Taoist Qigong training 


I write to spread my ideas about moral realism. I don't get a lot of comments back, but a few. One point that is buried, I believe, in the doubts that my critics have expressed is their belief that I am trying to combine things that do not combine. Social justice and capitalism. Military preparedness and peace-seeking diplomacy. Feeding the billions and caring for the ecosystems of this planet. 

My response to these kinds of queries is the same in every case. Balance is what the universe is made of. Balances of opposing forces, ever-shifting. We are situated among such forces in every aspect of our lives. Matter. Ecosystems. Work, education, health care, personal relationships, etc. Our learning, by hard experience, to sort the entities and forces operating in all of these is what makes us human. Reason applied to experience and then the learning passed on to the next generation. Culture. 

Yes, it's complicated. Yes, a basic state of anxiety is normal to the human condition. These are the price of our being free in a way that no other species we have found is free. Free to act in informed ways that will alter the odds of our future going wrong. Learning/culture is the human response to quantum uncertainty. Nations gradually learning personal responsibility for every individual adult citizen and then gradually gaining freedom - this is the highest common factor among the the billions who make up the human species today. Every time you feel tempted to curse the anxieties in your life, maybe remind yourself: would you really want a life that contained no dilemmas, no choice? 

Nations that put regimes in place which reduce citizens' choices to none or almost none, however harmonious in the short term, do not come to happy ends. History has shown us that over and over. No autocracy or oligarchy or theocracy has ever had leaders that smart. Reality keeps unfolding in ways that we can't perfectly foresee or make provision for. The best wisdom, the most effective system of governance, is the one that uses the wisdom and experience of all of its citizens and extends citizenship to all of its rational adults. 

Centrally planned economies, for example, can't compete with market-driven ones. Over whole economies and over decades, committees don't have the experience or clarity of vision that millions of shareholders do. And to follow this thought, while keeping balance in mind, we can ask: "But why then would the successful people in business care about the millions who aren't good at entrepreneurship and investing?" Why? Because history tells us that to callously let them suffer and die is - in the long term - merely stupid. Aristocrats, theocrats, and autocrats over and over have been murdered by enraged people who have seen their children die. So you fund the public schools and the health care system, you pay living wages, and you accept that these are the price of the civil order that enables your market and its working in the first place. It's just good business to create a population that believes in its nation's way of life and that contains minimal numbers of corrupt officials and sociopathic criminals.

And elected governments? I think Lincoln said it best. "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Or Churchill (though there is some dispute over whether he said this first). "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of the others." 

So? We work. We debate. We find consensus. Or at least, compromise. And we get on with it. We just don't resort to violence, or at least not until our lives are literally at stake. And if you're reading these words, dear reader, I hope it is because you really are fed up with the hurting and obstinacy of the last fifty centuries. You want to do better. You want to be one who puts her/his energies toward reducing the odds that the madness will come again. You believe in human exceptionalism. We can get out of the pattern that has for so long run and ruined our lives.  

America, for example, is, in the eyes of many of its citizens, an exception to the usual rules of History. But that is because humanity is proving, in these times, that it is an exception to the usual rules of Biology. We are the species that no longer needs carnivores to stay healthy. We have schools. We have markets. We are finally ready to stop being our own carnivores. And in this process, America is leading the way. It's mission will be done when it is just one more nation-citizen in a world that contains several hundred nation-provinces, all of them running under democratic regimes. 

America has, for lots of reasons, the leading system right now, the one that is the most vigorous. But America will not conquer the world. It doesn't want to. The values of democracy, adapted in ways that work for each nation, will conquer the world. I really believe that. The process, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your temperament, will only require of thinking people who study history and culture, every ounce of strength they have. But democracy has always been so. It asks of us ...everything. Each of us finding her/his own best way to contribute to the world and then working at it with both passion and discipline. Dynamic taoism. Balance. 

To re-phrase Kennedy's words just a bit: "Ask not what your world can do for you; ask what you can do for your world." 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless friends, have a nice day. 




                    

                                                                                   John Kennedy   

   

                    group portrait, International Space Station (with crew of shuttle Discovery) 2010



   

                                                   developers and contributors, Berlin Hackathon, 2011



                    

                                                          Mitch Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, Noel Redding - 1966


   

                        11 of the 13 Nobel Prize Winners in 2011        (Stockholm, Sweden) 


Yesterday, I offered a gloomy post about the consequences for our species if we keep working under a moral relativist master program. Today, it would be a lot nicer and also more rightly balanced to offer some of the evidence that gives us hope. 

The people of the world are becoming more and more comfortable with pluralism, in the high profile arenas of the world, in the media, and in society in general. This fact is evidence of something very simple. We are learning love. Brothers and sisters, all of us. One tribe. And we're stronger for this change. Our teams are versatile and one day they will all be squads playing/working for the same grand team. 

It's coming. We just need to hang in there, through the difficult times, all the while adhering to our moral realist beliefs, a little longer.  





   

                                           leaders of the G20 countries, Mexico Summit, 2012
   



                                               And then? And then? What? 


   


                          Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, working near the lunar module, 1969 



   


                                       photo of surface of Mars, taken by Curiosity probe, 2014

A hard post today, friends. To read and to write. Hard for readers because it will contain some images that are disturbing, barbarous, even revolting. Hard for me to write for those same reasons and the fact that I must focus and make myself concentrate nevertheless. There is a point here that is important past measuring. 

