(credit: Carol M. Highsmith, via Wikimedia Commons)  

                                        Further Thoughts On Christmas

Once again, I’m feeling a need to write about my pet peeve at Christmas so here goes. One old guy’s rant at postmodernism. Again.

For the past several years, as we approached Christmas, I have published a post here that explained my view regarding this holiday, the second most celebrated in the world. (The most celebrated is New Year’s Day.) My message is always: celebrate the ideals behind the day; then you can stand the nonsense and even feel, profoundly, the real spirit of Christmas.

I don’t think of myself as a Christian because I don’t believe Jesus was divine, or more accurately, I believe he had a light in his thinking that all of us have in some degree, though his was the greatest of all so far. But he was still a man, human, and I don’t pray to him. That is polytheism. For deep reasons, too many to explain in this post, I don’t trust any form of polytheism.

On the other hand, I like his message of love for all humans and of reducing our concern for material things. Let Caesar people have what’s theirs. Money and the things money can buy. We have more profound concerns in daily life. Work. Love.

That message of love and humility is what I believe in celebrating. Others had said it before, but Jesus, by the drama of his life and death, made it personal. That ideal is worth celebrating. The rest of modern Christmas is tinsel show.

However, I’m not patient with folk who get offended by the greeting, “Merry Christmas”. I understand their distaste.  Throughout history, a lot of cruelty and injustice has been perpetrated in Jesus’ name by various Christian entities: nations, churches, charities, and others. From the earliest days of Christianity, till now. I’m well aware of it.

My reply to those charges has remained pretty much the same over the years. In the first and most obvious place, none of that was Jesus’ fault. He asked his followers to practice humility and compassion – at levels almost unheard of in his times – to all other humans, not just members of their ingroup. That belief and the practices it entails are what we celebrate at Christmas, not the support some churches gave to colonialism, slavery, the Inquisition, or the Crusades. The sins of Christianity’s past are sins of people, not Jesus. Not Christmas.

In the second place, all of the other faiths of the world have had their glaring errors, including scientism itself, which is the philosophy that the most heated critics of Christmas often recommend to us. There have been too many atrocities committed by people who claimed their loyalty was to science for any serious person to ever hold science up as our moral guide. Both Stalin and Hitler had their “sciences”. Even Heisenberg failed morally in those times.

But there is more to my distaste for the Christmas bashers than that. There is something deeper going on here.  

In the largest, global view of all humans, we see that we have to have something. Each of us has to have some code of behavior in our heads to even live together, go to work, smile at the drugstore clerk, and take out the trash. A human with no code of behavior in her head is catatonic: she sits and stares and drools.

You are weighing and choosing your actions this second. Your code is personal, yes, and very complex, yes, but it must be in there. If you’re reading this, you aren’t catatonic. Those who tell us that we should give up on the idea of moral codes altogether are spouting drivel. Postmodernist kaka.

There are major variations in codes of acceptable behavior between cultures and even between individuals within any given culture in the world this very moment. But there are enough areas of overlap between citizens in Canada, for example, for us to be able to live together, work, produce goods and services, get paid, make babies, raise them, and keep on keeping on.

I will repeat my point here to be clear: we all – but for the psychopaths and the catatonics – have a behavior code of some sort installed as a major app in our brains. We have beliefs about right and wrong, and they guide us as we make choices and act every minute of every day. If we didn’t,  we couldn’t. All of those abstractions together – for those who like cyber terms – are our software.

The thought that scares me about the critics of Christmas is a two pronged fear. In the first place, they seem to be exhorting the rest of us to drop all of our connections to all past moral codes. This is a central point for postmodernists, and it sounds glibly appealing. But I wonder what they offer to replace those codes, and more specifically, for this present season, the ideals behind the Christmas greeting. They, we, all of us, can’t get by on no values, beliefs, ideals, or moral code of any kind. Then, since we must have something in place in our heads in order to run our lives, I repeat: what do they suggest?

Whether they want to admit it or not, most of the cynics who sneer at Christmas are riding on the customs and values of the Judeo-Christian system of believing and behaving. We, in the West, are the current exponents of that movement in world history. For the most part, we aren’t Oriental, American indigenous, or African in our beliefs, values, and world views. And yes, our system of believing is stuffed with flaws and needs serious updating. But to say we must just drop even the idea of having such things as beliefs, ethics, or values from our thinking is ridiculous. No one chooses catatonia.

So what do the postmodernists suggest if we drop entirely the traditional ways of thought and behavior, including, more specifically for this season, all mention of Jesus’ ideals at Christmas?

