Joan Clarke, cryptanalyst, World War Two 

                                                                (credit: Wikipedia)

Leo Szilard, Joan Clarke, and the Women of Bletchley Park

Leo Szilard and Edward Teller had a lot in common. They were both born Jewish in Hungary a generation before World War Two. They both became scientists, and both worked on the team in the U.S. in the mid-1940s that built the atom bombs, the ones that were dropped on Japan in August of 1945.

But otherwise, they diverged in many ways. Szilard did not want to see the Los Alamos team’s first nuclear bombs, “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”, actually used on any cities in Japan. He put together a petition and got many of the main scientists who had built the bombs to sign it in the last days before “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima. He wanted the bomb dropped on some island near Japan with Japanese official observers present, so they would see what could be done to their cities if they continued with the war. The military ignored him. He and many other scientists working on the bomb had only joined the project because they feared Germany might build one first. By June of 1945, Germany was out of the war. Leo, to his dismay, found that control of the project had been ripped out of the hands of the men who knew what these gadgets could do. 

                                                  Leo Szilard (credit: Wikipedia)

 

In the meantime, Teller consulted with project director, Robert Oppenheimer, who reportedly felt military and political leaders should handle the decision on whether to drop an atom bomb on Japan. Teller refused to sign the petition. Teller has been characterized since those times as a stooge of the US military, while Szilard is seen as a man of conscience. These characterizations are not completely fair, but close enough for my purposes in this post.

My larger point is that these men who were key players in the building of the bomb were both of Jewish descent. In Nazi Germany, they probably would have died in Auschwitz. They would never have had the chance to work together and agree – or disagree – as they did. The Jewish components wouldn't even have been available. 

Enrico Fermi, the key scientist in the earlier Manhattan Project, had a Jewish wife. They had fled Italy in 1938 to escape the harsh new race laws there, which were deeply anti-Semitic. Oppenheimer himself was Jewish. In fact, the list of key figures in the building of the first bombs is full of names of Jewish scientists. 

                                              Edward Teller (as a young man) 

                                                            (credit: Wikipedia) 

Teller is also seen as the father of the fusion bomb, the H-bomb, which was built a few years after the war. Fusion bombs are more powerful than fission bombs. They are the weapons in the figurative cloud that now hangs over this planet.

Some of these scientists did not like each other, but that didn’t matter to the final results. They tolerated each other. They cooperated and built the bombs. Out of this mix, the democracies of the West got an early lead on the totalitarian system in the USSR, which had long since openly vowed to create a Communist world state and kill all who opposed that view.

The secret of the H-bomb was stolen by Soviet spies, and the whole arms race we all know about was run. But the USSR was held in check by those weapons until it dissolved out of existence. (Without a major war, we should also note. Those who cared more for peace than ideologies defeated those who believed in violence simply by outlasting them.)    

When Heisenberg’s facility was destroyed by Allied agents in April of ’45, the German work on nuclear weapons was found to be at least two years behind the work at Los Alamos. He didn’t have Oppenheimer, Szilard, or Teller. 

In Japan, arguably an even more monochrome society than Germany, during WWII, no meaningful work on atom bombs was even done.  

But I reiterate that there is a larger point here. In the more tolerant national ethos of the US, the project was simply more possible sooner. There were more varied and numerous human resources there.

A major strength of democracy, clearly visible in the events of the years leading up to the building of the bomb, is its pluralism. Its tolerance. In a real, working democracy, lots of different kinds of people learn to live together and tolerate, even respect, each other. The Americans acquired many of the Jewish scientists of Europe in the 1930s. As the power of the Nazis rose in their home countries, these men made a simple choice: to leave. Most went to the US to continue their scientific work there. Jewish scientists added to the ranks of scientists of many other creeds in the West, and they became a strength of Western democracies. Not out of any one of them, but out of their interactions and teamwork, a huge scientific breakthrough occurred.

