 

The heart of the matter in the West, according to an essay by L. White, in his essay entitled "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis", lies in the way that followers of Christianity and Judaism have been taught for centuries to think of the relationship between people and the natural world. The Bible tells the faithful that they have been given "dominion" over the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fishes of the seas. In short, humans are the center of all creation and, therefore, humans are allowed to do whatever they want with other species. White argues that we have to get rid of this thinking if we are ever going to grow into a way of life that will allow humans to live on this planet sustainably. He even proposes that we in the West take St. Francis of Assisi as our model and learn to love all of the other species in nature so much that we can't bear to harm them. Francis, he feels, is the only really moral saint in the history of the West.  

On the other hand, it is common these days for us to hear in the media that the native peoples in many spots in the world, but especially in North America, loved the land that their God had given them and sought in everything they did to live in a mutually respectful relationship with all other living things. For the Cree and Ojibway, every hunt was guided by divine powers, and animals that they would be able to kill were placed in their paths if and only if the hunters had grateful attitudes toward them and also toward the environment that they all shared. Perhaps, we can take our cue from native people. 

All of this sounds decent and sensible, especially when we consider how much trouble we are in here on Earth. This planet is heating up at an unprecedented rate, and furthermore, there is no denying anymore that the heating is happening almost entirely because of humans running their machines. Something has to change if we are going to survive on this beautiful world. 

On the other hand, I see the counter-arguments. There are few places more garbage-strewn than some of the native reserves that I have been on in Canada and the US. Archaeologists tell us that this kind of behavior is not really new, on the parts of native peoples of North America anymore than it is anywhere else in the world. Until very recently, people all over just dumped their garbage somewhere out of the way and convenient and then went back to their usual activities.

And the counter-arguments to the whole beautiful view of humans living with and in nature get much stronger than just this rude discrediting of the moral grounds of the native people. 

The neoconservative climate change deniers argue fiercely that industrialization makes comforts and, even more, it makes power. While people in activist groups that claim to be defending the environment are meeting to rail against the abuses of the corporate system, they arrive at the convention in gas-guzzling vehicles, they stay in air-conditioned rooms, they eat in restaurants that offer foods imported from thousands of miles away, and they watch t.v.'s and work on computers made in countries even further off. Capitalism makes power, even for those who say they hate it. All of these hypocrisies, the climate change deniers on the right of the political spectrum love to mock. 

It seems clear to me that a set of rules for a better relationship with the natural world is going to be the hardest part of our new moral code to build. But the guide we need here is easy enough to find. We need the principle of balance, one of the most important principles in the natural world. Our paying attention to that principle gives a small lift to our spirits when we begin to feel that we will never achieve long term stability in our relationship with the natural world. In this struggle to find a sensible, decent relationship between ourselves and nature, we can take our cue from nature herself. 


                        
                                                               farmer, 1931



What I mean is that there will be no going back to the farming communities of a hundred or more years ago, nor to the hunter-gathering way of life that is much older. No living in a more direct and simple way which asks of us only long hours of hard labor each day and peaceful sleeps each night. That picture may seem sweet, but it never really existed. Many of those hard-working farmers lived with constant dread of the hail, frost, blights, and insects that could put a humiliating end  in a few days or even hours to all of their best efforts. Those people lived in fear, at least as much as we do today. Ultimately, they feared losing their farms and ending up starving, along with their whole families, in slums, working at dead-end factory jobs that would let them accumulate nothing that they could leave to their children - if they could even find a job. And lots of them did end up in exactly those straits. Starvation and disease were hovering even closer for the hunter-gatherers. The good old days weren't so good.     

But we also can't let modern capitalism and all of its industries and corporations simply have their way. We know that now. 

The rational relationship, it seems to me, is one in which we all allow ourselves lives of modest comfort, no gross excesses - no maintaining multiple homes we never live in, but heat anyway -and we pay attention all the while to composting, re-using, and recycling every atom of waste we make. Then, with the help of Science, we may even be able to devise ways to get our food, clothes, shelter, and recreation, while all the while supporting our planet's natural systems. 

The part of our new moral code that guides us to live sustainably on this planet will probably not be based on any of the traditional codes of the peoples of the past, or perhaps we can say that code will take its basic outlook from St. Francis and the Ojibway. But it will have to be composed of a thousand small mores and models, nuances guiding our actions in every way every day so that they keep this planet livable. We are going to get most of our guidance in this part of our future way of life from Science. Science that looks unflinchingly - which is what the term "Science" is supposed to mean -  at what is. What does the evidence say? Can solar and wind power replace gas and oil as ways of heating homes? Are organic farms viable in a market driven economy? Will consumers come around in mass numbers to driving electric cars? Will they elect politicians who will push them in that direction by, for example, raising the price of gas until it is not affordable for the vast majority of ordinary wage earners? 