The images below show the destruction wrought in the First World War (1914 to 1918) in Europe, of course, but also in other theaters of the war and on the seas.



   

                                           stretcher bearers after Battle of Passchendaele, 1917


   
                                         dead German soldier, France, 1917


   

                     Armenian woman kneeling beside her dead child, killed by Turkish soldiers, 1915



   

                          (British Empire troops) East Indian dead, Battle of Tanga, East Africa, 1914



   

                                                     dead British pilot, viewed by German soldiers, 1917


          

                    Edith Cavell, British nurse, working behind German lines, saved lives of soldiers 
                    from both sides, caught and shot by German firing squad, 1915 



   
                                                                  American field hospital, France, 1918


   

                               African-American soldiers, winners of French Croix du Guerre, 1919




   

  HMS Queen Mary exploding/sinking, Battle of Jutland, taking 1266 men to their deaths, 1916



Latest estimates by historians for WWI casualties, run as high as 17 million dead, including over 6 million civilians. (More by far than I thought and listed on this blog a few months ago.) 

Now we could post photos of the dead from the Russian Civil War that followed and was caused by World War I. Or the deaths that happened as the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires fell apart, deaths also caused by World War I. And those from World War II, several times more destructive than World War I. World War II was also caused by World War I via the humiliating terms forced on Germany by the Treaty of Versaille. 

But what's the use of showing all those images? If, by now, any readers have not got my point, then more photos are wasting our time. The twentieth century was a steady stream of living nightmares from its beginning to almost its end. Arguably, we're still suffering consequences of the 1914 - 1918 war, though the deaths are beginning to dwindle in numbers. 

Why do I bother to list and describe such horrors? Humans are warring animals. Get over it. Why worry about what we cannot change? Such worry is just wasted energy. 

NO. IT'S. NOT.

The root causes of war do not lie in some indecipherable secret attribute of our species: they lie in differing cultures, with their differing belief systems, mores, and moral codes. But differing cultures are not incommensurable. We have tons of evidence to show that when the bullies have beaten and murdered each other and many others nearby, and have worn out their "anger", so-called "incommensurable" cultures find one another, meld, form hybrid cultures, and go on. 

I don't know any of you personally, readers, but I can say with utter candor for myself, I'm fed up. Not with courage or cowardice or civilization or barbarism. I'm fed up with obstinacy and stupidity. None of the pains of war need to happen. We could write a culture for all humans to live by, and it could work, and we could re-direct our enormous energies to improving the odds of our species' surviving by moving into space in numbers while simultaneously cleaning up our planet. 

Thus, I now can close by repeating why I hate postmodernism. All of its core ideas were in place in the thinking systems available in the West by 1912. These ideas are Nietzsche in nice clothes. We had them all well before the 20th century madness began. They did nothing to help men and women of goodwill prevent that madness and the horrors that it spawned. If anything, they set smart people from the universities of the West on complacent paths of mutual destruction. The West then drew in nearly everyone else.  

What the social scientists and humanities profs said, essentially, was: "There are no such things as 'right' and 'wrong'. They are cultural constructs in every case, real and theoretical. The only bottom line is that when you are in Rome, in order to be 'right', you must do as the Romans do (or Russians or Chinese or Kenyans or Indians or Brits or Americans or French, etc.)."

What consequences did they really expect? For me, taking such a position - some of the smartest people we had and have! - taking that position is a cowardice of giant proportions. I will not do it. 

"It's not up to us to solve such a dilemma" these people sometimes tell me. DAMMIT. There is nobody else. The capitalists, the generals, the socialists, the diplomats, the theocrats, etc., etc. ...they've had their turns. Humanity is hanging by a thread and down to its last hope: the thinking people of the democracies of the world.  

I fear with every cell in me that if we continue to drift into more and more "particularism" - as the social scientists seem to be not only allowing but intending - more and more "special interest" groups will inevitably form and then become more and more alienated from each other. If we fail in the moral realist project, we are going to do it up really well this time. 20th century-style war with 21st century weapons, including the nuclear ones. 

To my cultural anthropologist friends - and yes, I have some of those - I say: Have you really pictured what you're shrugging off? 

So I'll say again. Right is what we are doing when we debate and discuss our disputes and agree from the outset to let the democratic processes of free elections, rule of law, and responsible government lawmaking solve them. At the very worst, we have to let our sisters and brothers with whom we disagree do what they have voted for. Then, as long as they are not violating the human rights of any individuals or minorities, we must let the errors run their course. Let reality be the arbiter. It will. When a system does not work, it will - given time - fall on its face. I am certain of it. 

It took about 70 years for the people of the former Soviet Union to conclude in large majority that communism ("scientific socialism", "historical materialism", etc.) doesn't bloody work. But in the end, they did. And they dismantled it. We did not, as a species, have to fight the Armageddon War. 

We can stop the madness. We just have to keep developing the moral realist model, the cultural materialist model that shows why democracy, with human rights and market-driven capitalism both under its umbrella, works. Then we sell it to the folk, everywhere.  


