Clostridium botulinum (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Another more general example of the dangers posed by an inaccurate picture of reality can be seen in the common activity of home canning. I may think I know all about bacteria and how to can foods at home in sealer jars. If I’ve looked through microscopes, I may be confident my picture of the microscopic level of reality is a true one. But if my knowledge of home canning covers only common bacteria, my knowledge may prove to be a dangerous thing. The usual boiling-water bath for foods canned in jars does kill most bacteria, but for a few microbes, boiling is not enough. Botulism is nothing to be played around with. Botulinum bacteria can be boiled to death, but their deadly toxins can survive boiling. My partial and inadequate set of beliefs about home canning might get me killed.

                                                

Or consider a few even more basic examples. Even my senses sometimes are not to be trusted. I may believe that light always travels in straight lines. I may see, half immersed in a stream, a stick that looks bent at the water line, so I believe it to be bent. But when I pull it out, I find that it is straight. If I am a caveman trying to spear fish in a stream, blind adherence to my ideas about light will cause me to starve. I will overshoot the fish every time, while the girl on the other shore, a better learner, cooks her catch.

I can immerse one hand in the snow and keep the other on a hand warmer in my coat pocket. If I then go into a cabin to wash my hands in tepid water, I find that one hand senses the water is cold, the other, that it is warm. Can I not trust my own senses?

When we seek to find some things in our experience that we can believe in absolutely, we are stopped by questions like “What do I really know?” and “How can I be sure of the things that I think I know?” and “Can I even be certain of what I see, hear, and touch?” We are deeply aware that we need a reliable core around which we can build the rest of our belief system or we may, sometime down the road, suddenly find that a whole set of ideas, and the ways of living the system implies, are dangerous illusions.

A flawed view of the world can lead one to a lifetime of error and misery. Marxism’s biggest error is its insistence on its own absolute infallibility. This claim taken as an axiom means immediately that Marx’s view of how a workers’ state must be run will tolerate no debate, no opposition, and no other political parties. Thus, attempts to install Marxist regimes have made available the political machinery by which tyranny may be put in place. Sadly, we have seen that once the controls for that machinery are available for the seizing, a “seizer” always arises.

But Science is about reality, the reality that comes even before political activities begin. If we insist, as some Marxists do, that Science must bow to the will of the people, we inevitably begin to tell our scientists what we want them to conclude, instead of asking them what the evidence seems to show.

                                          

                                         

                                                               Trofim Lysenko (credit: Wikipedia) 

A clear example is the doctrine called Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia. In that nation in the 1920s, the official state position was that human nature itself could be altered and humans made into perfect “socialist citizens” by changing their outward behavioral traits. If they were made to act like utterly selfless socialist citizens, they would become so, even in their genetic programming. This government position required that the Darwinian view of evolution be overruled because politics must rule Science.

Darwin had said that members of living species do not acquire genetic changes from having their external traits altered; living things change their natures only when their gene pools are altered by the processes of genetic variation and natural selection over many generations. In its determination to create what were called “socialist citizens”, Soviet Communism required people to believe that the acquired characteristics of any organism—for example, the state of a shrub being leafless as a result of its leaves having been picked — could be inherited by that organism’s descendants.¹ For years, Soviet agriculture was all but crippled by the party’s attempts to make its political “truism” be true in living reality, for crops and livestock, when it simply wasn’t. 

Chapter 3 – Foundations for a Moral Code: Empiricism and Its Flaws

At first glance, it seems that what we most want to know is how this universe works so we can figure out how to navigate through its currents with more health and joy and less pain and misery for ourselves and our children. If we get the basics of our world right, we have a chance of figuring the other details out. If not, we’re doomed to wander off track, into harm, over and over. People who don’t make a desire for real world effectiveness one of the primary focuses of their lives don’t pass on their values and ways of living, short-sighted as those may be. People who do want to find effective ways to live pay attention to the physical universe and, as a result, transmit their belief systems more effectively to their children, and thus their beliefs move forward (in their kids) efficiently over time.

So we want to understand this world and our place in it. However, as we study this problem in a general way, it becomes apparent that a deeper problem exists. We begin to wonder about the reliability of our basic information-processing system—that is, the human-brain-hardware–human-mind-software system. Can we trust the faculties we use to gather information about our world? Or are our perceptions, and any reasoning based on those perceptions, frequently fooled by our own yearnings or fears?