What has been ensuing in the wake of that cynicism in my lifetime (75 years) is not the world of John Lennon’s “Imagine”. What we’re getting is much clearer than that if we have the honest eyes to really look: a new, modern saint who is even called “Saint”. Dressed in white and red. He smiles as he tells all, including the youngest of kids, his simple creed: buy stuff. More and more stuff. Trees, ornaments, presents, food, booze, pills. Stuff will make you happy.  

My grandkids all get gift certificates. I encourage them to buy books. Or food stuffs, which have biodegradable consequences. But I tell all nine of them, as calmly as I can: “Ask every item you see in every store and on every website: ‘Hello, little item! How long till you’re in the landfill?’”

In short what I’m saying is that there’s a whole conversation here the Christmas critics aren’t having because, I believe, they don’t want to. If we take all beliefs and values out of our culture – including Jesus’ beliefs in loving and respecting our fellow humans and turning away from materialism – which are the things Christmas is about – then, what will we replace those beliefs with? Santa!??

Merry Christmas. You didn’t hear it here first, but you did hear it here. Merry Christmas. Peace on earth. Good will toward all the human family. And I exhort you: ignore the material junk. That’s the whole point. It’s junk. Christmas is about something else entirely. Merry Christmas from one old guy in Canada.

       https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Postpartum_baby3.jpg

          Passenger plane hitting World Trade Center tower, NYC, Sept. 11, 2001           

                    (credit: https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/09/10/remembering-                                                    the-september-11th-terrorist-attacks/) 

                                    (credit: David Handschuh, NY Daily News) 

                                             (further citation above) 

                                   9/11: Personal Reflections

I have a number of American friends, some physically in my life off and on, and some online friends whose thoughts I enjoy reading. I identify deeply with the basic premises of America: freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of movement, worship, commerce and markets, and so on. The rejection of titles, kings, and aristocracies. America, this one’s for you.

I didn’t hear about the 9/11 attacks until about 7 a.m. Pacific Time on this day in the calendar twenty three years ago. I was rushed that morning, I had so much to do when I got to school, much of it before our scheduled start time for classes. (No real classes were going to happen.) I didn’t turn on the tv in my home at all.

When I tuned in to my car radio on the way to work, the South Tower had just collapsed. The CBC local radio had switched to CBC’s reporter in New York, who was orally agog. A bad metaphor, but readers know what I mean. The second tower went down while I was trying to do prep work for classes and watching t.v. monitors, which in our new school were all over the building.

I bumped into my old friend and colleague, Jim Holtz, as I was coming out of the photocopying room just a minute before the North Tower’s collapse. Subtle irony. Jim was a draft dodger from Illinois who had come to Canada in 1968 to shun the terrible killing in Viet Nam. We walked upstairs together.

Obviously, he still had a lot of family and friends back in the U.S., though many of them had not talked to him since he’d left for Canada, and, as it turned out, would never talk to him again. He died of cancer in 2017. Best of my colleagues and a gentleman and a scholar in every way. I miss him now, as I write these lines.

Anyway, he was getting misty as we walked and kept glancing at screens. When the North Tower went down – all shown up close and intensely personal, I wept, “What, so now a bunch of innocents have to die for the sins of some politicians in a government most of them don’t even like!” (Yes, I do talk that way.) Jim didn’t weep, but his eyes were moist, and he muttered something like, “Apparently so.” Only that.  

Let me add, my American friends, that a hundred plus Canadians were working in the twin towers that day at that time, and twenty four of them died there. We did feel your pain and still do.

A week later, NYC had a service open to the families and friends of all who had died there. I remember one Canadian woman who went down for that service being interviewed afterward, again by the CBC. She had held onto an American woman who knew she was Canadian, and who had cried to her in anguish, “Why do they hate us so much?!!”

This was in the middle of the worst grief of both of their lives. I think one had lost a husband, the other a son. We have to keep the mitigating factors in mind.

And let’s also keep in mind that over 33,000 people from 230 commercial planes were immediately grounded in Canada. The radio orders were to clear the skies and across that huge space – mid-Atlantic to mid-Pacific and north and south for similar distances, the clearing of the skies by U.S. and Canadian Air Forces was done in about 40 minutes.

6,700 people had to land in Gander, Nfld. alone, a town which existed to service trans-Atlantic flights with fuel and provisions. There were under 10,000 people normally living in Gander, but between homes, schools, churches, etc., the locals took them all in, gave them showers, meals, and beds, and embraced them in their anguish. For about a week. (“Come From Away” is a true story.) Like Ambassador Taylor had done in Tehran with the Americans who had eluded capture when so-called “students” there had seized the U.S. embassy in 1979.