   

                                                    Germans destroying the Berlin Wall, 1989


When men and women of my generation ("Baby Boomers") saw the Soviet Union come apart in the late 1980's - early 1990's, most of us were not really relieved. "Relieved" is not the right word. We were stunned. Amazed. I, personally, at first, could not believe it. A giant nightmare was finally over. 

So I'll end by saying once more. We can do this. Smart people can develop and test and prove a model of how humanity could run, with all parts tuned and humming in harmony. Courage and wisdom. Freedom and love. Sensuality and spirituality.  

You say you're weary. I don't want to know. I say, GET UP! Intelligence will save us or we won't be saved. 

But in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless friends, have a nice day. 

                                    


The man pictured above is Ernst Rohm. He was one of Hitler's closest confidants. He had been part of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, the one that failed and got Hitler and several of the others who took part in it (including Rohm) convictions for treason. Hitler got a five year sentence, though he only served nine months. Rohm and several others were also convicted. Some did prison time but Rohm got off with a suspended sentence. However, the loyalty he had shown to the Nazi idea and to Hitler himself earned him a special, close relationship with Hitler for the next nine years. 

He built up the SA (in English, roughly "Storm Troopers"), the NAZIs' private militia. The SA were the street fighters who broke up the rallies of every rival political party and harassed Jews and any immigrants not seen as "Aryan" through the years until Hitler got the chancellorship. With the chancellorship, of course, he got power over all departments of the state ...Armed Forces, police, courts, schools, health care, taxation, etc. 

Hitler then gradually came to see Rohm as a threat to his leadership and long term goals. World conquest. Lebensraum. The Thousand Year Reich. 

Rohm really believed the "socialist" part of "National Socialist Workers' Party" (NAZI, for short). The idea of nationalizing the large industries of Germany was poison to the owners and financiers and also to the Reichswehr's officers, nearly all of whom had backed Hitler and the NAZI party in the later years of their rise to power. SA men, under orders from the hierarchy of the SA (often Rohm, himself), supported strikers in many major labor disputes during the 20's and 30's. 

In late June and early July of '34, Rohm and almost all of the upper echelon of the SA, all Rohm's personal associates, were assassinated - much faster than they could hide or fight back - by teams of the most secret and deadly assassins in the rival NAZI organization, the SS. 

But what did the NAZI propaganda then tell the baffled German public? How could they justify this monstrous, impossible-to-hide act? 

It was easy. Almost all of the men killed (at least 85 whose names were released, but probably closer to 200 total) were gay. They were homosexuals in a time when homosexuality was the "mortal sin", the one no excuse could excuse. German public opinion swayed in a day. Expressions of relief at the state's being freed of this "menace" became the correct opinions of all. Even though in reality there were still closet homosexuals in the party and in the SS, they stayed hidden. Politics. 

Hitler and his cronies went on, of course, to co-opt the legions of the SA (over 3 million men in 1934, at a time when the army, the Reichswehr, had been limited by the Treaty of Versailles to one hundred thousand). Gradually, the SA men were slipped into the Reichswehr as Hitler re-armed Germany and further and further defied the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The rest, as they say, is history. 

But why is Rohm's story especially interesting from the moral realist's point of view? Let's contrast it with the story of the man pictured below. 


                            

Alan Turing was comfortably homosexual for years and many who knew him were also aware of his homosexuality. But he was not shamed or harassed in the circles in which he lived, in academia and in the British code-breaking staff at Bletchley Park during WWII. He was probably the man who did the most, by his genius for math and logic, to win that war for the Allies. He broke the NAZI codes. 

He was arrested and charged for being a homosexual seven years after the end of the war, and his story has been cited often as an example of British hypocrisy in regard to homosexuality. But he was not assassinated. There was never a hint of his being assassinated for his sexual preference though if the NAZI's had known of his work during the war years, he would almost certainly have become a target for strategic reasons.  

My point is this: yes, I know he suffered a huge injustice in the end, being made to take pills to stifle his sex drive and eventually committing suicide when his friends mostly abandoned him. But all of this was far in the future when he was doing his invaluable work in cryptography. I am confident that there were almost certainly geniuses of a similar caliber in Germany in 1934, young people who saw how the politics of Germany were going, how dangerous it was to be gay, and who simply withdrew from any job in which their secret might be disclosed. The Brits were not free of homophobia, in public or private. They were just more tolerant than the NAZIs, and their more accepting attitude had real, major consequences.   

In addition to the above examples involving individuals, I like to cite the more general examples of the Codetalkers in the US Armed Forces (the Marines, especially) who made it possible during WWII for the Americans to employ a code that the Japanese simply could not break. This was because it was Navajo and only a few hundred speakers of this language even existed. All of these were loyal to the US and remained so. (As did the Lakota, Meskwaki, and Comanche employed in that war and the Cherokee and Choctaw similarly employed earlier in WWI.)  



   

                                                                    U.S. Army codetalkers in WWII


Tolerance makes pluralism, and pluralism makes us strong. Really strong, in hard, practical ways. Resourceful. Resilient. Nimble. Adaptable. 

And pluralism is just the result of brotherly love. No, we don't have it down very well yet, but yes, absolutely, you are stronger - YOU are stronger - over the long haul for really loving your neighbor. One day, the ways in which she/he now seems strange may save the lives of you and everyone you love. 