                     

                                                                 Karl Marx (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Consider, for example, a girl I knew at university in 1971 whose core beliefs were all Marxist. How she yearned for Marx’s vision to come true. For her, all the troubles of the world were due to the capitalists’ manipulations and conspiracies, and only a world workers’ state would ever create a decent life for all people. The fact that the communist states of the world at that time were rife with cruelty and corruption, for her, was always somehow due to the capitalists in other lands. The harsh living conditions and the secret police in these states were temporary measures that would be remedied as soon as the capitalist dogs had been eradicated from the earth.

She had so utterly deluded herself that I used to feel weak as I listened to her. She saw oppression in the faces of all the workers we passed as we walked the campus. She saw fascist symbolism in every poster of every concert being advertised on the notice boards. She carried a list of provincial and local government people whom she and her friends were going to assassinate “when the revolution comes.” Her eyes were working, but what she noticed as she walked through her day was not what was there. I wonder where she is now. But she taught me something—how fully humans can delude themselves.

Since then, of course, Communism has failed totally; the world has seen that centrally planned economies wither. However, she was just one of many sincerely deluded people I’ve met over the years who left me wondering, “Which of my own beliefs can I trust? Can I trust my moral beliefs? Can I trust my everyday ones? Can I even trust what I see?”

From the nation to the person, some coherent code must be in place in order for us to function, even if that code is mostly programmed into the subconscious. People without any basic operating code in place can’t act at all. They are called catatonic. The problem today is that, for millions of people all over the world, the old moral codes that used to guide all human thought and action are fading. World War I was the first in a series of real-world shocks that have deeply rocked all of our beliefs—beliefs about the value of our science and, even more deeply, beliefs about our codes of right and wrong.

So let me reiterate: the worst fact about our moral dilemma in the twenty-first century is that collectively, the gurus of Science, though able to achieve amazing things in the realms of machines, chemicals, etc., have had nothing to say about how we should or should not be using these technologies. Many of them even go so far as to claim that should is a word that has no meaning in Science.

It seems bitterly unfair that the same science that eroded our moral beliefs offered nothing to put in their place. But what seems more cruelly ironic is that at the same time as Science was destroying our religious and moral beliefs, it was putting into our hands technologies of such destructive power that the question that arises is whether any individual or group of individuals could ever be moral enough to handle them responsibly.

We are living in a time of terrifying uncertainty. We now have the weapons to scorch our planet in one afternoon—so completely that the chances of our species surviving in that post-apocalyptic world are effectively zero.

Furthermore, even if we escape the holocaust of nuclear war, we are steadily polluting our planet. We’re aware of this, but we can’t seem to stop, even though the vast majority of the scientists who study the earth and its ecosystems say that the point of no return is rapidly approaching. To people who have studied the earth and its systems, the risk of environmental collapse is even more frightening than that of nuclear war.

Large numbers of us, in the meantime, “lack all conviction.” Without a moral code to guide us—one we truly believe is founded in the real world—we are like deer on the highway, paralyzed in the headlights, seemingly incapable of recognizing our peril.

Most reasonable, informed people today know these things. In fact, we are so weary of hearing what are called the “dire predictions” that we don’t want to think about them anymore. Or we think, get scared, then go out with our friends to get inebriated. There seems to be little else one ordinary person or even clusters of powerful persons can do. The problems are too big and too insidious for us—individually or collectively. Shut it out. Forget about it. Try to live decently. Hope for the best.

For me, none of these answers are good enough. To ignore all of the evidence and arguments and resign myself to the “inevitable” is to give in to a whole way of thinking I cannot accept. That way of thinking suggests that the events of human lives are determined by forces that are beyond human control.

I disagree. I have to. I believe true philosophers must.

Whether we are discussing the cynicism of people who focus on events in their personal lives or the cynicism of people who study human history, or cynicism at any level in between, I have to tell these cynics bluntly, “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this debate because you wouldn’t be here.”

