Chapter 10              Part B 

  On the other hand, we have to evolve. If we give up war, will we grow weak and sickly, and then die out, like the deer on the island that has no predators? There have been experts who said so, flat out. War, they insist, is ugly but necessary. They are ready to risk nuclear holocaust, even initiate it. (2.)       

  However, there are some pieces of evidence which support the belief that humans may learn to live, multiply, and spread without constantly fighting one another. One of the best lies in how, in every society, there are some people that show a clear inclination toward settling apparently irreconcilable differences by negotiating rather than by violence. Implicitly, they are then acknowledging that they do not believe any one world view or set of values (even the ones that they learned as children themselves) necessarily leads to the only appropriate, viable, “right” way of life. From the view of the social sciences, we could say the value systems of these more peaceful members that can be found in all societies assign a higher priority to the lives of other humans than to the reducing of the anxieties they experience when they see other humans living in ways that are alien to them.

        modern British school-children 

  Another bit of evidence to note is the vigor that is evident in pluralistic societies, ones that have succeeded in synthesizing (which is different than compromising) several cultures. Merging ways of life can work. Britain is an excellent example here. Celts, Iberians, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Danes, and lately people from all of the countries of Britain’s former colonial empire have blended. Who calls him or herself a “Brit” these days may show genetic and cultural features from any of these tribes and/or nations.

               

        Furthermore, we can see that after a war, people's living patterns and values change in major, radical ways, for the vanquished, of course, but often for the victors as well, ways not anticipated by the planners on either side. When I was a boy in the 1950's in Edmonton, Alberta, there were two German delicatessens in my town, and "sushi" and "dojo" were just words in a novel. By the time that I was a young man, these things could be found all over my town, one whose men had just won a war against Germany and Japan a few years before. 

    modern public school students in Canada 

      Today, Germany and Japan are two of the strongest economies in the world and Edmonton schools contain students from almost every culture on earth. It seems so stupid now that fifty-five million people had to die so that the Japanese could learn to open up to the ways of the gaijin, and I could learn to love and trust people named "Kobayashi". 

       We were the victors in that war yet today we have embraced many of the technologies and morés of the vanquished. We can integrate. The trick in the future will be to bring about these changes on both sides by planned interactions in commerce, sport, science, art, and finally intermarriage. By peaceful coexistence and reason instead of bloodshed, in other words. Hard but not impossible. In this age of the internet and the global village, getting easier by the day.

        One way or another, changes keep happening in every human culture, whether the changes originate from within or without. But changes in ways of living aren't always accompanied by people hurting and killing each other. And given that, in the end, we all must answer with our cultural codes and morés to the same material reality, there may even be reason to hope that peace-loving people, if they can become clever and motivated enough, may prove more fit for long term survival than are the war-mongers. From these and many other observations of the open-mindedness, adaptability, and improvisational capacities found in major segments of all societies, we can draw hope for peace.

               

        Further discussion of whether war can be avoided or at least reduced in destructiveness and duration is, however, premature at this point. Even this most pressing and distressing of issues must be subsumed under our discussion of world views, a discussion which is yet to come in my argument. But a few words on the larger picture are appropriate here.

               

       In an objective analysis, even though all values are tentative for humans, no values should be called "arbitrary". Yes, our world, including the parts of it that we make, is always changing, so our values must also. But new, different values and morés are not arbitrary, i.e. they are not all of equal merit, because they do not all lead to the same survival odds for a nation or the human species. Some new values, and the morés they foster, work well, some badly. Some are moving society in an unhealthy direction entirely.

        Values have consequences that are too crucial for us ever to describe those values by a term as casual-sounding as the word "arbitrary". The whole point of formulating a universal moral code would be to guide us all so that we can clearly see the new patterns of energy flow emerging in our environment and then devise new ways of living that will give our species the best chances of surviving over the long haul. We have to learn to live consciously and by reason. If we don't find a code of values that is reasonable and easy to keep in mind, the lessons of History and the trends of technology combine to say that we are doomed to scorch or poison our planet – or both. 