Freedom left to run as it wished would result in the formation of in-groups and suspicion, then hostility and violence. When it is attenuated and guided with a balancing portion of love, it makes for a complex, sometimes stressed community. But that community is strong. In the long haul of generations and centuries, it will outrun its less nimble competitors every time. 

There is hope in spite of how desperate our circumstances sometimes appear. Love really can guide us. In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless friends, have a nice day.   

   

         Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens debate the moral value of religion (Toronto, 2010) 


I have some very large generalizations swirling around in my head today. But thinking about the teleological value of ideas and systems of ideas is what I do. As automatically as breathe. 

So what is the point of the image above? For me, it is one of many examples I could post to bolster my claim that open debate in which opponents treat each other with respect and often, in the end, agree to disagree, is very profoundly what democracy is about. Both of these men probably went home from this debate unchanged in their views on religion, and this was also probably true of most of the audience. But it was the debate and their right to have it that were the really precious things. The debate required courage, wisdom, freedom, and love - in modest, but real amounts - from both of them. These values of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love - lived and practiced - as permanent fixtures in a culture - keep improving that culture's odds of surviving in this hard, hazardous universe, as my book (posted in daily pieces since mid-April) has tried to make clear. The values of democracy keep the society that lives by them evolving and adapting to the real, harsh universe in which we must, finally, exist.  

"I don't agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." (Evelyn Beatrice Hall, but often mis-attributed to Voltaire.) 


   

                         Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, early suffragettes (taken about 1870)  
                          (These two had a falling out in mid-life, but later became friends again.)


One of the criticisms I sometimes get from people who have read my thoughts on moral realism is that my system/philosophy leaves what we humans should be doing so open. There are only general guidelines/values that I recommend we use to inform our policies and actions. Specifics daily routines are not specified.  

My rejoinder to that very apt criticism is that anxiety and debate and compromise - endless wrangling - is just life. Democracy, i.e. freedom, lets us get on with that wrangling more nimbly and efficiently than any of its competitor systems of governance. But the wrangling itself? As vital to democracy as oxygen is to all animal life.


                                 

                               Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein debating the meaning of quantum theory



You want certainty? The security of always knowing where you stand and what you are supposed to be doing next, right down to the last detail? I reply: "As in which real, historical society?" 

All through history, into these times, nations filled with thousands and even millions of diligent, decent people have given the control room of their societies over to someone who promised to deliver the security they so longed for. And a few autocrats have even been able to deliver it. For a while. To the elites they favor. But, oh my. When the deceased monarch's descendants begin to quarrel over who is the true inheritor of Papa's mantle. Or the masses get disillusioned and fed up ...over and over, how do they change a totalitarian regime? Agony. Disaster for those very people who were trying to be so diligent and decent. 

Kids want to be fed comforting lies. Adults must learn to get by on, and even learn to enjoy a steady diet of, leaner fare. 

But, nevertheless, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud folks, have a nice day.  





                                           Bill Nye debating creationism with Ken Ham

I am back, friends, for a post every couple days or so for the next few weeks. 

The Olympics have just closed in Rio. This world event is related to my values/cultural system in some logically useful ways. Why? First, because millions of people look to athletes to see inspiring demonstrations of the values they admire and believe in, and second, because, as I have argued repeatedly, the deepest, most basic of human values are universal. Great moments in sport move people all over the world, even when those people speak different languages and observe different customs. Courage, wisdom, freedom, love, compassion, work, sacrifice ...all over the world we admire these virtues because, over millennia, societies everywhere have learned, as whole societies, that these values work. They enable people who live by them to confront the forces of the natural world and survive. Even though we are most of the time not conscious of how our values guide and motivate us, they have been programmed into us so deeply that the behaviors that emerge in the living days of the human subjects are informed by, and driven by, values/virtues that are similar in country after country. And nowhere else do we see these truths as clearly as we do in sport.  


        
   


This photo shows Wilma Rudolph winning her race at the Rome Olympics in 1960. If you don't know her story, you should. Look it up. Her courage, self-discipline, and sacrifice would move a store mannequin to weep. And after all those years of courage and sacrifice ...she won. A true story more inspiring than any fiction. She defined courage. 


Below is an image of wisdom -- skills, strategy, tactics, etc. -- being passed on from an older man to a younger one. Respect on both sides. And real, useful knowledge being passed on. 


   
                                                
                                         basketball coach Brad Stevens talking to player A. J. Graves 




   
                                            
   legendary gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi chose freedom over communism (defecting in 1981)



And freedom? To pursue your own innovative methods in your sport? And to be recognized and paid if they work? If you're an athlete, freedom is the air you breathe. "I am training with these coaches because I chose them and they chose me."  


And if the image below (from the Rio Olympics) doesn't move you, then I wish you would not come to my blog. We have nothing to discuss. After an accidental fall for both women, NZ runner Nikki Hamblin helped US runner Abbey D'Agostino to get up and go on to finish the race. After literally years of brutal training for this day, still compassion won out over ego. For me, the most precious image from these games. 