                                

                       Albert Camus, French philosopher (1913–1960) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

As Albert Camus sees it, suicide is the sincerest of all acts.⁶ Its only equal in sincerity is the living of a genuine life. A genuine person stays on in this world by conscious choice, not by inertia. A genuine person is still here because he or she chooses to be. Insincere people may claim to be totally disillusioned with this world and other people in it, but that simply can’t be the case if they are still alive and talking. These people are only partitioning up their minds, for the time being, into the manageable compartments of cynicism. But the disillusionment they feel now—on any scale, personal to global—is going to seem minor compared with that which they will one day feel with themselves, one day when their fragile mental partitions begin to give way. And it doesn’t have to be that way, as we shall see.

So, to sum up our case so far, what have we shown? First, that Science has undercut and eroded the old beliefs in God and the old codes of right and wrong. Second, that because of our ongoing need just to manage our lives and, even more importantly, because of our recently acquired and constantly growing need to manage wisely the physical powers that Science has put into our hands, we must replace the moral code we no longer believe in with one we do believe in. Perhaps then we will have a chance to live, go on, and get past our present peril.

If we can work out a moral code we truly believe in, and if it really is congruent with physical reality, will it lead us on to a renewed belief in a Supreme Being? That question is one I will set aside for now, but I will deal with it in the last chapter of this book. For now, let’s set our sights on trying to begin to build a new moral code for this era, so that finally we may confront and quell “the worst” among us. And the worst in us.

Notes

1. Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Journal of General Psychology, 10 (1934). http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/heathwood/pdf/benedict_relativism.pdf.

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996).

3. John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

4. Harold Kincaid, Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

5. Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999).

6. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 11.

In the meantime, by the end of the fighting, the political, religious, and business leaders in every sector of society appeared to be out of answers. They continued spouting the platitudes that had got their nations into the horror to begin with. Their moral systems seemed to be bankrupt. Paralyzing doubt began to haunt people in every level of society, from the rich and powerful to the middle classes to the poor.

If the morals of the West had led to this, people could not help but think, maybe Science was right about the Bible. Maybe the moral beliefs that it recommended had all been a fraud. Maybe there were no moral rules at all. Darwin’s model of the living world had portrayed “nature red in tooth and claw.” Survival of the fittest—that seemed to be the only credible model left. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world.

Before the scientific revolution began to erode God out of the thinking of the majority of citizens in the West, even if people hadn’t been able to grasp why bad things sometimes happened in the world or why bad people sometimes got ahead in spite of, and even because of, the suffering they inflicted on others, people could still believe God had reasons and the code of right and wrong still held. God was watching. Matters would be sorted out in time. The liars, manipulators, thieves, bullies, and killers would get their just deserts in time. We just had to be patient and have faith. The people, in large majority, believed the authorities’ official spiel.

But World War I was just too big. With the scale of the destruction, the pathetic reasons given to justify it, and the amorality of Science gnawing at their belief systems, more and more people began to suspect and fear that, just as Science had said, there was no God, the Bible was a collection of myths, their leaders were a bunch of deluded incompetents, and the old moral system was a sham. And then, things got worse.

   

                British Army bulldozer burying bodies at Bergen-Belsen (credit: Wikipedia) 

                                                         

   

           British soldiers forcing German guards to load bodies onto trucks (credit: Wikipedia) 

Following the First World War, to exacerbate the moral confusion and despair, the man-made horrors of the twentieth century began to mount. They are so many and so ugly. The Russian Revolution and Civil War. The worldwide Depression. World War II, six times as destructive as World War I. Hitler’s camps. Stalin’s camps. And on and on. But we don’t need to describe any more. The point is that these were the actions of a species that had gained great physical power at the same time as it lost its moral compass or, more plainly, its ability to handle that power responsibly.

   

          Political prisoners at work camp in Kolyma, Siberia (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The big question, “What is right?” keeps echoing in an empty hall, and the big fears that go with it have only grown. Where will the code that we need to guide our behaviour in international affairs, business, or even everyday matters come from now?

The First World War shattered the optimism of the Golden Age prophets, but it also shattered much more deeply the confidence of the nations of the West, which had begun to believe they had found the answers to life’s riddles. Pre-WWI, people in the West had come to believe that their wise men were in control: the ways of the West, with Science in the vanguard, were taking over the world, and thus the sufferings of the past would gradually be reduced until they became only anomalies or dim memories recorded in books.