                                               Alan Turing (as a young man) 

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In this same vein of thought, I point to Alan Turing in Britain. He was the key player in the project that broke the most important German code, the one called “Enigma”. He was also a homosexual. He was treated shamefully after the war, but repressive laws often get renewed in the nervous times that exist after a war. By 1947, Britain was a more scarred and frightened land than it had been in 1934.

In the meantime, in Germany in 1934, measures aimed at purging the nation of homosexuals were brought in. Thousands were arrested and given prison terms or sent to camps. After the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, the homosexual life style of Ernst Rohm and several of his cohorts in the SA was even given by many Nazis as an excuse for their being assassinated. 

If Turing had been in Germany during the pre-war years, he would have known his private life would be closely scrutinized before he could do classified work such as code-breaking. He would likely have shied away from doing any such work. But Britain in the years before the war was, unofficially, but practically, more tolerant than Germany. Once again, a democracy’s being tolerant turned out to be a major strength.

The Americans broke the Japanese codes in the Pacific war. Their knowing what Japanese fleets were going to do before they did it produced some major American victories, notably the Battle of Midway in mid-1942 and the shooting down of Admiral Yamamoto’s plane a year later.

In the meantime, the Japanese never did crack the code used by the Americans in the Pacific. It was Navajo. Only a very few people in the world spoke Navajo and none of these betrayed the US. The Navajo men who actually spoke radio messages for the US forces were called “Code Talkers”. They were vital to the winning of the war. The highly monochrome regime in Japan, which was condescending and cruel in its view even of other Asians, had no such resources to draw upon. The Code Talkers were clear-cut strengths of a democracy.

Generally, “macho” male-dominated societies don’t even want women among the ranks of those who are really deeply involved in a war. No important roles for females. Ever. But Joan Clarke was a vital member of Turing’s team in the cracking of Enigma. Many, many women worked at Bletchley Park.

It is also widely known now that women are among the cleverest and bravest secret agents working inside enemy country. Violet Szabo was captured by the Nazis. And tortured. But she never gave away a single fact that was of any use to them.

  

                                 Violet Szabo, British spy (credit: Wikimedia) 

A key insight into nuclear fission came in 1938 from Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jew. In 1953, Rosalind Franklin provided vital insights that made it possible for Watson and Crick to build an accurate model of the DNA molecule, the key to all life.

I could list examples for hours. 

The point is that any nation that bars women from playing meaningful roles in its national life is, in one fell swoop, losing half of its human resources. Not a smart move in the great game.

I could go on, but I think my point is made. In the giant picture, over the long haul of years, decades, generations, and even centuries, democracy is tougher than its competitors, the totalitarian societies, because in the long haul, freedom and pluralism are real assets, not liabilities.

Even more deeply, we need to see that these democratic traits are national assets because of the uncertainty that is built into the physical universe from the level of the atoms on up to the stars. Freedom and pluralism are a society’s way of matching its culture to one of the basic principles of the universe, namely the probabilistic quality of reality. We don’t know what kinds of surprises our nation will be hit with in the future. But we do know for certain that surprises will come. That is how the universe is built.

The answer to this deep uncertainty is to have lots of different kinds of arrows in your quiver and skills in your skill set. You just can’t know what the future may throw at you. But you can know that your nation's chances of handling those shocks are better if your nation has a whole lot of different resources at its disposal.

In plainer English, love is an asset. Democracy’s tolerant way of life is an asset. Kind people, in the long haul, really are the strongest people.

I think I will leave it at that for today.

                                Alexander, the Great (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

What If Everyone Thought That Way? 

What if everyone thought that way? Large numbers of ordinary people who have studied no Philosophy still have clear ideas about right and wrong. They have guidelines that they live by and that they consult when they have to make a moral decision in a situation that is unfamiliar to them. If they get into an argument about an action a friend is considering, and he starts to give reasons for his actions that seem selfish or short-sighted, they ask: “What if everyone thought that way?”

In other words, it turns out that even the most ordinary of people give deeply considered answers – philosophical ones – for their actions. They thereby reveal that they are aware of moral dilemmas, and that they have their own ways of testing the “rightness” of their thoughts and actions.