We can see Science here as simply our best insight into nature and how she really works, our guide to finding balance. And Science is telling us to live in balanced ecosystems. There is no reason why we can't fit our methods of food production, travel, housing, etc. into ecosystems that already exist on this planet. There is no rational reason for saying that we can't do the work that needs to be done. We just need to believe, above all, that reason and passion as values can themselves exist in balance in our societies and in each of us. Work. Hard work. Work that is carefully guided and informed. Hard, but not impossible, as projects like urban gardens and products like electric cars are showing all over the world every day.


  
                                                                   Tesla, electric car 



The bottom line is this: can reason guide our passions? Can we love and also think and do? 

How much character does the human species have?  

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day. 

An important part of my project of building a new moral code for humanity has been to sift the codes of the world's major religions with an aim to try to see which parts of those codes have worked well in the past, why they have done so, and in what forms they may be worth keeping in the new code that I am trying to compose. 

However, I also try to watch out for those parts of the moral codes of the world's major religions that are obsolete and that we should therefore write out of our new moral code for the world. 

A glaring and inefficient part of almost all of the traditional moral codes has been the exploitative and illogical attitude that they have had towards women. 

In Buddhism, it is made very clear that no woman can ever be a buddha, that is, an enlightened soul. Wives are to obey their husbands and not make them angry, and they are to rise before their husbands in the morning and go to bed after them at night. But Buddhism is probability the best of the lot as far as the roles that it assigns to woman in society. 







In Hinduism, no woman can be admitted into in-depth study of the holy texts. Men are told that they should approach their wives reasonably if they want sex, but if a wife won't listen to reason, then the man can beat her until she does submit. Wives for centuries were routinely thrown on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands in a practice called "sati", even when they were very young and could have had long, productive lives ahead of them. Only British rule put an end to this practice, and the extinction of it was long and slow. 

The Hebrews begin their day with a prayer in which they thank God for the fact that they were not born female, and women are assigned, at least in traditional Judaism, a submissive role to their husbands. After all, it was Eve who gave in to the temptations of Satan and who caused the downfall of the whole of humankind. She must, therefore, bring forth her children in pain and be subject to the rule of her husband (say the scriptures). 

Christianity adopted most of these same notions, and, in addition, there is the obvious fact that until quite recently, women were not accepted as clergy, and still are not in the oldest and largest of the Christian sects, namely Roman Catholicism. 

  
      Patricia Sandall and Jeannette Love, ordained Catholic priests (in defiance of the Vatican)  



Islam is widely viewed in the West as being worse than any of the above. Men can have four wives if they want to. Women are treated as commodities, given by their fathers, in marriage, to other men and those men can divorce them simply by telling them "I divorce them" three times. Women are the majority by far in hell, says the prophet, and they can drag men there with them if they are not kept under strict control. They must cover their beauties, refrain from actions that might distract or seduce men, and not go out of their homes unless accompanied by a man that they are related to or know very well. The treatment of women in Muslim countries contains some parts that were probably due more to the customs of the Arab tribes to whom Islam was first offered than to the teachings of the prophet, but the two certainly reinforce each other. The net effect today in most parts of the Muslim world is that a woman who dishonors her family can be killed by brothers, fathers, etc. At that point, most people in the West don't care where the custom originates. It's so plainly wrong that discussion of it is not possible. 

  
                   Noor Almaleki (murdered in Arizona by her father for dishonoring her family) 



All of this patriarchy is long overdue not so much for an overhaul as for abolition. 

I reiterate at this point that the purpose of my blog is to understand why some values and beliefs need to be written out of our new moral code altogether. It is the large view of how moral values link to survival that I try to explore. If we know the truth, it will set us free. 

The misogynist view of women survived and enabled the tribes who lived by it to survive because it made babies. A small tribe or a large nation must have babies if they are to spread and flourish. In the sex act, male arousal and orgasm are necessary for procreation; the female, in the meantime, can be utterly bored or even terrified the whole time. For reproduction of the species, her level of interest and enthusiasm are not relevant. Tribes that taught men to be dominant over women and women to accept that situation had more babies over the long haul. For millennia, that was what mattered in the survival game.  

The final point to make in this part of the argument is that men were needed for centuries to help in the nurture of human babies. Up until very recently, a single mom was facing an almost impossible task. In the meantime, men were simply far more likely to give their support to those children that they were very confident were theirs. Biologically theirs. That confidence is massively increased when men are so dominant in society in general that women who stray into having unsanctioned sex risk everything, including their lives. 

