Chapter 2    Why We Have To Find A New Moral System 

Part A 

  

William Butler Yeats 

                                              

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere

 The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

 The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

 Are full of passionate intensity.”                 

           (from “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats, 1919)

  When our ideas of right and wrong began to erode, we became the society that Yeats described in his great poem “The Second Coming”. We live in a time in which some of the most immoral of citizens are filled with “passionate intensity”: business fraud artists call themselves “daring entrepreneurs”; Mafia thugs claim sincerely that they are just soldiers in one more kind of war; warmongers tout their indispensability. In other words, all of these people really do see themselves as moral people, heroic ones even. Meanwhile, some of what should be society's best citizens “lack all conviction”.    

    For example, it would seem logical that people in the Science-driven countries of the West, in looking for moral direction, should look to their experts, the scientists, and most especially, the ones who specialize in the study of human societies, their values systems, and the mores they spawn: things like the actions that people perform, the statements, oral and written, that people in their various societies make about which acts are “good”, and the rationales that they give to justify their actions. In the West, these experts are our social scientists, sociologists and cultural anthropologists. 

    But many social scientists in the West have no moral direction to offer their fellow citizens. In fact, they have given up on trying to define right and wrong. In their writings, they question whether “values” exist in any real way at all. Some even go over to the offence and question what it is that science is seeking. Are scientists seeking the truth about reality or what exactly? The varied answers to this question are all parts of a raging controversy in the universities of the world right now.

Thomas Kuhn 

     

    In “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, Thomas Kuhn argued that the whole activity called “science” is a process that definitely is not strictly rational. It does not move forward in a steady march of improving knowledge. In Kuhn's view, science always moves from a less useful picture of the world to a more useful one by unpredictable leaps, rather than in a gradual, rational expanding of human knowledge. 

     The jumps, or "paradigm shifts", occur for individuals, communities, and nations as each individual who “gets it” has his/her moment of insight and then experiences a leap of understanding that makes him/her see reality in a new and radically different way. A kind of “conversion experience” that then steers him/her into a sect of fellow believers. Whatever else it is, Science - says Kuhn - is not merely rational. It is driven as much by unconscious and social factors as by conscious, “logical” ones. Not surprisingly, Kuhn’s work has provoked many responses, pro and con (1.).

    In the meantime, attacks aimed specifically at the social sciences are made by philosophers like John Searle. Taking still another tack, he argues that physical sciences can be rigorous, but social ones cannot. Social sciences have to talk about things that are too vaguely defined, and therefore, Searle claims, the conclusions that studies in the social science produce can’t be law-like at all (2.). (He and several other critics of social science are well countered in Harold Kincaid’s book “Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences”.) (3.)

     In response to these criticisms, some social scientists have striven to put more objectivity and empirical rigor into what they do. But they do admit that the studies done in their fields are often difficult to replicate because relevant background conditions to the phenomena being studied can’t be re-set. For example, how could we get a tribe to go back to living as fishers when the fish species they once lived off of are gone? Could we get a modern nation, or even a small sub-group in it, to live without their cell phones? 

    Even a social scientist’s looking at a group of people changes them. Some of the mores of the people being studied are then altered. Some of those mores may even cease to exist.   

    Social scientists also admit that the models which guide their research can’t be expressed in neat mathematical terms so the phenomena that the researchers describe are often not neatly, objectively measurable. Finally, many of the ways in which the researchers’ own biases may influence how s/he sees the data seem impossible to forestall, no matter how carefully the studies are designed.

   Studies of human customs only make sense when they are viewed in the context in which the humans being studied normally live. Outside of their contexts, human actions often look pointless. In Aztec society, which merchants sold batteries? Where did the Crusaders get their typhus shots? 

   Thus, social scientists admit that they often must settle for a “single print” of any phenomenon that they wish to study, and societies vary widely in their beliefs and mores. In fact, how can any social scientist, who grew up largely inside of one culture, ever claim to look objectively at another culture?

