Chapter 16. (conclusion)
America had to undergo some difficult adjustments before it began to
integrate the Christian belief in the worth of every individual with the
respect for the law that enables individuals to live together in dense
populations in peace. But the slaves were freed, and the government began to
compensate the native tribes and take them into the American mainstream. Or
rather, to be precise, America began moving toward these more balanced ideals
with more determination and continues to do so into this era, as do all modern
democracies.
Thus, in the larger picture of all these events, the Romantic Age
imprinted into the Western value system a deeper respect for the ways of
compromise: the “better angels of our natures” that Lincoln spoke of. The
result was modern representative democracy. Its values guide people toward
balancing progress with order. They keep democratic countries from devolving
into chaos. Our best hope for creating institutions by which people use reason
and debate instead of war to find balance in each generation – balance between
security-seeking conservatism and the reformers’ passions – is democracy.
Lesser sideshows in the swirls of history happen. These are analogous to
similar sideshows that have happened in the biological history of this planet.
Species and subspecies of animals and plants meet, compete, mingle, and then
thrive or die off. So do species of societies. But the largest trends are still
clearly discernible. The dinosaurs are long gone; so are many obsolete
societies. New species of societies keep emerging. It is also worth noting that
events of this age prove that war is not the only path by which this process
can work. During this era, Britain ended slavery in her Empire – without a war.
In a compromise, two opposing parties each give up a bit of what they
want in order to get a bit more of what they need. But what happened during the
Romantic Age was a melding of two very different ways of life. As conditions
changed and old cultural ways became obsolete, a new species of society arose:
representative democracy with universal suffrage. And it proved vigorous.
The idea of democracy evolved until real democratic states formed, ones
that were built around constitutions and universal suffrage, not titles or
traditions. The constitutions stated explicitly that protecting the rights of
every citizen is the most important reason for democracy’s existence. This
change came about by the hybridization of Christian respect for the value of
every human being, Roman respect for order and discipline, and Greek love of
abstract thinking: thinking that questions all the forces that be, even the
apparently axiomatic forces of the physical world.
Representative democracy based on universal suffrage became the goal of
the Renaissance and Enlightenment world views when they were applied by human
societies to themselves. The Romantic Age showed that the adjusting and
fine-tuning takes time, and sometimes also pain. A state that says it values
human rights must deliver them or else eventually dissolve in chaos.
In the meantime, as Romanticism raged on, what of the Enlightenment
world view? Inside the realms of Science and Commerce, the Enlightenment was
still in place and actually getting stronger. The Romantic revolt left it
changed, but invigorated. Science came to be envisioned by scientists as the
best way to fix society’s flaws. When partnered with Science, Industry could be
managed so that it made goods of high quality produced in humane ways
affordable for all.
Under the Enlightenment world view, the one of Newton and Laplace,
events were seen as results of previous events that had been their causes.
Every single event became, in an inescapable way, a link in a chain that went
back to the start of the universe. The universe was ticking down in a
mechanical, irrevocable way, like a clock. (This view is called determinism
in Philosophy.)
While the Romantic revolt ran its radical course, governments,
businesses, industries, armies, schools, and nearly all society’s other
institutions were still quietly being organized in ways suggested by the
Enlightenment worldview. The more workable of the Romantic ideals (e.g. relief
for the poor, protection of children) were absorbed into a new worldview that
kept spreading till it reigned, first in the West, then gradually in the world.
Crewe locomotive works, England, c. 1890
(credit: Wikimedia Commons)
At this point, it is important to stress that whether or not political
correctness approves of the conclusion we are heading toward, it is there to be
drawn and therefore should be stated explicitly. The Enlightenment worldview
and the social system it spawned got results like no other ever had. European
societies that operated under it kept increasing their populations, their
economic outputs, and their control of the physical resources of the Earth. A steam
shovel could outwork a thousand human shovelers. Western Science also produced weapons
that rolled over all the non-Western ones that opposed them.
But it is also important to stress that the Westernizing process was
often unjust and cruel. Western domination of this planet did happen, but in
the twenty-first century, most of us will admit that while it has had good
consequences, it has had many evil ones as well.
Naval
gun being installed, New York Navy Yard, 1906
(credit:
Wikimedia Commons)
The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the Enlightenment worldview,
with the moral code that attends it, is no longer an adequate code for us to
live by. It is ready for an update. In the midst of its successes, it has also
produced huge problems, like the oppression of women and minorities, class
inequities, wars, colonialism, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and pollution
levels that will destroy the Earth’s ecosystems if they’re allowed to continue
unchecked. Some problems that arose out of the Enlightenment’s ideas are out of
control. Even more frightening, the Enlightenment worldview appears to have run
out of ideas for how to solve them.
But the larger point of this long discussion of the rise of the West is to
see that worldviews give rise to value systems and value systems give rise to
morés. The morés then cluster to form a way of life that has a survival index
in the real world. Furthermore, some morés and habits of living, when they come
to be believed and practiced by the majority of a society’s citizens, increase
that society’s survival odds more than others do. By our morés, and the
patterns of behavior they foster, we interface with reality. Then, if our
values and morés are well tuned to reality as it exists in our time, we thrive.
But I stress again that the worldviews, values, morés, and behavior
patterns that we humans live by do not, as cultural relativism claims, all have
equal survival indexes. They also are not part of our way of life because of
random events in the world or impulses in us. In the moral realist view, human
values are shaped by forces that humans can influence. We can shape our own
values and way of life. In the past, we have not done so very well. But we could
learn to do better, and so, to re-write the code that drives us.
The point of my last two chapters has not been to show
that the ways of the West are always the best. What my last two chapters
have shown is that first, beliefs have consequences in the physical world for
the folk who live by those beliefs; and, second, that some belief systems get
better results than others.
Human culture, properly speaking is a code of ideas by which a tribe can
live and organize their activities and communities. The ideas knit together
into a full idea system, and even though usually some parts seem at odds with
other parts, the code is coherent enough to enable people who live under it to
function in their daily lives. For example, we have long been conflicted in the
West under our Judeo-Christian system about when to grant forgiveness to a convicted
criminal and when to punish him/her severely. But for ordinary folk every day,
the situations in which we must choose between the two options are few. These
ideas/beliefs don’t affect decisions about whether or not a person should wash
the dirty dishes from earlier today or whether she should give back the excess
change given to her a few seconds ago by a careless clerk in a store. Culture
is also, mostly, not passed on through a code written into our genes. It is
passed from generation to generation in society by enculturation, by children
learning the beliefs and morés of their culture from older humans who nurture
them.
Under this definition of “culture”, humans have been evolving more and
more by culture and less and less by genetic coding, for thousands of years.
Furthermore, under this cultural mode of evolution, we have reached some
inarguably useful results. First, there are more of us now by several orders of
magnitude than there were ten thousand years ago. Second, we are larger in body
size. Third, we live longer than our distant ancestors did. We also have fewer
infant deaths now than we did then. We eat a better diet, one with a better
spectrum of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals than our ancestor had. Finally, we
have a much wider range of lifestyles encompassed in nearly every culture in
existence in this twenty-first century than our xenophobic ancestors did.
We needed to grasp the mechanism of human cultural evolution in order to
move on with our project. We’ve now done that. First, we’ve shown that human
history does have a system to it; and second, that we can intervene in that
system and, maybe, if we act with a coherent vision – that of a new, more
nuanced Modern Science – we can learn to direct that system toward maximum
health for us all. The emphasis that I have given to Western culture and its
history over the past two thousand years or so has only been intended to show
that arguably, the largest breakthrough in the cultural developments of all the
societies of this planet over those last two thousand or so years has been the acquiring
of the scientific method. It is being embraced as a way of thinking all over
the world, more with every decade that passes.
Please also note, that I do not intend to convey the idea that the
breakthrough from superstitious thinking to scientific thinking somehow could
have come only out of the West. Bits of its precursor ideas have come to the
thinkers of the West from almost all the other cultures of the world. What
matters now is that we see that it is the way of thinking that will enable us
to go on. All cultures are evolving all the time. The way that science rose in
the West during the Renaissance was just as fortuitous as any of the other
major advances of human civilization. However, we only need to accept here that
science, with its inductive way of reasoning by hypothesis and experiment, is
our way forward, as a species, and that there is no going backward. In short, we
must learn scientific reasons to love each other, or we die. Those are our
choices.
The new worldview Science is offering, and the values and morés it
fosters, are so different from the one out of which the success of the West
grew that in these times, the cultures of the West seem to be verging on
self-destruction as they try to adjust. The obsolete parts of the Western
worldview will be replaced. As our models of reality evolve, all worldviews,
morés, and cultures get updated eventually. The difference in our era is that,
if we work hard to ensure that they are not replaced by others that lead to new
forms of injustice, we may move on without causing another Dark Age or worse: our
own extinction.
With the problems and hazards that we have before us now, there is
little hope for our species if we don’t learn to manage ourselves.
Discussion of the moral implications of the worldview of Science will be
the business of my next two chapters. The cultural evolution theory presented
in this book offers guidelines by which we can design a new society. This
theory is a corollary of the Theory of Evolution. It can, in a general way,
inform how we are to move forward and still simultaneously maximize our odds of
surviving. It cannot tell us exactly where we will be in a hundred years. We
will have to adjust our path into the future as the challenges arise. As we
always have.
The general, energetic forward push of life is a given for all life
forms. Living things push out into the space about them, adapt, and flourish or
else die out. We humans, with our culture-driven way of evolving, could be
destined for space travel and colonizing new planets. We live to expand; it's
what we're programmed for, and there is no compelling reason why we can’t continue
to do so if we come together.
Now let's return to our main project. I will combine the insights of
three fields of study to build a new code of right and wrong: the physical
sciences, the life sciences, and this new model of cultural evolution.
My goal is to provide an outline of a
new moral code that all reasonable people can commit to simply because they can
see that it is consistent with all we currently know of our universe and our
life in it: a universal moral code that is clearly consistent with physical
reality.
If we are to persuade humanity to move past war, first, we must make
sense.
Notes
1. Huntington, Henry, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Beluga
Whales”; Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, September, 1998.