   

             Nikki Hamblin (NZ) helping Abbey D'Agostino (US) to her feet during 5000 m. race 


Deep down, we all love the same things, the same values, the same virtues. Cultural relativism is bunk. If we have some problems getting together and working to bring about world peace and world prosperity that does not prove that we can't work out those problems. It only proves that we have to try harder. 

What other choice is there? 

Now, friends, I must let it simmer for a while. Holidays with my wife. I'll be back soon. Hopefully two weeks or so. If you like the idea that moral values can be seen as being real as gravity or electromagnetism and that belief in God is possible and even logical for a thinking, educated person in today's world, please pass the URL for this blog on to a friend or two. Tell them the latest iteration of my book begins last April. 

I care about the world and especially my species. There is no ulterior motive for me; this page has purposely been designed not to take in money and I intend to stick to that policy. 

And love the ones around you. 

And make beauty whenever you can. It is much stronger and more durable than you might at first think. Beauty is a survivor. Beauty guards herself by asserting her beauty ...right out in the open for all to see. She is so fine, so lovely that she disarms and even reverses hate, cruelty, and violence before they can raise a hand. 




   

 


Bryce Canyon

Pastel yellows, rouges, oranges,

Cliffs of Bryce like giant sentries:

“Old men’s faces will not mar us,

George’s, Abe’s, or Tom’s or Teddy’s.”

Beauty guards Herself with Beauty.  

Chapter 17.                               (completed) 

And now, to close, I offer a short dialogue between two friends discussing the ideas that have taken us so long to explain. A nutshell summary of the thesis of this book, if you like, in a more entertaining format.

A scene in a sidewalk café in Vancouver, Canada, where two characters meet and have a Socratic dialogue. A University of British Columbia graduate student, Flavius, known to his friends as Flux, is drinking coffee and relaxing in the spring sunshine. Serendipitously, his friend, Evo, another grad student, strolls past. Flux recognizes him and calls out.

Flux: Evo! Evo, you subversive element! Over here!

Evo: (Drawing near.) Well, well. The quarry you see when you don’t have a gun. What mischief are you plotting now? Wait—I’ll get a coffee. (Goes to counter to order.)

Flux: (Muttering to himself.) Hmm. Just the guy I wanted to see. I think.

Evo: (Approaching with his coffee in hand and sitting.) So, what’s up?

Flux: The truth is … I’ve been getting more and more obsessed in the last few weeks with the whole debate over the existence of God. And over moral relativism, and whether we need to believe in God to be good. Whether people in general do, I mean. Not you and me. We’re so good we’re excellent. That’s an axiom. (Laughs awkwardly.)

Evo: (Glancing at a girl going by.) I can resist anything but temptation. But seriously, folks.

Flux: (Looking glum.) It is serious, actually, this moral thing. These days, I can’t seem to think of anything else. Almost everyone I talk to at UBC despises religion, but none of them have a way of deciding what right and wrong are. It’s all relative, they say. Then I say they’re committing humanity to permanent warfare, probably annihilation, when they say things like that. They shrug and tell me to grow up. We’re doomed, my friend. Humanity is doomed, even if it is a nice day. (Laughs darkly.)

Evo: Are you sure you want to start this conversation? I have a lot to say on the subject, you know. And, after all, I am older and wiser than you are. (Laughs.)

Flux: Ah, be serious. But … yeah, I know you’ve thought about this one. Which makes me ask—if you’re okay with talking about it—do you still believe in God?

Evo: I do.

Flux: When we talked about this before, your answers didn’t really work for me. But you’re saying you still believe?

Evo: Yes. (Pauses.) I don’t buy most of the world’s religions, or priests, or holy books. But the answer is, basically, yes.

Flux: Still.

Evo: More than ever. When did we last talk about this stuff? At that party at the lake?

Flux: Yeah. That was it. And you haven’t changed your mind? At all?

Evo: No. (Pauses.) The short answer is “no”.

Flux: What’s the long answer?

Evo: How much time do you have?

Flux: It’s Friday afternoon. I have no place I have to be till Monday morning. Come on. Seriously. The whole issue is weighing me down.

Evo: Well, how about you ask questions, and I’ll try to answer them.

Flux: All right. So do you really believe in God, in your most private heart of hearts?

Evo: Yes.

Flux: What was the crucial moment or crucial logical step, or whatever you call it, for you?

Evo: No one moment. No one step. No epiphanies. I came to it gradually for a bunch of reasons, backed by logic and evidence. Later, it did get personal. It’s in my “heart of hearts” as you put it. I call my own kind of religion theism, which isn’t a very original term. But I need to be clear that I think each of us has to work out his or her own way of conceiving of God and relate to that personally in their own good time. I came to believe that moral beliefs can be based on what science is based on—the facts of empirical reality. That’s moral realism, and it led me gradually to think we have to design a moral code that’s acceptable for all people, and then live by it …and learn to live together. Gotta do these things if we’re gonna survive. I got motivated to think hard for a while. I came to two conclusions. First, that moral values do name things that are real, and second, that the core belief in the moral code that will allow us to survive …that core belief is theism. In other words, moral realism logically entails theism.

Flux: All right, wait a minute. Realism? You’re saying values are real like this cup is real? I’m not gambling on whether this cup of coffee is in my hand right now. It’s there. It’s real. I’m certain of it.