The net effect of summing up all of these separate factors was to make patriarchy a survivor. The whole calculation is just a calculation of probabilities. Patriarchy wasn't fair; but it was a good bet with good probabilities for paying back with interest.  

Today, we have too many humans on this planet as it is. In addition, modern economies make it possible for women who so desire to have babies and jobs at the same time. In most states in the West, they can even stay home with their babies on maternity leave - in some countries for up to two years - without suffering serious financial hardship. Or their husbands can choose to stay home and nurture the kids. Or they both can work and put the kids in daycare.






The question that occurs to us at this point is whether or not modern Western societies that contain more gender equity will prove as prolific and vigorous as those in the World that are still mired in patriarchy. I think the answer is already clear. We don't have the infant mortality rates in the West that we once did. That makes patriarchy less advantageous. In addition, we now are living in economies that can afford to educate all of the kids well. For the most part, in the nations race, the Western nations aren't really winning; they've already won. It's little wonder that for every ten or twenty disturbed young men that ISIS gains from the West, tens of thousand of disillusioned men, women, and children are coming the other way.  

The states that want to stay in patriarchy are going to keep falling further and further behind in the race for power. At the end of the day, they are simply losing because they are missing out on the development of at least half of their human talent pool. Women can't do everything men can. There probably will never be a single, gender-free category in the Olympic Games. But aside from the physical, women have shown they can do, and are doing, anything men can do. All of the professions, all of the businesses, government, the military, and so on. In the meantime, the kids are growing up as good as they ever were and probably a bit better. They now have moms, as well as dads, whom they can see as real heroes. 

I say "Good on 'em." 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day.   

Buddha said: "Hatred does not cease through hatred at any time. Hatred ceases through love. This is an unalterable law." He said this about 600 years before Jesus was born. 

Peter said to [Jesus], “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” ²² Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven."






In the 1960's, Martin Luther King said: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." 

The point is that these men came to the same conclusion after thinking and experiencing and thinking some more. They were not naive, superficial men. They were not fools or bumpkins who believed in impossible ideals that can't be realized by real people in the flow of real daily events. 

How I love the movie "Selma". And it is a true story. Love and wisdom in subtle balance. Until I saw that movie, I had no idea that King had the political savvy that he did. But then I looked up the facts, and found that the movie portrayal of him is no exaggeration. He was that smart as well as that compassionate and that determined. And then add non-violent. He will be seen as the greatest American of the twentieth century someday. I am certain of it.  

My point today is once again that the best wisdom of the world's religions (King was a Baptist Christian pastor, and I believe, an inspired man) coincides. The reason that a few of the world's thousands of religions have survived and flourished is that their values guide people to ways of life that - over millions of people and thousands of years - work. 

Love, in the end, is all that our lives are about and all that holds our communities together. Life itself makes little to no sense if it does not have love in it. It must end in death. Unlike other animals, we know that death is not just something that happens to other, unfortunate living things. It is waiting for all of us. So why don't we just end the anxious waiting and go there? As humans, we also know that we are capable of choosing to bow out of this life. 

We hang on for love. It is all that gives life flavor in the end. All pleasures and triumphs fade for the individuals who achieve and enjoy them. Look at the evidence of the real world. 

Can love solve the problems we now face? The spread of nuclear weapons? Global warming? I can't answer those questions definitively. I can only look back at history, at Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Lincoln, King, Saint Joan, and others like them. For certain, they would not be remembered as they are today if they had not had a belief in love that rose above the distracting ups and downs of their times. A dedication to their ideals that guided and informed their actions day by day.  

We can do this. We can make a better world. We just have to learn to believe in things that we cannot see.



                                                      "Joan of Arc"          (Lepage) 

Let's consider another principle endorsed by some of the major religions of the world, a principle that, I believe, has survival value for all of us. 

In the New Testament, Jesus tells his followers the parable of the servants who were each given "talents" by their master. They were allowed to keep the talents and do as they wished with them for a few months, and then the master came back and asked each for an accounting. Two of the servants had invested the sums left with them wisely and could give the original sum back to the master with interest. The third had buried his smaller sum of talents in the ground for fear of investing it badly and then having to answer for the loss to his master. The master immediately punishes him for his "lazy" and "slothful" ways. 

The implication is that we are to use the talents that we are given, not hide them. We are to involve ourselves in the world and try to make the good we have in us spread to make the world and ourselves better. Most of all, we are individually answerable for how we live our lives. No excuses, no special deals. Each of us is free and responsible, and we will be judged on how well we have lived up to our potential. 

The Koran has similar commands for the faithful, not embedded in parables, but told directly. If you are in a position of authority in the community, you must deal justly, even if that means making a decision "against a kinsman". "Each soul earns only on its own account" and none of us can "bear another's load". 







