Castle Bravo thermo-nuclear test (Bikini Atoll, 1954)

              (credit: United States Department of Energy, via Wikimedia Commons)

A major plank in the structure that supports moral realism comes to us from the study of History. Just how desperate the peril of our current situation is may not be clear to casual observers, but if we are human and we are like our forebears in our basic natures, then yes, desperate peril is not too strong a term. There is a pattern in History, and we must see it and work to stay out of it quite simply because this time, we truly must not repeat it.

   

                                                           Sky burial, Tibet 

                                         (credit: FishOil, via Wikimedia Commons)

History can be fascinating to study and we can easily get lost in its territories. There are many variations in how humans form communities and nations, so many that we can easily, as the saying goes in English, fail to see the forest for the trees. For example, how different societies handle death can vary in fascinating ways. Some cultures insist that burial of their dead in the earth, with certain prescribed rites accompanying the burial, is the only way to deal with death respectfully (the West). Others insist that burning of the corpse is the right way to deal with death (India). Others feed the corpses of their dead to birds of prey (Tibet). Still others ceremoniously eat the corpses of their dead and are revolted by the very thought of burying them (ancient Callatiae).

We can also get lost in the legal records of trials during the reign of Louis XIV or the 1936 membership lists of the Nazi party in Frankfort or the names of the commissars in 1941 Sevastopol or the ministers in the cabinet of some Chinese emperor of the Song dynasty. And on and on.

But these kinds of side-trips are tiring, frivolous distractions. They are not what the study of History should be about.  

So what should the study of History be about?

We must try to understand why humans in large groups – tribes and nations – do the things they do, not just look at what they do. Our intention in these times must be to comprehend how human societies evolve, with our ultimate aim being to detour around the worst kinds of group behavior and so to keep our species from annihilating itself.

An encouraging thing to note is that if we study enough History from all over the world and in all eras, we really can draw some fairly confident conclusions. The first is this: while the cosmetic details of societies may differ a great deal, all societies have a core program of concepts, values, beliefs, customs, etc. that enables them to survive. The point is that a society’s beliefs and morés are not just arbitrary. The large majority of citizens in every society is programmed with concepts, customs, etc. that steer them into patterns of behavior which enable them to live together, get food, build shelters, find mates, have children, nurture/raise them, fight off invaders, and thus to survive as a culture/nation. 

Every society – via its parenting styles, schools, churches, media, etc. – aims and acts to extend itself forward in time.

                      

                                                bust of ancient historian, Herodotus 

                      (credit: Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, via Wikimedia Commons)

Next, about human societies, we can also say that in all of them, the citizens generally get so used to their society’s beliefs, morés, customs, etc. that they see their way of life as being just human and “normal”. Herodotus found over 2400 years ago, that all human beings tend to see the customs they grew up with in this way. (“Custom is king.”)

It is worth noting here that in the real world of hard facts, there is no single “right” way of life, even in a given location and a specific era. Many ways of life can work in any location to give their citizens full, healthy lives along with a capacity to breed and pass their ways of behaving on to their children. Even in one specific locale, where the ecosystem contains resources that are obvious and easy to exploit, many different ways of life with many different technologies for using the resources can arise. Central Europe has contained many varied tribes, each with its own customs for literally millennia, often living side by side (and too often in the past hating each other).   

There is no single “right” way for humans anywhere ever, but in theory, it is possible that under a larger, global system of ideas and customs, all of the world’s cultures/nations could coexist and get along.

This brings us to an even more important insight into History: human tribes in all parts of the world for millennia have shown discomfort when they met a different tribe. Then hostility, then violence. And it isn’t that two tribes can never work out agreements under which they may live side-by-side in peace, even trading to their mutual benefit. But it has been easier for neighboring tribes, even formerly friendly ones, to slip into hostility and war. Humans in their groups have made war on each other as naturally as the sun rises and sets, all over the world for a very long time. Right back to the Australopithecines.