There had been wars and famines and depressions before, but the traditional ideas of God and of right and wrong, based on the Bible, had retained the loyalties of people in the West because: first, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI; second, the ways of the West had for the most part seemed to work; and third, there hadn’t been a serious alternative set of beliefs to consider.

But now, with the rise of Science, all was changing. As we gained physical power, our ideas about how to handle all that power began to seem increasingly inadequate. Then, in the horrors of WWI, the moral systems of Western societies seemed not just to fail but to unravel; people’s worst fears came true. Science was a monster, and it was on the loose.

As Science, with the help of its new communication media, was giving the jingoistic, xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in European societies more power to mold people’s minds, it was also arming these forces and leaders with ever bigger and more terrible weapons—while the moral philosophers and social scientists dithered. The outcome had a feeling of inevitability to it. A global arms race was becoming normal. The probability kept rising. Sooner or later a war of monstrous proportions had to happen.

   

              German soldier’s belt buckle (standard issue), WWI (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Descartes’s method, based on compromise, of using Christian morals to control scientific technologies was not working. Not only were Christians of the West carrying out previously unthinkable horrors, they were doing so mostly to one another. Worst of all, in every one of the warring nations, these acts were being done expressly in the name of their God. Gott mit uns was embossed on every German soldier’s belt buckle. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was being sung at Sunday church services in every English-speaking country in the world.

There was no doubt about it—the old beliefs and values just weren’t up to the hard tests that the new, scientific age was posing for them. In fact, the sages that many people had been looking to, namely the scientists in all of the branches of Science, asserted that, on the subject of morality, there was nothing that Science could say. 

   

                            going over the top during the Battle of the Somme (credit: Wikipedia) 

Long before the horrible casualties began to mount, World War I was huge in the historians’ views even from its very beginning because, for the first time in history, modern scientific weapons and technologies were going to be used to kill men in assembly-line fashion. The process was going to be made as efficient as the new, scientifically designed factories: scientific technologies, arranged in efficient sequences and supervised by experts. Now we would see what Science could do.

We saw.

Consider just one telling statistic: the British Army lost more casualties—sixty thousand wounded, missing, and killed—in the first six days of the Battle of the Somme than it had lost in all of its recorded history, all over the world, up until that week. France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, the United States, Canada, and all of the other countries involved were hit with similar losses, over and over, for four long years.

In the end, nine million combatants were dead, with three times that many permanently scarred. And those were just the combatants. How many civilians? No one really knows. Every country on earth was touched, or we should say wrenched, either directly or indirectly. Over six hundred thousand Canadians (from a population of eight million) enlisted in the armed forces, and out of the four hundred twenty thousand who actually got into the fighting in Europe, over sixty-five thousand died.

Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to the war discussed in total seriousness the very likely possibility that the new modern weapons would be useless because men would simply refuse to use them on other men. Modern torpedoes, flame throwers, machine guns, poison gas, airplanes—the horrors they’d cause! No. No one would be willing to use them.

   

             Early 20th-century French postcard depicting the year 2000 (credit: Wikipedia) 

Other writers a few years before, more sanguine about how Science would affect society, had even been speaking of a coming Golden Age. Science wasn’t just showing us how to build horrible weapons. It was also curing diseases, creating labour-saving machines, improving agriculture, and even inventing new forms of entertainment. Progress was steadily reaching into the lives of even the humblest citizens. Surely, goodness and mercy would follow close behind.

Now, all of this still may sound academic and far removed from the experience of ordinary folk. But the truth is otherwise. When a society’s sages can’t guide its people, people look elsewhere for moral leaders. When the “wise” respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with jargon and equivocation, others—some of them very unwise—jump in to fill people’s needs.

So we ask: how did the eroding of the West’s moral systems that followed the rise of Science affect people living through real events? Let’s consider one harsh example.

                                                      

   

                                    World War I, young German soldier (credit: Wikipedia) 

By the early twentieth century, the impacts of the ideas of Darwin and Freud, and of Science generally, had arrived. Social scientists and philosophers were left scrambling to understand what new moral code, if any, was implied for humanity by these new ways of seeing the world. Answers on every side were contradictory and confusing. Then, following too soon, in a bitter or perhaps inevitable irony, real-world political events broke out of control. In 1914, World War I arrived; it became the major test of the moral systems of the new “scientific” societies of the West.

