Chapter 14 – The Morally Crucial Features of Modern Physics

At last. We are ready to tackle the moral challenge. The question now is: What are the traits of the real universe, as Science sees it, that should guide how we design our new moral code? The answer is: The two most important traits of the modern scientific worldview are entropy and uncertainty. Each of these needs a bit more elaboration.

   

                                          

                                                       (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The first feature of reality that matters to how we design our moral code is stated by the laws of thermodynamics. These laws are more familiar to us and easier to explain than quantum uncertainty. 

The laws of thermodynamics say that energy (with matter viewed as a concentrated form of energy) can’t be created or destroyed. Energy can only be changed in form, as in from chemical energy in gasoline, to heat energy in the cylinders, to mechanical energy in the motions of the pistons, the crankshaft, and so on. 

But the laws of thermodynamics also tell us that even though the amount of energy in the universe stays constant, it always flows from areas of greater concentration to areas of lesser concentration. If matter or energy become more concentrated or organized in one area of space, then an even greater amount of energy must flow in from areas nearby. 

Everything is burning out. Metals corrode, wood rots, people and animals die. Life carries on by struggling against entropy.  

Even the stars and our sun are burning out.  In ordinary experience, this law is the trait of the universe that makes life always hard. Always full of work. The physical universe on its own works all the time to kill everything living. 

An area of matter-energy concentration (like our planet or my body) must always be maintained at the expense of even greater rates of energy burnout in nearby spaces. I get energy by eating plants or animals which also ultimately depend on eating plants. Plants get their energy from the sun as it burns. When fossil fuels like gasoline are burned, they are just releasing stored solar energy, as are hydroelectric dams and firewood. The sun is our source, and it burns and dissipates energy much more intensely than the creatures of the earth get and store second-hand solar energy.

The universe is heading toward a final state in which more than 10⁷⁹ tiny particles will be spread across it at a temperature of absolute zero. We don’t understand numbers that big, but that doesn’t matter. The heat death of the universe, as far as our science can tell, is inevitable. (It isn’t due for at least another five billion years.) 

To humans, who are energy-concentrated living things, this means that we exist against the natural flow of the physical universe. The level of disorganization or “burnt-outness” of anything (including the whole universe) is called its entropy, and the entropy of the universe is always increasing.

The second feature of reality that matters to our new moral code is uncertainty. In order to adapt to uncertainty, humans must learn to calculate probabilities of future events. Probabilities range from the likelihood that it will rain this afternoon, to the likelihood that there's a leopard in the grass nearby, to the likelihood that Germany will attack Russia given what Hitler said about Germany’s need for living space to the east. We design our actions and live our lives by odds-making.

Our deep belief that life is full of toil is our way of understanding entropy. 

Our deep belief that life also contains constant hazards, in addition to the constant hard work, is our way of understanding uncertainty.

If the true picture of reality and our place in it is that stochastic, one begins to wonder how we manage to get anything done. What mental models guide us to effective action in such a scary environment? The answer lies in viewing the human mind in a way that is consistent with quantum theory, namely the Bayesian way.

Simply put, none of us would truly engage in everyday life if we did not see ourselves as being free. In my dealings in everyday life, of course I believe in free will. I get out of the way of oncoming landslides or buses, I go to work to earn my pay, and I hold people responsible for their actions. I expect other rational adults to do the same. I applaud decent actions and reprimand mean, unethical ones. I calculate odds of both the material rightness and the moral rightness of nearly everything I do. The Bayesian view of the mind, combined with the quantum picture of reality, affirms and draws into sharp focus my everyday picture of myself. Free. Responsible. Scared.

The Bayesian model of the human mind is an appropriate one to integrate with the quantum model of the universe because Bayesianism lets us see the human mind as an adaptation to universal uncertainty. A sense-data-processing, probability-calculating, action-planning operating program—honed by trial and error through centuries of both biological and cultural evolution—is going to be more likely to enable the organism that uses it to survive than is any other kind of adaptation we could propose.

