The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the Enlightenment worldview, with the moral code that attends it, is no longer an adequate code for us to live by. It is ready for another update. In the midst of its successes, it has also produced huge problems such as the oppression of women and minorities, social inequities, technology-driven wars, colonialism, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and pollution levels that will soon destroy the earth’s ecosystem if they’re allowed to go on unchecked. Some of the problems look as if they are out of control, and even more frightening, the Enlightenment worldview appears to have run out of ideas for ways to solve them.

The crucial point of this long discussion of the rise of the West is that world views give rise to value systems and value systems give rise to morés. The morés then cluster to form a culture or way of life that has a survival index in the real world. Furthermore, some morés and habits of living, when they come to be believed and practiced by the majority of a society’s citizens, increase that society’s survival odds more than others do. By our morés and our patterns of behaviour, we interface with physical reality. Then, if the values are tuned to our current reality, we thrive.

But I stress again that the world views, values, morés, and behaviour patterns that we humans live by are not all, as cultural relativism claims, of equal value and are not part of our way of life because of random inclinations flitting through our brains. This book offers a more rigorous model for understanding these ideas.

Of course, other civilizations have also had eras during which they were in ascendancy. In fact, many economic and political signs today indicate that the dominance of the West may be ending. The new worldview science is offering and the values and morés it fosters are so different from the ones out of which the successes of the West grew that cultures of the West, as they try to adjust, sometimes seem to be verging on self-destruction. We must strive to insure that the obsolete parts of the Western worldview will not be replaced by others that simply lead to new forms of injustice, but that instead humanity will finally enter a period of peaceful integration of all human cultures. With the problems and hazards that we have before us now, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for our species if we can’t do this work.

Discussing and interpreting the moral implications of the new worldview offered by the new physics will be the business of my next two chapters. I will present a moral code and an argument for it that is not as all-encompassing as Hegel’s but is more useful. The theory of morality presented in the remainder of this book offers some firmer measures by which to judge our actions.

                                 

                                                                             Karl Popper

However, this new theory will not satisfy the demands of the most exacting philosophers, such as, for example, Karl Popper and his disciples.⁴ Popper loved the physical sciences and considered them to be models of what science should be, but he found biology disappointing because he felt its foundational theories (notably the theory of evolution) could not be tested in neat, clear ways to see whether they could be falsified. He wrote off the social sciences pretty much completely.

Popper argued that only theories that can be tested in ways that risk their being falsified deserve to be called science. For example, he was deeply impressed by the theory of relativity, because it could be tested definitively. If it had failed to predict Eddington’s observations of the stars visible during a full solar eclipse, the theory would have been viewed as a failure. But it succeeded brilliantly, and Einstein’s international reputation soared.

Biology is not that neat. The theory of evolution can be tested only in ways that, if successful, may make it seem more likely to be true. In his early work, Popper did not even want to call biology a science. But gradually, over years, he came to concede that some theories could make probabilistic, Bayesian kinds of predictions rather than neat, causally linked ones and still be rigorous enough to be properly called scientific. The psychological theories of Adler and the historical ones of Marx weren’t that useful, but Popper came to see that the theory of evolution was.⁵

We accept now that the history of life does not proceed by cause-and-effect steps as they are pictured under the Enlightenment world view. Instead, life proceeds forward through time like a river, with many branches and tributaries connecting to the main channel. The difference is that life flows uphill. It flows against the gradient of entropy, opportunistically searching for new habitats in which some new species or new ways of life may take root, adapt, and flourish. This is a better metaphor for describing how life moves across time.

Under this model, the life flow keep bifurcating. Some forks take detours and some are blocked completely and die out. Whether a given branch will surface further on in the natural history of the world is dependent on many odds-governed factors such as changing climates and mutation rates of other species (especially those that are its food, its competition, and its predators). But the entire system keeps expanding relentlessly, as is shown by the way the amount of biomass on our planet has been increasing since life began here about three billion years ago.

While the model of human cultural evolution presented in the rest of this book will not satisfy Popper’s most rigorous early demands, it will do what we need it to do. It will give us categories and guidelines that will lead us toward better odds of surviving over the long term.

Notes

1. Matthew Allen Fox, The Accessible Hegel (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005).

2. Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York, NY: Warner Books, 1999), pp. 16–19.

3. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 (1776; Project Gutenberg). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/731/731-h/731-h.html.

4. Karl Popper, “Science: Conjectures and Refutations,” in Martin Curd and J.A. Cover, Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1998).

5. Mark Isaak, ed., Index to Creationist Claims, The Talk Origins Archive, 2005. http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211_1.html.