What I dream is that the people of the world will come to comprehend and then to handle the aggressive drives that exist at the tribal level in all humans. The mode of behaving called "tribalism" that made war such a universal phenomenon for our species right back to the Australopithicines is a way of life that we can no longer afford to practice. We can't stop our most primitive drives, but we may be able to learn to redirect them. 

To stop the madness, we must first cut off the head of the tribalism monster and graft on a new one. This metaphor sounds pretty nasty, but in the realm of human memes and the cultures that are built on them, our species actually operating under a new master operating system would not be painful at all. Probably, we would operate, or rather the kids in a couple of generations would operate, in a society in which creativity, imagination, work, and change were all just life. We learned to drive cars and to put a set of rules in place for all drivers in a generation. The hard part for our species is going to be letting go of the past. Seeing our kids make a new world and leave us and most of our ways behind.  

How many humans might we be aiming to re-educate? Here is a link to one version of the world population clock: 

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/  


I think this project is still doable. How? Via the internet. We need to offer an explanation of where our troubles all ultimately come from, and it needs to be an explanation that is readily understood by all reasonably intelligent adults on this planet and is also readily teachable to the kids. 

There is much reason for hope when a man like Barack Obama can get elected in a country that had legal slavery of members of his race four or so generations ago. The last African-American who had been born into slavery died in the 1970's, well after Pres. Obama was born. 

The climate deal signed in Paris is looking like it will come into effect before the end of 2016. 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/paris-climate-change-60-signed-1.3772285

Slavery - which still exists in many parts of the world - is being tackled, as articles all over the internet attest. 

https://blogs.state.gov/stories/2013/02/01/ten-ways-you-can-help-fight-modern-slavery

I could go on, but the point has been made, I think. We can do a lot of things. There is hope. What we can't do is just do nothing. 

What I try to do to get  more sanity, decency, and sense into the way the whole world runs is to offer a model of what our largest operating memes, our moral values, are and why they are as they are. A model that fits the facts. A model that can be seen as scientific, in other words. Such a model, I believe, will make our activities to build a better world rational and efficient. 

The project of putting a new understanding of why we talk the way we talk and do the things we do into the minds of the big majority of the world's people may yet work. 

So I say again: courage and wisdom, in a taoist, dynamic equilibrium, are our response to entropy. Freedom and love, in a similar balance, are our response to quantum uncertainty. Over millions of humans and thousands of generations, they became core values all over the world because they work. They get results. They enable human tribes who believe in them and live by them to survive. These values must inform all that we believe at the tribal level, and one day, the species level. 

Core values are not particular to any one culture. If we have a bewildering variety of cultures and their values and mores out there in the real world, this does not prove cultures are incommensurable. It only proves just how free we really are. And for over a million years, at least, we have been testing different cultural meme sets, mores, and values against one another by war. Hitler was correct in saying it made our species vigorous. What he didn't see is that its day is up. As Kennedy said, either we end it or it will end us. 

Let the past go. 

So? Whether you're feeling confident or you're floundering, remember: values are real. Yes, we have invented words to label patterns in human civilization, but the patterns are ones that exist in empirical reality. The words for those patterns work just as well as the word "gravity" works to describe patterns of movement of bodies in space and the word "magnetism" works to describe what iron filings do around a magnet. "Courage", "wisdom", "freedom", and "love" are as real as any words can be. They name observables.   

In practice? In real terms, what is good? 

Whatever is increasing the health of our planet is good. Whatever isn't is bad. That is what wisdom tells us. 






Pluralism is good. That is what love tells us. A complex human social ecosystem containing a wide varied of human lifestyles in complex interactive relationships is nimble. It flexes with shocks. It can adjust and adapt. It is much more resilient than any monolithic, near-heterogeneous society ever can be. Diversity is a good thing for non-human ecosystems. It is good for human ones as well. In the long haul, even if pluralism goes underground for a while, it always returns. The trick, the challenge, for humans is to learn to do more than just accept pluralism and live with it. We must learn to exalt it and revel in it.  

I could go on, but enough for today. 

Right and wrong are real. That is my message. How values work over whole populations and over many generations, I am barely beginning to comprehend. I still hope to see farther into how values and cultures work. A model that fits the past and may even enable us to make predictions about what is coming for our species if we go one way, and what would come if we went any of several others. A model that finally becomes scientific, one with explicative and predictive value. 

But I'm running out of time. My fondest wish is that moral realist thinking and model-building will take root in a few young minds, ones that get the math, which I am sure is there. They will build, test, and promulgate models that will give us greater guidance in running our world. Competing models sometimes. And the struggles will take place in our minds, our research, and our debates, which is where they must be quarantined and studied if we are to survive. 

But I will keep on in my backwater too, of course. 

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