Individual responsibility for one's own moral choices: this is a valuable concept to promote because it aids society in building market places and communities in which there is overall efficiency. In societies in which individual responsibility is a prime value, built-up capital is not lost in payments for non-services. Currency is exchanged in deals that all correspond to goods or services of real value. Wealth can multiply.  







Some critics of Islam might want right here to jump into the discussion and ask something like, "Why, if individual responsibility is so important in Islam, are so many Muslim countries plagued with suffocating levels of graft and corruptions?" 

The simple answer to this question is that people are sometimes weak and they fail ideals; but sound ideals don't fail people. And perhaps it is also worth noting that there are Christian countries in which the level of corruption of officials is just as bad as it is anywhere in the Muslim world. If corruption in general is less in the Western world, it also took a long time to beat down, or put conversely, generally practiced and expected levels of honesty take a long time to develop and spread. Maybe, we in the West, could just be a little patient with the rest. Change is coming.  

But let's focus on the wisdom of the whole idea of individual responsibility and not get distracted arguing about whose society is more corrupt. Accountability is clearly wiser for all of us over the long haul than any imaginable alternative. 

Therefore, I'll close by re-stating this principle: teaching the kids individual responsibility for the moral content of their behavior has survival value for society over the long haul. Traditional values turn out to have profound implications in the long haul. Honesty is wiser than any of its alternatives, as the evidence of history shows.  

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day. 

Today, I feel, once again, compelled to address the atheists among my readers, or at least, the readers who think they are. 


  
                                     global atheist's convention (Melbourne, Australia, 2012) 


  
      Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Ayan Hirsi Ali at Melbourne convention




The principles embedded in the major world religions - the principles, that is, that we can see from our study of history do work to make nations that survive ...those principles are what matter. The atheists among us can believe that those principles do not require any "deity" or "holy scripture" to give them the authority to be accepted by everyone. Reasoning and evidence, that is, evidence based in the universal patterns in the histories of the various peoples of the world - these are what we should use to guide us in our work on a universal moral code. 

In short, I'm fine with the atheists of my world refusing to accept or say that there is a consciousness in this universe. I can be good friends with the atheists of the world as long as they are willing to give up moral relativism and get to work with the rest of us on building a universal moral code. In fact, any delegates to the convention, to use a political metaphor, who come to the table already determined to promote only one agenda, namely the one informed by their religious belief system and scripture, are immediately suspect. 

Our whole process of debate and compromise must be dedicated to the proposition that all people can be persuaded rationally if we give the whole process enough time. But the final arbiter of our debates must be the evidence of history, all history, in all nations. The arbiter can not be a scripture, a dogma, or a set of theocrats from any one belief system. These all have been wrangling and shedding each other's blood for far too long already. It is past time that the rational people of the world confronted them in open public debate and deconstructed the moral codes that they claim are indisputable. 

In any such confrontation, we can always ask fundamentalists of any stripe: "What results will your ways and rules produce for the human species over the long haul? What reasoning tells you so? What evidence in history supports your claims?" 

The principles of courage and wisdom, grounded in the physics of entropy, along with the principles of freedom and love, grounded in quantum uncertainty, if they inform all that we do, will steer us to survival, and health and happiness. Let courage, wisdom, freedom, and love, embedded in a balanced ecosystem of beliefs and lifestyles, be our guides. No single ruling individual or religion; genuine respect and tolerance for the ways of others. Open markets of ideas. Then, let reality be the arbiter.   

All of these guidelines for our negotiations, I believe, will be quite acceptable for the atheists of the world, especially once they have had the theory of moral realism and the evidence of world history explained to them. The principles that will guide our behavior so that our species moves forward in time to greater knowledge, skill, happiness, and health for all people -- these, I think, the atheists will have no problem with. 

At that point, I'm fine with all of them, far more so than I am with religious fundamentalists of every stripe, who are keen to bring about a world state under one brutally enforced, totalitarian code of behavior for all. In fact, given the diversity that already exists in the world, the number of radically different nations that are implicitly willing to live and let live, I question whether totalitarian visions of the future are not mere childish delusions. The genie is out of the bottle. Pluralism is here to stay. Get used to it. Or better yet, learn to revel in it and enjoy all kinds of foods, music, apparel, sports, and so on just as much as you do a fine day in nature when you can see all of the species interacting and making the whole ecosystem stronger. 

To close today's post, let me also say, gently, to my atheist friends one more time: if you do come to believe that a single, tolerant, wise, loving code of behavior for all humans could be drawn up and that it really could work for us all over the long haul, and if that belief comes to inform all that you do and say, day by day, in your lives, then you actually do have a kind of faith, and you do believe, in your own, individual way, in God. 