“What if everyone thought that way?” is a profoundly philosophical question that comes from Immanuel Kant, one of the giants of Western Philosophy. Kant said that to be moral, we must act as if we would be willing to see the principle behind our actions become a law of the universe. To be moral, you should be able to “universalize” the principle behind every one of your actions. “What if everyone thought that way?” is really only saying in more ordinary language what Kant says more formally.

                                Immanuel Kant (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In a moral argument about whether some action or spoken remark is morally right, people who say things like, “And how many people will this plan of yours benefit?” or “Yeah, but how much real good will this plan of yours do for real people on the ground?” are utilitarians. They consider actions to be more and more right the more good they do and the greater the numbers of people they do that good for. The greatest good of the greatest number. That’s utilitarianism.

There are even people who will ask of a person with whom they are having a debate about moral issues, “Where was your compassion that day?” or “Where was your sense of responsibility?” or “What’s the matter? No courage, Joe?” These people are leaning toward virtue ethics, the way of thinking about right and wrong that was recommended by Aristotle over two thousand years ago.

      

                                               Aristotle (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

And some will consider every act down to its smallest details in terms of whether it will harm or benefit the ecosystems of this earth. These are getting their ethics from environmentalism, which is a real moral philosophy in our own times.

So what point am I trying to make here? Just that ordinary folk really are guided by the belief systems of their moral leaders. And it’s worth mentioning here that there are still many who ask themselves every day, “What would Jesus do?”. 

And Alexander the Great travelled for years with a copy of the “Iliad”, the Ancient Greek epic about the hero Achilles and his exploits during the Trojan War, by his bed, and he read it every night. It was his guide for how a real man should live life.

The thoughts of philosophers and writers do matter to ordinary folk. The heavy thoughts of the great thinkers do filter down, over time, to the grass roots level.

Which brings me again to the matter of postmodernism. All of the moral guides and philosophers mentioned above have flaws in them, and counter-examples can be thought of which show up these flaws. But at least they are something. They gave, and still give, their followers some guidance as they make choices.

Postmodernism and its offspring, moral relativism, offer nothing. In fact, they emphatically assert that there is not, and cannot be, anything true or real in the way of moral principles to offer. All moral “principles” are just opinions. No moral code means anything against the backdrop of the complicated, real world.

But wouldn’t this moral relativism – if all of the people of the world believed it – lead to a world at peace? Live and let live? You tend to your business, I’ll tend to mine?

Absolutely not. History tells us, absolutely not. Why? Because a few bullies who are really driven by mad goals of their own, would take over whole nations and then whole areas of the world. A paralyzed population like the one described above – a moral relativist, postmodernist population – would not have any way to defend itself against the propaganda in the press and the thugs on the streets who follow the lies of the bully leader. And when they come, when they see the opening, do those bullies come hard! Consider the bullies of the last century. And they hate democracy. It’s for weaklings, as far as they are concerned.

When no one with thoughtful, rational answers for ordinary people’s questions is around anymore, then the bullies and their thugs and propaganda have room to step into the hearts of ordinary folk. And step in they will. I guarantee it.

Does any of this scenario sound like our times? Still wonder why I say we need a universal moral code? 

       

                        Idi Amin (credit: Bernard Gotfryd, via Wikimedia Commons) 

        

                                                                     Pol Pot 

                          (credit: Store Norske Leksikon, via Wikimedia Commons) 

             

                                                                     Adolf Hitler  

                                                (credit: Heinrich Hoffmann, via Wikipedia) 

 

            U.S. president, Ronald Reagan and Soviet chairman, Mikhail Gorbachev 

                                       (at bilateral talks, Iceland, 1986) 

                                          (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Again, Moral Relativism

There are many people out there in cyberspace, some of whom read my blog, who are unclear about what moral relativism is and why I consider it to be such a dangerous philosophy for our society to be following. And it’s worth saying again that our leaders are almost all educated people; they have been to the universities and in at least some of their courses, most of these leaders learned moral relativism and the worldview called postmodernism that moral relativism is usually said to rest on. (Ayer, Derrida, Foucault, Boaz, Benedict, etc.)