Evo: No, actually—that statement isn’t a certainty, even if you think you’re certain of it. Human senses can be fooled. That’s what the movie The Matrix is about.

Flux: Hmm. Okay. I take your point.

Evo: Every belief is a gamble, even our belief in science and the scientific method. The smartest of smart gambles is theism. Believing in God. Not so I can improve my odds of getting into some dimly imagined afterlife, but so I and my kind can survive. Here. On earth. So we can handle what the future’s going to throw at us. Navigate the hazards. Once I proved my version of a universal moral code to my own satisfaction, from there it was a series of small steps to the core belief in God.

Flux: But you must have periods of doubt? Surely.

Evo: I used to. But they’ve almost gone. Mostly because I keep answering the doubts inside my own head. Over and over. I’ve seen all the doubters’ best moves. I can whip ’em. (Laughs.)

Flux: So …what, then? Your belief, in your head   ̶  your theism, I mean – is constantly fighting for its life?

Evo: Pretty much. All beliefs in all heads have to fight to survive.

Flux: But you don’t worry that one day the theism in your head is going to lose?

Evo: I don’t know for sure that I’ll never lose my faith, but the signs are that it’s pretty durable.

Flux: And yet you love science?

Evo: Absolutely. Science is God’s way for us. For humans in general, I mean.

Flux: Were you ever an atheist?

Evo: Oh, sure. I look back on it now as a phase I had to go through. Everyone does. Some people don’t ever get to the other side, that’s all. Other side of that atheist phase, I mean.

Flux: You don’t worry that what you see in the real world is …only what you want to see?

Evo: I see science and the theories of science, Flux. Testable. Repeatable. They and all the experimental evidence that supports them keep telling me, more and more, that God is there. Here. Real.

Flux: But you did have periods of doubt?

Evo: Oh, yes. For fifteen years. And then I only came around a few years ago to believing I ought to believe in God. That it was a smart gamble. And that everything in life is a gamble in the end. Even the most basic things you trust—not just science, but even believing your hands are at the ends of your arms because you see and feel them there. Sense data. Things you sense. But for a long time, that smart theistic gamble wasn’t personal. Not personal like you love Marie or your mom and dad. It was only cerebral. I believed in believing in God, but I didn’t believe – like – primally, if you get my meaning.

Flux: Yeah, I get your meaning. So what changed?

Evo: I started meditating. Every day. Half an hour or so. Sometimes, twice a day.

Flux: Did you take a course?

Evo: Yes.

Flux: Which one?

Evo: It doesn’t matter. Check around. Find one that works for you. Then it’ll feel like it’s yours.

Flux: Hmm. Okay. That’s fair. And then what? God just arrived?

Evo: Basically, yes. I realized one day that I was hearing an inner voice. Not a great way of putting it, but close enough. During the time when I was trying to control every detail in my life, I was going nuts. Then I learned to accept handling just the details my conscience—God’s voice in my head—told me were mine to handle, my responsibility. It was like, I became “response-able”—able to respond—and then I got good solutions just as I was coming out of my meditation, or right after. It was a way of thinking about God that made sense to me. Let God—the universe, if you like—talk to me. Then I’d get some quiet, excellent answers. Like a presence was hovering by me and nurturing me. That’s not very dramatic. But it’s how I experience my personal sense of God. Like I love my kids. Or my dad. Personal. First, for large, evidence-backed reasons, and then, second, for internally felt ones.

Flux: (Studying his friend closely.) And it still seems like a rational decision to you?

Evo: More than that, Flux. I think as a species we’re all going to have to come to some form of moral realism, then theism, if we’re going to get past the crises that are coming. Getting rid of nukes. Fixing the environment. Moral realism is the only option that has any chance of working. Nobody trusts the so-called sacred texts or the priests anymore. Most don’t trust personal epiphanies either, no matter how intense the events feel. We know it’s too easy to see what you want to see. First, we want models that fit our observations of empirical evidence, over and over. And moral realism, for me, is that kind of true. It’s a model of reality that fits the facts of history and of daily life.

Flux: You think Science proves that God exists? I know people who’d laugh out loud at that.

Evo: They don’t see history or anthropology as sciences, Flux. And they don’t study the basic assumptions of science. Analyze science itself. If they did, they’d reconsider.

Flux: So tell me. For you, what moral values are grounded in empirical reality?

Evo: Humans have gradually evolved responses to entropy, over billions of people and thousands of generations. The cultures that emerge may vary from era to era and place to place, but every one of them seeks a balance of courage and wisdom. Those values are our big-scale responses to entropy, the “uphillness” of life. Courage and wisdom. Other balanced sets of values built around freedom and love are our responses to quantum uncertainty. All four values—courage, wisdom, freedom, and love (checks them off on his fingers)—inform the software of all nations that survive because they shape how people in those tribes behave. And that connects them to reality. To survival, in other words. And those basic qualities of adversity and uncertainty, remember, are built into our universe right down to the atoms and quarks. Those qualities are everywhere, all the time. We learned to handle entropy and uncertainty, not as individuals, but as tribes, over centuries, by building our societies more and more on those four values.

Flux: Those are some pretty large and vague moral principles to build a culture around. A lot of radically different societies could be constructed that all claimed they were brave and wise and so on.

