Chapter 11          Part F 

   In the meantime, what of that Enlightenment, i.e. scientific, worldview? Inside of its realm, namely Science, it was still almost entirely in place and in fact getting stronger. Romanticism, by and large, passed over it and left it untouched. Under it, as Newton and Laplace had said, all events were to be seen as results of previous events that had been their causes, and every single event and object came, in an inescapable way, like a link in a chain that went right back to the starting up of the universe. The giant universal machine was ticking down in a purely mechanical way, like a giant clock. 

   While Romantic individuals and artistic movements went their eccentric, sometimes radical, ways, then fizzled out, governments, industries, businesses, armies, schools, and nearly all of the other institutions in society were more and more organized to be consistent with the Enlightenment world view. With the more workable of the Romantic programs written into it (e.g. concern for the poor), the Enlightenment worldview spread until it reigned, first in the West, then gradually in more and more of the rest of the world.

      Crewe locomotive works (England)      1848

        At this point, it is important to stress that whether political correctness approves of the obvious conclusion that we are heading toward or not, it is there to be drawn and so should be stated explicitly. The worldview and the resulting social system of the Enlightenment got results. Like no other ever had. It just “worked” in the sense that the European societies which operated under it kept increasing their economic outputs, their populations and, more tellingly, their control of the energy flows and physical resources of this planet. However, it is also important to stress that the Westernizing process very often wasn't even close to just. Western domination of this planet did happen, but in most of the West now, we are ready to admit that while it has had good consequences, it has lots of evil consequences as well.

  naval gun factory    Coventry, England     c. 1902

   

   The conclusion to be drawn from these facts is that this Enlightenment worldview/paradigm, with the moral code that attends it, is no longer an adequate code for us to live by. In the midst of its successes, it has also produced huge problems, such as wars of conquest, colonialism, social injustices, nuclear weapons, and pollution levels that will destroy the ecosystem of the Earth if we don’t fix them. Some of these problems look like they are about to run out of control, and the Enlightenment worldview with its attached moral values, appears to have run out of ideas for ways to solve them.

  In addition, the people who made the rise of the West happen, the scientists themselves, have begun to undermine and re-shape the Enlightenment worldview. Another new and radically different world view is spreading because of findings in the cutting edge research of Science, which, of course, is no longer merely an institution of the West. It belongs to all of the people of the world.

   The Medieval worldview with its attached values lingers on in a few places, but, mostly, people who reject Science are becoming backwoods curiosities. The Enlightenment worldview, with its attached set of values and morés, is at the base of the normal way of thinking for most folk in the West. However, it too is in the process of being superseded. It gave us amazing technologies, but it also enabled us to kill people of other cultures while simultaneously telling ourselves that we were doing them a favor. In our modern society in general, and in Science in particular, this worldview is being superseded. Science, as it evolves, is leading us toward a new worldview that revokes the Enlightenment one almost entirely.

    The larger point of this long discussion of the rise of the West, however, has been to make a simple, crucial point: worldviews give rise to values systems and values systems give rise to morés. The morés then cluster to form a culture or "way of life" that has a survival index in the real world. Furthermore, some morés and habits of living, when they are spread over all the citizens of a society, increase a tribe’s survival odds more than others do. By our morés and our patterns of behavior, we interface with physical reality. Then, if the values are fine-tuned to the current reality, we thrive.

   But I must stress once again that the worldviews, values, morés, and behavior patterns that we live by are not all of equal value and are not in their places because of mere random inclinations flitting through, and sometimes lodging in, our human brains. There is a far more rigorous model for understanding what is going on here. The whole worldview-values-morés mechanism of cultural evolution can be seen quite clearly in the history of the West as its rose to world dominance by gradually integrating the most rational parts of several different cultural systems, each composed of worldviews, values, and morés, over a period of about two and a half thousand years.

    Of course, other civilizations in other parts of the world and in other eras have also had periods when they were in ascendancy. In fact, many economic and political signs indicate that the dominance of the West may be ending. The new worldview that Science is offering and the values-morés system that it fosters are so different from the ones out of which the successes of the nations of the West grew that cultures of the West, as they try to adjust, sometimes seem to be on the brink of self-destructing. Our hope is that the outdated Western dominance will not be replaced by one more form of dominance, but that instead humanity will finally enter a period of peaceful integration of all human cultures. With the problems and hazards that we have before us now, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for our species if we go down any other path.

