Chapter 2 – Why We Have to Find a New Moral System

                                  

                                                                                     William Butler Yeats.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

—from “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats, 1919

When our idea of God began to erode, so did our ideas of right and wrong, and when those ideas began to erode, we became the society that Yeats described in his great poem “The Second Coming.” We live in a time in which some of the most immoral of citizens are filled with “passionate intensity”: fraud artists call themselves entrepreneurs; Mafia thugs claim sincerely that they are merely soldiers in one more kind of war; warmonger generals tout their indispensability. In short, these people see themselves as moral beings, even heroic ones. Meanwhile, some of what should be society’s best citizens “lack all conviction.”

For example, it would seem logical that people in the science-driven countries of the West, in looking for moral direction, should turn to their experts, the scientists, and most especially, the ones who specialize in the study of human societies, their value systems, and the morés they spawn. These include the actions people perform, the oral and written statements they make about which acts are “good”, and the rationales they give to justify their actions. In the West, these experts are our sociologists and cultural anthropologists.

But social scientists in the West have no moral direction to offer their fellow citizens. In fact, they have given up on trying to define right and wrong. In their writings, they question whether “values” exist in any real way at all. Ruth Benedict, the American anthropologist, put it succinctly: “Morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits.”¹

Some even go over to the offence and question what it is that science is seeking. Are scientists seeking the truth about reality? If not, what exactly are they seeking? The varied answers to this question are all parts of a raging controversy in the universities of the world right now.

 

                    

                                                                                   Thomas Kuhn.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that the whole realm of activities called science consists of a process that is not strictly rational. It does not move forward in a steady march of improving knowledge. In Kuhn’s view, science always moves from a less useful picture of the world to a more useful one by unpredictable leaps, rather than in a gradual, rational expansion of knowledge. He called these leaps paradigm shifts.

Paradigm shifts occur for individuals, communities, and nations as each individual who “gets it” has her moment of insight and then experiences a leap of understanding that makes her see reality in a new and radically different way, a kind of conversion experience that then steers her into a sect of fellow believers. Whatever else it is, science is not merely rational, says Kuhn. It is driven as much by unconscious and social factors as by conscious, logical, rational ones. Not surprisingly, Kuhn’s work has provoked many responses, pro and con.²

In the meantime, attacks aimed specifically at the social sciences are made by philosopher John Searle. Taking still another tack, he argues that physical sciences can be rigorous, but social ones cannot. Social sciences have to discuss things that are too vaguely defined, and therefore, Searle claims, the conclusions that studies in the social sciences produce can’t be nomothetic—that is, lawlike—at all.³ (He and several other critics of social science are well countered in Harold Kincaid’s book Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research.⁴)