Chapter 3 – Foundations for a Moral Code: Empiricism and Its Flaws

At first glance, it seems that what we most want to know is how this universe works so we can figure out how to navigate through its currents with more health and joy and less pain and misery for ourselves and our children. If we get the basics of our world right, we have a reasonable chance of figuring the other details out. If not, we’re doomed to wander off track, into harm, over and over. People who don’t make a desire for real-world effectiveness one of the primary focuses of their lives don’t pass on their values and ways of living, short-sighted as those may be. People who do want to find better ways to live pay attention to the physical universe around them and, as a result, transmit their genes and belief systems more effectively to their children, causing their beliefs to move forward and spread more efficiently over time.

So we want to understand this world and our place in it. However, as we study this problem in a general way, it becomes apparent that a deeper problem exists. We begin to wonder about the reliability of our basic information-processing system—that is, the human-brain-hardware–human-mind-software system. Can we trust the faculties we use to gather information about our world? How easily can our perceptions and any reasoning based on those perceptions be fooled by our own yearnings or fears?

                                                                    Karl Marx

Consider, for example, a girl I knew at university in 1971 whose core beliefs were all Marxist. How she yearned for Marx’s vision of the world to come true. For her, all the troubles of the world were attributable to capitalist manipulations and conspiracies, and only a world workers’ state would ever create a decent life for all people. The fact that the communist states of the world at that time were rife with corruption, for her, was always somehow due to the capitalists in other lands. The harsh living conditions and the secret police in these states were temporary measures that would be remedied as soon as the capitalist dogs had been eradicated from the earth.

She had so utterly deluded herself that I used to feel weak as I listened to her. She saw oppression in the faces of all the workers we passed as we walked the campus. I thought they just looked bored. She saw fascist symbolism in every poster of every concert being advertised on the notice boards. I saw images of rock bands trying to be provocative in order to sell tickets. She carried a list of government people whom she and her friends were going to assassinate “when the revolution comes.” Her eyes were working, but what she noticed as she walked through her day was deeply biased. I wonder where she is now. But she taught me something—how fully humans can delude themselves.

Since then, of course, Communism has failed totally; the world has learned that centrally planned economies wither. However, she was just one of many sincerely deluded people I’ve met over the years who left me wondering, “Which of my own beliefs can I trust? Can I trust my moral beliefs? Can I trust my everyday ones? Can I even trust what I see?”

A flawed view of the world can lead one to a lifetime of error and misery. Marxism’s biggest error is its assertion that everything is political. It may be that art and journalism can be shown to be influenced by the political philosophy of the journalist or artist. But for Marxists, all human activities, even artistic ones, are either Marxist work that is helping to advance the Marxist cause, or fascist work that is hindering that cause.

But science is about physical reality, the reality that underlies all political or artistic activities. If we assert, as some Marxists do, that science also must bow to the will of the people, we will inevitably begin to tell our scientists what we want them to conclude, instead of asking them what the evidence in reality seems to imply.

                         

                                                                               Trofim Lysenko

A clear example is the doctrine called Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia. In that nation in the 1920s, the official state position was that human nature itself could be altered and humans made into perfect “socialist citizens” by changing their outward behavioural traits. If they were made to act like utterly selfless socialist citizens, they would become so, even in their genetic programming. This government position required that the Darwinian view of evolution be overruled because politics must rule science.

Darwin had said that members of living species do not acquire genetic changes from having their external appearances altered; living things change their basic natures only when their gene pools are altered by the processes of genetic variation and natural selection over many generations of evolution. In its determination to create what they called “socialist citizens”, Soviet Communism required people to believe that the acquired characteristics of an organism—for example, the state of shrub being leafless as a result of its leaves having been plucked—could be inherited by that organism’s descendants. (1.) For years, Soviet agriculture was all but crippled by the party’s attempts to make its political “truism” be true in material reality, for crops and livestock, when it simply wasn’t.