Ku Klux Klan members marching in Washington, D.C. (1926) 

A post today on the meaning of one of the major items in the news. I think that many observers in recent weeks have not grasped that the NFL football players who have been going down on one knee during the national anthem are demonstrating a wonderful thing; if we analyze it carefully, we can see that. 

Why would I say so? Because when we go back over what African-Americans have suffered over the past four hundred or so years, and what they are still suffering in many parts of the U.S., we can't help but think that these young NFL players are showing remarkable restraint. 

For the first 250 years during which slavery was legal in the U.S. (early 1600's to 1865), African

American slaves could be whipped, beaten, mutilated, raped, and murdered with no threat of punishment whatsoever for the white owners who committed these crimes. Under the law in those times, these acts weren't crimes. Slaves were property and a white owner could do pretty much whatever he wanted to with his property. And make no mistake: these crimes in many states, but especially those South of the Mason-Dixon line, went on constantly. Beatings and rapes especially were daily occurrences. 

With the end of the Civil War, and the North's victory, slavery was finally legally abolished. In a decade or so, there were significant numbers of African-Americans being elected to Congress. Then in a generation all of that was reversed. The laws in the South were altered by whites in ways that enabled local justices to refuse voting rights to anyone who could not explain the Bill of Rights or a section of the Constitution. It became easy for white judges to refuse to accept a black person's explanation. Soon few to no black persons in the South could vote and shortly thereafter, the numbers of black persons who got elected to Congress dropped to near zero. Other laws were also easy to stack against African-Americans. Schools, hospitals, jobs, rights ...these all receded and receded out of reach if you were black. In the U.S., these laws were known as "Jim Crow" laws, and this time was the Jim Crow era.  

And it still wasn't enough. Any black person who was deemed by whites to be getting "uppity" was a target of the Ku Klux Klan, a paramilitary group that unofficially but effectively ruled the South by the 1890's. They lynched "uppity" black people routinely. How powerful were they? By the 1920's, tens of thousands of them could march in Washington with their hoods off, showing their faces, and fear no repercussions whatsoever. And they did, while lynchings were going on in the South at a rate of nearly two per week.  

The power of the Klan has gone up and down in several cycles since those times. The FBI has gone after them hard. But the Klan's power is far from quelled even now. 

In more recent times, we are seeing disproportionate numbers of young black men getting shot by police in cities all over the U.S. It is this injustice that the NFL players going down on one knee during the national anthem are now trying to get the rest of the population to focus on and work to correct. 

It's not as if other countries in the world don't have problems with race. The troubling thing is that in the U.S., the problems are so much larger than in the other nations of the West, and they seem so intractable. Millions of white people seem determined to not budge an inch. 

So why are these football players in the U.S. remarkable? Because they could so easily be doing other acts so much more inflamatory and destructive. But they're not. They are keeping their protests peaceful, respectful, and fully in compliance with the law. 

Personally, I can't help but wonder if I were black whether I would be so restrained. 

 These men have heard all of the stories that go back for generations about the abuses that their parents and grandparents suffered at the hands of white people, but they are reaching out in a way that tells the white folks: "This systemic criminal behavior practiced by one group in our society against another group must stop. We know most of you are not monsters. But nevertheless, this criminal behavior by police against black men must stop. Answer the better angels of your natures. Help us." 

These NFL players and the large majority of African-Americans they represent, by their firm but restrained protest, are showing that they still believe in the decency in most white people and in the dream of what America could be. They are still trying to reach out.

In the U.S. as in all democracies worthy of the name, either our values as we have espoused them really do matter to us and we really will act to see them practiced by all citizens toward all others, or we abandon them entirely, and as Lincoln said, die by suicide. 

And still, in spite of so much vitriol aimed their way, and the facts in their home towns remaining so intractable, these men refuse to give in to violence or to despair. They keep believing in the real American Dream. A country that contains liberty and justice for all. 

Yes, high-sounding ideals. But these ideals have endured and gotten stronger - in fits and starts, but, nevertheless, with real measurable progress - for 241 years. Life is still stacked against you if you're born black in these times in the U.S. It's just not as stacked against you as it was in the 1850's or even the 1950's. There has to be something driving that history. What else could it be but a quiet, internal committment to those high-sounding words, by millions, black, Asian, indigenous, and Caucasian, who believe that with courage, intelligence, and love, those words could still be made true. 

From the point of view of History, the behavior of these young men is showing us once more that love is hard and it takes patience, but it really is stronger than hate.   

