Stalingrad, 1943 (credit: Wikipedia) 

If you have been following this space, you will understand that I see the concept of a "meme" as very analogous to the more solidly proven unit of life called a "gene". Whether predictable patterns of neuron activity in human brains, patterns that could reliably be called "memes", exist is so far unproven. Meme theory is in its infancy. Every individual human brain is unique and is evolving rapidly day to day as it takes in new sense data, files them in memory, and adjusts its operations. Thus, memes are hard to pin down. 

But memes are worth considering even if they are still just speculation. 

For example, as I read narratives about World Wars One and Two, I can't stop myself from seeing those conflicts in terms of meme/culture struggles. There was no racial or even ethnic superiority or inferiority to any of the players. The racial theories of the Nazis were nonsense. It was memes that were fighting to the death in those wars, driving their carriers to ever greater sacrifices. The carriers (humans) were largely unaware of the lethal memes they were carrying. 

For example, consider the memes that dictatorships instill. Speer's "Inside The Third Reich" makes it very clear that while a dictator may have the advantage over democracies in the speed with which he can make decisions, as the challenges get tougher, those decisions are more and more likely to be wrong. Autocratic memes (hail the king, emperor, fuhrer, whateverer) are lethal memes in the modern world. Modern, technologically sophisticated societies have grown too complex for any one person to have a thorough comprehension of how a society works. Maybe dictatorship was marginally viable for Napoleon in his time, but its day ended with the dawn of modern industrial states.  

Hitler's unorthodox moves in the early stages of the war overwhelmed the tradition-bound officers and diplomats of his adversaries. But then, as Speer recounts in close detail, Hitler began to make bigger and bigger blunders. He did not understand large scale strategies and he hated having to listen to any opposition. Driven by his own cultural programming, he posed as fuhrer; his underlings, for similar reasons, looked to him as fuhrer. Clear chains of command; prompt decisions. Rapid dissemination of ...mistakes.   

In additon, his state machinery was grotesquely homogeneous. Able, "Aryan", heterosexual males in all the important roles. (We know now that there were homosexuals in the SS, but they stayed in the closet.) No Jews, no Slavs, no Arabs, Orientals, women, etc., etc. 

Talent occurs throughout all slices of any human population. Prejudices aren't so much mean as they are stupid. They cause nations that promulgate them to shrink their talent pool. His impoverished talent pool originated in a mistaken set of memes in his own head. 

Why does love, as a giant value/meme matter? In the long haul, love just means that we accept our neighbors regardless of the categories they might fit into, as long as they aren't getting their livings by force or trickery. Then, when a crisis comes, the pluralistic nation has more resources to draw on. More tools in its toolbox. It's that simple. The US had codetalkers to call on, and Jewish-Americans, and African-Americans. Britain had Arab legions, native Canadians, etc. 

In addition, pluralism results in not only more versatility, but more citizens in general. More population, more resources, more technologies, etc. That is what comes of loving our neighbors. More people want to live here. 

Though, God knows, I'd far rather the struggles were in business for innovations and markets, than in war for land and resources, the point is that the democracies proved more versatile and resourceful in the real life and death struggle called "war". 

Russia, I know, was anything but a democracy, but the totalitarian nature of Stalin's rule, it seems to me, had it huge downside too. Even though Russia and Germany were far more like each other than like the Western democracies, Russia did do most of the defeating of Germany. But what accounts for the huge numbers of casualties that the Russians suffered? In a word, a dictator. 

Stalin made some blunders at least as large as Hitler's. For example, in killing off most of his army's capable senior officers before the war even began. And in refusing to believe for several days that Germany was even invading. He got paranoid and trusted fewer and fewer people, as dictators always do. He just had the good or bad fortune, depending on how you look at it, of having an adversary even more megalomanical than he was. The first Nazi armies into the territories of the Soviet Union were welcomed in may places, particularly in the Ukraine. It was only when people saw that Hitlerian dictatorship would be even worse than Stalinian that the will to fight Germany hardened. 

And Stalin had a more pluralistic army, as meme theory predicts he likely would. Historians estimate that as much as one third of the Russian troops were of non-Russian origin. 

The cultural evolution theory that values pluralism over autocracy - as a meme - holds. 

The nations that hungered for one-man rule with quick decisions, clear lines of responsibility, no free elections, and none of the wrangling that seems so exhausting - those nations got what history deals out sooner or later to all who love autocracy. A lunatic at the helm and suffering beyond measure. (Note well that Hitler and Stalin both died as literal lunatics.)  

In raw courage, the average German or Japanese soldier was the equal of any soldiers who have ever existed. Their armies lost not because of tyrant leaders but because of the memes that produced those regimes in the first place. Hitler was just an attachment that went with a whole set of ideas, ideas not so much evil as mistaken in their worldviews, philosophies and values, ones simply out of touch with the forces of the physical universe itself. 

Most species are driven to behave as they do because of the programming in their genes. If we round up thousands of coddling moth males and expose them to just enough radiation to render them sterile but not kill them, and we then turn them loose in the valley, they will mate will thousands of females who will then lay eggs that will not hatch. But the female moths can't help being themselves. Genes drive their behaviors. So are elk drawn to elk calls - to get shot. So are ducks drawn to duck calls. Hunters know how to exploit programming. The examples could go on. Genes drive most species' behaviors. It's hard not to be a duck if you're a duck. 