                                                                                  

                              

                                    World War I recruitment poster (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

When World War I began, in the cities and towns of Europe and in the cities of all other countries that were attached even remotely to the main belligerents, banners flew, troops marched, bands played, and huge crowds of men, women, and children all shouted for joy. A few sober people raised objections for one set of reasons or another, but they were drowned out in the din. In every nation involved, people fell easily into viewing the human race as being made up of "us" and "them", as people tend to do in wartime, and people easily began to say to their neighbors that, finally, the superior armies and ideals of their way of life were going to sweep aside the barbaric, backward armies and ideals of their nation’s enemies.

Exhorted in speeches by their leaders and by writers in the media to stand up for their homelands, the men of Italy, Germany, France, Britain, Austro-Hungary, and Russia, along with all their allies, absorbed the jingoistic stories being told in their newspapers and signed up to fight. Competing narratives about Europe and its history had finally brought the European tribes into head-on confrontation.

                                                                         

                                

                                     Anti-German propaganda poster (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

My country, Canada, was part of the British Empire in 1914, and Canadians were just as eager as any of the loyal subjects in London, England. Young men leaped out of the crowds lining the streets to march in step with the parades of soldiers going by. Many of them were worried that by the time they got through their training and on to Europe, the fighting would be over. Girls clustered around men in uniform who came back to visit their workplaces or colleges or even high schools before shipping out. Old ladies out shopping, by 1916, would spit on any young man of military age who was not in uniform.

   

Others in the social sciences have taken a more aggressive stance. They have argued that no science, not even Physics, is truly objective. Complex, culturally acquired biases shape all human thinking—even, they say, the thinking of the physicists and chemists.

Thus, they argue that the overarching position called moral relativism is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the whole body of social science research, or all research in all fields, for that matter. We can try to observe and study human societies and the belief systems they instill in their members, but we can’t pretend to do such work objectively. We come to it with eyes already programmed to see the details considered “significant” under the models and values that we absorbed as children. Each researcher’s model of what human society is—or should be—lies deeper than her ability to articulate thoughts in words or even simply to observe. Our biases can’t be suspended; they prefigure our ability to think at all.


   
                            
                           same girl in differing lights - which is real?  (credit: Wikipedia) 

This is the stance called social constructivism. In its view, thought filters are learned from our culture (parents, teachers, etc.) as we grow, and with these tools, we string together sense data—the ones that we have been told matter—until, moment by moment, we form a picture of “reality.” But the whole of reality is much more detailed and complex than the set of sights and sounds we are paying attention to. And other people, especially those from other cultures, construct their own pictures of reality, some of them very different from ours, but still quite workable. People from other cultures have morés and ways of seeing reality that differ from our ways, but their ways do work for them.

In support of this claim, social scientists point out that while descriptions of events in a given society are possible, and even generalizations about apparent connections between events in that society are possible, general, law-like statements about how moral codes and morés for all humans in all societies work continue to elude us.

Some social scientists even go so far as to claim there aren’t any “facts” in any of our descriptions of the events of the past, or even the events happening around us now. There are only sets of details selected by us, but guided by the values we learned as children, and we string these details that we do notice together to form various narratives, any one of them as valid as any other one. At the highest level of generality on what morals are, many social scientists not only have nothing to say, they insist that nothing “factual”—that is, nothing objectively true—can be said. Each of us is trapped inside of her or his version of reality, and there is nothing we can do about that. Even Science is just a set of opinions that seem to be working …for now. 

This argument called the Science Wars continues to rage. There’s not enough space here to go into even five percent of it. But the point for us is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack conviction. They can read about honor killings and remark calmly, “Well, that’s their culture.” In fact, to many thinkers in the humanities and social sciences today, all convictions are temporary and local. (One more recent, sensible, and useful compromise position is taken by Marvin Harris in Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times.)⁵

                

                                                                                   ^{Marvin Harris (credit: Wikipedia)} 

This has been the scariest consequence of the rise of Science: moral confusion and indecision among our elites. It began to become serious in the West in the nineteenth century after Darwin and then Nietzsche's ideas started to spread, but here we are in the twenty-first and, if anything, the crisis of moral confidence appears to be getting worse.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that the whole realm of activities called "Science" follows a set of practices that are not merely rational. Science does not progress 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. 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

                           

                                                                                       John Searle (credit: Wikipedia) 

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 models that are too vaguely defined, and therefore, Searle claims, the conclusions that studies in the social sciences produce can’t be nomothetic—that is, law like—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)

In response to these criticisms, some social scientists have striven to be more objective and empirically rigorous in their work. But they do admit that the studies done in their fields are often difficult to replicate because relevant background conditions to the phenomena being studied can’t be reset. For example, how could a tribe go back to living as fishers when the fish species they once lived off are gone? Could we get a modern nation, or even a small subgroup in it, to live without their cell phones?

