Orlando Bloom as Balian in "Kingdom of Heaven" 

I keep trying to frame my thoughts on moral realism in slightly different language and to support my argument with different examples taken from life and art so that some people who do not get the main point in one post may get that same point when it is presented in different form in a later post. 

So what is that main point? Let's give the argument another, fresh form. 

The words we use to name our values really only name patterns in human behavior, patterns that we believe are valuable to remember, to give prominence to in our thoughts, and to use to guide our own behavior, first, in our daily lives, and second, in the special circumstances of a crisis. For example, we learn the concept that we call "courage" because our ancestors discovered the concept and then taught it to their children eons ago. And the whole community in those ancient times developed this concept because living while trying to be courageous, and teaching children to do the same, caused more people in that society to survive and pass the concept on to their children. A courageous society grows. An indolent one shrivels and dies out. 

Our ancestors also simultaneously learned the concept that they called "wisdom" because experience taught them that courage alone could do a lot of damage. Aspiring to be courageous and nothing else gets young people killed in risky behavior and gang fights. Courage guided by judgement/wisdom gets good results for the whole society over the long haul. 


                                          Frodo and Gandalf in "The Lord of the Rings" 

These values were closely linked in the minds of our early ancestors in myths. The hero who goes on a purifying journey and takes on enormous challenges always has a teacher. As I've said before, Jason and Achilles must have Chiron, Arthur must have Merlin, Dorothy has Glinda, and Luke Skywalker has Yoda. Frodo needs Gandalf. These myths embed the courage/wisdom balance.  

Freedom and love are more recent discoveries in the values-concepts domain, but they have certainly become important to us. Democracy is a kind of religion in the modern Western belief system and lawyers and newspaper reporters are its priests. "All The President's Men", "To Kill A Mockingbird" and so many other titles dramatize our belief in the values of democracy. It is useful, by the way, to catch that these books and movies would have seemed like much ado about nothing to many of our ancestors. Freedom and love, and the democracy they create, are recent concept acquisitions and we have only been programmed to feel emotional about them in comparatively recent times.

In more primal forms, Mel Gibson loves playing William Wallace, and audiences love watching him do it. Wallace just has to cry out "freedom" even as the English torture him to death. Orlando Bloom was the engaging hero Balian in "Kingdom of Heaven", a movie that was praised in both Western and Islamic countries. He sought to create a kingdom of the soul, a kingdom of conscience, and the mutual understanding and respect that he eventually finds with Salah ad-Din saves the lives of thousands of his followers. 

Ayn Rand has had an impassioned following for decades, and her novels argue that free people are not equal and equal people are not free. Freedom must reign. Her heroes don't just espouse the value of individual freedom, they revel in it. They are creative geniuses who care next to nothing for anything other than the free pursuit of their own talents and entrepreneurial projects. 

Which brings us to some more nuanced thoughts we have to deal with when we look to balance the concept/value we call "freedom" with some other value that will keep the unrestrained pursuit of freedom from turning our society into a wrangling set of mutually hostile vested interest groups that deteriorates into a collection of constantly warring gangs. Freedom run amok is just as destructive to a society as courage is, and just as much in need of a moderating value to keep it on track. 

That moderating virtue is love. Love your neighbors and you will respect their rights to be themselves and to pursue their dreams in any way that does not directly harm you. We can even be in the same line of work and compete fairly in the marketplace and may the best team win. Love teaches us all of that and all of that makes our whole larger society strong.     

My larger point today is that if you see the good sense of teaching values concepts to young people and thus shaping their patterns of behavior so that our whole culture grows larger in numbers and territory by growing greater in courage, wisdom, freedom, and love, then you are, in a profound sense, a religious person. You have a kind of faith. You believe in things that you can't see and you stand by them in times when the events happening around you don't seem to be favoring people who support those values and it would be much easier just to do what's expedient. Give in. Join the Nazis. Sneak around and burn your rival's warehouse. Lie behind your friends' backs. Take the bribe. Cheat on your spouse. But when you truly have values, you don't do those things. Millions like you make your society efficient, affluent, and strong.  

What is even more important to see is that this belief in the realness, the physical realness, of values and in the visible effects that they have on the patterns of behavior of whole societies - this belief has the potential to unite our world. The most determined of atheists and the most devout of religious believers, if they can agree on these minimum essential beliefs, can learn to live together in peace. We can build that better future that you used to dream of when you were a child. 

It is that simple. Or in the words of Salah ad-Din in the film "Kingdom of Heaven", it is nothing and it is everything.  



 
                            Ghassan Massoud as Salah ad-Din in "Kingdom of Heaven"