In humans, genes are pretty powerful too. But memes are even more so. What man anywhere is not captivated by a lovely female form? But humans are driven by their cultural programs even more than their genetic ones. Men all over are drawn to the lovely female figure, but what each will do next varies between cultures. In some cultures, that male will go home and put on his make-up, then come out and parade in front of the female with the lovely figure. In some cultures, he will puff out his chest, and begin to talk more loudly. 

Of all of our cultural programs/memes, giant ones such as courage and wisdom are the most important. In dynamic, constantly-tuned balance, courage and wisdom program the humans who carry them to cope with entropy, which we know simply as adversity, one of the most pervasive of all the constants in reality. And freedom and love, in dynamic, constantly tuned balance, program those who carry them to handle the uncertainty which is also a basic trait of all reality. 

Note again that the whole cultural memes process happens in ways closely analogous to the ways in which genes program the members of most other species. But we are the only true cultural evolvers. We evolve by the competitions between memes, not genes.  

The memes of democracy - courage that combines with wisdom, freedom, love, and individual responsibility up and down every hierarchy -- prove strongest in the long haul. States founded on hate and fear lack the versatility and creativity that states founded on love foster.  

Cut corners on any of these giant memes when you're training the next generation, and they are one day - in war, famine, plague, or natural disaster - going to pay the price of their teachers' short-sightedness ..as their memes fail them in the real world. 

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



   
  
                                        Sama schoolchildren (Iran) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 


   

                                      American kindergarten (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 



   

                                   Chinese children at summer camp (credit: Creative Commons) 

   

                                  Storm on the Sea (artist: Schotel) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 


Today we shall discuss memes and what a model of human culture that employs the meme as its basic unit might imply. (I put a link to the Wikipedia article on memes at the bottom of this post for the keeners in the class.) 

The originator of the meme idea, Richard Dawkins, goes as far in some of his work as to argue that a meme may exist as an identifiable site of activity in a human brain, or in slightly different forms, in all the brains of all the humans who grasp a certain meme's concept or model or idea. 

How many people, for example, get a clear picture in their imaginations of a band of yellow or of a familiar yellow item in the real, sensory world when we say the word yellow? I know I see a band of yellow in a rainbow or a fresh daffodil, depending on the context in which the word occurs. If I am told that I can have the yellow M and M's in a box of those candies, I have no trouble finding them. The meme works. 

In a meme theorists' view, all ideas that we can possibly think can be broken down into collections of memes. Furthermore, memes must fight to survive in the neuro-space, and, more importantly, the cultural space in which they come into existence. All the time. We keep ideas if they prove useful.  

So what makes the idea/meme of a snake or an arrowleaf plant survive when one called pet rock does not? The answer is very plain. The arrowleaf plant is edible in all of its parts and in many parts of the world, all snakes are deadly. A meme/idea survives in the brains of individual humans and in the lore of a culture if it enables its carriers to survive a little more reliably than humans not carrying that meme. 

Every culture is made of thousands of memes kept in circulation by the people of that culture. Like a selfish gene, a selfish meme is one that drives its carriers to behave in ways that enable some of the carriers to survive, but more importantly, behave in ways that make the meme survive. 


   
                           
                                              library of Salamanca (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 



The giant memes are carried by millions down over centuries because they work. Democracy. Human rights. Courage. Wisdom. Freedom. Brotherly love. 

Yes, these giant memes have survival value for their carriers. Especially when they exist in complex equilibria in most of those thousands or millions of human minds that make up the medium in which the culture lives and breeds. 

This is the point of studying mythology. A people's myths contain their memes, and their memes will show you clearly how they lived in their place and time and why. 

Courage and wisdom are presented, in balance, so clearly in Achilles and Chiron, Arthur and Merlin, Glinda and Dorothy, Katniss and Haymitch and so many others that if they were to be any plainer, they would have to leap out and bite someone. 


                     

                                  Thomas Jefferson (artist: R. Peale) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Freedom and love are more recent conceptual experiments, but they are still clear. With these two, however, because they are so recent, we tend to see our examples in figures from history. And by recent, of course, I mean the last couple of thousand years. Courage and wisdom myth figures are much older. Churchill and Gandhi spring to my mind when I think of freedom and love. They are a balanced pair. Jefferson and Lincoln. Socrates and Jesus.  

We can't see memes. We never will see them. But we can't see atoms either. A model, concept, or meme is kept, or more precisely, survives in a culture if it equips its carriers to survive. 


                      

                             Abraham Lincoln (photo by A. Heisler) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 



Courage. Wisdom. Freedom. Love. 

Dynamic balance. 

There is hope, folks. We can understand ourselves and why we do the things we do and we can join together to get rational control of this process we call history that has kicked us around for so long. It is only a matter of will. 

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


 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

   

                                   salmon swimming upstream (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Moral realism takes as a given premise that meme complexes - sets of closely related ideas that exist in the minds of the people in a given culture, are closely analogous to gene complexes in the nuclei of the cells of living species. 

For example, in the human genome, there are definitely identifiable sets of genes that determine a baby's eventual eye color long before that baby is born. From conception, in fact. There are also genes for cystic fibrosis, musical talent, size, strength, susceptibility to cancer and so on. 

Now complexes of related ideas in human minds, complexes that are passed from parent to child by nurture rather than by nature, are usually more flexible than gene complexes. In fact, genes can't be changed much at all, though there is some evidence now that learned behaviors may be inherited by offspring in some species. But this is a digression. For the most part, the genes an organism is born with are the ones it is stuck with for the rest of its life. 