The mind software that runs on the brain hardware is presently defying all the models we have devised to try to imitate or explain it. In other words, the details of the programs that run on the brain’s hardware are even more of a mystery than the neuron hardware itself. 

The mind's survival value lies, first, in how it enables its carrier to spot patterns in real world events. Then, second and even more importantly, the mind's survival value lies in how it enables its carrier - a human being - to learn effective ways of handling the real world, ways that have already been discovered by other, earlier minds.

Finding patterns in the flows of matter and energy around us and calculating ways to exploit them is what our minds do. So far, we have not been able to pin down exactly how minds do this. But in spite of our difficulties with comprehending what happens while we are cognizing what we see, the Bayesian model of the mind is useful enough. It enables us to do some serious reasoning.

So far, we have shown how the Bayesian model of the human mind is integrated with the sociocultural model of human evolution and the quantum model of the physical universe. We are thinking creatures, learning—sometimes over generations—by Bayesian means, individual and collective, to improve how we deal with our surroundings. Bayesianism. Cultural evolution. Quantum uncertainty. With this tripartite model to support us, we are ready to draw some further powerful conclusions.

Notes

1. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: HarperOne, 1952), p. 19 of URL link. https://www.dacc.edu/assets/pdfs/PCM/merechristianitylewis.pdf.

2. Vassilios Karakostas, “Nonseparability, Potentiality and the Context-Dependence of Quantum Objects,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science, Vol. 38 (2007), pp. 279–297. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0811/0811.3696.pdf.

3. Robert Bishop, “Chaos,” Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 edition, first published July 2008). 

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/chaos/.

4. “Indeterminism,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 25, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminism#Robert_Kane.

5. Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” originally appearing in The Monist, Vol. 2, (1891–1893), pp. 321–337. http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/necessity/necessity.html.

                          

                                                                 Albert Einstein (credit: Wikipedia) 

It is important to reiterate here that quantum theory is not talking about the uncertainty of events at the macro level, a kind of uncertainty that we say we are forced to accept because of practical limits on our measuring abilities. Under the Newtonian view, one may believe that we humans see events that look unpredictable, from our limited human level, but still also think that the universe is a deterministic place. But quantum theory says that the processes taking place at the subatomic level are always occurring in ways that appear to us to be uncaused—what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” (he hated the idea of it). Furthermore, the point for my goal of trying to find a basis in physical reality for a moral code is not affected by these distinctions. Probability, quantum and non-quantum, as an overriding quality of reality, is ubiquitous and eternal. We must live with a probabilistic reality and adapt to it as a fact of life.

Physicists are unclear about how or even whether quantum uncertainty and non-quantum uncertainty enhance each other. The huge range of outcomes in complex systems may be influenced by both quantum and non-quantum forces. Currently, we just don’t know. The exact nature of what is going on down there is still being debated.

However, our moral models are not affected by these distinctions. In the level of reality at which our choices are made and our actions are measured, we experience reality as being made of probabilistic events. And in those chains of events, informed, guided, chosen human actions can effectively intervene and alter the likelihoods of at least some outcomes. This is all that really matters for moral philosophy.

Therefore, in all that follows, I will speak of the probabilistic quality of reality as being one of the crucial and basic facts that we humans must deal with. When I speak of uncertainty, I will be referring to the total uncertainty of reality, quantum and non-quantum, that we must face and deal with.

             

                                                    Charles S. Pierce (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Quantum theory breaks the backbone of classical determinism. At the tiniest level that we have been able to study, events are not connected by single paths of direct cause and effect. They are connected by forces that do not obey exact laws of cause and effect, but instead can be described only by laws of probability. The consequence for humans is that life is full of uncertainty, or to be exact, probabilities. In science, the usual term for this kind of system “stochastic”. Most of the time we know to a high degree of probability what is going to happen next, and also, with a fair degree of reliability, how we may be able to influence what is going to happen next, but we never know for certain what is going to happen. This view was anticipated by American philosopher and scientist Charles Peirce in the 1890s and has been further developed by many thinkers right into the twenty-first century.^4,5

We can and do act in bold, informed, calculated, and skilful ways, and our actions alter the probabilities of the various events that may happen in the next few seconds or decades, but it is also true that we can’t ever act so intelligently or skilfully that we can be 100 percent sure of any outcome, good or bad. The elements of surprise and risk are built into reality.