You just don't believe in the kind of deity that any of the fundamentalists in any of the world's major religions still cling to. Neither do I. And why should we? The evidence is clear: their ways can't work to make a vigorous and happy life for us all over the long haul. But believe in God in your own way? At that point, oh, yes, you do. I hope one day in a quiet way, privately, inside yourself, that realization will make you happy. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day. 

  
                                                                    meningococcal bacteria 



Today, I will pause and take stock of what I have said in the last three posts about the new moral code that I am trying to get people to join with me in creating. 

The whole point of monotheism as far as the cultural evolution of our species is concerned is that we are going to have to come up with one code, at least in its most general guidelines, for all of humanity. A single moral code to live by is the most important consequence that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were supposed to provide for their adherents. In practice, what arriving at such a code means is that you must judge yourself and your friends by the same standards that you use to judge strangers and even to judge your enemies. If you believe in many gods, you can play them off against one another. Freya will protect you from the wrath of Thor. Athena can give similar protection from Poseidon, and so on. And people will use any out they can seize upon rather than keep doing the hard self-discipline of themselves. This is our primitive nature. Xenophobia and hostility then violence. But if you believe in one God, you have to pause over and over and study your case and your opponent's case. On whose side does justice truly lie? Logic, restraint, moderation, and tolerance all become more and more needed under a monotheistic belief system. These prime values then work to make a strong society, one that survives over the long haul. 

We can have such a society without being believers in any deity if we can draw up a single, rational, evidence-based moral code for us all. This path, I know, some of my atheist friends far prefer. My contention is that once we have such a code, and we really do live by it because we believe that in the long haul, the code works, we have a kind of faith, no matter what we call it. But more on these subtler matters in a few days.   

What is more glaringly obvious at this point in the reasoning is the realization that resorting to Jesus as your "lawyer" in the next life is the exact kind of thing that Abraham was trying to put an end to when he had his giant monotheistic insight. God, in the all encompassing view, doesn't play favorites in the human family. All must obey the same rules. I think today we can say that God doesn't even favor humans in general over other living things, even meningococcal bacteria or trichina worms. We just aren't that special. But Christians, in their worst excesses, because they think they have special influence in the next world, also think they just don't have to be nice to "others", if those "others" are people who have not been "saved" and who keep refusing to be so. This is one more instance of the exact thing we were not supposed to do.   



                             
                                                                             trichina spiralis 



So one of the first rules we can derive from studying the strengths of the major religions of the world is the one that directs us to create a single moral code for us all to live by. Of course, the adherents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, much of the time in history, did not behave in ways that were very equitable when they were dealing with people of other cultures, but this is only an indication of the rationalizing nature of humans. The codes were quite clear. Welcome strangers. Be a good Samaritan. Don't judge others by any standard other than the one that you are willing to be judged by. All of this simply means that what you need to do in reaction to those who are different from you, as long as they and their differences are not harming you, is leave them alone. 

It is worth noting here that a major feature of the monotheistic idea is that it goes against what nations/tribes had been doing for centuries in reaction to other, noticeably different nations. Monotheism offered a new and, as it turned out, better way. One set of rules for all, a set of rules that mostly tells us to let others be themselves, however quirky their ways may seem. 

The other main thing I hope I have made clear from my discussion of the commonalities among the major religions of the world is the exhortation to believe in abstract principles held in the mind and sometimes not observable in their effects on human behavior for decades. That is why we have been ordered not to make idols and bow down to them. Put stuff over ideals, and soon you will lose both and probably your life into the bargain. 

Note that whether you are an atheist or a theist of one of the Abrahamic religions really doesn't matter as far as this rule of living goes because its wisdom is sound regardless of whether you think it came to us by the slow process of trial and error called "cultural evolution" or was revealed to us in divinely inspired scriptures. The bottom line is that a long-term functioning and stable society with a productive economy and a population who support and believe in their system of governance can't occur in a place where people take whatever they can readily grab anytime no one is watching them. Once people start placing goods above their ideas of good, the decline of their state and its economy becomes inevitable. 

To sum up our discussions of the last few days:

First, get to work on writing a universal code of right and wrong that all humans can live by. In this century, I believe, we are going to have to work that code out by debate and compromise among ourselves. Our primary foundational principle of love requires that the code we draw up be worked out democratically. Otherwise, it will not be accepted in the hearts of the people. This democracy business is long, hard, and slow. But it is infinitely preferable to any of the alternatives.  

Second, put principles above material things. Show that in the way you live your life. Principles must inform the actions that enable us to make and exchange goods. The making, trading, and accumulating of goods must never become the main point of our lives.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day.   

