Another bit of evidence to note is the vigour evident in pluralistic societies, those that have succeeded in synthesizing (which, you may recall, is different from compromising) several cultures. A community formed by merging many ways of life can work. Britain is an excellent example. Celts, Iberians, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Danes, and more recently people from the countries of Britain’s former colonial empire have blended. Most who call themselves Brits these days may show genetic and cultural features from any of these tribes and/or nations.

Furthermore, we can see that after a war, living patterns and values change in major, radical ways not only for the vanquished, but often for the victors as well, ways not anticipated by the planners on either side. When I was a boy in the 1950's in Edmonton, Alberta, there were two German delicatessens in my town, and sushi and dojo were just words in a novel. By the time I was a young man, German delicatessens and karate dojos could be found all over my town, one whose men had just won a war against Germany and Japan a few years before.

  

                                             Modern public school students in Canada

Today, Germany and Japan are two of the strongest economies in the world, and Edmonton schools contain students from almost every culture on earth. In retrospect, it seems so stupid that fifty-five million people had to die so the Japanese could learn to open up to the ways of the gaijin, and I could learn to love and trust people named Kobayashi.

We in the West were the victors in that war, yet today we have embraced many of the technologies and morés of the vanquished. Which proves that we can integrate. The trick in the future will be to bring about these changes on both sides by planned interactions in commerce, sport, science, art, and intermarriage. By peaceful coexistence and reason instead of bloodshed, in other words. This will be hard but not impossible. In this age of the Internet and the global village, it is getting easier by the day.

One way or another, changes keep happening in every human culture, whether the changes originate from within or without. But changes in ways of living aren’t always accompanied by people hurting and killing each other. And given that in the end we all must answer with our cultural codes and morés to the same material reality, there may even be reason to hope that peace-loving people, if they can become clever and motivated enough, may prove fitter for long-term survival than are the warmongers. From these and many other observations of the open-mindedness, adaptability, and improvisational capacities found in major segments of all societies, we can draw hope for peace.

However, further discussion of whether war can be avoided or at least reduced in destructiveness and duration is premature at this point. Even this most pressing and distressing of issues must be subsumed under our discussion of world views, a discussion which is yet to come in my argument. But a few words on the larger picture are appropriate here.

In an objective analysis, even though all values are tentative for humans, no values should be called arbitrary. Our world, including the parts of it that we make, is always changing, so our values must also. But new, different values and morés are not arbitrary—that is, they are not all of equal merit, because they do not all lead to the same survival odds for a nation or the human species. Some new values and the morés they foster work well, some badly. Some are moving society in an unhealthy direction entirely.

Values have consequences too crucial for those values to be described by a term as casual-sounding as arbitrary. The whole point of formulating a universal moral code would be to guide us all so we can clearly see the changes in the patterns of energy flow  emerging in our environment and devise new ways of living that will give our species the best chances of surviving over the long term.

Clever strategies for survival pay attention to the energy patterns of the earth. Are the algae in the Indian Ocean multiplying, trapping sun energy? Are the forests doing particularly well this year in Central America? Is the soil left by the volcanic eruption two years ago in Indonesia particularly fertile? Are the crops all dying in the East African drought? Is the soil eroding in North America even faster this year than it was last? Is North Sea oil running out? Can we tap into the tidal power in the Bay of Fundy? If we’re rational, we note and exploit energy supply opportunities and remedy energy supply problems out of choice, not by luck. We have to learn to live consciously and by reason, which also implies that we have to work out a moral code that is rational. If we don’t devise a code of values that is rational and easy to keep in mind, the lessons of history and the trends of technology combined show that we are likely doomed to scorch or poison our planet—or both.

As stated above, the wide variety of morés and value systems of our societies has led some social scientists and philosophers to suggest that every system of values is correct in its own cultural context, and none is correct in any ultimate, objective sense. But this is a dangerous and false conclusion to draw. These people have the best of intentions: they want to encourage us all to feel tolerant toward one another’s cultures and to get along. However, their moral code is not assertive enough. It aims to fill the gap left after they have deconstructed—with a kind of cerebral, detached amorality—all the traditional moral codes.

Humans need strong, affirmative guidelines to live by. What the moral relativists seem to be aiming to produce is a cynical, judgmental outlook that is above critique because in the realm of morals it affirms nothing and therefore cannot be critiqued. But real humans have to make decisions in real life. We need a global model of what is right, one that has a sense of direction and purpose. In the analogous situation for scientists themselves, they couldn’t undertake research without models and theories that guide them to plan their experiments and studies. Without models to guide his research, a scientist would be a buffoon wandering among rooms full of gauges, beakers, and computers, with no clue as to his purpose there.

Moral relativism leads to a practical consequence of resigning this planet to the bullies. When the tolerant citizens can say only what they are against and never what they are for, the bullies with their “will to power” (Nietzsche’s term) will sway the masses and get their way—by trickery, promises, threats, or blood. The Western Allies in the 1930s did not call themselves moral relativists, but the moral relativist way of thinking was already loose in the universities of Europe, and the consequence was that most of the leaders of the nations that might have stopped Hitler and Mussolini had no stomach for such action. In fact, many prominent citizens in the West admired the fascist states and leaders and said so openly. Franklin Roosevelt said he was deeply impressed by what Mussolini was accomplishing in Italy.³ The consequences of this indecision were WWII and the deaths of fifty-five million people. Parallel situations abound in the history texts right into our own time.

  

                                                                  Benito Mussolini

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