Evo: Which is only to say how free we truly are, Flux. But notice my system is way different than saying that moral values are just arbitrary tastes, like a preference for vanilla shakes over chocolate.

Flux: I think I see where you’re going with this line of thought. We could build an ideal society or something pretty close to it, couldn’t we?

Evo: We’ve been working our way toward that realization for two million years.

Flux: These moral values, the way you describe them, must have been worked out over a long time, and also with a lot of pain then …right?

Evo: Pain and more importantly, death. Which is why we’re taught to respect our values so much. Our accumulated wisdom keeps telling us we don’t want to revisit our past mistakes.

Flux: Here’s a mental leap coming at you. How would the kind of ideal society you envision — brave, wise, free, tolerant — right? – how would it evolve, without war or revolution? How would it resolve an internal argument over some controversial social issue?

Evo: Like capital punishment, say?

Flux: Whoa! Quick answer. But, yeah. Not the one I had in mind, but a good example, actually.

Evo: Reasoning and evidence. Gradual consensus-building. Scientific studies. Calm persuasion. The facts say it doesn’t work, you know. Capital punishment, I mean.

Flux: How so? It seems to me that it solves a problem permanently.

Evo: Countries that get rid of it see their murder rates go down, not up. It doesn’t deter potential killers. Just the opposite. It makes them determined to leave no witnesses. To any crime. And then capital trials drag on and on ’cause juries don’t want to make a mistake. In the end, it costs more to execute an accused killer than to lock him up …for good. Long-term studies say so.

Flux: What if he lives a really long time?

Evo: In my system, barring exceptional circumstances, he’d stay locked up. But most of them die in under twenty years. They’re the kind of people who live unhealthy lifestyles. Junk food. No exercise. Drugs. Cigarettes. Fights. They don’t last in prison or out. On average, I mean.

Flux: But even if, say for the sake of argument, they only last twenty years in prison, that’s a long time. Guards to pay, meals, medical supplies, entertainment … it’s gotta add up.

Evo: Not as much as killing him does by, like, nearly three times. The studies say so. On average, killers only live about seventeen years after they go to prison.

Flux: I’ll look it up when I get home. But back to our point. You think we can solve everything by debate and compromise?

Evo: Based on reasoning and evidence, the answer is yes. And patience. Just not war. The Soviet Union went from being an unstoppable superpower to gone in my lifetime. With no global war. I’ll never doubt the transformative power of patience again.

Flux: I think I’m beginning to see your point a bit. You see moral guidelines as being grounded in the facts of physical reality?

Evo: I’ve made that case for myself and some others many times over. Entropy and quantum uncertainty are built into the fabric of reality. As long as I’m in a universe that is hard and scary, then courage, wisdom, freedom, and love will be virtues. That picture—for me, anyway—is more reliable than my senses. It’s eternal. I’m 99.99 percent sure.

Flux: And that proves for you that God exists?

Evo: That and a couple of other main points. Even assuming the universe stays consistent from place to place and era to era is an act of faith. No one can prove the future will go like the past. But we take it as a given that the universe has that kind of consistency. Science wouldn’t make any sense under any other first assumption. Then, I get direction from today’s cutting-edge science—quantum physics. All the particles in the universe are what physicists call entangled, you know. Which just means that the universe has its own kind of awareness.

Flux: What, like I’m aware?

Evo: As far beyond your and my awareness as the universe is beyond us in size. Yeah, that’s a hell of a statement. I know full well what I’m saying. But look at the evidence. Let me say it all at once, as plainly as I can. The first step to theism is believing in the consistency of the universe. The second is believing the universe is aware. The third is moral realism, which means believing that courage, wisdom, freedom, and brotherly love — steer us into harmony with the particles of matter, from quarks to quasars. Those three big beliefs—in universal constancy, universal awareness, and universal moral truth—when they’re added together, tell me this universe is a single, aware, caring thing. This aware universe is “God,” if you like that term. If not, that’s okay. Call it by whatever name works for you.

Flux: Cold sort of caring, don’t you think? There are a lot of cruel things in life.

Evo: No, it just looks that way to us sometimes. But it’s unreasonable and unfair for me to ask God to pardon me from getting cancer or meningitis or whatever …if the dice roll that way. God loves it all, all the time. God loves the avalanche that buries the careless skier who skis out of bounds. God loves malignant cells and meningococcal bacteria just as much as God loves me. We may learn how to change the odds, to cure meningitis or prevent cancer, but in a universe that is balanced and free, those scientific advances are up to us. Our brains evolved to solve puzzles exactly like those ones.

Flux: You know there are people who get the consistency-of-the-laws-of-science idea, even the quantum-entanglement-awareness one, but leave you right at that moral realism step.

Evo: Oh, I know. They keep trying to find some other way to get principles of good and bad from the natural world. A lot of people don’t want God. They want to be in charge. Like Nietzsche. (Laughs.)

Flux: Other species—chimps, squirrels …so on—find altruism on their own, you know. Sometimes, one of them will do something for the good of the community and even get killed because of it.

Evo: Then the next thing to ask is: What kind of a universe rewards those animals’ finding and practicing altruism? People finding altruism in nature and saying that means they don’t need to believe in God in order to be decent …that dodge is no dodge at all. It only delays answering the moral question. Why is being altruistic – what they call “good” – a desirable way to be? So the tribe survives? Well, if that’s the case, then we have to ask again: what is that telling us about the basic nature of reality? 