[Today's post has been extensively revised in the last few hours. I apologize for the incoherence of my work from earlier today. I wrote it at 4 a.m. this morning, but that is really no excuse. Anyway, below I offer some more organized thoughts. I hope you enjoy.] 


***********************************************************************************


I've been writing about the positive and negative effects of the moral codes of the major religions of the world as a way into my discussion of what kind of a moral code the people of the world are going to have to create over the next generation or two. There are reasons for my taking this approach.


                               
                                                                     statue of Krishna 


The moral codes embedded in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all contain some clear flaws, when we consider them as possible moral guides in the twenty-first century. But there is an "other hand" here, and I'd like to switch your attention onto it. Out of all the literally thousands of religions in the history of the world, these few have managed to spread until each of them can claim millions of adherents. The simple conclusion to draw, if one is a moral realist, is that, in spite of their flaws, the major world religions must be getting some things right. In some crucial ways, they must be steering people who follow them toward patterns of behavior that enable their adherents to survive, individually and as communities. That is the view one must take if one is a moral realist. Observable patterns in phenomena must have theoretical explanations. There must be principles or models underlying the patterns in the data, ones that can be stated as generalizations. 

Therefore, since I brought up Islam yesterday, let's examine another of its strengths.

One of the things that deeply offends Muslims, and that they have difficulty communicating to people of other faiths, is their belief that truly moral people should not make images of the things that they call "divine", whatever that "divine" might be. Now the question becomes: "Why is this important?"


  
                                                       statue of Buddha (Kamakura, Japan) 


My take on this matter is that when a church begins to commission and display paintings, statues, and stained-glass window images of God, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and so on, then in a gradual, insidious way, the priests, pastors, lamas, etc. begin to focus more and more on their church's material things and less and less on the principles that the prophets taught. Giving in to this idol-making is the beginning of materialism, a belief that things and appearances are all that really matter.



                              
                                                 Head of Christ (Richard Hook painting) 



The churches never teach such stuff explicitly; rather, the slip into materialism happens by slow degrees over centuries of time and millions of people. But by degrees, adherents of a religion begin to slip into a mindset that tells them, "If the church can accumulate and show off its things, I can too. If I have enough things, then whether I truly have the qualities my religion claims to value, like humility, honesty, and respect for the rights of others, will not matter."

When the whole activity of idol-making - and that's what it is - is described in this way, then the disadvantages of the activity become obvious. When people begin to care more for stuff than they do for the principles that gave them the economic system that enabled their society to create the stuff in the first place, then they are going to, in a couple of generations, lose that stuff, and the economic system, and probably, for many of them or their descendants, their own lives. What I want to communicate to you today is that the beginning of caring more for stuff than for ideals lies in making material images of the divine. 

Real, effective respect for the rights of other human beings is impossible if we do not have even more general principles of love and freedom written into our mental programming. It is these abstractions, over generations, that then make the concrete wealth of market-based economies possible. It is our placing our primary emphasis on values rather than things that makes the human institution called an "economy of scale", with all of its attached commodities, possible.

The evidence supporting this belief is clear to see. In countries where abstract ideals are given only lip service and high degrees of graft and corruption exist at every level, and in every sector, of society, the building of an economy which makes quality goods available and affordable to the big majority of ordinary people does not happen. Too many hours of labor are squandered as people pay for non-services and unusable goods. Food can't be eaten because inspectors have been bribed to overlook spoiled meat and milk and so on. Gasoline has been stolen and so is never a source of wages for ordinary workers down the chain of production and distribution. Buildings collapse in 4.2 magnitude earthquakes because the building inspectors were paid to pass construction flaws that a smart ten-year-old who plays with Lego could see. "Experts" hold degrees that were bought and paid for. Policemen protect only their families and patrons and persecute everyone else. All of these come when masses of people in general no longer carry a constant awareness of, and respect for, wisdom, freedom, and love. 

The young people in ISIS are right to loathe the addiction to consumerism that is so evident in the West and in their own countries. Deep down, consumerism is a violation of one of the key principles of Islam, the religion that nearly all of the ISIS militants were raised under. These young people long for something to believe in. However, they are wrong in thinking that they can fix the idolatry in the world by blowing up statues of the Buddha or by smashing ancient temples in Palmyra. The problem is deeper than that. The greed for things, when it overrides people's respect for values, makes society inefficient and poor. However, it won't go away just because a few angry young people blow up some old statues. What these young people need to grasp is that there is something much deeper than mere statues going on here.   