 Others in the social sciences have taken a more aggressive stance. They have argued that no science, not even Physics, is truly objective. Complex, culturally-acquired images and biases shape all human thinking, even the thinking of the physicists and chemists. 

  Under this view, moral relativism is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the whole body of social science research, or all research in all fields, for that matter. We can try to observe and study human societies and the belief systems that they instill in their members, but we can’t pretend to do such work "objectively". We come to it with our eyes wearing lenses that focus most easily on the models and values that we absorbed as children. 

   Understanding a new model of how matter works is hard. The learning gets harder when we shift focus to our fellow creatures in the living world. When we approach the study of human societies, these social scientists say, suspending our thought habits about how human societies work isn’t possible. Each researcher's model of what human society is - or could be, or should be - lies deeper than his/her ability to articulate thoughts in words. It can’t be suspended; it prefigures our ability to think at all.    

    This is the stance called "social constructivism". In its view, you use thought-filters that you learned from your culture (parents, siblings, teachers, etc.), and with these tools, you string together sense data that you have been taught are the ones that "matter" until, moment by moment, you form a picture of "reality". But the whole of reality is much more detailed and complex than the set of facts that you are paying attention to. And others, especially others from other cultures, construct their own pictures of reality, some of them very different from yours, but still quite usable and productive.

    In support of this contention, social scientists point out that while careful descriptions of events in a given society, and even generalizations about apparent connections within sequences of events in that society in that era, are possible, law-like statements/generalizations about how mores and moral rules for all humans in all societies work continue to elude us. 

     Some social scientists go so far as to claim that there aren’t any “facts” in any of our descriptions of the events of the past, or perhaps even of the events happening around us now, social or physical. There are only various “narratives” from various cultures and individuals, any one of them as valid as any other one. At the highest level of generality then – that is, on what morality is – many social scientists not only have had nothing to say; they insist that nothing "factual" - i.e. nothing  “objectively true” - can be said.

    This argument called the “Science Wars” continues to rage. We can’t go into even five percent of it here. But the point for us is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack conviction. They can read about "honor killings", and remark calmly, "Well, that's their culture." In fact, to many thinkers in the humanities and social sciences today, all convictions are temporary and local. (A sensible and useful compromise position is taken by Helen Longino in “Science As Social Knowledge”.) (4.)   

     
     This has been the scariest of the consequences of the rise of Science. Moral confusion and indecision among our elites began to become serious in the West in the nineteenth century, but here we are in the twenty-first, and, if anything, the crisis of moral confidence appears to be getting worse.    

    Now all of this still may sound academic and far removed from the experience of ordinary folk. But the truth is otherwise. When a society’s sages can't guide the people, the people look elsewhere for moral leadership. When the “wise” respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with jargon and equivocation, others – some very “unwise” – jump in to fill the people’s needs.

    And so we come to ask: how has the eroding of the moral systems of the West that followed the rise of Science affected real people living through real events? Let’s consider one harsh example.

               

         

         

            World War I (photos from the Western Front) 

         

         By the early twentieth century, the impacts of the ideas of Darwin and Freud, and of science more generally, had arrived. Social scientists and philosophers were left scrambling to understand what new moral code, if any, was being implied for humanity by these new ways of seeing the world. Answers on every side were contradictory and confusing. Then, following too soon, in a bitter or perhaps inevitable irony, real world political events broke out of control. 1914. World War I. A major test of the moral systems of the new “scientific” societies of the West arrived.

Chapter 2.         Notes 

1. Kuhn, Thomas; “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, 

   third edition; The University of Chicago Press; 1996.

2. Searle, John; “Minds, Brains, and Behavior”; 

   Harvard University Press; 1984.

3. Kincaid, Harold; 

  “Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences”; 

   Cambridge University Press; 1996.

4. Longino, Helen: “Science As Social Knowledge”; 

   Princeton University Press; 1990.