"The Scream" (Edvard Munch) (often called the iconic painting of the 20th century) 

We are living in a time of terrifying uncertainty. We now have the weapons to scorch our planet in one afternoon—so completely that the chances of our species surviving in that post-apocalyptic world are effectively zero.

Furthermore, even if we escape the holocaust of nuclear war, we are steadily polluting our planet. We’re aware of this, but we can’t seem to stop, even though the vast majority of the scientists who study the earth and its ecosystems say that the point of no return is rapidly approaching. To people who have studied the earth and its systems, the risk of environmental collapse is even more frightening than that of nuclear war.

Large numbers of us, in the meantime, “lack all conviction.” Without a moral code to guide us—one that we truly believe is founded in the real world—we are like deer on the highway, paralyzed in the headlights, seemingly incapable of comprehending our peril.

Most reasonable, informed people today know these things. In fact, we are so weary of hearing what are called the “dire predictions” that we don’t want to think about them anymore. Or we think, get scared, then go out with our friends to get inebriated. There seems to be little else one ordinary person or even clusters of rich and powerful persons can do. The problems are too big and too insidious for us—individually or collectively. Shut it out. Forget about it. Try to live decently. Hope for the best.

For me, none of these answers are good enough. To ignore all of the evidence and arguments and resign myself to the “inevitable” is to give in to a whole way of thinking I cannot accept. That way of thinking suggests that the events of human lives are determined by forces that are beyond human control.

I disagree. I have to. I believe true philosophers must.

Whether we are discussing the cynicism of people who focus on events in their personal lives or the cynicism of people who study human history, or cynicism at any level in between, I have to tell these cynics bluntly, “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this debate because you wouldn’t be here.”

 

                                    Albert Camus, French philosopher (1913–1960)

As Albert Camus sees it, suicide is the most sincere of all acts.⁶ Its only equal in sincerity is the living of a genuine life. A genuine person stays on in this world by conscious choice, not by inertia. A genuine person is still here because he or she chooses to be. Insincere people may claim to be totally disillusioned with this world and other people in it, but that simply can’t be the case if they are still alive and talking. These people are only partitioning up their minds, for the time being, into the manageable compartments of cynicism. But the disillusionment they feel now—on any scale, personal to global—is going to seem minor compared with that which they will one day feel with themselves, one day when their fragile partitions begin to give way. 

And it doesn’t have to be that way, as we shall see.

So, to sum up our case so far, what have we shown? First, that science has undercut and eroded the old beliefs in God and the old codes of right and wrong. Second, that because of our ongoing need just to manage our lives and, even more importantly, because of our recently acquired and constantly growing need to manage wisely the physical powers that science has put into our hands, we must replace the moral code we no longer believe in with one we do believe in. Perhaps then we will have a chance—a chance to live, go on, and get past our present peril.

If we can work out a moral code we truly believe in, will it lead us on to a renewed belief in a Supreme Being? That question is one I will set aside for now, but I will deal with it in the last chapter of this book. For now, let’s set our sights on trying to begin to build a new moral code for this era, so that finally we may confront and quell “the worst” among us. And the worst in us.

Notes

1. Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Journal of General Psychology, 10 (1934). http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/heathwood/pdf/benedict_relativism.pdf.

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996).

3. John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

4. Harold Kincaid, Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

5. Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999).

6. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 11.