Were Canadians in those cases being warm? Human? Compassionate? Oh, for God’s sake, America! Let your friends love you. Yes, we disagree sometimes. But we live next door. We know you. Often better than you know yourselves. We still like you. A lot, actually.

But my point today is about that Canadian woman at the open service in NYC a week of so after 9/11 and her sharing her grief with her new American friend. Like most Canadians back then, she reacted to “Why do they hate us so much?” with a mixture of bemusement and incredulity. 

The tone of the CBC report on that small incident also implied the Canadian reaction. “Lady, where have you been? Do you know anything about the puppet regimes that America has been propping up in other countries all over since at least Teddy Roosevelt’s times. Saddam Hussein was a CIA boy until he wasn’t. Do you know of Mossadegh’s murder in Iran? The Shah was the CIA’s stooge. Trujillo closer to home? Duvalier? Marcos? Batista right off your coast? Mobutu? Diem?"

And on and on. Even the money that built Hitler’s state was largely from American banks, though, in fairness, not American governments.

But people in foreign lands conflate all Americans. In their view, “regimes is memes and banks, schmanks”. "You’re all in it together," they say.

That’s not the fault of any ordinary citizens going to work today in the U.S., but it does in a subtle way show us why America had to abandon the whole idea of isolationism and why it is simple survival to teach world awareness and history to your children. World leadership, involvement, and responsibility are on you now, like it or lump it. The world’s markets, governments, and cultures are intertwined, and growing more so as I write. You're the one remaining superpower. You can’t ignore the world or even any major part thereof or you’ll pay. Not fair. But real.

This writer needs to stop ranting. This writer needs to calm down.   

What am I trying to say today? Do a lot of people in a lot of places curse the very name “America”? Yes, and partly with sound reasons.

They too are kidding themselves, of course. American governments much of the time were just protecting their citizens. Local populations want American cash and expertise, government and private. And companies especially are not there to watch their investments shrink. They look to whoever locally can bring order out of the chaos, and to be clear, chaos often is what they find. So back a local strong man and get on with mining or logging or whatever. Politics are not our business, say the corporate boards. They are wrong.  

And that’s the heart of the matter. You have to pay attention to the justices and injustices done in your name, my American friends. 

Or maybe, more fairly, I should say, “all my friends in the West”. We like to think we’re the grown ups in this global playground. And to a high degree, we are. Or at least, we should be. We have the material means to make a difference. 

If we’re going to survive, we’re going to have to start acting that way. Adult. Calm. Balanced. Fair. Responsible. Looking to treat our brothers and sisters everywhere like our brothers and sisters everywhere. Not like means to a profit. 

The world has an excess of profit and of stuff. Meaningless junk. Time to turn to each other.

Thoughts on 9/11.

On the other side of some sober thoughts, have a sober day. As you should. And in fairness, as should all of us here in the West.   

                       (Woman covered in dust minutes after first tower collapsed)

                                                        (citation as above) 

         US Secret Service agent carrying woman from the site

(credit: citation as above) 

                                         I have not winced, nor cried aloud       

                                             Kathleen Quinlan 

                                  (actress who played Deb in movie of 

                               "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden") 

                                           (credit: Wikipedia) 

                        

Here’s a post that gets its point from a work of literature. Art is safer to talk about than real life. After all, a novel is fiction, right?

One of the great novels of the last century is called “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden”. It is about a period during the life of a teenaged girl named “Deb”, who suffers a serious mental illness and ends up in an asylum for nearly three years. She does get better, due partly to her family’s support, but even more to some brilliant and compassionate work by her psychiatrist whose name is "Dr. Hannah Fried". 

It’s a brilliant novel and deserves to be rated as one of the best ten or so American novels ever written. Written by a woman about a woman being healed by a woman, with the love and support of her mom, who’s also – how gratifying! – a woman. Which is all beside the point.

It’s a brilliant novel, period, regardless of which gender, class, or race it focuses on. Universal, which seems to be rated of little importance these days. But all drivel aside, my post today focuses on one scene from that novel.

Deb’s story happens during World War Two. A lot of the men are far away fighting the Japanese and the Germans, which means that jobs are hard to fill. Some of the staff in Deb’s hospital are very caring and professional, but some definitely are not. In better times, they would not even have been there. They hate the job and hate the insane, who can be pretty trying at times, which is only what one would expect.