The way to see the young men taking a knee at NFL games is as the most loyal patriots of all. They believe in the founding fathers' vision; they are trying their best, in a way that is open to them because of their athletic ability, to make it come true. 

   

            Buffalo Bills players take a knee during the national anthem (credit: NY Daily News)                                            

  

   
                         
                    President Obama visiting the new Martin Luther King memorial (Oct., 2011) 
                                         (credit: Chuck Kennedy, official White House photo) 
                                     

On Saturday, a couple of days ago, I wrote about the recent controversy over whether statues of Robert E. Lee should be removed from public spaces in the U.S. I tried to show that while it is reasonable for us to admire Lee's courage and intelligence, we should still highlight at the same time that he made a mistake. Millions of others had made the same mistake in every nation of the world for centuries. Their mistake was that they allowed and supported the institution of slavery in their communities. 

As I have said before, slavery is just wrong. Not in the sense that it is evil. Just wrong. My watch can be wrong. A thermometer can be wrong. The speedometer in my car can be wrong. A cancer diagnosis can be wrong. Not evil. Just mistaken. 

Lee was making a huge mistake when he gave his support, courage, and intelligence to the cause of the Confederacy. That brief state's main point of contention with the rest of the Union was slavery. The South, by and large, wanted to keep it. The North, by and large, were opposed to it and wanted to see it abolished by law from the whole U.S. They fought and the North won.

But my point on Saturday was that we can admire Lee's courage and intelligence and decide, nevertheless, that he was wrong. We can disagree emphatically with his choices and we can say so in a public way. We can do these things without hating and fighting each other today. One of the crucial features of a democracy is that the people living in a democratic state agree to live by the rule of law. They elect people to represent them in the legislature which writes the laws that every citizen must abide by, and they agree to live by those laws. When they have disputes, they take them to a court of law to get them resolved. They do not take matters into their own hands. Once that vigilante justice begins, it deteriorates into endless revenge killings and rule by the biggest bullies around in the space of less than one generation. A return to the Europe of the Dark Ages. We have been there, done that, and don't want it back. We have learned, mostly, to settle our differences by talking rather than by physical fighting. 

So what do we do in a democracy when a division as deep and as darkly, racially motivated as the one in Charlottesville shows its ugly face right out in public? 

We engage with the other side in open discussion and debate. This is what democracy takes as one of its given assumptions. If we don't talk about a matter like the racism that is evident in the U.S. (and to varying degrees, in every other nation on earth, by the way), openly and respectfully, it will fester and erupt into violence over and over until we do talk about it. 

Therefore, I say again to the proponents of "white" pride and their cohorts (and by the way, I am an old, white male who detests racism of every kind): slavery was wrong as every form of racism is wrong because it is stupid. It causes a society that allows racism to go on to waste some of its best talent. Talent, we know now, is spread over all races, genders, creeds, and ethnicities. It is just smart business for us to learn to accept, respect, and come to like people of all groups in society. Then we are much more likely to get the best person for the job in every case and to build a stronger, more prosperous, more peaceful nation and world. 

And we can teach the kids to see past race and gender differences. I used to tell the kids in my classes that someday a teacher in a school somewhere in the world will be working on a Social Studies project with her class about the schools in the U.S., or Canada, or any of a hundred places in the world in the 1960's. One group of students will be looking at copies of the forms that students had to fill out on the first day of school. Name, address, phone number, father's name, mother's name, and so on. That group will come to the teacher with one of the forms and show her one blank space that was supposed to be filled in by every student. Above the blank will be the words "racial/ethnic origin". The children will say to the teacher: "What was this?" And the teacher will say back: "I don't know." 

Can we learn to love one another, or at minimum, respect one another? All of us? All over? 

Martin Luther King thought so. Gandhi thought so. Nelson Mandela. William Wilberforce. Jesus Christ. Hildegard von Bingen. Jigonsasee. Deganawida. Tolstoy. Herman Hesse. Martin Niemoller. Sun Yat Sen. Mo Tzu. And so many other lovers of humanity who lived and died for decency and sense. 

And finally, we need to say plain and simple, again and again: What other choice do we have? 

We have nukes now. In the past, we could have wars over these very deluded differences. The past is done. Now, we either learn from it, learn to do better, or we go under for good. 

So once again, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a decent, kind day. 

