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Another harsh post, readers. 

I often have to work at being patient when people begin to speak of their latest New Age faith or philosophy or self-help regimen. Jargon. Rituals. Gurus. These are the trappings of a way of going backward. Many of them get traction today because they are anti-science, anti-Western, and anti-establishment, and not ...the latest poison term ...Eurocentric. For God's sake, don't be Eurocentric. 

God bless Barack Obama for going to Africa, to Kenya, the country of his father's birth and heritage, so that what he had to say would carry ten times the weight of anything that, for example, I might say, and then saying, without mincing words: 




“Every country and every culture has traditions that are unique and help make that country what it is, but just because something is part of your past doesn’t make it right; it doesn’t mean it defines your future,” Obama said, citing the recent debate in America over the Confederate flag. 

“Around the world there is a tradition of oppressing women and treating them differently and not giving them the same opportunities, and husbands beating their wives, and children not being sent to school. Those are traditions. Treating women and girls as second-class citizens. Those are bad traditions. They need to change.”





This speech went largely unnoticed by the mainstream media in the West, but it seems to me it is huge in terms of the philosophical issues it tackles. He is saying that moral relativism is wrong. It doesn't work. People everywhere have to stop using it as an excuse for staying mired in the practices that they find comfortable, and this is especially true when reasoning and evidence can be given which show those practices are cruel, stupid, and unnecessary. 

I am a Western, scientistic kind of thinker through and through. I believe that we can show with reasoning and evidence - evidence found in the history of every country and civilization of which we have any records - that the values called "courage" and "wisdom" and "freedom" and "love" keep rising as a society's levels of civilization, culture, and affluence keep rising. This is not a lucky coincidence. There is a system of cultural evolution operating among the human societies of the earth. The study of that system is a science that we have only begun to understand. 

But the larger view - the one that says the scientific method can be applied by us to all other phenomena, including ourselves, and that it is in that direction of improving our knowledge that our salvation lies - that larger view I subscribe to absolutely.  

On this matter of moral realism, I have written at length in other posts on this blog. 

Today, I will speak of one of the implications of this position, which is that whatever else we do, we can't start seeking our salvation or redemption by going backward. Stopping scientific research. Refusing to vaccinate our kids. Rejecting genetically modified foods outright. I am in favor of our doing more research on these technologies and on others that are controversial. For example, GMO's make me especially nervous. I worry that we may be losing biodiversity, and it is one of the four main pillars on which our planet's ecosystem rests, the others being air, water, and soil. I worry that one of our genetically modified crops or several of them acting in conjunction may cause the ecosystems of the earth to evolve a virus or fungus that will wipe out some of the current species of the earth completely before we can even begin to find an answer to it. We have to proceed with great caution when we insert new life forms into an ecosystem.  

But to turn away from the achievements of the West to anything, however vague and unproven, that is non-Western simply because it is non-Western seems like madness to me. The scientific advances of the West have created so many helpful technologies including the ones that have enabled you and I to communicate as we are right now. 

Yes, we are going to have to find alternatives to war - values, mores, and comprehensive ways of running economies that keep us vigorous but not militaristic. Yes, we are going to have to find energy alternatives and end our use of fossil fuels. But no, we can't do those things by getting seven billion people to go back to burning wood in caves. 

There are many similar issues that I could discuss, but I think the point is clear. We can't go back. We have to go on - more carefully than we have in the recent past, with more sensitivity to systems, living and non-living, biological and cultural, but this will be hard, not impossible.
  
A song that captures my antipathy for all forms of mystery, bafflegab, and pseudo-science is the one that I give a link to below. It was actually written about a personal love relationship that fell apart, but it describes a man who was very skillful at mystery-making. It also contains some of the most intensely honest, un-cliche lines ever written in any language, and it was written by someone who knew that mystery-making, famous fellow the best of anyone in his life. Her indictment is as damning as an indictment of a human being can be.  



Now you're telling me you're not nostalgic. 
Then, give me another word for it. 
You were so good with words, 
And at keeping things vague. 

'Cause I need some of that vagueness now, it's all come back too clearly, 
Yes, I loved you dearly, 
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust, 
I've already paid. 

                                        Joan Baez (writing about her long term relationship with Bob Dylan)


<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MSwBM_CbyY>