Moral Relativists say that there are no such things as right and wrong and that a so-called moral value is only valid when you are inside the culture that believes in it. The only overarching principle that covers all moral codes in all places and times is the one that tells us when we are in Rome, we should do as the Romans do and respect what they respect.

In some parts of the world today, a man may be heartsick for weeks before he can finally steel his nerves and make himself do what he must do if he is to restore his family’s honor: he must kill his 15 year old daughter. She dishonored her family. She lost her virginity to an 18 year old boy who is far beneath her socially, and she even was caught sneaking away to meet him after her father had forbidden her from ever seeing him again. She has lost her good name in the community, and seriously damaged her family’s good name. Her father has no choice, and he will do the deed though it grieves him sorely.

We in the West can’t understand such a value system, but inside the culture that does believe in it, moral relativists say, that action is right.

For moral relativists, values are really just preferences, like my favoring roast pork over beef steak or frozen yogurt over ice cream. Tastes. But no more. They aren’t somehow grounded in any arguments or evidence in the physical world that we all can see and touch. Therefore, there can never a moral “science”. The laws of science can be demonstrated to all who wish to see by experiments that can be replicated by any researcher who has the means to get the materials needed to do the experiment. That’s what science means: testable. No moral code, say the relativists is anything like that provable. 

The moral relativists say that the moral codes out there in the world right now not only aren’t grounded in evidence in the physical world; they can never be grounded in such evidence. Many educated people who took even a little Philosophy during their university years quote Hume here and say confidently that you can’t derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. You can never get a moral code out of evidence in the real world.

Where do people get their moral beliefs then? Moral relativism says from traditions. Customs. And sacred texts. But there are hundreds of these, a dozen or so major ones, and they aren’t always compatible with each other.  

Science-minded atheists often find the criticism that they have no moral code hard to answer. They don’t want to sound amoral. But they believe their view of the world is just honest – not cruel, just honest. Some will go further and tell you the hardness of the moral relativist worldview is just the way the world is and has always been. Some even go over to the offense and argue that there are no “facts”, anyway, only different culture’s takes on what happens.

In some countries, a woman is sexy if she is quite hairy; in the West, not so. And some people need fish sauce on practically all of their meals. And in some places, there are ghosts everywhere, and they are all evil and cruel. In some places, when you are introduced to a man, and you are a man, you shake his hand for at least ten minutes. Show you are sincere. Real men do. In that culture.

Customs, morés, values, and even concepts differ from place to place, culture to culture, and era to era. The Spanish have two verbs for the English verb “to be”. Both the Germans and the French have two verbs for the English verb “to know”. Different ways of thinking in different cultures. For me, I admit cultural relativism is indisputably real. But that does not mean moral relativism is the conclusion we must come to when we see that cultural relativism is real. Just because no people in earlier times were able to work out a logical base for a universal moral code, that does not mean that no such code ever could be worked out. A universal moral code, grounded in arguments and evidence in the material world. The one that is clearly there for us all. Hard, but not impossible. 

And it’s the hazard hidden in moral relativism that troubles me most of all.

To cut to the chase, how would moral relativists advise the leaders of the world to settle disputes between nations? If Russia, and that means Russians in big majority, feel that their fellow Slavs in Serbia are being bullied by a bigger nation, are the Russians entitled to intervene? In fact, how can any dispute between cultures or nations be settled in a moral relativist world except by war?

Some moral relativists shrug at this point. They see evidence all through history and all over the world that war is the only way that a dispute between cultures can be solved. What people like me who are troubled by this fact need to do, they say, is get over our squeamishness. That’s how it is. Suck it up, Buttercup.

I reply that while war is still a fact of our world, and it has been for a very long time, what has changed is that our weapons have gotten bigger. In these times, we can’t do another full-scale world war. It could end us. And then they shrug and tell me again, “Suck it up, Buttercup.”