Memes arranged into sets of ideas that we call theories, models, concepts, beliefs, or values, on the other hand, can be modified even in adulthood. Difficult, but not impossible. We can give up our geocentric model of the solar system once we see the logic and evidence for the heliocentric one. We can stop thinking that diseases are caused by swamp vapors and learn germ theory. We can even convert to a new religion that is radically different from the one we were born into. We can learn to play the piano even at a mature age. Or weld. Note that this kind of changing of the memes is doable, by and large, for human beings. Animals lower than us on the complexity scale, for the most part, don't learn new tricks very well, if at all. 

But we do. Most of us can re-educate and re-train several times in a lifetime. 

Moral realism argues that in human cultures, ideas and concepts, etc. survive and spread if they enable the humans who carry them to live more vigorously and thus survive and spread themselves. Ideas and ideals live if they make the people who carry them live. Sometimes this may mean that an individual will sacrifice her/himself in order that the individual's children or neighbors or fellow citizens may live. Altruistic genes can be fatal for the individual and yet be very positively survival-oriented for a species. So also can altruistic memes work for a culture. 

Which brings me to an interesting point: if genes can be selfish, as Richard Dawkins uses the term, then can memes be so as well? 

What Dawkins means by a selfish gene is not that there is a gene that programs its carriers to be selfish people, cats, or whatever. What he means is that the gene drives the behavior patterns of the individual so that the gene itself will get passed on down the generations, regardless of what the processes involved in the passing on do to the individual carrier. Sexual reproduction immediately comes to mind. Yes, it feels good. No, intercourse isn't always good for us in the short or long term. But the genes involved make it, anatomically and hormonally, so motivating that we throw caution to the winds, as do most other species, just to have that one more orgasm. Pity the millions of salmon swimming up the Fraser River. They are being manipulated. 

But then are there memes that are selfish in the sense that Dawkins intends? 

I think that, yes, there are such memes, or more accurately we can call them meme complexes or more commonly, values. 

Courage and wisdom - in subtle, lively balance - and freedom and love, these are the ideals that drive us and have driven us for centuries. Really efficient balances of these ideals have been hit upon by the great civilizations of History. This is one of the key insights of moral realism. 

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

                     

                                                           Richard Dawkins (credit: Simple Wikipedia) 

   

                     schematic of Alaskan ecosystems, natural and social (credit: Wikipedia) 



A review of a key point would be useful today. 

In the moral realist worldview, a community, a society, or a nation - all these are ecosystems. They contain many different sub-groups, sub-sub-groups and even individuals that have clearly differing beliefs, values, habits, mores, personal rituals, and so on. These various "species" act and interact and sometimes cooperate in a mutalistic way and sometimes compete in predator-prey relationships and sometimes even live in parasite-host relationships. But all the relationships link together to form a system that is tremendously complex. 

Each living individual in a social ecosystem is driven by memes (concepts, beliefs, and other purely mental programs) far more than by genes. These meme/concepts/beliefs are mostly learned from each individual human's parents and teachers during her/his developing years. To complicate matters, human individuals are highly capable of altering at least some of these memes. This makes humans much more programmable and nimble than say gene-driven species in jungle,wilderness, or ocean environments. People can learn new skills, new jobs, new languages, customs, manners, ways of grooming and dressing themselves, and so on, and in fact some people in nearly every culture are doing these kinds of things all the time. 

Therefore, we should not be surprised at all by the fact that any vigorous community or nation always contains a lot of different kinds of people, interacting, cooperating, and competing all the time. 

In this model of cultural evolution, an ecosystem that contains a lot of behaviorally and mentally diverse species, rather than anatomically/genetically different species, will be far more resilient and able to adapt to surprise shocks and stresses than any ecosytem made of only a few relationships between a limited number of species. 

This is why, in this hazardous, uncertain universe, pluralistic democracy has kept growing and spreading, gradually and slowly, for millenia. It gets stronger not because it's nice but because it works. It gets results. Hard, observable, measurable results. The results just take time. 

Pluralistic democracy celebrates diversity, by letting neighbors differ from each other in any ways that do not damage the peace. Thus, when a shock hits the nation, there are better odds that the nation will contain someone who can see how to handle it and then teach his method to his neighbors. Better odds in a democracy than a more homogeneous, totalitarian system can ever contain. 

We need differences. They make us strong. (This is what Hilary Clinton, just a few months ago, was trying to say.) The intra-national tensions and debates these differences set off can feel threatening and upsetting in the short term. But in the long term, these debates are sure signs that the nation is staying strong. 

Look back over the real histories of the democracies of the world. They always seemed, to their critics - to be on the brink of flying apart. Yet here they are, more numerous and prolific by the decade all over the world. In the meantime, totalitarian states by the dozens have become footnotes in the history books. 

It was Churchill, a conservative if ever there was one, who said: "Democracy is the worst form of government ...except for all the others." Though I disagree diametrically with much of what he said and did in the course of his life, and admire much as well, in the quote above he was spot on. 

And that's enough for today. In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day anyway.   


   

                                           Little Italy, New York City, circa 1900 (credit: Wikipedia) 



   

                                              Chinatown, New York City, 2009 (credit: Wikipedia) 

A short post to stimulate some more thought and controversy.

A criticism that might be aimed at my version of moral realism is that it is too wide open. Almost infinite numbers of cultures could be imagined that would be acceptable as balanced systems of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love in my view. Life is much different in Japan or Germany than it is in Canada. All of these cultures have their strengths and weaknesses and all are evolving constantly. Saying that is just admitting to the facts of reality.

So how do we decide what right and wrong are in this place and time?