Unlike the Newtonian paradigm, the quantum one has opened up the possibility that we humans have free will. We really can influence probabilities by skilfully executed action in the real world. The odds that the flap of a butterfly’s wing will cause a hurricane or a rockslide are extremely remote. The odds that I will not get hit by a rockslide if I hear a roaring and duck beneath an overhanging shelf of basalt are much better. I can react successfully to the unforeseen. 

The odds that a field in April, left alone, will be full of corn ripening by October are extremely remote. The odds are much higher that the same field will contain a corn crop if I seed it with corn in April and water and weed it for the next five months. Human knowledge and skill enable us to intervene in the flows of events around us. At present, we can’t stop the hurricane, but our computer models, when fed enough data, can tell us when we need to get out of the hurricane’s way if we want to have reasonable odds of going on with our lives.

                          

   

                                 Planaria (aver. size 1 - 2 cm. long) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

The programming in life forms as humble as planaria enables them to swim to the side of the petri dish that is out of the direct light. They use their innate intelligence—their unique instincts—to improve their odds of survival by avoiding beams of direct light. How much more empowering is human programming? Thus, the quantum view is a view of ourselves that deeply resonates with our belief in the free will that directs our daily actions.

We are, within human limits, free. We can perform actions that alter the odds of some possible futures happening. We learn, think, and act to increase the odds of experiencing futures that will support our survival, health, and comfort, and decrease the odds of our experiencing futures that will lead us to pain, injury, and death. We think, learn, and act in ways that make it more likely that we will keep being able to to think, learn, and act. This is the nature of human freedom, and the lesser degrees of freedom in all life forms.

We gain a better understanding of how profoundly different this worldview is when we contrast it with the old Newtonian one. Philosophers who understood the old Newtonian worldview believed that natural laws like Newton’s laws of motion would eventually explain phenomena in the realms of Physics, then Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, and History. In this model, every event and every action performed by animals or humans is seen as being governed by rigorous natural laws that in each case must lead to only one outcome. Thus, only one history for the entire universe is possible. Human intuitions about the extent - even the existence - of our own freedom are illusions.

This view is called determinism: it says there is no such thing as free will because the future is already set, even if no human being will ever be able to know all of the natural laws and the positions and momenta of all of the particles. In principle, under the Newtonian view, there is no free will for humans or anything else in this universe because the future is already fixed. The quantum view, by contrast, opens up the possibility that living things can learn to spot patterns in the sense data they detect in the world around them, recognize the ones that tell of hazards and opportunities, and act to alter the probabilities of future events so that their chances of survival improve.

That picture resonates with our habitual and intuitive view of ourselves. We are, to a degree that varies from situation to situation, free. We can shape future events. 

In the quantum world view, events in reality cannot be pictured as coming in predetermined, connected sequences of cause and effect, but they aren’t random either. All events can now be seen as governed by rules of probability. Which subatomic particles will jump to other energy levels at any given nanosecond can be described only by laws of probability; all larger events are shaped by those subatomic particles.

Normally, an event or an object seen at our level of reality is the average of quintillions of subatomic events. Most of the time, the events we see at our level, the macroscopic one, are high-probability macro events, and they fit together to create the classical, Newtonian pictures and patterns we’ve seen over and over and have come to expect of everyday life.

But quantum theory leaves open the possibility that once in a while, when enough unusual events at the subatomic level coincide, they cause an event at our level—a hurricane, a supernova, a tornado, an avalanche, a failed bolt in an airplane, a mutation in a bacterium, or a sillytumble (okay, I made that up). None of these events is “uncaused”; they all have causes. The problem with the Newtonian worldview is that the causes aren’t neat sequences of earlier events. In principle, we can’t predict these outcomes in advance because we can’t calculate the sums of all the influential links in the causal chain. Weird things can, and sometimes do, happen.