My first intention today, then, is to say again that we can’t do war anymore, no matter how “natural” that way has been for us in the past. We have nuclear weapons now. The way of the past – if we slip into it – will finish us. But also I want to say today that I think there is a way out. It is a long, slow, arduous, tedious one, but I don’t see any other, and once we know there is but one path to our survival, we must set out on it. Determinedly.

We are going to have to overtly, explicitly teach the kids – all the kids – to live together and get along. Teach them over decades, even generations if necessary. No one tribe's stories or mores or traditions matter anything like as much as this larger objective. 

What we must not do is rely on our old belief systems that tell us to acquiesce in our current ways of life. That has been the course adopted by billions of decent people all over the world in the past. Adopted because acquiescence and vaguely defined hopes were the paths commended to them by their leaders.

We must do better. We must fix our sights on doable social change and begin to employ the practical means that we have to create that change.

It is worth going off on a tangent for a moment here. We must not be surprised that the leaders of the past – religious, secular, military, political, etc. – in all parts of the world – told their followers to trust in them and in their tribe’s beliefs and customs. Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that is what leaders will do because that is how they justify, and keep, their jobs. But in the nuclear age, we are going to have to become a population worthy of democracy – all the adult citizens of the nation involved in the nation’s affairs as a given of daily life. We are going to need all of that wisdom to stay out of the patterns that have been the normal human way for centuries. Democracy is the one way by which we may be able to stop the unthinkable from occurring. We must not trust our leaders in the blind way that our forebears did. We must all get into the game. 

The subtlest lesson we can glean from studying History is that people hanging on to what is familiar, hoping for the best, and letting events take their course is a recipe for disaster. We must grow neither cynical nor resigned. People have before. We can see what it got them. We can do better in this time. We have the means in our hands. No more vague hoping, no more cynical ennui.

                           

                                               pupil and teacher (Mauritius, 2007)

                                 (credit: Avinash Meetoo, via Wikimedia Commons)

We can do better now because we know that the education of the kids is the future. As we shape the twigs, for the most part, so the branches will grow. As we educate the kids, so the future will be programmed. If we teach them distrust and suspicion of other cultures, those traits will characterize their adult lives. If we teach them responsibility and compassion, those traits will come to the fore.

   

                                                  pupils and teacher (U.S., 2013) 

                                   (credit: Michael Anderson, via Wikimedia Commons)

We can’t educate kids out of some things, of course. They will have to work and eat. They will need to have and raise their own kids. And so on. Some traits of humans are unalterable.

But we can train them in the skills of citizenship in a democracy. To spot and neutralize the bullies of the world as those bullies vie for power. To mediate disputes among them by peaceful means. To compete in peaceful ways – sports, the market, academia. And to reach out to folk in other nations. To talk, work, and live together, and get along.

The records of the many and varied nations of the past show that we will not escape the war-fate of our forefathers if we don’t work specifically, with focus and drive, toward peace in our societies all over the world. The one obvious, practical means by which we can do that is in the schools. Teach the kids to build peace. 

No more docility. The trusting folk of the twentieth century got ground up. WWI. WWII. Next time, if we let it come, will be much worse.

So let me close by getting even more specific.

My suggestion? We need a Social Studies course and a World Literature course all students in the world can take. U.N. developed and recommended. The Discipline and Practice of World Peace. World Lit. for the World.

Radical? Yes. But my final, emphatic point today is this: I believe we have no other choice but to re-design the kids’ studies and then teach those new courses to them.  There is no other practical way to shape the future of our species, and there is no one else to do this work but us.

We must work via the means we have toward the prime objective: a population in the next generation who live together, all over the world, in basic, daily confluence. The subtle lesson of History is that trusting in our old, familiar ways is the essence of tribalism, and tribalistic complacence, over and over, everywhere, is what has made human history so bloody for tribe after tribe in place after place. We must learn to change by choice instead of by pain.  