 

         As I have said above, the wide variety of the morés and values systems of the societies of this planet has led some social scientists and philosophers to say every system of values is "correct" in its own cultural context. But this is a dangerous and false conclusion to draw. These people have the best of intentions: they want to encourage us all to feel tolerant toward one another's cultures and to get along. But as noted above, their moral code is not assertive enough. It aims to fill the gap left after they have deconstructed - with a kind of cerebral, detached amorality - all of the traditional moral codes.

               

        However, humans need strong, affirmative guidelines to live by. What the moral relativists seem to be aiming to produce is a cynical, judgmental outlook that aims to be above critique because in the realm of morals it affirms nothing. But real humans have to make decisions in real life. We need a model of what is right that has a sense of direction and purpose to it. In the analogous situation for scientists themselves, real scientists couldn't do science, i.e. could not do research, without models and theories which guide them to plan their experiments and studies. Without a model of the phenomena being studied, a model that can be used to guide his research, a scientist would be a mere buffoon wandering among rooms full of gauges, beakers, and computers, with no clue as to what he was doing there.    

               

         The practical consequence that moral relativism leads to is a resigning of this planet to the bullies. When the tolerant citizens can say only what they are against and never what they are for, the bullies with their “will to power” will get their way, by trickery, promises, threats, or blood. The Western Allies in the 1930's did not call themselves "moral relativists", but the moral relativist way of thinking was already loose in the universities of Europe, and the consequence was that most of the leaders of the nations who might have stopped Hitler and Mussolini had no stomach for such action. In fact, many prominent citizens in the West quite admired the fascist states and leaders and said so openly. FDR himself said he was deeply impressed by what Mussolini accomplished.(3.) The consequences of this indecision were WWII and the deaths of fifty-five million people. Parallel situations abound in the History texts right into our own time.

       Benito Mussolini 

               

       The core of the problem for the moral relativists of the West is that other nations' cultures may very well be telling them that they must spread their culture until it encompasses all of humanity and that democracy is a dangerous delusion. Their belief system requires that they conquer, subdue, or eliminate altogether, the other cultures of the world. And aggressive cultures have always existed. Democracies have to be motivated to face them, if we are to have a world in which we can discuss any options at all. (I will discuss more completely why pluralistic democracy really is a wiser, more strategic social design than totalitarianism in coming chapters. For now, let's return to developing the main argument.)   

               

       We have to have a far more assertive code than moral relativism offers. Furthermore, such a code will only be acceptable to most people in the science-driven world of today if it integrates our world view - i.e. our best models of  reality - with the code's guidelines. Even under this constraint, many different value and moré systems are possible, and many of those that are possible could be used to equip a given human society to survive and flourish. 

       However, some values clearly don’t work. In today's world, values which teach citizens the virtues of war or, alternatively, of moral inertia are among the least survival-oriented. Again, then, I must reaffirm: we have to find that third way. Not a return to one of the traditional moral codes, but not moral relativism either. 

       A universal moral code would not end the diversity of cultures on this planet; it would simply give people in those different cultures a means by which they could settle disputes between cultures without them having to go to war. Then, by art, sport, commerce, intermarriage, etc., in two or three generations, the integration of cultures could and would take place. The theory is sound: we could build one world, beautiful, vigorous, evolving, and peaceful.  

       artist's conception of a utopian future 

               

       For now in this essay, however, we must return to our main line of thought. 

      We had arrived at the step in our reasoning which states that all of a society’s morés/approved behaviors are implicit in its world view. Now we can move on – still by small steps and gradual degrees – to examine the question of whether any world view, along with its concomitant sets of values, morés, and behaviors, can be shown by logic and evidence to be so directly derived from the deep principles of material reality itself that it deserves to be adopted by the whole human race as a beginning point for a new moral system.  

Notes 

2.http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1983/may-jun/cimbala.htm

3. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini