Chapter 11.                          Part J 

         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 here in the twenty-first century, we are ready to admit that while it had good consequences, it had lots of evil excesses 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. It is ready for another update. In the midst of its successes, it has also produced huge problems, such as the oppression of women and minorities, technology-enhanced wars, colonialism, social inequities, 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 out of control, and, even scarier, the Enlightenment worldview appears to have run out of ideas for ways to solve them.

The crucial point of this long discussion of the rise of the West is that 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 come to be believed and practiced by the majority of a society's citizens, 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 tuned to our current reality, we thrive.

But I stress again that the worldviews, values, morés, and behavior patterns that we humans live by are not all, as cultural relativism claims, of equal value and are not in place in our way of life because of random inclinations flitting through, and sometimes lodging in, our brains. This book offers a more rigorous model for understanding what is going on here.

Of course, other civilizations in other parts of the world and in other eras have also had eras during which 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 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 parts of the Western worldview will not be replaced by ones that simply lead to new forms of injustice, 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. As we watch the worldview, values, morés, and culture of the West and the world evolve, one of the things we must not do is get carried away and 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.

Some interpreters of the New Physics offer 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, and no moral code is based in empirical reality. By this view, no moral code is anything more than a taste, like a preference for strawberry ice cream over chocolate. That thinking makes war the only arbiter for disputes, an option we can't afford to choose. That thinking also seriously misinterprets what the New Physics is telling us, as we shall see.