Perhaps, war kept us strong in the past. Hitler thought so. But our Science has made war obsolete. All that is needed for peace to come is for us to truly see that.

The lesson of History so far is that all through history, people haven’t learned from History. They have grown weary of politics and consigned their fates over to elites. The vague, effete cynicism of the postmoderns today is just a version of this same indolent naivete, but with a bigger vocabulary.

Democracy asks of us the best we have, yes. But it does not fail us. We fail it.

Teach the kids – articulately and with openly avowed intention – what world peace will look like and, step by step, how it will be achieved. Training in conflict resolution. Competition. It’s human for us to need it. But competition carefully balanced with respect for the rules and the spirit of the game. Grace in victory and in defeat. Love of a game played well by sportsmanlike players. Love of learning, in classrooms where some are always going to shine more than others, but where it is considered rude to flaunt that cleverness. Knowledge of the signs of tyranny jockeying for power. Knowledge of the democratic machinery in our systems of governance that enables us to stop those tyrants while they are small.

The measures that can be taken – the things we could teach – are known to us. Now we must teach them.

   

                      Michelle Obama with Quantico high school graduates (2011) 

                                      (credit: Linda Hosek, via Wikimedia Commons)

Our weapons have grown up. Now, so must we. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a determined, willful, youth-oriented day.  

Thinking About Thinking

   

                                                               pitcher plants 

       (credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast, via Wikimedia Commons)

Human thinking is going on. That much is obvious. Like all living things of the animal type, humans normally don’t just sit and let the rockslide bury them. They jump out of the way. They also pick low-hanging fruit when they can. Something must be going on inside each human bundle of skin and bone to make it move as it does. A stone or a glacier will not get out of the way of a landslide no matter how much warning it gets. A stone is unaffected by a berry no matter how juicy the berry looks. A stone won't even lean toward a sheltered place a foot away to escape the eroding winds that visit its face so roughly. 

Trees are living things of the plant type; they can’t get out of the way of an avalanche. But they can communicate with each other, even warn each other, via airborne organic compounds, when a blight or swarm of insects is coming. And flowers, more things of the plant type, can turn toward the sun. Pitcher plants snap shut on hapless insects that come too close - and eat them. 

All living things can, to some degree, act to increase the odds of their surviving in their present form.

The ability in living things to discern subtler and subtler sense data and react to them in more and more complex ways, so that each living thing enhances its odds of experiencing well-being and reduces its odds of getting hurt or killed, keeps increasing as we rise up the scale of complexity. Complex organisms are quicker at avoiding pain and finding well-being than are simpler life-forms.

Humans are the best of all species at avoiding pain and securing pleasure. We can plan years before an event occurs to mitigate it if it is likely to be painful or enhance it if it is likely to bring us well-being. We can take effective action years before hazards or opportunities occur. It is this acting to enhance our odds of finding joy or avoiding pain before any stimulus is felt that we can safely say was preceded by thinking. Foresight. We are the only life forms that have it.   

A big debate in Philosophy occurs over what is going on inside the brain of a human that makes her/him capable of such complex behavior. Philosophers are fascinated by this thinking. What is it? How does it work?

I wish to discuss today the model of human thinking that I believe best fits the evidence of real human behavior. It matters very much to moral realism.

Human thinking is based, before anything else, on concepts. We see, hear, feel, taste, and smell things around us in our environment all the time. Even in her sleep, the young mom hears her child starting to whine. Sense data are always being transmitted via our nerves into our brains, and we can recognize, and react effectively, to millions of different events happening around us. Mom is about to wake up and go to that child before the child vomits on his pillow.

“Maybe thousands, but not millions of different events,” some readers will cry out at this point. Here we come upon a useful insight. No situation we experience will ever be exactly like any other we experience, so we can legitimately say that humans can react effectively to millions of different stimuli. Small differences in lighting, colors, sounds, aromas, etc. make every situation we experience unique. Why we react effectively so much of that time is that we notice patterns in sensory details, even though no two sets of details, i.e. no two experiences, are ever exactly the same.

   

                                     Spot 7 differences between these two pirate ships

                                        (credit: By Ftiercel, via Wikimedia Commons)

What people mean when they say that every situation we experience should not be called unique is that we constantly sort the sensory details of the situations we are moving through, and thereby sort the situations we are experiencing, into categories. Most situations we encounter are giving off details among which we recognize patterns, patterns we know from memories of past experience. We see patterns in the details we are sensing, and we correctly categorize each situation by recognizing its type, then recalling and implementing behaviors that have worked in the past in events of this type. Thus, most events we pass through can’t be called unique. They are almost always events of a type we have seen before, even though they aren’t exactly like any of our past experiences.

The patterns that mark the especially hazardous or promising situations matter most to us because once we know them, we can more quickly and efficiently recognize and respond to them and thus avoid major pain or seize major opportunities. We learn from our experiences or from mentors’ instruction, or both, to see useful patterns, the ones that tell of hazard or opportunity. But it is important to see here that we learn to spot the patterns that may affect our health and well-being because that is how we survive. It is not a matter of curiosity or of wanting an education. Pain and pleasure are our teachers. Pain is our warner, pleasure, our rewarder. Both give us effective learning incentives. Cultural conditioning complicates matters; for example, pain, in its social form, is disapproval. But in the end, pain and pleasure are always our teachers.  

As an aside, perhaps, we should note that a culture is simply a collection of bits of knowledge about how to find pleasure and avoid pain. It is passed from generation to generation of humans because, most of the time, it works. But all cultures contain bits of knowledge – concepts, customs, and morés – that are generally accepted by the people of that culture even though they are obsolete. They guided people of the culture toward more health and vigor once, but they now hold no benefits for the tribe. Nevertheless, all tribes, out of habit, keep at least some obsolete customs and beliefs. 

Curious. However, deeper discussion of the ways in which tribes and nations evolve culturally is beyond the scope of this post and has been dealt with in this space before. For today, we’ll be satisfied with thinking about thinking and saying what we can that will throw light on the whole subject.

Most adults have learned the concepts that enable them to recognize patterns in the events they are likely to encounter. They then strive to use their concepts, make decisions, and act to find well-being and avoid pain. So goes the day.

For the most part, our concepts and categories work. We don’t get hypnotized by trivial details; we look past trivial stuff, see the larger patterns, and act to live another day. We have effective sense-detail-processing, decision-making programs in our heads. If we did not, we would starve, get eaten by predators, or get run over in the first few hours in which we were on our own.

When I am hungry, as I am now, I think of the categories of things that I call “food” and I plan to move in the next hour or so in ways that will likely allow me to encounter and consume some food. Luckily, in my area of Canada, I can go to a café I like, order a kind of food I like, and eat it. I’m dreaming of bean burritos at this minute. I know the locations of several cafés that make them and I am near certain they will still be open for business an hour from now.

But my larger point is this: like my planned taco expedition, all that we think, decide, and do is based on our mental manipulation of concepts. They must be in there or we could not function. We would be overwhelmed by a continuous stream of sensory details and sit and stare in a catatonic trance. 

But the vast majority of us don’t. We learn and use concepts (hunger, taco, bus, money, etc.) and we go to the right bus stop, wait, get on the one that will take us to the taco stand – not the theater bus tonight – board the bus, ride it to the taco stand we love so well, get off the bus, and find the taco stand - gone. The owner has left a sign which says the city has granted him a change of location. The new location is nearly six kilometers from here, but much better for his business. 

(Business? What is a "business"?)

Which only goes to prove my next main point about thinking. All our concepts are useful in helping us to calculate the odds that events we are encountering now will turn out in ways we have seen similar events turn out in the past. But we don’t ever know that any possible outcome is certain. We only have some concepts and with them we do some reasoning that we believe has very good chances of being correct. But my taco café may be closed because the owner is attending a wedding. Or it may be out of taco shells because the morning shift manager forgot to call the tortilleria and order more shells today. If my favorite café burned down last night, it will not be open today. We learn concepts; they help us decide; but they are not guaranteed to support infallible reasoning.

We learn and store memories of patterns in sense data, patterns that warn us of likely upcoming events which in the past have brought us either high levels of pain or of pleasure. But our best thinking – our best memory manipulations – can only point us toward good odds of coming through the events around us alive and whole. No thinking can guarantee we won’t get hit by disaster or miss a chance to own a gold mine.

“But”, you interject, “surely this probabilistic, odds-making thinking does not govern in sciences like Physics, Chemistry, and Computing Science? The laws of Science, once our scientists discover and prove them, are unchanging.”

No, they’re not.

The glaring example in Physics is seen in the Michelson-Morley experiment. In 1887, Michelson and Morley were trying to measure the drifting effect left by the earth as it traveled through the ether, a substance physicists believed must fill up all space in the universe. They reasoned that light waves, like all waves, obviously needed some medium in which to travel. Waves like those on the sea travel through liquids. The atoms in a body of liquid don’t go forward as a wave passes through them, they just go up and down. Sound waves travel through a medium also, namely air. Thus, light waves must travel through a medium of some sort. 

Or so the physicists thought.   

But Michelson and Morley couldn’t find any evidence of an ether filling space. In fact, the evidence indicated that there is no ether. And if that was so, then what was light? What is light? How does it get around? What is it doing?

Thus, began a long sequence of experiments and theories that led eventually to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Physicists at the time had come to believe that Physics was pretty much a done deal. Newton had found the laws that describe how all bodies move. The rest of the history of Physics, most physicists believed, would be just working out details and implications of Newton’s equations.

What the Michelson-Morley experiment did was it led Physics to a whole new picture of reality and how it works. Newton was nothing like the last word on the subject matter of Physics.

The laws of Motion. Universal Gravitation. Calculus. These models had been unshakable for over 200 years. Now, the experiments were telling physicists that Newton’s equations described only a tiny percentage of the phenomena that the universe contained. Reality was way more complex than Physics had so far imagined. Newton was the beginning of Physics, nothing like the end.

Why does this example tell us so much about human thinking? Because no subject is more rigorous in its reasoning than Physics. Chemistry is tightly reasoned, but still somewhat sloppy compared to Physics. Biology gets worse. It contains so many vague connections between steps. Psychology, even looser. And physicists see Sociology and Anthropology as being like music, painting, and poetry: sometimes pretty to hear or see, but not really Science at all.

What the Michelson-Morley experiment led to was the shocking realization for all serious thinkers in all fields that they might never set down any laws of Science that were unshakable. Ever.

For philosophers, none of this was very shocking. David Hume, who was a philosopher, had shown that none of our “laws”, even in Science, can ever be set down in final, unshakable forms. We can only state laws of Science that appear to describe what the scientists have seen so far. And some laws of Science do this very well. We use them to make predictions about what will happen at time “D” after we have set up apparatus “A” and performed steps “B” and “C”. We can then do experiments, test the laws, using different materials, locations, and so on. If we can predict what we are going to see happen and we see it happen, we can argue confidently that we have found a scientific law. The power of Science is amazing – most of the time.

But we also get surprises, things turning out in ways we did not expect. Like Michelson and Morley. While they may have understood what Hume had said about the impossibility of knowing anything for certain, it was a rude shock for them and all other physicists to discover that in their beloved science, so clear and rigorous, there were still always going to be rude awakenings.

What Hume said is that our best, most carefully-reasoned laws and models are still only describing what we have seen so far. They may not be adequate for describing what may happen in the future. And we can’t know the future. We can’t ever go there. We can only move cautiously and watch.

Then what are the scientists doing?

They are telling us, whenever they give us a scientific law, what they believe is likely to happen in a given set of circumstances. Likely to happen. Not certain.

If even the best, most rigorous of sciences is only telling us tentative thoughts about what likely will happen in very specific circumstances in the future, how much shakier are the reasoning processes of most of us most of the time?

Which leads us to the even deeper problem with thinking. What is the humility of modern Physics telling us about the very roots of human thinking? About human ways of studying phenomena and trying to describe what we are seeing exactly?

What we have to accept is more than that our laws or generalizations are always imperfect. What we have to accept is that the very categories of things that we think we are describing before we even begin to try to put laws about them together – these categories are themselves always inadequate.  

So let’s go deeper and consider Aristotle’s categorical logic, the way of describing thinking that Philosophy students usually begin their studies with.

There are only four kinds of statements that have real content, according to Aristotle. He sees value in creative literature, but it is not Philosophy. It is not the serious matter for serious students to analyze.

The four types of statements are: Universal Affirmative (e.g. All whales are mammals. All politicians are liars.); Universal Negative (e.g. No men are mothers. No rodents are reptiles. No prime numbers are even numbers.); Particular Affirmative. (Some pro boxers are women. Some charmers are psychopaths. Some dogs are purebred Rottweilers.); and Particular Negative (e.g. Some women are not mothers. Some flying machines are not airplanes.)

There are many logical manipulations one can do with Aristotle’s categorical statements. For example, we can work out in Logic that if all things of type “A” are also things of type “Z” and all things of type “B” are also things of type “A”, then all “B’s” must also be “Z’s”. And if some “D’s” are “R’s” and All “R’s” are “O’s”, then some “O’s” are “D’s”. And on and on. There is a lot of fun to be had with pure Logic.  

But what I want to show today is this: these statements are idealizations because the very terms they speak of are idealizations. In reality, there are no tight, sealed categories of birds or of reptiles. In the past, and even now, there were and are creatures on the border between the two categories. At some time in the future, the categories will again not fit real animals in the real world. Reality and all of the entities in it keep slipping across the borders we create and try to impose between categories of real things. In reality, with any statements about the physical world, our categories, our terms, never apply perfectly or even for very long.

As an aside, we can note that there are exception-free statements in pure Math, but Math is a special area of study. Proofs in Math exist only in human minds. They sometimes fit phenomena in the material world, but often they simply don't.

 

                                                                    Leopon

                                (credit: TRJN (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons)

So we can repeat: in the empirical world, there are no exception-free categories of things. This means we can't devise any perfectly unshakable statements about the real world ever, and this is why all our real-world statements are really only statements of probabilities.  

In short, in all our thinking we have ask ourselves, “What are the odds, the probabilities associated with all of my statements?” Those odds, especially in Science, are sometimes very high, but they are never 100% certainties.

It is on this spirit of tentativeness that the tolerance of moral realism rests. We all have to learn that we all are capable of judgements that are in error. It’s not just that my thinking is tilted by my upbringing and the mores and customs that I was raised to accept. The problem runs even deeper. The problem is that all human reasoning is flawed at its core.

Reality is subtler than our best reasoning. All of our most confident statements about reality are still only statements of what we believe are high probabilities. Never of certainties. It is that realization that prompts us to really listen to each other and examine our terms and the evidence we have, over and over, even when the process proves tedious. Scientists submit all that they do to peer-review, and even then, they have sometimes led each other to false theories and models. Luckily, the ongoing peer-reviewing that Science is based on has the power to fix these errors.

Curiosity and venturesomeness, with humility and social interdependence added: these are what loving our neighbors really means. Tell me your view of the issue. I'll tell you mine. We'll discuss our terms, our evidence, and our reasoning. We'll test and we'll let reality be the arbiter.  

We can disagree and yet respect each other’s views, as long they can be explained with reasoning and evidence. And thus we can live together and get along.

In the shadow of the mushroom, nevertheless, have an empathetic, tolerant day.