So many in these times turn a blind eye to this basic flaw in the way the humans of the earth are going. More and more are falling into a private, quiet despair. “We are going to off ourselves,” they tell me.

I feel very certain that we don’t have to do that. We can change. By reason.  

I believe there are ways in the real world to get past the barriers between cultures and to enable whole cultures strange to each other to negotiate and compromise and get along without going to war. In my view, smart people who love their fellow citizens of the world, should be trying to find and explain to others more and more clearly what those ways are and how we could teach the kids all over to use those ways of thinking and talking so that they learn to get along – even with other people from other cultures strange to them.

A new, more inclusive, respectful, democratic set of values can be shown to be grounded in evidence in the material world that all can see and touch. In short, we can derive ought (a code of right and wrong) from is (the observable facts of the real world) and teach a new moral code to the children of the world.

And that is what my whole blog is about. Deriving ought from is. But if you really want to see the complete case for the opposite of moral relativism, namely moral realism, you’re going to have to read my book. The argument is complex, and it can’t be explained in a line or two. But …yes. It is possible that we could prove the validity of a new moral code for us all and then teach it to the kids …so that we keep reducing the odds of a full blown, global war happening until those odds have dwindled to almost nothing.

To me, it seems the lines on the graph in my head are coming together. If they touch, we will cross the line into nuclear madness.  

Only a new, effective moral code for all could save us. No sacred texts, no gurus, no biological or chemical or economic solutions. They’ve all had their chances. They’ve all struck out too many times. We have to gamble on something new.

Hang in there, ladies and gents. We can still do this.

 

 

 

(If you are interested in the whole argument for moral realism, and an outline of a new moral code, start on Mar. 2, 2021 of this blog. The whole case is here.) 

    

    

                                  Diversity conference (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

  

 

                                     Michel Foucault (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

A Bitter Conversation

 

“Well, well, Michel. You are Michel Foucault, are you not?”

“Mais oui. And you, monsieur, are …?”

“I am a retired teacher from Ohio. I just happen to be taking a few courses at this university. I heard you were on campus here to visit an old friend, but I didn’t expect to run into you. When I recognized you, I just had to say ‘hello’. I disagree with your worldview completely, by the way. I have read your book, Madness and Civilization, and parts of three of the others. You are pretty hard to pin down. As I read, I often asked myself, ‘What is he trying to get us to conclude here?’, but I got no answers. But you’re very popular and have a lot of disciples.”

“You still have not told me your name, mon ami.”

“It’s William. Guillaume, in French. Actually, can you pause to talk for a few minutes? On this bench, here? That is very kind, sir. I may never see you again, and I have longed for years to say some things to you.”

“I find that I am curious enough to wish to let you continue. I have no events to attend until this evening and I have nothing to do. Continue, if you like. I would only be bored with this time if I did not have someone to talk to.”

“Thank you. But I warn you that you may find some of the things I have to say uncomfortable.”

“Well …continue, nevertheless. Do you find my accent difficult?”

“Not at all on the accent part. But to get on with it. Okay. You seem to me to be saying that all key concepts like madness, and criminality, and sexuality change so much from era to era and country to country that the only conclusion we can come to is that whatever is controlling human cultural evolution, it is too complex for humans to ever understand. Or worse yet, chaos is driving our history. There is no order to it. You sometimes even seem to be dedicating your life to smashing values and concepts in your own culture in France, and in every country that you can in any way influence. You smile and nod. I’m sorry, but the truth is that I don’t find this amusing.”

“There is nothing to do but laugh, mon ami. Life is absurd.”

“Okay, I’ll be even more honest. So far, I find you pleasant as a man, but the approach to life you offer in your writings is offensive to me. If you really are that disillusioned with the human condition, why don’t you do what Camus challenges us to do. Commit to bringing some sort of meaning to your life, even if it is just meaningful for you, or get out of it. Why don’t you just end it?”