People on the right are going to have to get used to the idea that government regulations, inspectors, forms, taxes, etc. are just part of life in a democracy. The market is not a good model to look to as a guide for all aspects of life. What should you pay your children for being good kids? What rent do you charge your aging, broke parents to live in your large, empty, well-furnished basement? Which beggars downtown should you beat up for the $11 in their hats? If a couple of your old school friends whose lives have gone bad offer you 200% return in one weekend if you will just "front" them $10,000 to make a buy in Panama, should you take advantage of this amazing offer? The market is not a very good model for some of the most precious things we value and do.

People on the left are going to have to get used to the idea that businessmen and businesswomen are absorbed mostly in making goods and providing services that other people want and are willing to pay for. Many of them don't give much to the beggars downtown because they never see beggars. They leave an underground garage below their condos and they park in one below their office towers, all entrances and exits operated by remote control. Their energies are totally expended, most weeks and even years, on business. They conduct their business within the laws of the land and they pay their taxes. When they holiday in Bali, or buy a new Lexus, that too is their business. And if they know nothing about the arts or social justice and don't give a damn, that too is their business. People on the left have to - morally speaking - let them go. 

Communism isn't a good model for much of life. It suffocates creativity and initiative in commerce. 

Unionize the workers in Indonesia and other similar lands, lefties. But don't screech at the business person who moves her/his factory there. They are only trying to stay solvent in a tough market.

Get into politics, righties. Respect the democratic process, and if the law says you can't take company money and then pretend it is a private political donation, you have to respect that law, or go to jail. And you can't pollute the environment. Or endanger your workers health. Get over it.

Yes, my set of moral beliefs leaves a lot of room for debate and compromise. What did you expect?

Freedom. Courage. Love. Wisdom.

Welcome to the jungle, that is, the democratic jungle. In it, we fight with words instead of weapons, but otherwise the contest is on. A system that can remain by and large at peace and safe, but still evolve with the changing physical environment. Ain't it awful? Ain't it great?  

In my own thoughts, I go through new arguments showing that postmodernism is incoherent and dangerous on an daily basis. It scares me that much. But here is one more argument. 

If there is nothing outside the text (as Derrida once put it), then there is no such thing as some material world event or object or process that any one of our words actually refers to. The process of communication during which we get the meaning of someone else's speech or article is all happening inside of an inescapable network of words and in the end, all the words can refer to is each other. There is no "outside" source of meaning. 

Then what happens if a dedicated scholar who speaks two or more languages translates a work? Even, let's say for the sake of argument, one of Derrida's works or Foucault's into, say, English? Are there such things as better translations and worse ones? If so, how on earth could any other scholars judge a translation to be a "good" one? It gets at Derrida or Foucault's intended meaning more accurately in the new language? What "meaning"? One outside the text? I thought they said that can't exist. 

You see, here's the real stunner. If at a very fundamental level all communication is just the bandying about of familiar sounds or marks on a page between people who share a set of conventions about their ways of venting their feelings (which is all that's left if deconstruction is right) as they process "texts", then genuine communication of anything substantive from outside of this particular communication act cannot happen. But it does. 

"Careful. That patient has AIDS." or "Watch it! That truck driver can't see you in his rearview mirrors!" Does the content of these communications or others like them matter? How could it if there is no way we can talk to each other about "matter"? 

At the level of fundamental, subconscious understanding between the parties involved in any act of communication, the postmodernists ask us to accept that we aren't really communicating anything of substance ...while simultaneously we actually are. 

This is the equivalent of our accepting, again at a level we aren't normally even aware of, a logical claim of the form "A and not-A". My friends trained in Symbolic Logic, I hope, should be having a calf right now. If we accept "A and not-A" in any set of statements in any system of logic, what we can then conclude is ...anything. ANYTHING. 

Yes. That is how grand an illusion postmodernism is. Little wonder that people in Anthropology and other fields who have fallen under the pomo spell can listen to arguments reviling a given cultural more or practice and then some other arguments defending it, in the same speech or article, and agree with them both. 

Everything is everything. Everything is everything. Distinguishing between things in the physical world, becomes impossible. We can't trust any such communications. They are all illusions. I can ignore grizzly bear stalking my unaware friend. If I don't tell him anything bad, nothing bad can happen. 

The problem is that right at the level of individual human sanity, we survive and navigate through the day by watching events around us and responding to them in mostly effective ways that we can only devise based on concepts that are rooted in sense data. In the real, material world, in other words. Ways of organizing our flows of sense data and reacting effectively to them. Being able to talk to one another about the things we can agree we both see in reality is a useful trait we picked up when we acquired language. To now decide that we don't need any ways of talking about meanings that come from outside the communication act is to turn our backs on 200,000 years of human evolution. For what? Smugness? Complacency? Niceness? 

A human who no longer has any trusted concepts in place becomes catatonic. Sits and stares and drools. And yes, concepts sometimes can be inaccurate of even wholly mistaken. But there is no chance of one person helping another to see that if no reference to evidence outside of the debate is possible. 

Postmodernism, in short, is a playing at insanity. So clever. Aren't they brave? 

Why on earth would anyone ever cook up such a worldview? I think I see why. 

The human mind is naturally powerfully disposed toward cognitive dissonance reduction. In any situation in which we feel that our basic beliefs and values are threatened, we are very creative at finding explanations for the events or texts that are disturbing us. Explanations that make the upsetting events or texts seem trivial, unimportant, or mistaken. Whatever works to reduce our cognitive dissonance. Deep inside, we need to like ourselves. The biggest lies we tell are often the ones we tell ourselves because we need to. 