Is there an explanation in all of this for the differences between the West and the rest? My point today is that I think there is. The key difference that Christianity made for the nations of the West back eighteen hundred years ago lay in the fact that Jesus' story felt personal. His adherence to principles, and his sacrifice of his own life for those principles, got to people. Not all people, but enough so that adherence to the beliefs that he taught, such as respect for the rights of others, gradually reached levels that then enabled Western economies to rise to their current levels of efficiency. That social capacity for heartfelt honesty passed a kind of critical mass sometime during the Renaissance. Economies of scale then became possible. In the new economies, people who devised better ways of doing things got real returns for their efforts. They were then the kinds of people that re-invested their gains. The wealth generated went into making more wealth. It did not go, as it had so often in the past, to "patrons", who too often produced nothing and squandered everything. 

We can also note other evidence of the inefficiency of systems that accept high levels of graft and corruption. For example, a "hostile takeover" in the developing world is quite different from a hostile takeover in the West. In the West, in such a takeover, one company, without any cooperation or agreement, offers shareholders of another company such a good price for their shares that large numbers of them choose to sell. Company A gets control of the majority of the shares of Company B, elects a new board of directors at the next shareholders' meeting, and then pushes out all management and workers that it deems not loyal to the new order. 

In the developing world, on the other hand, a hostile takeover means that law is whatever the men with friends in government say it is. Sometimes, hoodlums even show up at a company's factories, warehouses, yards, and offices with guns. They tell the managers in these places, "Leave or we'll kill you." Easy choice.

Again, I stress: the crucial difference between these two scenarios lies in the realm of ideas, not guns. The first scenario contains respect for the rule of law; the second does not. Rule of law is founded on the principles of courage, wisdom, love, and freedom - in balance - embedded in the minds of the majority. Values that inform all of the behaviors of every individual in society and that are lived in a way that places principles above products, ideals before idols.    

Will the new "managers" and "directors" who achieve these hostile takeovers know how to run an auto parts plant or a baby food bottling plant or a casino or an oil exploration company? Sometimes. But more usually they don't, and the business goes bankrupt in a few years as project after project yields inadequate or non-existent returns. Wealth, unlike energy, can be created, and it can also be destroyed. 


  
           Billionaire Michael de Groote lost over $100 million financing a Dominican casino


To close for today then, I will sum up by saying that as more and more knowledge of the West and its ways seeps into the non-Western countries and their populations, the ideas of honesty and competence at every level are more and more honored. Not because they sound nice, but because they work. They enable a society to create wealth. Their working has nothing to do with whether they are "Western" or not. 

To tell the whole truth, we need to admit that the nations of the West have often failed in the very ways that they are accused of in the other parts of the world. In the meantime, however, graft and corruptions are far worse in the developing world. And as long as we have gone this far, let us also admit that outrage over graft and corruption is becoming more and more widespread. That outrage started the Arab Spring. It has caused riots in China and India. It even causes riots in the US when black boys are shot by incompetent policemen for activities that simply would not have gotten them killed if they had been white. Times are changing, I believe, for the better. 

The evidence indicates that we are coming to the dawn of a new age of decency and sense. Principles are coming, gradually, to matter more than products. The idols are seductive, but they are not irresistible. We just have to articulate those principles and then spread them to the world. Love and freedom, courage and wisdom, in balance, must be given priority over comfort zones, privilege, and material things. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day.    

  
                                                                      Masai warrior 



Today, what would be appropriate to discuss, I think, is the downside of our not living under one moral code, a code that makes love, or at least its minimum form, tolerance, of all other human beings its primary value. In other words, I need to talk about the complementary side of my post yesterday. What happens if we do give in to racist thinking and do let in-groups and out-groups in our societies form? 

History is full of evidence which shows us what happens when a tribe or nation begins to think habitually in terms of "us" and "them". Unfortunately, for centuries, it has been natural and human to do so, it seems. Most nations throughout history, most of the time, have spoken in these ways. To the Christians of Europe for centuries, all human beings were divided into two groups: Christians and heathens. Some Christians still use these terms. The Muslims speak of the faithful and the infidel. To the Chinese, for centuries, there were civilized persons (Chinese) and barbarians, though they did assign a lower, but still human status, to some other Asians. But "gweilo" is still a dirty word in parts of China. The word "Masai" means "the people", as do the words "Innu" and "Cheyenne", and so on. All of this, I have noted and described before in this space. 

But what evidence is there for my arguing that this way of thinking is immoral? 

We need only to look at the consequences. 