Even a social scientist’s examination of a group of people changes those people. In the process, some of the morés of the people being studied become altered or cease to exist. Social scientists also admit that the models guiding their research can’t be expressed in neatly logical terms so the phenomena the researchers describe are often not reducible to formulas. 

In addition, many of the ways in which a researcher’s own biases may influence what she looks for and how she sees the data seem impossible to forestall, no matter how carefully the studies are designed. Finally, many human customs make sense only when they are viewed in the context in which the humans being studied normally live. Outside of their contexts, human actions often look pointless. In the ancient markets, which kiosks sold batteries? Before they went overseas, where did the Crusaders get their typhus shots?

   

                     romanticized portrayal of "The Last Crusader" (Lessing) (credit: Wikipedia) 

Thus, social scientists admit they often must settle for a single print of any phenomenon they wish to study. Societies vary widely in their beliefs and morés and keep changing even as we examine them. There are a great number of “prints” of reality to study and more coming all the time; we’ll never catch up. And for that matter, how can any social scientist who grew up largely inside of one culture ever claim to look objectively at another culture?

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

                                                                    

                            

                                                     William Butler Yeats (credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

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 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.

                                          

                                           Rabbi Menachem Froman (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

If we consider just these three scientific theories—Galileo’s, Darwin’s, and Freud’s—what can we say have been their consequences? Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, for most people, removed the biblical God from their picture of the cosmos. They didn’t need him in their model of the universe. Darwin removed God as the creator of life. He even reduced humans to just one more kind of animal. And Freud made humans look like sick animals, easily deluded by their own aggressive, lustful, self-absorbed thoughts. (Donald Palmer’s book articulates this idea well.⁷)

                 

                                                                The Dalai Lama (credit: Wikipedia) 

Despite all this, science has not proved that the existence of God is impossible or that a universal moral code is impossible. But over the past four centuries, science has severely shaken the traditional idea of God and thus, inevitably, the traditional ideas of morality (the two are deeply intertwined, as we shall see). However, let me stress again that what does not follow from these scientific models is that there is no God or that every form of theism and every form of moral code are mere wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what God is and what the fact of God’s existence should mean for us in how we live our daily lives, an understanding that incorporates some subtler ideas of God and science into a single, consistent, coherent picture of what we believe is real.

                        

                                                              Pope Francis (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

But for now, we can say that science has almost levelled the old, pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking of these things. And let us make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the vast majority of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how this world works had the inevitable consequence of removing our society’s confidence in its moral code, our ideas of what right and wrong are, and how we should try to act—toward the world in general, but especially toward one another. If the moral rules we’re supposed to follow aren’t God’s rules, whose rules are they? Human authorities’ rules? Which human authorities? Who are they to be telling me what to do? They're just people, like I am. 

                                         

                                                                    Hindu swami Prabhupada (credit: Wikipedia) 

The point may seem a rather trivial one to most people in the West. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? Explaining in more detail why humans throughout the world, sometimes at deep, subconscious levels, are struggling to cope with this loss, even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts and feelings they are having, will be the business of the next chapter.

               

                           

                   Muslim spiritual leader Abdul Ghaffer Khan (with Gandhi) (credit: Wikipedia) 

Notes

1. Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 55.

2. “Life Expectancy,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed March 29, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

3. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Articles 211 and 212, ed. Jonathan Bennett. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/descartes1649.pdf.

4. Ibid., Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 3 and 4., trans. John Veitch, 1901. http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations.

5. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966), p. 353.

6. Cathryn Delude, “Researchers Show That Memories Reside in Specific Brain Cells,” MIT News, March 22, 2012. http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.

7. Donald Palmer, Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy (California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1st edition, 1991), p. 56.