In one scene in the novel, the strongest woman on Deb’s ward, who has in the past done serious, physical injury to other patients and to staff, has been tied down on a gurney in a wet sheet pack, a measure which was used to calm violent patients. The point is that Helene, the patient in question, is helpless, and she is in a separate room off the main hallway of the ward. Almost soundproof. 3 a.m. There are two patients in there in wet sheet packs on this night, the other being Deb.

A seriously neurotic attendant named ‘Ellis’ is on duty for midnight shift. He has come in to check their pulses to see whether they have calmed down enough to be allowed to go to sleep in their beds. He is indifferent to Deb, but he despises Helene. It soon shows. When he turns her head to get easier access to her carotid pulse, he emphasizes his power over Helene with some unnecessary roughness. She is not to be toyed with, even strapped down helpless. She curses at him. He slaps her. She spits at him. He slaps her again.

Slap. Spit. Slap. Spit. Fist.

As Deb watches, helpless, humiliated, ashamed, he punches Helene ten or a dozen times hard, while she, of course, can’t do anything but spit at him. She spits blood, then blood and chips of teeth. She gives up when she is almost beaten unconscious. He takes her pulse, picks up his clipboard, writes something, and leaves.

The scene is ugly and infuriating. Even more for Deb, it is humiliating. She must witness this ugliness and see Helene broken by violence at the hands of a dysfunctional male who never should have been in such a position of power. She feels secretly ashamed that she didn’t scream, which was, of course, because she was scared. Helene would not cry out because of her own “hard girl” code. So in the end, what gets done about the matter is nothing.

My point today, by a bit of a lateral leap, is that we are witnessing in these times, the social parallel of Helene’s suffering. People – or we should say, whole peoples, whole tribes – in some dire circumstances, become just as tough, just as determined as Helene to endure no matter what. Right into the grave.

The Palestinians have become that. They have suffered for seventy years. Robbed, beaten, humiliated, starved, killed. Abandoned even by other Arab states. They didn’t get the kind of despairing, numb, cynical, and hard they are now in a decade or even a generation. It took years and years. But they’re there now.

The Israelis could kill ninety nine percent of the people in Gaza and the West Bank. The remaining one percent – under fifty thousand – would keep spitting blood and chips of teeth. From all over the earth.  

Deb got better. A good doctor. A supportive family, both due, at least in part, to their having money. She went back to the world.

Did Helene ever get better? The book does not say. She might have. Or she might have died there. She just gets dropped out of the story.

Her character no longer shapes or informs the narrative.

But Deb’s story is all fiction anyway. Who cares?  

                                     Gaza: digging for bodies

                         (credit: Associate Press website: Nov. 17, 2023) 

               (https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-buried-                           rubble-airstrikes-89c0e8d0934d573d94d2fbfeba44d933)

                                   Do You Like This Stuff?

Today, I’m offering a post that is not part of the piece I’m currently working on. A small departure. I feel driven to air some thoughts on the mess in the Middle East that’s flaring out of control now in 2024. Again.

I have thought for many years that one indicator of when I am getting closer to the truth on a subject is seen when I’m infuriating parties on every side. In short, too often, I know I’m getting closer to the truth the more I piss people off.

But damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. Truth doesn’t need the approval of anyone, no matter how important they seem in the “corrupted currents of this world [where] Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice”. (Hamlet)

What you’re saying is making people mad? Good!

So?

What have Bettin’ Yahoo and his ilk demonstrated over the last few months? That fanaticism leads to the most painful of ironies: you become the thing you thought, at the outset, that you hated. He has made Israel into a genocidal state. There isn’t one rationalization that he and his cabinet have given for their actions in Gaza over the past 11 months that hasn’t been used many times before, including by the Nazis. He has become the monster that he said he set out to destroy.

To preserve their culture, the people in Gaza have died in numbers at least thirty times those of the Israelis just in the last year. And finally, those Gazans are showing signs of collapsing? Hah! Not one bit. If anything, their resolve is hardening. Yahoo is learning he can’t “make Israel secure” by inflicting pain. No one can. In fact, the more suffering his troops heap onto the people of Gaza, the more determined the people of Gaza become.

To Israelis, that patch of dirt is land promised to them by Yahweh in the Torah in – what they see as – the beginning of time. To Palestinians, that land has been theirs for just as long. They are the descendants of the Philistines of the Bible.