Flux: All right, I see why you say that. Your moral values would seem moral to aliens from other worlds. Do you dislike people who keep, as you say, “dodging” the moral realism question?

Evo: Not at all. As long as I can see that they’re trying to live lives of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love, I love them. They may get old and die and never say that they believe in anything like God, but I don’t care. I still love them. Hey, if they try hard to live decent lives, for me that’s enough. But believe in God? By the evidence that shows on the outside of them—which, by the way, is all science cares about—they actually do. Do believe, I mean. They just choose a lonely existence inside. Which is their choice, of course. But I still love them.

Flux: They’d tell you that viewpoint is pretty condescending.

Evo: They have, many times. It’s still okay. We can live together in peace. And still evolve and survive. That’s all that really matters. (Pauses.) But we must choose to live. Surviving’s not a given. So we need a system of ethics in order just to decide even simple things, minute by minute, day in and day out, about every object and event we meet up with. Good or bad? Important or trivial? Take action or not? What are my action choices? Which one looks like the best gamble in this situation?  The most efficient moral code will be the one that’s laid out so our decisions are quick, effective, and accurate. Consistent with the facts of reality, short and long term. A central organizing concept—a belief in God – is just efficient. At least to start with. It’s only after a lot of work inside yourself that it becomes personal. But it’s first of all just …efficient. It gets results.

Flux: Your picture isn’t very comforting, you know, Evo. The mental space it offers is pretty bare.

Evo: I know. I’d be a liar if I offered you easy grace. You first have to choose to be responsible for your own life. Then so many other challenges come. But they’d come anyway. It’s just that if you choose to bow your head and take the beatings fate dishes out, without trying to figure things out and improve your odds of happiness, your life’ll be even worse. You have to choose to choose, and even then life is going to be rough. God’s a hard case. But I’m okay with seeing God as a pretty hard case. To make something out of nothing, he has to be. A balance of forces makes something out of nothing. And in that picture, God made us free, Flux. Whether we choose to rise to the challenge, to live bravely and creatively, is up to us. Out of the labour, we make ourselves – and then our society – good, and if we’re really good, we teach our kids to do the same. Hopefully, even better.

Flux: You don’t believe in miracles, do you?

Evo: “Only in a way” would be my answer there. I think events that look miraculous happen. Things that look like exceptions to the laws of science. But later they turn out to have scientific explanations. For me, everything I see around me all the time is the miracle. What’s it doing here? Why isn’t there just nothing? And then the living things in the world are more miraculous, and then …my baby’s smile …you know what they say. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Flux: Is there a church you could belong to? Are you pulled to any of them?

Evo: Unitarians, maybe? Nah, that’s another question that you need to answer for yourself.

Flux: Any you hate?

Evo: Honestly? Nearly all of them. Priests make up mumbo-jumbo to take away people’s ability to think for themselves. It’s easy with most people ‘cause they want security. But there’s no such thing. Not in this lifetime. That one I’m sure of. Maybe they don’t consciously make it up, but they do make it up. Priests, I mean. It gets them a slack lifestyle so they gravitate to rationalizing ways to protect that. Over generations, the lies just keep getting worse. No, I’m not big on organized religion.

Flux: Would you call yourself a dreamer? A starry-eyed optimist?

Evo: I seem that way to some people, I’m sure. My view of myself is that I look at the long haul. I’m most interested in that. Then, what energy I have left over I give to the small, confusing ups and downs of everyday matters. I guess some would call me a dreamer. But cynics are cowards to me. It’s the dreamers who have courage. And once in a while they turn out to be right, you know. (Laughs.)

Flux: I better let you go, Evo. I’ve kept you long enough. I was just feeling …down …you know.

Evo: You’re not keeping me from anything that matters as much as this talk does, bro.

Flux: Alright. I’ll take that as being sincere. Actually, knowing you as long as I have, I know it is. Thank you. I’m feeling …I don’t know …hopeful, somehow, right now. (Pauses.) Actually …I think I get it.

Evo: Welcome home, Flavius, my friend. Welcome home.

    

Here the Great River Now empties into the sea;

Here the babbles and roars of Duality cease;

Every echoing gorge, every swirling façade,

Is dissolved in the infinite ocean of God.

(Author unknown)

Notes

1. Nicholas Maxwell, Is Science Neurotic? (London, UK: Imperial College Press, 2004).

2. “History of Science in Early Cultures,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_in_early_cultures.

3. Mary Magoulick, “What Is Myth?” Folklore Connections, Georgia College & State University.  https://faculty.gcsu.edu/custom-website/mary-magoulick/defmyth.htm#Functionalism.

4. “Pawnee Mythology,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawnee_mythology.

5. “Quantum Entanglement,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement.

6. Jonathan Allday, Quantum Reality: Theory and Philosophy (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2009), p. 376.

7. “Quantum Flapdoodle,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 2, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism#.22Quantum_flapdoodle.22.

8. “Occam’s Razor,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed May 4, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor.

9. “Isaac Newton,” Wikiquote, the Free Quote Compendium. Accessed May 4, 2015. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton.