Chapter 2    Part C 

   

British Army bulldozer burying bodies at Bergen-Belsen

  

  British soldiers forcing German guards to load bodies

    Following the First World War, to exacerbate the moral confusion and despair, the man-made horrors of the twentieth century began to mount. They are so many and so ugly. The Russian Revolution and Civil War. The worldwide Depression. World War II, six times as destructive as World War I. Hitler’s camps. Stalin’s camps. And on and on. But we don’t need to describe any more. The point is that they were the actions of a species that had gained great physical power at the same time as it lost its moral compass, or, more plainly, its ability to handle that power.

    The big question (What is right?) and the big fears that go with it have only grown. Where will the code that we need to guide our behavior in international affairs, business, or even everyday matters come from now?

    From the nation to the person, some coherent code must be in place in order for us to function, even if that code is mostly programmed into the subconscious. People without any operating code in place can’t act at all. They are called “catatonic”. The problem today is that for millions of people all over the world, the old moral codes that used to guide all that human beings did are fading. World War I was the first in a series of real world shocks that have deeply rocked all of our beliefs - our beliefs about the value of our Science and, even more deeply, our beliefs about our codes of right and wrong.

     So let me reiterate: what is far worse is that, collectively, the gurus of Science, though they have been able to achieve amazing things in the realms of machines, chemicals, medicines, etc., have had nothing to say about how we should or should not be using these technologies. Many of them even go so far as to claim that “should” is a word that has no meaning in Science.

    It seems bitterly unfair that the same Science that eroded our moral beliefs then offered nothing to put in their place. But what seems far more cruelly, diabolically ironic is that at the same time as Science was eroding our religious/moral beliefs out from under us, it was putting into our hands technologies of such destructive power that we can’t help but wonder whether any individual or group of individuals could ever be moral enough to handle them responsibly.

               

         We are living in a time of terrifying uncertainty. We now have the weapons to scorch our planet in one afternoon – so totally that the chances of our species surviving in that post-apocalyptic world are effectively zero.

     Furthermore, even if we escape the holocaust of nuclear war, we are also steadily polluting our planet. We know that we are, but we can’t seem to stop, even though the vast majority of the scientists who study the Earth and its ecosystems say that the point of no return is rapidly approaching. To people who have studied the Earth and its systems, the risk of environmental collapse is even more frightening than that of nuclear war.

   Large numbers of us, in the meantime, “lack all conviction”. Without a moral code to guide us – one that we truly believe is founded in the real world – we are like deer on the highway, stunned in the headlights, seemingly incapable of recognizing our peril.

               

         All reasonable, informed people today know these things. In fact, we are so weary of hearing what are called the “dire predictions” that we don’t want to think about them anymore. Or we think, get scared, and go out with our friends to get intoxicated. There seems to be little else one ordinary person or even clusters of rich and powerful persons can do. The problems are too big and too insidious for us – individually or collectively. Shut it out. Forget about it. Try to live “decently”. Hope for the best.

               

         For me, none of these answers are good enough. To ignore all of the evidence and arguments and resign myself to the “inevitable” is to give in to a whole way of thinking I cannot accept. That way of thinking says that the events of human lives are determined by forces that are beyond human control.

    I disagree. I have to. I believe true philosophers must.

     Whether we are talking about the cynicism of people who focus on events in their personal lives or the cynicism of some of the people who study all human history, or at any level in between, I have to tell these cynics bluntly: “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this debate because you wouldn’t be here.” 

Albert Camus, French philosopher (1913 - 1960) 
   
    As Camus sees it, suicide is the most sincere of all acts.(5) Its only equal is the living of a genuine life. A genuine person stays on in this world by conscious choice, not by inertia.  A genuine person is still here because he or she chooses to be. The other kind of person may claim to be totally disillusioned with this world and the people in it, but that simply can’t be the case if he or she is still alive and talking. These people are only partitioning up their minds, for the time being, into the manageable compartments of cynicism. But the disillusionment that they feel now – on any scale, personal to global – is going to seem minor compared to that which they are one day going to feel with themselves, one day when their fragile partitions begin to give way. And it doesn’t have to be that way, as we shall see.

    So, to sum up our case so far, what have we shown? First, that Science has undercut and eroded the old beliefs in God and the old codes of right and wrong. Second, that, because of our ongoing need just to manage our lives and because, even more importantly, of our recently acquired and constantly growing need to manage wisely the physical powers that Science has put into our hands, we must find a way to replace the moral code that we no longer believe in with one that we do believe in. Then, perhaps we will have a chance - a chance just to live, to go on, to get past our present peril.

    If we can work out a moral code that we do truly believe in, will it then lead us on to a renewed belief in a Supreme Being? That question is one that I will have to set aside for now. But I will deal with it in the last chapter of this book. For now, let’s set our sights on trying to begin to build a new moral code for this new age, so that finally we may confront and quell the “worst” among us. And in us.

Notes 

5. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus; translated from the          French by Justin O'Brien; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,           1975, p. 11.