In Europe, and especially in France, after World War Two, millions of people had stores of memories so painful that they did not want to look at them. Across Europe, new lows for humanity were spoken and performed by people in all walks of life. Doctors who did grotesque medical experiments for the Nazis. Judges who enforced grotesque laws. University professors who taught "German" Science. Clergymen. Lawyers. Teachers. Welders. Carpenters. Drivers. Laborers. Women who were homemakers who screamed themselves hoarse in joyous response to Hitler's speeches. All of them not only abandoned their Jewish neighbors and colleagues, but even turned them in to the Gestapo. And then felt righteous about it. Frenchmen and many others fought against the Nazis and then for them and then against them and over and over, against each other. 

Think of the ambivalence, anger, and sadness you stir up if you try to talk to the Baby Boomers in the U.S. about the Vietnam era. Then multiply that by at least three times. 

Postmodernism is a rationalization in the whole consciousness of Europe, but it has spread to much of the rest of the human race because it is so tempting. So comforting. We like to be nice. The problem is that reality sometimes isn't nice and what we don't acknowledge we can't fix. 

So let's close today's post with a challenge: 

Postmodernists. If the whole field of History is made merely of a bunch of "narratives", every one of them just as true as every other one of them, then ...did the Holocaust happen or didn't it?


   

                                                                      (credit: Wikipedia) 

Today, loyal readers, I think I will let what I've had to say settle for a while. I hope at least some of you see that I am offering a viable way out of the "broken" system that we are looking at in the democracies of the West these days. A rational, but also compassionate, way. But like any social system one could propose, a moral realist way has little chance of taking hold if people do not buy into it and take ownership of it. 

Why should they? Because they are smart enough to see that we can't go on as we have been for the last twenty generations or so. Our weapons have gotten too big. In addition, our capacity to poison the systems of this planet has grown so large that we are really causing that poisoning as you read these words. It's us. It's not random and it's not nature herself to blame here. 

We'll come together under a model of human survival on this planet or we won't anything. Piecemeal, well-intentioned action is ineffectual. Our drift toward catastrophe remains unaffected by such acts. 

I see the biggest culprit in the current paralysis of good people as being postmodernism, with its method of deconstruction attached. It has fitted millions of very clever and concerned people with a vision that is ineffectual in the real world. Starting tomorrow, I will try to explain why I think postmodernism is both mistaken and dangerous. 

But for today, just simmer. We'll start to get more upset tomorrow. 




                                                   (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

And now, to close, I offer a short dialogue between two friends discussing the ideas that have taken us so long to explain. A nutshell summary of the thesis of this book, if you like.

                                                                                   * * * * * 

A scene in a sidewalk café in Vancouver, Canada, where two characters meet and have a Socratic dialogue. A University of British Columbia graduate student, Flavius, known to his friends as Flux, is drinking coffee and relaxing in the spring sunshine. 

Serendipitously, his friend, Evo, another grad student, strolls past. Flux recognizes him and calls out.

Flux: Evo! Evo, you subversive element! Over here!

Evo: (Drawing near.) Well, well. The quarry you see when you don’t have a gun. What mischief are you plotting now? Wait—I’ll get a coffee. (Goes to counter to order.)

Flux: (Muttering to himself.) Hmm. Just the guy I wanted to see. I think.

Evo: (Approaching with his coffee in hand and sitting.) So, what’s up?

Flux: The truth is … I’ve been getting more and more obsessed in the last few weeks with the whole debate over the existence of God. And over moral relativism, and whether we need to believe in God to be good. Whether people in general do, I mean. Not you and me. We’re so good we’re excellent. That’s an axiom. (Laughs awkwardly.)

Evo: (Glancing at a girl going by.) I can resist anything but temptation. But seriously, folks.

Flux: (Looking glum.) It is serious, actually, this moral thing. These days, I can’t seem to think of anything else. Almost everyone I talk to at UBC despises religion, but none of them have a way of deciding what right and wrong are. It’s all relative, they say. Then I say they’re committing humanity to permanent warfare, probably annihilation, when they say things like that. They shrug and tell me to grow up. We’re doomed, my friend. Humanity is doomed, even if it is a nice day. (Laughs darkly.)

Evo: Are you sure you want to start this conversation? I have a lot to say on the subject, you know. And, after all, I am older and wiser than you are. (Laughs.)

Flux: Ah, be serious. But … yeah, I know you’ve thought about this one. Which makes me ask—if you’re okay with talking about it—do you still believe in God?

Evo: I do.

Flux: When we talked about this before, your answers didn’t really work for me. But you’re saying you still believe?

Evo: Yes. (Pauses.) I don’t buy most of the world’s religions, or priests, or holy books. But the answer is, basically, yes.

Flux: Still.

Evo: More than ever. When did we last talk about this stuff? At that party at the lake?

Flux: Yeah. That was it. And you haven’t changed your mind? At all?

Evo: No. (Pauses.) The short answer is “no”.

Flux: What’s the long answer?

Evo: How much time do you have?

Flux: It’s Friday afternoon. I have no place I have to be till Monday morning. Come on. Seriously. The whole issue is weighing me down.

Evo: Well, how about you ask questions, and I’ll try to answer them.

Flux: All right. So do you really believe in God, in your most private heart of hearts?

Evo: Yes.

Flux: What was the crucial moment or crucial logical step, or whatever you call it, for you?