“You are a talkative and aggressive one, aren’t you? I don’t even know you, sir. But alright, I will give you my best honest answer. I enjoy what you Americans call ‘messing with people’s heads'. I like making them feel lost in a baffling ocean of concepts and arguments. It’s fun. And I believe it is good for them and their society if they do feel continually shaken up. Then, they drop their pretenses. Then, society changes. For better? Not always. But it is so filled with hypocrisy now. It needs to be shaken out of its delusions. Are you content with that answer?”

“Absolutely not. I loathe the cowardice of it. The …what’s the word …smugness of it. You are in this life. You have your existence in which you eat, drink, shit, feel, breathe, copulate, and so on. You feel it. It is not a matter of indifference to you. If you broke through the ice on a frozen lake, you would claw at the sides of the hole you were freezing in with all the same panic and desperation as I would. Or anyone would. So don’t pretend that you are indifferent and casual about your own pain and your own life. You aren’t. Period. No one is.”

“Ah, but mon ami, the thoughts and behaviors that I might succumb to in a moment of desperation are beyond my control. I am not interested in them. I care about the actions that I choose. Deliberately. The rest are just boring.”

“Do you think these words might be revealing of something deeper?”

“Not at all.”

“See to me, all this talk is just games. Posing. Banter for adolescents. Here’s a leap. Tell me this: are you familiar with the writings of de Man and Derrida?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know the men personally?”

“No. I know their works, not the men themselves.”

“So you …”

“But I agree with much of what they have written. Not all, by any means, but deconstruction is sometimes a useful tool.”

“I am going to be blunt with you now and point out a few simple facts that may or may not weigh as arguments with you. You were 18 when World War Two ended, is that right?”

“Is there some relevance to this line of questioning?”

“Just answer. You’ve gotten out of being properly confronted for too long.”

“Alright. For the sake of amusement, yes, I was 18 when the war ended.”

“Did you ever serve in any French forces or the Resistance?”

“No.”

“Did any of the men in your family serve?”

“No …this is becoming personal ... and ridiculous.”

“Were any of your family collaborators with the occupiers? The Germans?”

“No. That is …not as far as I know.”

“Did Paul de Man ever serve?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“In fact, he collaborated with the Nazis in Belgium for years, is that not so?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do too! You know he did. Stop the evasions!”

“What is your point, here, sir?”

“And Derrida. Did he ever serve?”

“What is your point, sir? Tell me, or I will walk away right now.”

“Alright, here’s what I really think. Smart people are subject to rationalization and confirmation bias just as much as any other people, sir. You and your cohorts have been trying to justify your anemic response to the Nazis since you first began to write. Deep inside, you are all ashamed that you yielded to the Nazis, crawled into bed with Nazis. And turned whichever way they told you to turn. The Allies eventually defeating those Nazis was very inconvenient to the collaborators of the occupied countries. Surprise. Whatever meaning is behind the history of those times, they were not shaped by the ubermensch of Nietzsche's dark vision. Nietzsche is just a wailing sociopath with a big vocabulary …no, let me say it all. In simple terms, every person in Nietzsche’s ideological band is fucked up. And deep inside …I feel very certain …you and the others in your coterie have been ashamed ever since 1945. But you can’t acknowledge that. So you make up complicated excuses, guarded by big vocabularies and ad hoc concepts. To me - just to me, okay - you’re a shame on the honor of your nations. Continental nations. Nations that got overwhelmed. And lost the fight in round 2. But France had friends who did – in time – prevail over the Nazis. No, don’t interrupt me! Let me finish, sir!”

“Rant on, rant on.”

“France had friends who didn’t succumb to the Nazis, not because they were somehow superior in character to the French. Just geographical accidents. The deep corruptions of France’s national character during World War Two could have happened to any nation under the wrong circumstances. Almost no ordinary folk blame France for caving to the Nazis. But deep down, the French themselves do. And the smartest of these can’t admit how ashamed they are. They repress the matter, and it comes out in rationalizations. Too many European intellectuals generally have contrived long-winded excuses that obliquely deal with that failure. And some non-philosophical Frenchmen have grasped at those straws of rhetoric because they need to. In Vichy times, some men fought on one side and some on the other. They killed each other. You know all this is true. Now most wish just to put the war behind them. But a few write and write works full of excuses and evasion. And big vocabularies and vacuous concepts. Rationalizations.”

