Chapter 17           The Morally Crucial Features of Modern Physics

 

We’re now ready to tackle the moral challenge, to derive ought from is. The question now is: How would a moral code based on the most ubiquitous and profound principles of empirical reality work?   

Note again that it’s the big constants of the universe that we want to resonate with. Our moral code, if it is well-designed, should match our best worldview: Science. Note also that even when we know what the constants are, we still have many ways in which to design a society with high survival odds. This point about there being many possible cultures that could live in a given environment is what relativists keep telling us. But the larger point is that whatever design we choose, we will have to accommodate the principles of Physics. Moral relativism offers us no guidelines at all to follow as we design a new moral code for society. At best, it tells us that being moral in a global village world such as the one we now have means staying equivocal. Moral realism tells us to look at the basic forces that are in every environment and begin to build a universal moral code there. This is the crucial difference between the two.

Note also that the room for huge variety in culture designs for many different actual societies is really only an indicator of how free reasoning beings like us are in this universe. We are free to such a degree that, as the Existentialists say, it scares many. But it is exhilarating to others. Imagine. Work. Live creatively. These are the maxims for all thinking species in this universe.

An analogy with the biological world fits well here. Life forms are so varied that a biologist can get absorbed in studying any one of millions of species for the rest of his life. But there are giant constants that are essential for all living things: for example, respiration, by which all living things get energy. Or pH. Or temperature. To understand life, we first seek the big constants, the factors that govern life for paramecia, piranhas, parrots, and people. Similarly, to understand cultural evolution, we must grasp how the largest principles of reality inform, or at least should inform, our moral values.

For our moral code, the two most important universal features of the worldview of modern Science are entropy and uncertainty. Thermodynamics teaches us about entropy; Quantum Theory teaches us about uncertainty.

Understanding entropy means we must accept that the universe is heading toward a final state in which all the universe’s most basic particles will be spread evenly across it at a temperature of 0 degrees K. We don’t understand numbers that big, but that doesn’t matter. Physics tells us that the heat death of the universe is inevitable. (In about 5 billion years.) On a daily, human scale, entropy simply means that all things tend to burn out and fall apart.

To humans, who are energy-concentrated living things, this means we exist against the natural flow of this universe in which the level of disorganization, entropy (“burnt-outness”), is always increasing. This is the first major thing that Physics has to say to Moral Philosophy: life is always hard.  

 

          

                               (credit: Profberger, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

The second universal feature of reality that matters to our moral code is uncertainty. Probabilities of future events range from the likelihood that it will rain today, to the likelihood that there's a leopard nearby, to the likelihood that Germany will attack Russia, given what Hitler said in Mein Kampf about his country’s need for living space. And we live our lives always calculatings odds. Thus, life is hard, but also uncertain. Scary. 

Our belief that life is full of toil is our way of understanding entropy. Our belief that life also contains constant hazards, in addition to the constant toil, is our way of understanding uncertainty. For individuals, families, tribes, and nations, adversity and uncertainty characterize life all over, all the time. (Note that a major component in the belief system of the West is belief that humans are not fated merely to endure the harshness and the scariness of life. From the Greeks, we learned that it is heroic for humans to fight back. To not just endure, but to defy the entropy and uncertainty of life, and once in a while, even to win.)

Over thousands of years and billions of people, values enable the survival of a society only if those values reflect universal forces underlying physical reality; or, to be more precise, successful values must cause humans to behave in ways that accommodate adversity and uncertainty, especially for whole societies over the long term. Thus, such values, riding in their human carriers, endure.

Our values in modern democracies have been fairly effective at guiding us to survive and spread, though not always in humane ways. Over millennia, the demands of survival in a hazardous reality have caused us to work out a set of values, morés, and behaviors that (mostly) guide us to handle both adversity and uncertainty. If we and our forebears had not learned and implemented these basic value lessons at least moderately well, we wouldn’t be here.

(Below are pics of children being programmed into the values of their cultures.)

 

 

        

                      Young patriot (credit: US Army, via Wikimedia Commons)

              

 

       Chinese children (PRC) in Young Pioneers (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

   

 

         

                                 Russian children in Vladimir Lenin Pioneers (1983) 

                            (credit: Yuryi Abramochkin, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

                        

     

                                Iranian boy soldier during Iran-Iraq War (1980 – 88)

                                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

 

But we don’t yet comprehend these big truths of morality in a conscious way. 

Most people of every nationality still see their values as being exempt from analysis because they get programmed as children to be deeply, unswervingly loyal to their tribe’s ways. This kind of programming has made the majority of people in most societies, both historical and modern, into unthinking pawns of their tribe’s culture. A major purpose of this book is to help thoughtful readers become aware of values and draw them into conscious thinking as concepts that  can be analyzed and discussed rationally.