Archeology says they’re both wrong. There were other tribes on that land before both Israelis and Palestinians. Which matters to – apparently – no one.

The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Gita – all the “holy” texts – are not legal documents. But to the fanatics of a hundred faiths, “man’s law” is irrelevant. Each has its book and its fanatics. Its "law". 

Let’s review a few more of the arguments.

Balfour promised that land to the early Zionists of modern times in 1917. Answer: The land was not his or his country’s to promise.

The Jews of Europe were the victims of the worst crime in history: the Holocaust. The world owed the Jews a land of their own. Answer: If we even entertain that possibility, we immediately must concede that those same Jews, mostly of Europe, have far more right to a piece of central Europe than they do to Palestine. The Germans and Poles were the nations that most miserably failed the Jews in every moral sense. Maybe, what was East Germany should have become the Jewish Homeland.

Furthermore, the Palestinian people had zero to do with the Holocaust. In fact, every recognized nation of those World War Two times was far guiltier in the matter of the Holocaust than the Palestinians, including all the free nations of the West.

The Jews were a people without a land who found a land without a people? Utterly false. There were people already there. Thousands of them. Yes, they lived in a technology well behind that of the West. No, that did not give anyone in the West or anywhere else the right to say they could be evicted from homes and lands their families had occupied for centuries.

The first people in modern times who called themselves ‘Israelis’ fought for and won that land against massive odds at the founding of Israel. So what? That ethic would endorse Nazism. Violence makes you right, say the Nazis. Winners write the history texts. Yes, they often do, but no, that does not make them right. Genghis Khan was a scary guy. His conquests still awe us. But no one wants him back. He became a monster. Like Hitler.

On the other other hand, (in logic, we have a lot of hands), the early Israelis did want to live together with their Arab neighbors and get along. It was Arabs who said “No deal. Get out!”

The Jews truly had suffered beyond any people ever during the Holocaust. They have a moral right to a homeland. If as a people they have resolved to trust no nation to look after them ever again, who can blame them? Six million - probably a low estimate - dead. Never again. 

I could go on, but the point is that all this is explainable by Social Science and none of it has to be this way.

Every tribe, not just Jews and Arabs, has its own culture. Every culture teaches its young when they are most impressionable that their way of life is the one truly human way. Almost always as well, the programming tells them that the divine power that their people have always believed in is real and has endorsed one way of life above all others.

I say such programming is all lies.

What the universe favors over the long generations and centuries is pluralism. A lot of different kinds of people, different in gender choices, creeds, skin tones, cheekbones, abilities, disabilities, and so on. A social ecosystem in which human rights protecting every minority and every individual are enforced by a democratic rule of law.

As long as you don’t try to force your way of life onto anyone else, you’re okay by me.

Unfortunately, there are a lot more tribes than just the Israelis and the Arabs who have the way of life and who are patiently, so patiently, waiting for the rest of the human species to see the light.

(We say we are God’s chosen people because we are. Why can’t you get that?)

The Jews, much of the West, in fact is actually saying, in simple modern terms, to the Arabs, “Get over it.”

The Arabs, in fact much of the Developing World, are actually saying, in simple modern terms, “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”

Oh, the patience of them all! The righteous anger!

But if Sociology is telling us that every tribe thinks its way of life is normal, natural, human, and right, does Sociology say that our warring and our eventually annihilating our species is an inevitability? Not quite.

Send your kids, all of them, to well-funded, well run, quality public schools in which no one faith group dictates what every child will study. The curriculum must be secular; a separation of church and state, for the schools are an arm of the state, which should be faith neutral.

If the first wave of modern Israeli education had put all the kids on that dirt into such schools, quietly endorsed science, not German science, art, not European art, history, not Islamic history, music, not Jewish music, and so on – if parents then had had the will and the vision to say ‘We shall raise citizens of the world, not good little Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus … or any others of the sects that put their holy books’ authority above the human rights of every citizen, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

Furthermore, as long as we allow schools in which such ‘higher authorities’ are being endorsed and taught, the suffering we’re seeing now will go on.

So I’ll ask again: if you want your kids to go to schools that endorse and teach some holy texts of some ancient tribe over science, world literature, and history, then do you like this stuff? Screaming kids, screaming parents, ripped limbs, shattered bones, and slumped dead bodies being dug out of rubble? Do you like this stuff?

If you choose any form of religious schooling for your children, this is what you ultimately are choosing. In the actions that speak so much louder than words, you are endorsing endless conflict. Maybe, the end of our species in not too long from now.

Do you like this stuff? 

          Elementary school in Meah She'arim, Israel    March 27, 2012 

                                (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

               Palestinian school in Fallujah, Iraq (March 20, 2005) 

                              (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

A Defense of Moral Realism: Introduction: Part 2

     U.S. Navy plane flying over Soviet missile cargo ship bound for Cuba

                                          (credit: Wikipedia) 

To continue on from my last post then, I will say that at about the time I was learning the steps in the scientific method, I also developed an obsession with a second matter: the moral side of human life. Events in the world caused me to feel deeply that we’re facing one problem that is clearly the most desperate that we need to solve.

The deepest question is not one like “Can we cure this flu?” or “Can we eradicate this moth?” The deepest question is not: “Can we?”, it is: “Should we?” “Would this act be right?” In short, the problem to which we should be devoting our best science is “What is right?” For us. 

My Science 9 teacher also taught us, a few weeks later, about atomic theory and the nuclear weapons that several nations in the world already had in 1963. And I understood how science had led us to these too. They filled me with dread.  

A year before the scientific method lesson, I’d seen terror in the faces of adults around me – my parents, teachers, even adults in stores I visited. October ‘62. Humanity hovered on the brink of nuclear war. Few of the adults understood how atom bombs worked, but they knew if those bombs were used, they would cause unimaginable destruction, maybe even an end to all life on earth. By smart human agency and some luck, we came through that crisis. But only just.

Over a year later, I got another massive shock. Just after my scientific method lesson, President Kennedy was assassinated. Two days later, his alleged assassin was also assassinated.

These two events – the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s assassination – led me to conclude that the adults of my world had little understanding of, or control over, what was going on in international events. At the very least, if our leaders were doing their best, then the model of human social behavior that they were using was inadequate.

It’s terrifying for a boy to see fear in the eyes of adults he’s been trusting all his life. But I had also learned this amazing method, this thinking tool, that I could use to solve any problem, and I felt the way out of the mess of the modern world – nuclear arms proliferation, ecosystem collapse, overpopulation – was in front of us. Science. All we have to do is use it on ourselves. I believed that then and I believe it now. There is hope for us if we follow science well. Even History, Sociology, and Anthropology – our human tribal ways – could be understood by science.

So, I set a challenge for myself: use the scientific method to discover why we humans act the way we do, and if that much could be solved, then use the model developed via this line of research to hypothesize how we could act to reduce the odds of our destroying ourselves. If an effective model of human group behavior can be found, this model could guide us to a universal moral code. A code that is science-based and that tells us how we should treat each other. We could use it to redesign our societies so that we dramatically improve our survival odds.   

What follows in the rest of this essay is what I have been able to conclude so far from my studies of the humanities and social sciences and of people in my everyday life. My hope is that some young persons will pursue this project, develop the model of history that I present here, make a strong case for their version of that model, and then persuade enough of their brothers and sisters of its accuracy to form a critical mass: a group of people resolute and skilled enough to update the operating system of this pale blue dot.

That operating system, of course, is the human species. Us.

And here, to end this Introduction, I’ll address one last group, namely people who say this whole project, this reprogramming of the nations of the world with a new moral code, even if we could articulate a one, is just too huge. They have lives, and those lives are so stuffed with worries as to be barely bearable as it is. They’re worn out just holding on.

My reply is: “Look around. There is no one else. We save us, or we’re done. That’s the bottom line.” 

                   President Kennedy and cabinet meeting (Oct. 29, '62) 

                                                 (credit: Wikipedia) 

A Defense of Moral Realism: Introduction 

Part 1 

 Science is our hope and yes, I really believe that 

                                                                                 Svend Hansen 

                                teacher, principal, school board member,                                             

                                        Edmonton, Alberta  

                            (credit: Edmonton Public Schools) 

In grade 9, I had a really good Science teacher. He loved Science, he loved kids, and he loved getting the two together, which is all a good teacher really ever has to do. On a cool fall day in Edmonton in 1963, he taught my Science 9 class a basic lesson: the scientific method – what it says, how it works, and why it gets the amazing results that it does. I’m sure that I have embellished the picture in the years since that day, but basically, I recall clearly that on that day I got the scientific method, which is to say I understood it, and it filled me with hope.

I saw that prior to the arrival of science in my society, when people had had a question about some events in their lives – a question for which they had no stock answers – they had consulted wise women and men who were supposed to be able to give them answers. But often the answer was: “Because the gods decreed it that way. Our lot in life is to accept their decrees, not question them.”  In fact, people generally believed that the profound truths of the universe were beyond reason and evidence, too complex for almost any humans to grasp.