   

                                           Sun Yat Sen, early 20th century Chinese leader and hero 

                                                (credit: By JHH755, via Wikimedia Commons)

  

   

                        Statue of Robert E. Lee on his horse, Traveller, in Charlottesville, Virginia 
                                             (credit: Cville dog, via Wikimedia Commons)

Today I write of the importance of wisdom, which to me means thinking about the concepts on which we base our thinking. It is only when we analyze our most basic ideas that we have at least a chance of gaining what we call "wisdom". What ideas are we taking so much for granted that we never even examine them? Why do they matter?  

The photo above is of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. As of this writing, it is still in place. Attempts to remove this statue caused a lot of trouble when protesters who buy into an obsolete version of U.S. history demonstrated against the statue's being removed. These protesters who still honor Lee were confronted by counter-demonstrators who find the statue offensive and long overdue for removal. It is worth mentioning that there are dozens of memorials to Lee across the U.S. South and hundreds of other public reminders of him, including roads, counties, and public schools named after him. 

But across the whole U.S., there are thousands of statues of thousands of people. Why have the ones of Lee caused so much controversy in recent weeks? The answer is complex and nuanced as most issues involving people are when they're examined closely.  

Lee was the most famous of the Confederate generals in the U.S. Civil War that occurred from 1861 to 1865. That war killed more U.S. soldiers, North and South, than all of the other wars that the U.S. has been involved in combined. It tore the young nation apart. The psychological wounds are still raw for many Southern white people, whose short-lived Confederate States of America was ravaged by Union (Northern) soldiers, in some places for hundreds of miles. The Northern general, Sherman, told his soldiers to steal, burn, and smash, and they did. 

On the other hand, African-Americans see the Civil War war as being an attempt to correct one of the most immoral social institutions ever put in place in the U.S. or any other nation in history. 

Slavery is ugly, even as a concept, let alone when put into practice. The heroine of Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" murders three of her children rather than let them fall into the hands of the slave catchers. Morrison makes that horror and tragedy totally believable. In a true life case, Solomon Northrup spent twelve years in slavery in the U.S. South even though he had been born a free man in New York state. He was kidnapped and sold into slavery as a grown man. His descriptions of the abuses he saw sound honest even today. And terrible. No clever justifications given for slavery - and plenty can still be found in the newspapers of the Old South - could ever justify this barbaric practice. No one should be permitted in any society to own another human being like we can own a horse or a dog. Slavery is a dysfunctional, perverse practice; it leads to rape and murder as a way of life. But who in a slave-based society could tell the cruel owners that they were wrong? In the slave states, it was all legal. 

Lee was only one Southerner. There were millions of them and they owned millions of African slaves. Lee was a very smart man. First in his class at West Point before the Civil War started. Lincoln asked him to head up the Northern armies, but he declined, returned home, and in a few weeks took over as the general of the Army of Northern Virginia. Then he fought a bloody war which ended finally in the utter defeat of the Confederacy. 

Now let's be clear. Lee was a very smart man. No one in West Point during his time there was near as clever. He was also very brave man and a capable one. He could devise and implement strategies that really got results and won him nearly all of his battles. But in spite of all of these things, he was wrong. 

It is quite possible and in fact, fairly common, for brave and clever people to make mistakes, not just about the time or whether they are smelling pork of chicken cooking in the kitchen or who was the Roman general at the Battle of Zama. All of us, sometimes, screw up. We make mistakes, sometimes even about the most crucial matters in our lives. Lee did. As did Jefferson and Washington, and many others all through history, not just in the U.S., but in nearly every nation on earth prior to the 1800's. Slavery was widespread including in the Orient, Africa, and the Americas. And it was a foolish, painful error every time. No one can own another human being and call her or himself "moral". 

In this space, I have many times argued that moral values that work - i.e. that lead the people who live by them to happiness and prosperity - are the responses of human societies to the real, physical world. In this space, moral realism has been, and continues to be, my main thesis. 

So why is slavery wrong? Because more than anything else - more than its being condescending, cruel, or corrupt - it's just stupid. 

Over the long haul, a society has to deal with the uncertainty of reality. Always, the community must meet and handle challenges that no one could adequately foresee. We try to learn from the past and we make what provision we can to prevent disasters, but always surprises, some of them potentially deadly to millions, come crashing out of the future toward us. That is reality. There is no changing that characteristic of reality. 

Our smartest strategy over the long haul, not so much if we want to be nice, but just if we want to survive what the future is going to throw at us, is to build a community and a nation in which there are all kinds of people with all kinds of talents and knowledge bases, and they all get to develop the gifts that they have. Then, when disaster approaches, we have better chances of having someone in town who can see how to stop the disaster or dodge out of its way. 