  
                     movie depiction of Saladin's siege of Jerusalem (from "Kingdom of Heaven") 


Consider, for example, the Crusades. The Crusades were a series of invasions on the civilized part of the world - at that time - by a number of waves of hairy, smelly barbarians. In an objective view, that is the best we can say of those wars. Being a bit more honest, we might even admit that the atrocities committed by the Christian armies were more frequent and more vicious than those committed by the Muslims. Ridley Scott, in his film "Kingdom of Heaven", catches a truer picture of what the Crusades really were like  than has ever been presented to movie audiences of the West before. And good on him for doing so. My point is that, for later generations, the Crusades were described in the text books of schools in the West in glowing terms. The reality was almost the opposite of what the text books portrayed, an instance of us-versus-them thinking at its worst. Any lie was acceptable if it justified our side.  


                         
                                                                             Quanah 


Some natives of North America accepted Christianity as a replacement for their own religion, but most did not, and many individuals even in tribes that supposedly had been "converted" held on to their traditional beliefs, Sitting Bull and Quanah being probably the most famous. The problem for most natives was simply that Christians did not practice what they preached. Hudson Bay agents, for example, even went so far as to pass blankets from families who had been wiped out by smallpox on to other Indian families. "Well, the natives were 'savages' after all." Us-versus-them thinking again.   

The word "Eskimo" is not an Innu word; it is a Cree word that means "raw meat eaters". It was a racist slur. The Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans have racist slurs in their own languages that are commonly used to refer to each other's ethnic identities. In India, an African can be referred to as a "hapshi". It is not a nice word.  

As we look at the evidence, we can't help but think, that this human predilection for racism and war - if it is as common as the evidence seems to indicate - must have served some purpose in human history. How else could it have become so universal? But what purpose could have been served by a built-in tendency to be racist, chauvinistic, cruel, and violent? 

My response has two parts: first, I think that humans have always needed a way to toughen their cultures and the codes that these cultures contain because if a life form is to survive, it must evolve. That is just a fact of this uncertain reality. We can't know what the future will bring; we can only try to continually re-new our resources for fighting back against surprise, decadence, defeat, and decay - to re-new our resources for adapting to change, in other words. 

We humans long ago gained such mastery over all other species that they just don't test us, as a species, anymore. So we hit upon this mechanism of toughening our "ways of life" against each other. Hitler, in particular, was absolutely convinced of the necessity of war. His claim was: "In eternal warfare, mankind has become great; in eternal peace, mankind would be ruined." 

The second part of my response to the question about why we seem so inclined toward war is a reply to the first part: the simple reminder to myself and all readers that, while Hitler's view might even have been correct in the past, nuclear weapons have made it obsolete. We can't keep doing international relations in the ways in which we have been doing them for six millennia. Or as John Kennedy put it: "Mankind must abolish war or war will abolish mankind." 

This is the inevitable downside, then, of our holding onto any form of racist thinking and, as a result, continuing to be xenophobic and violent. We will soon extinguish ourselves if we don't change our ways. 

Christianity, therefore, is particularly dangerous for a society if the form or Christianity that society practices tells them that they are different and special because they have been "saved". This way of thinking leaves out most of the rest of the human race who have not been saved. Such talk is just a trick with words that ends in reaching the same result that so many national propaganda devices have in the past: it teaches its adherents, "It's us against them." 

Christianity, in its worst forms, is the very opposite of a monotheistic religion.  

Thus, I believe this is the most important part of Mohammed's message and even a quick reading of the Koran bears me out. The belief that "God has no partners" is taught in the Koran in crystal clear terms. And this change in thinking has consequences. 

If you have only one idea of the divine, then you must have only one code of right and wrong to guide yourself, your family, and your society in all of the complex, real-world dealings that all of these enter into. Many Muslims may not live up to that ideal, but that single moral code is still the Koran's main intent, in spite of the failures of some of its adherents. Sharia, for me, anyway, is a later invention of imperfect human beings.  

In the meantime, believing, as many Christians do, that the divine is made up of a trinity, but is somehow still one, is just word play; the net effect of this belief in the real history of human beings is the same as it is for any other form of polytheism: in-group versus out-group thinking leading to continuous war. 


  



And I repeat: although this thinking may once have served a purpose, it has to be replaced in the nuclear age. As Einstein himself said, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking; thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

Christianity is hardly the only offender in promoting this in-group versus out-group thinking, as my examples above have tried to show. But the much larger point we need to take from the whole story of our species so far is that calling a belief that is so ubiquitous "human" or "natural" does not make that belief right. If one is a moral realist, as I am, then what makes "right" is what makes sense, and what makes sense is whatever is necessary for us, as a whole species, to survive. 

Our learning to love one another - all of us aiming to love all of our brothers and sisters - is not just nice, naive idealism. It has now become the hardest, most visionary form of realism. We get that or we're done. 

And what of the problem of finding a substitute for war so that humans do stay fit? That will be solved by competition in business, science, sport, exploration, and so on. It can be done. 









  



In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day.