        

    Thus, before I close this chapter, I must reiterate one earlier point here. As we watch the worldview, values, morés, and culture of the West and the world evolve before our eyes, one of the things we must not do is to get carried away and to conclude that the rising worldview - the worldview of the New Physics, the one by which the thinking in the West and the rest of the world is being transformed - leaves us without any moral values whatsoever. The New Physics, some writers claim, offers a worldview in which each person's "reality" is chosen and shaped by that person, and therefore any moral code is only what a bunch people living in a given area agree on for the time being. By this view, no moral code is anything other than a taste, like a preference for strawberry ice cream over chocolate. No moral code, these people say, is grounded in any way in material reality. That thinking makes violence the only arbiter for disputes, an option we can't afford to follow. More importantly, that thinking also seriously misinterprets what the New Physics - our new worldview - is telling us, as we shall see.    

    Discussing and interpreting the moral implications of the new worldview offered by the New Physics will be the business of my next two chapters. I will present a moral code and an argument for it that is not as all-encompassing as Hegel’s, but then again, as many in his own time and many since have noted, Hegel’s system for interpreting human history is so general and vague that it is very easy to claim almost any set of actions is being performed in accordance with Hegel’s model. Both the Nazis and Marx found guidance and inspiration in Hegel. What I want to offer is a bit more defined. The theory of morality presented in the remainder of this book gives us some firmer measures by which to judge the moral quality of our actions.  

Karl Popper 

     On the other hand, it will not satisfy the demands of the most exacting philosophers of Science, such as, for example, Karl Popper and his disciples. (4.) Popper loved the physical sciences and considered them to be models of what Science should be, but he found Biology disappointing because he felt its foundational theories (notably the Theory of Evolution) could not be tested in neat clear ways to see whether they could be falsified. (He then wrote the social sciences off pretty much completely.)

     For Popper, at least in his earlier writings, only a theory that risks definitive experimental tests, i.e. tests that will show decisively whether the theory gives a true (or to be exact in Popper’s model, a not-false) picture of reality, deserves to be called “scientific”. As a young man, Popper had grown totally skeptical of “pseudo-scientific” theories such as Adlerian psychology and Marxism because they never risked anything. That is to say these theories did not propose or submit to any tests designed so that, if the theory failed the test, it would be proven invalid. No matter what happened, Adlerians and Marxists found ways of interpreting every event so that it fit their theory. 

      By contrast, Popper argued, only theories which can be tested in ways that risk their being falsified deserve to be called “science”. He was deeply impressed by the Theory of Relativity, for example, because it was formulated in such a way that if it had failed to predict Eddington's observations of the stars visible during a full solar eclipse, then the theory would have to be viewed as a failure. But it succeeded brilliantly, and Einstein's international reputation soared. 

      

     Biology is not that neat. The Theory of Evolution can only be tested in ways that make it seem more likely or less likely to be true, depending on the outcomes of the experiments. In his early work, Popper did not even want to call Biology a “science”. But gradually he came to concede that some acceptable scientific theories could make probabilistic kinds of predictions, rather than neat, causally connected ones, and still be rigorous enough to be not only scientific but useful. The psychological theories of Adler and the historical ones of Marx weren’t that kind of useful, but Popper came to see that the Theory of Evolution was. (5.)

   The history of life does not proceed by cause-effect steps as they are pictured under the Enlightenment worldview. Instead life proceeds forward through time like a river with many branches and tributaries connecting to the main channel. The difference is that life flows in a way that amounts to "uphill". It flows against the gradient of entropy. The tributaries, streams, brooks, and tiny rills are inching upward-forward all of the time, hungrily, vigorously, and opportunistically, searching for new habitats in which some new species or new way of life may take root, adapt, and flourish. This is a better, more helpful metaphor for describing how life moves across time.

     Under this model, life keep bifurcating and some forks get detoured and some get blocked completely and die out. Whether a given branch will be present and still getting more vigorous further on in the natural history of the world is dependent on many odds-governed factors such as changing climates, the rates of evolution of other species (especially competitors and predators), and so on. But the whole system keeps expanding relentlessly. The amount of biomass on this planet has been increasing since life began here about three billion years ago. And life must grow if life is to survive at all.

   The model of human cultural evolution presented in the rest of this book will not satisfy Popper's most rigorous early demands, but it will do what we need it to do, nevertheless. It grows out of the Enlightenment/scientific worldview. It is a life-oriented, middle kind of theory. It will give us guidelines rather than formulas, but they will be guidelines that can be used to steer our path in the world toward better odds of our surviving and flourishing, while reducing the odds of pain and death for us all, over the long haul.

Notes 

4. Popper, Karl; "Science: Conjectures and Refutations"; in Curd, Martin and J.A. Cover; "Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues"; W.W. Norton and Co.; 1998.

5. http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211_1.html