“Are you quite done, sir? I did not fly six thousand miles to be insulted by a nobody.”

“You’re right. We are incompatible. I hate your whole intellectual viewpoint. I guess I just thought you and I could talk as men. But …no. The intellectual is too personal to us both for that to happen. Ah, good day to you, Monsieur! Enjoy your stay in Massachusetts.”

                                        Jacques Derrida (credit: Wikipedia) 

 

                                                   New Stone Age hunters 

            (credit: American Museum of Natural History, via Wikimedia Commons) 

      

                                                          Neanderthal Woman 

                                   (credit: Bacon Cph, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Deriving “Ought” from “Is”

Most modern philosophers and scientists say that you can't derive "ought" from "is". They mean that you can't get any definitions of what "good" or "bad" are from any of the facts in the real world. The following argument shows otherwise.

1. First, understand Cultural Anthropology. A society’s whole system of beliefs, habits, customs, etc. for programming its citizens to act, survive, and multiply is called its culture. A tribe’s culture is its set of memories of past experiences plus the programs that people of the tribe have found useful for sifting through those memories when they meet up with a challenge and need to devise a way to respond to it. A tribe's memories of past events, along with its familiar methods for handling daily life and occasional challenges enables it to survive and flourish over the long haul. Useful strategies for healing illness, getting food, picking mates, raising kids, etc. are all in there.                                          

2. The most important long-term programs that the members of a tribe work out over generations are the most general ones. These allow us, once we've learned them, to react effectively to situations which may not be exactly like the situations our ancestors had to deal with, but which have general patterns in them that are like the patterns in the problems that our ancestors faced. For example, we may never have had to deal with a tsunami, but if our children do, and they have been told what our grandparents told us, i.e. “When the animals head for the high ground, you follow.”, we and our culture will go on. I may never have seen a sea leopard before, but if I know where every mammal’s heart has to lie, I know where to shoot to kill it.  Even more generally, I know “danger” when I see it. In short, general principles that work in the real world are valuable. We teach them to our kids because they get reliably good results.

3. The largest, deepest, most general, and most profound principles we have are what we call our values. They tell us how to design the program of actions and interactions that we engage in, day in, day out, with other members of our society and with plants, animals, and objects in our environment. Our values help us to prioritize – decide what matters, what doesn’t, and what to do about it – every minute of every day.    

4. We live by our values; if they work, they guide us well as we design all our other routines for living. If the values are well-matched to the principles of reality, then they will guide us to survive and flourish, generation to generation. Smart values make the evolving of our culture happen in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, way. Manageable change. Over centuries, wise values steer a society past pain. That is all they were ever meant to do. Values control how we pick and modify our behavior patterns, and our behavior patterns enable us to dodge hazards and seize opportunities in the real world, so that we survive, generation after generation. Therefore, our values must be in tune with the deep operating principles of the real, physical universe. So that we survive over the long haul of millions of people and thousands of years. 

5. Now, second, understand the deepest principles of the physical universe: entropy and quantum uncertainty. In essence, they tell us that life is always both hard and uncertain. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) says that life will always be uphill. Metals corrode, fabrics rot, animals and people die. Suns burn out, galaxies scatter, and planets crumble to dust. The universe is burning out. Always. Life swims against that current. Thus, life is hard and always will be. Then, quantum theory tells us life is not only hard, but also unpredictable. It sometimes “goes sideways”. And there is no way to devise a system which will give us the foresight we’d need to keep us from running into all the possible jolting surprises. The future is always uncertain. Our values guide us to better odds of surviving uncertainty, but never to total security.    