They believed a few special people could see those truths by revelation, a rare state of mind that was a gift that could not be attained by reason or discipline.

Lesser truths – about how to deliver babies or keep goats healthy or similar practical matters – could come to some minds via years of apprenticeship under a master of midwifery or goat husbandry or whatever. But even the masters’ knowledge had come via masters of previous generations. In other words, most of the tribe’s knowledge was passed down like habits – older people training younger ones in the knowledge and skills that the tribe had accumulated slowly over generations, mostly by trial and error, not reason and not revelation.  

Without revelation, humans could grasp only these lesser truths. What right and wrong are and why the cosmos exist weren’t matters for ordinary folk to understand. Instead, those things were learned as dogma and accepted without logical explanation or question. Some of each tribe’s knowledge was justified by something like science – by reasoning and evidence, in other words – but much more was justified by religious belief, with many ideas justified by bits of both. All of these then made up the total conscious wisdom of the tribe.

And many of every tribe’s ways weren’t conscious and weren’t justified at all; they were customs so ingrained that no one raised in the tribe noticed them.

Each tribe accumulated knowledge gradually over generations, and even then, a tribe’s total stock of knowledge was small when compared to its ignorance.

The scientific method changes this picture. With the scientific method – what Bacon called the “Novum Organum” – people could go beyond explanations like “we’ve always done it that way” or “the gods decreed it that way.” People could choose to respond to a problem that they wanted to solve by first, studying it closely, then forming a hypothesis about why it was the way it was, i.e., an explanation based on reasoning and evidence and pointing to possible causes and effects for why events might be unfolding in the ways that they did.

Then, if I were the seeker of understanding in this picture, I could imagine an experiment by which I could test to see whether my hypothesis worked: that is, I could imagine future circumstances in which – if my explanation of what was going on was correct – I’d be able to predict what was going to happen next. Most of the time, most hypotheses turned out to be wrong. But the seekers kept trying, and once in a while they hit on a bit of knowledge that was amazingly useful. They found a new way of looking at the world that worked so well that it gave them new power to direct the events of their lives.

How to make fire or how to make wheels were ideas of this breakthrough type, but we’ll probably never know who first had those ideas. On the other hand, we’re fairly certain it was Archimedes, a Greek scientist who lived and worked over 2200 years ago, who figured out how things can float in water. Anything wholly or partly immersed in a liquid will be buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the liquid that it displaces. If the water displaced weighs more than the thing being immersed, the thing will float. This was a very useful insight because it enabled people who built ships to design the hulls of those ships with great skill. By doing more testing, Greek shipbuilders learned to make fast, efficient warships and cargo ships. Then, shipbuilding became very profitable in Ancient Greece.

It is useful to note here that any hypothesis that can’t be tested in this physically observable way is not science. Science has no interest in untestable hypotheses.  

Note that future circumstances about which I am making my prediction might be ones I can set up at will. For example, if I hypothesize that using a longer lever will increase the load that I can move, then when I get a longer lever under this boulder I’m straining to remove from my field, I should be able to move that boulder with the same force I had applied to my end of the first lever that didn’t work just a few minutes ago.

Similarly, if I have by coincidence found a new chemical substance that I think will kill coddling moths, I can spray it into an enclosed chamber of a few cubic meters of air set up in my lab, one in which I have already trapped a dozen or so adult coddling moths crawling about on a small apple tree. If all the coddling moths die in the space of a few hours, then I will be able to conclude, tentatively, that I have found a new pesticide which kills coddling moths.

But it is also worth noting here that there are some hypotheses for which I can’t set up test conditions. Hypotheses in astronomy are clear examples of ones that I can’t test in a lab whenever I want to. I can’t summon up a comet anytime I please; I can’t check at will whether comets reflect more blue light than yellow light. But comets large enough for me to study through my telescope do pass by the earth every few years. I can test my hypothesis if I just show a little patience and wait for the next one.

In either case, when the phenomenon that I am interested in happens, if I am a serious scientist, I will observe changes to the physical properties of the things I am studying. I will carefully record all of my observations or data, and after the events I’m watching are done, I will study my data to see whether the outcome that I predicted would happen, did in fact happen as I said it would.

Sometimes, the prediction comes true in obvious ways, as when the coddling moths in the chamber all die. Whether the pesticide I’ve found is safe for other species is another question, but these moths are dead. With the longer lever, I can move the stone I could not move before. Hypotheses can be confirmed.  