This is why freedom and loving your neighbor matter so much. Yes, those values sound nice, but no, that is not the reason why they are precious. Properly speaking, they should not even be called "precious". They're crucial. They raise our odds of going on, as much now as they ever have. We've spent literally milennia learning them and teaching them to the kids a little more with every generation because ...over the long haul ...they work.

So yes, Lee was a clever and brave man, and yes, he was sincere. He was just wrong. And it is in that light that he should be presented, like Washington and Jefferson, and for that matter, Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and thousands of other famous people who supported slavery. 

They were just wrong. They were right about lots of things, but in this vital area of their lives, they made an error. My watch can be wrong. The thermometer hanging outside of my door can be wrong. "Wrong" does not mean evil. It means mistaken. But wrong is still wrong. Slavery is wrong because, over generations, it doesn't bloody work. It makes the society that allows it weaker and sicker with each generation that passes. 

So yes, it is long since past time when the monuments to Robert E. Lee were taken down. Or at least, taken out of public spaces. They could perhaps be tolerated in museums if the talks given to all who visited the museum closed with some remarks like these: 

"This man was brave, clever and sincere. But about the Confederacy and the social institutions that it was trying to preserve, he was wrong. Those institutions were centuries out of date and long overdue to be abolished. Subsequent events, evidence, and experience have shown us over and over that there are some good people, some bad, and some mistaken people in every group of people on Earth. As you leave this museum, it would be wise to meditate on how easily any of us can make a mistake. And sometimes cling to that error for a lifetime. Leave here more determined to be the best you that you can be but also leave here determined to let all other persons, as long as they are not directly harming you, be the best version of themselves that they can be. Love freedom and love your fellow human travellers on this journey from womb to grave. Live these values and teach them to your children. Do all this with the aim constantly in mind of preventing a war far worse than any of the ones in the past that destroyed the lives of so many intelligent but mistaken people like the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee."

                        

                                  Lee's statue being removed in New Orleans (May 19, 2017)                                                         (credit: Infrogmation of New Orleans, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                                         

                               

                             statue of Lee being removed from park in Dallas, Texas (Sept. 15, 2017)
                                             (credit: Reuters news service, via the BBC) 

The book is done. It began April 13 and has gone up in posts of roughly 500 to 1000 words almost every day since that April 13 start date. If you have found my view of the world, of the concepts humans call "values", and of the case for theism interesting, you may re-read the whole book by starting at the April 13 post and following all the posts since then.

But I am not re-writing the book again anytime in the foreseeable future.

However, I am not done with posting in this space.

I intend now to post an article every few days in which I apply the moral realist worldview and reasoning to events and issues currently in the news and on people's minds.

For today then, here is a post I wrote back in March. In it, I explain why I think postmodernism is so misguided and dangerous. The biggest "ism" shaping the thoughts and worldviews of millions of young people in universities all over the world ...and it is founded on a mistake in basic logic. Read on.

_______________________________________________________________________________

In my own thoughts, I go through new arguments showing that postmodernism is incoherent and dangerous on a 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  as they process "texts" (which is all that's left if deconstruction is correct), 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 a 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, words name concepts and categories of things that then enable ways of organizing 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 or 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, makes a game of playing at the borders of 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, where Derrida and Foucault and their mentors, fathers, and uncles dwelt - 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 did grotesque medical experiments for the Nazis. Judges enforced grotesque laws. University professors taught "German" Science. Clergymen. Lawyers. Teachers. Welders. Carpenters. Drivers. Laborers. Women who were homemakers 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. What did that toxic time and its aftermath after Germany had been beaten do to intense young men like Jaques and Michel? How could proud young men adust to such painful humiliation? 

Deconstructionism. Post-modernism. Everything is everything. It's all fiction anyway. Narratives, every one of them as true as any other one of them. 

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 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?




   

                                           Gate into Auschwitz death camp (credit: Wikipedia) 

Today this book closes. I posted the final segment of my final chapter earlier today. But I thought I would also include a more creative bit of writing that is in my book at the very end. It just isn't expository in style. It is a short dialogue that attempts in a more creative way to capture the whole case that this book has tried to make. A brief one act play, if you like, with no physical action but a great deal of the mental kind. You may even choose to read this second post today and not read the earlier one. Or you may read both. Either way is great by me. I hope you enjoy. Farewell.  

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A scene in a sidewalk café in Vancouver, Canada, where two characters meet and have a Socratic dialogue. 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 hundred thousand 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.

 

                             Korso, Krosko, Sandon (credit: Arald Vagen via Wikimedia Commons) 

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.