I received a letter from a man in a developing world country a few days ago. As I read his letter, I experienced a strange moment. He was asking me to instruct him. Teach him. 

At first, I wondered why he would make such a request of me. But on second thought, I realized that the posture I have taken on this blog does imply that I have some wisdom about life to impart. 

And I guess I do, but it is a paradoxical sort of wisdom. 

I'll call this man "K", which is close enough to his real name to keep me remembering my term for him as I write and for me to still avoid revealing his real name or where he lives. 

Dear K

I have written at length about my beliefs and why I hold them. You can study them in more detail by going back through the older posts on this blog. 

Briefly, I see a solid connection based on reasoning and empirical evidence between moral values and the physical universe itself. The values we call "courage" and "wisdom" are human responses to the basic entropy of the universe. The universe is built uphill. Things always tend to fall apart. Life is hard. We have learned, over at least a thousand generations, to respond to life with a general attitude of courage balanced by wisdom. We face adversity and take it on, and we do our best to accumulate knowledge about how all things in the universe work so that we will live and act in ways that make our survival more and more likely. Courage balanced by wisdom is our answer to entropy. 

We also have to deal with uncertainty in the real world, a trait of reality that we only began to grasp the scientific base of when we found quantum theory. Life is not merely hard, it is unpredictable. We roughly know the probabilities of the events that may happen to us in the next hour or year, but only roughly, and there are always possible catastrophes hovering near us. We have learned, again over many generations, to answer the uncertainty of the universe by living in communities that balance freedom and love. We are weak as individuals, but if we can keep a tribe of humans together, and that tribe has a lot of different individuals in it, we increase the odds that we will have an answer in our community for almost any hazard that the universe may throw at us. And in order to keep this varied population from resenting and assaulting one another, we teach love. Brotherly love, it is often called in the West. This just means that we believe that you should grant a basic level of support and respect to every other citizen in your community, even if his ways seem odd or disturbing to you. One day his quirky ways may save the lives of you and everyone you love, because in some future crisis he may be the only one in the tribe who knows how to deal with the hazards coming at you. 

Courage and wisdom, in balance, and freedom and love, also in balance, shape a way of life, for those who believe deeply in them, that is more likely over the long haul to produce a vigorous and prolific society. In short, I believe values are real because I can see the physical results that they produce, namely human cultures that survive. 

This belief led me, over time, to the further conclusion that there is a kind of a God in this universe. Or for some people, it is more appealing if I say that I think the universe is a kind of conscious. The consciousness of the universe is very different than ours. It is very finely distributed, but also very wide-spread. Wherever there is matter, there is a consciousness that connects that matter to all other things made out of stuff. Even fields and electromagnetic waves are woven into this consciousness.   

The phenomenon that physicists call "entanglement", to me, shows that the universe feels itself, all of the time, all over, and all at once. This kind of "god" that I believe in can seem in human eyes to be a very hard even cruel character sometimes. But I have to ask people who bring up the problem of evil (as it is called in the West) as a counter-argument to my theism why it is that they think they are so special as to deserve to be exempted from the laws of science that all other beings in the universe are subject to. For me, God loves colonies of bacteria and rock slides and malignant cells just as much as he does me. He cannot favor one over the other. They all obey scientific laws which are really just his laws. We all die. Why do some people resent that happening a little sooner or a little oftener in some parts of the universe? 

There are likely millions of conscious living species on millions of planets all over the universe. If we don't learn to live together on ours, and we bomb ourselves into extinction or asphyxiate ourselves with pollution, we will merely become a cosmic statistic. Not comic or tragic. Just over. We've been granted free will. If we use our powers foolishly, that will be the fault of no one but ourselves. 

This is how my view of the universe runs. 

However, it is important for me to now say something quite different than the content of the last few paragraphs. 

In the West generally, we don't believe in telling specific individuals how to live their lives. For the most part, as long as you respect your neighbors' rights to be themselves, however you choose to live is okay by us. I can't tell you how to live because I don't know the talents in your brain and body and the feelings in your heart. Most men choose to stay inside the boundaries of their country's mores. We grow up, get some training, get jobs, marry, and have a family. There is nothing wrong with such a life. Mostly, for years, that is how I lived. 

But I personally, and people in the West generally, believe that if you want to learn to play a guitar or a drum and earn your living travelling from town to town entertaining people, that is your business and yours alone. Perhaps, you want to go to a Shaolin monastery to study kung fu for the rest of your life. Or cook for a crew of men in a work camp in Indonesia. Or any of a million other possibilities. You have a right to fit into any of the societies on earth in any way that works for you. Or even to withdraw from society and live as a hermit on a deserted island. 

Your life is yours to do with as you please. No one has a right to control your life, as long as you give other people room to live their lives in that same free way. No one, not your government, not your father, not your wife, not even your child. Actions have consequences, and abandoning your family may make you feel very ashamed years down the road. But you have a right to take that course of action. It may be right for you. The painter, Paul Gaugin, did. So did Prince Gautama, the Buddha. 

I think I've said enough. I spread the message of moral realism. I believe that our working out a moral code together that we all can live by will be the saving of mankind - if we can do it. But one of my first principles is 'Hands off'. I mean that no person has a right to enter my life unless I consent to his or her doing so, and I have no desire to be an unwanted intruder in anyone else's life. 

Under that view of humanity, in this modern age, if you wish to discuss with me the guidelines that you feel should be part of the universal moral code, I would like that. 

Under that view of humanity, you and I can be friends.