Evo: No one moment. No one step. No epiphanies. I came to it gradually for a bunch of reasons, backed by logic and evidence. Later, it did get personal. It’s in my “heart of hearts” as you put it. I call my own kind of religion theism, which isn’t a very original term. But I need to be clear that I think each of us has to work out his or her own way of conceiving of God and relate to that personally in their own good time. I came to believe that moral beliefs can be based on what Science is based on—the facts of empirical reality. That’s moral realism, and it led me gradually to think we have to design a moral code that’s acceptable for all people, and then live by it …and learn to live together. Gotta do these things if we’re gonna survive. I got motivated to think hard for a while. I came to two conclusions. First, that moral values do name things that are real, and second, that the core belief in the moral code that will allow us to survive …that core belief is theism. In other words, moral realism logically entails theism.

Flux: All right, wait a minute. Realism? You’re saying values are real like this cup is real? I’m not gambling on whether this cup of coffee is in my hand right now. It’s there. It’s real. I’m certain of it.

Evo: No, actually—that statement isn’t a certainty, even if you think you’re certain of it. Human senses can be fooled. That’s what the movie The Matrix is about.

Flux: Hmm. Okay. I take your point.

Evo: Every belief is a gamble, even our belief in Science and the scientific method. The smartest of smart gambles is theism. Believing in God. Not so I can improve my odds of getting into some dimly imagined afterlife, but so I and my kind can survive. Here. On earth. So we can handle what the future’s going to throw at us. Navigate the hazards. Once I proved my version of a universal moral code to my own satisfaction, from there it was a series of small steps to the core belief in God.

Flux: But you must have periods of doubt? Surely.

Evo: I used to. But they’ve almost gone. Mostly because I keep answering the doubts inside my own head. Over and over. I’ve seen all the doubters’ best moves. I can whip ’em. (Laughs.)

Flux: So …what, then? Your belief, in your head   ̶  your theism, I mean – is constantly fighting for its life?

Evo: Pretty much. All beliefs in all heads have to fight to survive.

Flux: But you don’t worry that one day the theism in your head is going to lose?

Evo: I don’t know for sure that I’ll never lose my faith, but the signs are that it’s pretty durable.

Flux: And yet you love Science?

Evo: Absolutely. Science is God’s way for us. For humans in general, I mean.

Flux: Were you ever an atheist?

Evo: Oh, sure. I look back on it now as a phase I had to go through. Everyone does. Some people don’t ever get to the other side, that’s all. Other side of that atheist phase, I mean.

Flux: You don’t worry that what you see in the real world is …only what you want to see?

Evo: I see Science and the theories of Science, Flux. Testable. Repeatable. They and all the experimental evidence that supports them keep telling me, more and more, that God is there. Here. Real.

Flux: But you did have periods of doubt?

Evo: Oh, yes. For fifteen years. And then I only came around a few years ago to believing I ought to believe in God. That it was a smart gamble. And that everything in life is a gamble in the end. Even the most basic things you trust—not just Science, but even believing your hands are at the ends of your arms because you see and feel them there. Sense data. Things you sense. But for a long time, that smart theistic gamble wasn’t personal. Not personal like you love Marie or your mom and dad. It was only cerebral. I believed in believing in God, but I didn’t believe – like – primally, if you get my meaning.

Flux: Yeah, I get your meaning. So what changed?

Evo: I started meditating. Every day. Half an hour or so. Sometimes, twice a day.

Flux: Did you take a course?

Evo: Yes.

Flux: Which one?

Evo: It doesn’t matter. Check around. Find one that works for you. Then it’ll feel like it’s yours.

Flux: Hmm. Okay. That’s fair. And then what? God just arrived?

Evo: Basically, yes. I realized one day that I was hearing an inner voice. Not a great way of putting it, but close enough. During the time when I was trying to control every detail in my life, I was going nuts. Then I learned to accept handling just the details my conscience—God’s voice in my head—told me were mine to handle, my responsibility. It was like, I became “response-able”—able to respond—and then I got good solutions just as I was coming out of my meditation, or right after. It was a way of thinking about God that made sense to me. Let God—the universe, if you like—talk to me. Then I’d get some quiet, excellent answers. Like a presence was hovering by me and nurturing me. That’s not very dramatic. But it’s how I experience my personal sense of God. Like I love my kids. Or my dad. Personal. First, for large, evidence-backed reasons, and then, second, for internally felt ones.

Flux: (Studying his friend closely.) And it still seems like a rational decision to you?

Evo: More than that, Flux. I think as a species we’re all going to have to come to some form of moral realism, then theism, if we’re going to get past the crises that are coming. Getting rid of nukes. Fixing the environment. Moral realism is the only option that has any chance of working. Nobody trusts the so-called sacred texts or the priests anymore. Most don’t trust personal epiphanies either, no matter how intense the events feel. We know it’s too easy to see what you want to see. First, we want models that fit our observations of empirical evidence, over and over. And moral realism, for me, is that kind of true. It’s a model of reality that fits the facts of history and of daily life.

Flux: You think Science proves that God exists? I know people who’d laugh out loud at that.

Evo: They don’t see History or Anthropology as sciences. They also don’t study the basic assumptions of science. Analyze science itself. If they did, they’d reconsider.

Flux: So tell me. For you, what moral values are grounded in empirical reality?

Evo: Humans have gradually evolved responses to entropy, over billions of people and thousands of generations. The cultures that emerge may vary from era to era and place to place, but every one of them seeks a balance of courage and wisdom. Those values are our big-scale responses to entropy, the “uphillness” of life. Courage and wisdom. Other balanced sets of values built around freedom and love are our responses to quantum uncertainty. All four values—courage, wisdom, freedom, and love (checks them off on his fingers)—inform the software of all nations that survive because they shape how people in those tribes behave. And that connects them to reality. To survival, in other words. And those basic qualities of adversity and uncertainty, remember, are built into our universe right down to the atoms and quarks. Those qualities are everywhere, all the time. We learned to handle entropy and uncertainty, not as individuals, but as tribes, over centuries, by building our societies more and more on those four values.

Flux: Those are some pretty large and vague moral principles to build a culture around. A lot of radically different societies could be constructed that all claimed they were brave and wise and so on.

Evo: Which is only to say how free we truly are, Flux. But notice my system is way different than saying that moral values are just arbitrary tastes, like a preference for vanilla shakes over chocolate.

Flux: I think I see where you’re going with this line of thought. We could build an ideal society or something pretty close to it, couldn’t we?

Evo: We’ve been working our way toward that realization for two million years.

Flux: These moral values, the way you describe them, must have been worked out over a long time, and also with a lot of pain then …right?

Evo: Pain and more importantly, death. Which is why we’re taught to respect our values so much. Our accumulated wisdom keeps telling us we don’t want to revisit our past mistakes.

Flux: Here’s a mental leap coming at you. How would the kind of ideal society you envision — brave, wise, free, tolerant — right? – how would it evolve, without war or revolution? How would it resolve an internal argument over some controversial social issue?

Evo: Like capital punishment, say?

Flux: Whoa! Quick answer. But, yeah. Not the one I had in mind, but a good example, actually.

Evo: Reasoning and evidence. Gradual consensus-building. Scientific studies. Calm persuasion. The facts say it doesn’t work, you know. Capital punishment, I mean.

Flux: How so? It seems to me that it solves a problem permanently.

Evo: Countries that get rid of it see their murder rates go down, not up. It doesn’t deter potential killers. Just the opposite. It makes them determined to leave no witnesses. To any crime. And then capital trials drag on and on ’cause juries don’t want to make a mistake. In the end, it costs more to execute an accused killer than to lock him up …for good. Long-term studies say so.

Flux: What if he lives a really long time?

Evo: In my system, barring exceptional circumstances, he’d stay locked up. But most of them die in under twenty years. They’re mostly people who live unhealthy lifestyles. Junk food. Drugs. Smoking. Hate exercise but keep getting into fights. They don’t last long, in prison or out. On average, I mean.

Flux: But even if, say for the sake of argument, they only last twenty years in prison, that’s a long time. Guards to pay, meals, medical supplies, entertainment … it’s gotta add up.

Evo: Not as much as killing him does by, like, nearly three times. The studies say so. On average, killers only live about seventeen years after they go to prison.

Flux: I’ll look it up later. But to get back to our point …you think we can solve all our disputes by debate and compromise?

Evo: Based on reasoning and evidence, the answer is yes. And patience. Just not war. The Soviet Union went from being an unstoppable superpower to gone in my lifetime. With no global war. I’ll never doubt the transformative power of patience again.

Flux: I think I’m beginning to see your point a bit. You see moral guidelines as being grounded in the facts of physical reality?

Evo: I’ve made that case for myself and some others many times over. Entropy and quantum uncertainty are built into the fabric of reality. As long as I’m in a universe that is hard and scary, then courage, wisdom, freedom, and love will be virtues. That picture—for me, anyway—is more reliable than my senses. It’s eternal. I’m 99.99 percent sure.

Flux: And that proves for you that God exists?

Evo: That and a couple of other main points. Even believing the universe stays consistent from place to place and era to era takes a kind of faith. No one can prove the future will go like the past. But we take it as a given that the universe has that kind of consistency. Science wouldn’t make any sense under any other first assumption. Then, I get direction from today’s cutting-edge Science—namely Quantum Physics. All the particles in the universe are what physicists call entangled, you know. Which just means that the universe has its own kind of awareness.

Flux: What, like I’m aware?

Evo: As far beyond your and my awareness as the universe is beyond us in size. Yeah, that’s a hell of a statement. I know full well what I’m saying. But look at the evidence. Let me say it all at once, as plainly as I can. The first step to theism is believing in the consistency of the universe. The second is believing the universe is aware. The third is moral realism, which means believing that courage, wisdom, freedom, and brotherly love — steer us into harmony with the particles of matter, from quarks to quasars. Those three big beliefs—in universal constancy, universal awareness, and universal moral truth—when they’re added together, tell me this universe is a single, aware, caring thing. This aware universe is “God,” if you like that term. If not, that’s okay. Call it by whatever name works for you.

Flux: Cold sort of caring, don’t you think? There are a lot of cruel things in life.

Evo: No, it just looks that way to us sometimes. But it’s unreasonable and unfair for me to ask God to pardon me from getting cancer or meningitis or whatever …if the dice roll that way. God loves it all, all the time. God loves the avalanche that buries the careless skier who skis out of bounds. God loves malignant cells and meningococcal bacteria just as much as God loves me. We may learn how to change the odds, to cure meningitis or prevent cancer, but in a universe that is balanced and free, those scientific advances are up to us. Our brains evolved to solve puzzles exactly like those ones.

Flux: You know there are people who get the consistency-of-the-laws-of-science idea, even the quantum-entanglement-awareness one, but leave you right at that moral realism step.

Evo: Oh, I know. They keep trying to find some other way to get principles of good and bad from the natural world. A lot of people don’t want God. They want to be in charge. Like Nietzsche. (Laughs.)