Sometimes the predictions made by scientists doing the experiment come true visibly, even dramatically. But often in our era, the results of research are only observable via instruments (microscopes, telescopes, etc.), and even then, only over very long or very short timespans. Scientists today often use instruments to cause a change to happen, then use more instruments to record data as they happen. They save the recorded data and study them, and do calculations with them, after the experiment is done.

Let’s reiterate that in all cases – ones of large phenomenon or very tiny ones, very fast or very slow ones – in order for a hypothesis to be considered scientific, it must be observably testable. The experiment is set up so that the observations will clearly either confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis. I’ll see the results I predicted either clearly happen or clearly fail to happen.

Often, what we find out is that we ought to be trying to steer nature with much more care and nuance than we have been doing. For example, my moth-killing pesticide may also cause birds in my area to die; this may allow other pests to breed rampantly. Meanwhile, by more experiments I may learn that there are other species in the orchard that control coddling moths without upsetting the natural balances there.

Today, everything we know about nature is leading us to the conclusion that we can affect natural balances, but we must learn to do so carefully if we don’t want to cause side-effects that will be unpleasant for us. Thus, instead of using a pesticide, I may choose to breed predator species that eat coddling moth eggs. Then, if I release large numbers of these predators into my orchard, I may be able to wipe out coddling moths in my whole area. And no toxic chemicals will need to go into the orchard at all.

It is also useful to say here that most humans are hypothesis-makers. We like to try to figure things out, imagine possible explanations for events happening around us. We have curious minds.

What a mind is exactly can be hard to define. So I am going to postulate for the purposes of this essay that all living things have at least a primitive mind. I say this because research is telling us that even protozoa like amoeba can learn new rules and change their behaviors when their worlds change. Thus, I am going to describe, not define, what a mind is by saying it is a trait possessed by any organism that is able to recognize patterns in events and then come to avoid those events that will cause it damage or to pursue ones that hold opportunity.

All living things can do this. How exactly they do – how living things learn and know – we so far can’t characterize in simpler terms. But we see their actions.

But why should we have to give simpler definitions? All realms of knowledge begin from definitions of a few basic terms that are considered self-evident and necessary if that field of knowledge is to be explained. Terms like “point” or “line” in Geometry; “mass” and “force” in Physics. Etc.

So let’s propose for this essay’s sake that mind is a quality any entity has if it can learn from experience to change its ways of behaving so as to avoid hazards and pursue opportunities relevant to its own well-being. 

What the scientific method did for our more curious ancestors – when they kept it in mind – is that it gave them a systematic series of steps to follow, steps that would lead them to more and more models and theories that worked better and better for predicting results of recognized patterns in events. Such models then enabled them to steer events in nature or steer around them and, consequently, to live healthier, safer, more satisfying lives.

The overall conclusion to be drawn from this discussion of the scientific method, however, is that it offers us a path toward better and better understanding of the things in our universe. I got that at thirteen years old. I could see, via many examples, that the scientific method works. It gives us more and more control over nature, and thus, over our lives.

For all of my years since that day, I have believed that, given some time, science can solve every problem we humans encounter. Sometimes, it does not give us exact laws that enable us to make exact predictions. Instead, in many fields, a new theory only gives statistical laws that may be used to predict the odds of some event occurring. But statistical laws are still science, not superstition.  

For example, a theory of how hurricanes occur won’t enable scientists to stop a hurricane from making landfall or even say how many there will be in the next three months. But once a hurricane is developing in the open ocean, the theory may enable the scientists to say, day by day, that the odds that a hurricane will hit the coast are growing to near certainty. They can even predict where it will hit a day before it does so. Then, people can be warned to get out of its way.

No cancer research can yet say for sure which of us will get cancer, but research can tell us that our odds of getting cancer drop by over half if we quit smoking.  

In addition, note that if testing shows a theory sometimes leads us to predictions that don’t work, the next step is not to halt research on that theory. The next step is to test the theory further by experiments designed to reveal why it is only working some of the time. Scientific testing – if it truly fits the term “scientific” – always points the way to more and better science.

Science is not now and never will be complete. It’s always telling us to think and test more precisely. Form new models and theories; test them in subtler ways. We’re never done with any problem in science, but our theories and our ways of testing them get more and more nuanced and focused.

Thus, at 13, I found a love for science. Thank you, Mister Hansen. You may be long gone, but you gave me a gift that has put wonder in me to this day. 

            Francis Bacon, father of the scientific method

                           (credit: Wikipedia)