6. Now, third, put Physics together with Anthropology. In tribes that have worked out effective systems of values and behaviors, the people keep expanding and thriving in spite of the hardness and scariness of life because their values are designed to handle adversity (entropy) and uncertainty. The values that guide us to handle entropy are courage and wisdom. If a society teaches young people courage – to seek challenge, take in new territory, work out new ways of handling challenges so that courage and “grit” are simply habits they live by – then that society is more likely to survive, flourish, reproduce, and pass its way of life on to its children. If it does not handle reality well, it dies out. Maybe because of a surprise in the environment (a drought, a plague, etc.), but more probably because another society that is more vigorous overwhelms and absorbs it and its out-of-date way of life, i.e. it loses a war. 

7. The other value that has proved to be important to use along with courage for dealing with life’s adversity (entropy) is wisdom. If we only programmed our kids to seek challenge, many of them would end up dying young because they would be constantly engaging in risky behaviors that would cause them to die young. Therefore, we must also teach them to assess the potential risks and benefits of every venture they may be contemplating, and to take only those risks for which the probabilities of success look high and the probabilities of disaster, low. “Take risks, kid, but make them calculated risks.” Cost-benefit analysis. The behavior patterns that arise in tribes that value both courage and wisdom have proven effective in the survival struggle. Teach the kids: venture, but venture with a smart plan. Even in myths, ancient people's life guides, Jason (courage) needs Chiron (wisdom), Arthur needs Merlin, Luke needs Yoda, and Katniss needs Haymitch, etc.

8. As the balance of courage plus wisdom enables societies to deal with adversity, so the value we call "freedom" enables us to respond to uncertainty. Teaching kids to value freedom encourages every citizen to develop her/his talents (e.g. carpentry, math, athletics, art, cooking, healing, etc.). This gives a society a wide range of choices ready to use as it faces the challenges that the future will throw at it. Note, however, that no one versatile individual will ever come close to mastering all the skills that his society may need to call on in some future crisis. Our best bet as a community is to include a variety of people with many different skills and lifestyles so that no matter what the future throws at us, odds are that someone in town will be able to handle the crisis and guide us through it. Therefore, valuing freedom means encouraging the maximum variety of people and lifestyles that we can. Freedom, as a value taught in our society, is just a way of increasing our tribe’s versatility and survival odds over the long haul.  

9. As wisdom is the value that we teach each new generation in order to balance their courage and keep it from leading them into taking foolhardy chances and dying young, so the value that we teach to counterbalance and stabilize the effects of freedom is love. Courage alone would destroy the young persons who lived only by it; freedom alone would tear the community apart as many different kinds of people with different lifestyles would slip into cliques and grow uncaring about their neighbors. Prejudice, riots, then society breaking up would inevitably come. Like Wisdom trains and focuses courage, Love trains and focuses freedom. Therefore, love your neighbor, not in spite of the ways in which s/he is different from you, but because of those same weird ways. Someday in the uncertain, dangerous future, those ways, weird as they seem to you now, may save your community or nation – plus you, and everyone that you care about.

10. The values of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love are not just sweet-sounding. They provide guidelines for designing ways of life that work. Many varied jobs, done well, make a team, a community. In the long run, for our whole species, if we want to survive, these values simply make sense. Therefore, being kind isn’t just nice. Over the long haul, it’s our best bet. And being good means being brave, wise, creative, and loving, or at least respectful – in balance – all at once. These traits are seen as virtues in every culture on Earth because only cultures that have them have made it this far. Together, these virtues form the values-base that guides all successful human societies as they act, talk, and think. These virtues ultimately aim at one simple goal: to survive. Using these virtues, each culture works out its own way of life, by trial and error, over generations of hard experience – to suit its territory. Many cultures are possible in any given environment, but all of them will share these large values because the values work.

 

Entropy/hardship + Quantum uncertainty/hazard + Cultural evolution 

 

                               ==►  Morality (courage, wisdom, freedom, and love)                

         

In short, these values in all present cultures are just general life principles tailored to the local demands of the physical universe itself.

 

("Ought" has now been derived from "Is".) 

QED        

                                                            Modern bow hunter 

                                            (credit: BelleDeesse, via WallpaperUP) 

                                  Actors portraying cavepeople in movie 10,000 B.C. 

                                                       (credit: the Guardian)