Flux: Other species—chimps, squirrels …so on—find altruism on their own, you know. Sometimes, one of them will do something for the good of the community and even get killed because of it.

Evo: Then the next thing to ask is: What kind of a universe rewards those animals’ finding and practicing altruism? People finding altruism in nature and saying that means they don’t need to believe in God in order to be decent …that dodge is no dodge at all. It only delays answering the moral question. Why is being altruistic – what they call “good” – a desirable way to be? So the tribe survives? Well, if that’s the case, then we have to ask again: what is that telling us about the basic nature of reality? 

Flux: All right, I see why you say that. Your moral values would seem moral to aliens from other worlds. Do you dislike people who keep, as you say, “dodging” the moral realism question?

Evo: Not at all. As long as I can see that they’re trying to live lives of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love, I love them. They may get old and die and never say that they believe in anything like God, but I don’t care. I still love them. Hey, if they try hard to live decent lives, for me that’s enough. But believe in God? By the evidence that shows on the outside of them—which, by the way, is all Science cares about—they actually do. Do believe, I mean. They just choose a lonely existence inside. Which is their choice, of course. But I still love them.

Flux: They’d tell you that viewpoint is pretty condescending.

Evo: They have, many times. It’s still okay. We can live together in peace. And still evolve and survive. That’s all that really matters. (Pauses.) But we must choose to live. Surviving’s not a given. So we need a system of ethics in order just to decide even simple things, minute by minute, day in and day out, about every object and event we meet up with. Good or bad? Important or trivial? Take action or not? What are my action choices? Which one looks like the best gamble in this situation?  The most efficient moral code will be the one that’s laid out so our decisions are quick, effective, and accurate. Consistent with the facts of reality, short and long term. A central organizing concept—a belief in God – is just efficient. At least to start with. It’s only after a lot of work inside yourself that it becomes personal. But it’s first of all just …efficient. It gets results.

Flux: Your picture isn’t very comforting, you know, Evo. The mental space it offers is pretty bare.

Evo: I know. I’d be a liar if I offered you easy grace. You first have to choose to be responsible for your own life. Then so many other challenges come. But they’d come anyway. It’s just that if you choose to bow your head and take the beatings fate dishes out, without trying to figure things out and improve your odds of happiness, your life’ll be even worse. You have to choose to choose, and even then life is going to be rough. God’s a hard case. But I’m okay with seeing God as a pretty hard case. To make something out of nothing, he has to be. It takes a balance of forces to make something out of nothing. And in that picture, God made us free, Flux. Whether we choose to rise to the challenge, to live bravely and creatively, is up to us. Out of the labour, we make ourselves – and then our society – good, and if we’re really good, we teach our kids to do the same. Hopefully, even better.

Flux: You don’t believe in miracles, do you?

Evo: “Only in a way” would be my answer there. I think events that look miraculous happen. Things that look like exceptions to the laws of Science. But later they turn out to have scientific explanations. For me, everything I see around me all the time is the miracle. What’s it doing here? Why isn’t there just nothing? And then the living things in the world are more miraculous, and then …my baby’s smile …you know what they say. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Flux: Is there a church you could belong to? Are you pulled to any of them?

Evo: Unitarians, maybe? Nah, that’s another question that you need to answer for yourself.

Flux: Any you hate?

Evo: Honestly? Nearly all of them. Priests make up mumbo-jumbo to take away people’s ability to think for themselves. It’s easy with most people ‘cause they want security. But there’s no such thing. Not in this lifetime. That one I’m sure of. Maybe they don’t consciously make it up, but they do make it up. Priests, I mean. It gets them a slack lifestyle so they gravitate to rationalizing ways to protect that. Over generations, the lies just keep getting worse. No, I’m not big on organized religion.

Flux: Would you call yourself a dreamer? A starry-eyed optimist?

Evo: I seem that way to some people, I’m sure. My view of myself is that I look at the long haul. I’m most interested in that. Then, what energy I have left over I give to the small, confusing ups and downs of everyday matters. I guess some would call me a dreamer. But cynics are cowards to me. It’s the dreamers who have courage. And once in a while they turn out to be right, you know. (Laughs.)

Flux: I better let you go, Evo. I’ve kept you long enough. I was just feeling …down …you know.

Evo: You’re not keeping me from anything that matters as much as this talk does, bro.

Flux: Alright. I’ll take that as being sincere. Actually, knowing you as long as I have, I know it is. Thank you. I’m feeling …I don’t know …hopeful, somehow, right now. (Pauses.) Actually …I think I get it.

Evo: Welcome home, Flavius, my friend. Welcome home.

 

Here the Great River Now empties into the sea;

Here the babbles and roars of Duality cease;

Every echoing gorge, every swirling façade,

Is dissolved in the infinite ocean of God.

(Author unknown)

Notes

1. Nicholas Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic? (London, UK: Imperial College Press, 2004).

2. “History of Science in Early Cultures,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_in_early_cultures.

3. Mary Magoulick, “What Is Myth?” Folklore Connections, Georgia College & State University.  https://faculty.gcsu.edu/custom-website/mary-magoulick/defmyth.htm#Functionalism.

4. “Pawnee Mythology,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawnee_mythology.

5. “Quantum Entanglement,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement.

6. Jonathan Allday, Quantum Reality: Theory and Philosophy (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009), p. 376.

7. “Quantum Flapdoodle,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism#.22Quantum_flapdoodle.22.

8. “Occam’s Razor,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 4, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor.

9. “Isaac Newton,” Wikiquote, the Free Quote Compendium. Accessed May 4, 2015. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton.