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.