And it’s not just that too many factors are involved. Even simple Newtonian systems with only two or three objects and forces acting on them evolve in ways that defy our best computer models. The possible results of the system depend on initial conditions of all parts of the system. Miniscule changes, some of them quantum changes, in any of these parts at any time during the unfolding of events may lead to any one of zillions of very different outcomes. The possibilities rapidly become, in practical terms, incalculable.

          

                                     

                                          

                                             inside the eye of Hurricane Katrina (credit: Wikipedia) 

For example, we can only say after the hurricane has passed that five days before it hit, some of our models had been indicating near-certainty levels of the hurricane’s making landfall on the Florida Coast. Then, the evolving odds that it was going to hit a specific site—for example, Pensacola—began to approach 60 percent on Friday and 95 or 99 percent by Sunday. Tiny jumps by particles, even some subatomic ones (what physicists call the “butterfly effect“), right back to the hurricane’s genesis off the coast of Africa, favoured and eventually selected one outcome over all of the other possible outcomes.³

In this hurricane scenario, gradually, a winning-outcome candidate emerged. But before it hit, which outcome that would be was not just unknown; it was unknowable. Unlike the Newtonian/Enlightenment world view, the quantum worldview says that the outcomes in real-life sequences of events are in principle never certain, but are always to some degree predictable in the exact sense of that word.

The point of one of the seminal books of our time, Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is that even in Science, the most rigorously logical and real-material-world-grounded of fields, there are no certainties. All the models of reality ever constructed by the human mind have undergone revisions or even total overthrow in the past. There is absolutely no reason for us to assume that any of our culture’s mental models of reality at any level of resolution—from the subatomic, to the human-scaled, to the cosmic—will be used to guide scientific research a century from now. There is nothing in the idea of an electron that is immune to being superseded by another, more useful, scientifically effective idea, any more than there was in the ideas of the ether or phlogiston—two scientific ideas that are now obsolete.

                                                                   

   

                              Artist’s conception of a carbon atom  (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

And electrons themselves? Will they cease to exist? That’s absurd, you say. In truth, it isn’t at all. Quantum physicists are investigating something far more radical—that electrons were never there in the first place. Previous generations of high school children were taught to draw the atom or the electron in a model that resembled our solar system; at the time, it was a useful model of subatomic reality. New models of the atom that have been developed recently cannot be drawn at all.

The waves of light that enable humans to use vision as a primary sense are longer than the dimensions of this hypothetical atom or electron. “What does an electron look like?” is an incoherent question. Electrons don’t “look” like anything we can imagine, even if we could pool all the seeing and imagining that our species has ever done. That solar system–like model of the atom is just a useful model that has enabled some scientists to do calculations and make predictions about the phenomena these hypothetical particles will produce at the level that is observable to us if we prod those particles in certain ways that are available to us in our laboratories and cyclotrons.

But no physicists really think clouds of tiny bullets are whirling around down at the subatomic level. That model has had its uses, but we must not become attached to it. Its day is all but up, and new results are defying many of the ideas and assumptions that it, for so long, has implied.

However, what matters for the purposes of this book is that the quantum model of reality, even if we can’t picture it, has profound implications for our world view. It thus has profound implications for our ethical beliefs, values, cultural morés, and patterns of survival-oriented behaviour.

Quantum theory is the most complete model we have of reality. It correctly predicts all our observations of the universe, some of which, until well into the twentieth century, had stymied scientists. But the worldview quantum theory offers is a strange one, especially to Western thinking. In the world today, only a very few can do the math involved in quantum theory, but its most fundamental principle is not hard to state.

In fact, the overarching principle of quantum theory can be stated very easily: reality is flux. But grasping what those words mean is another matter. To say that everything is in constant flux is inadequate. Rather, we must say that change is reality. For example, the things we think we see, with their surfaces, masses and colours, are illusions. According to quantum physicists, an object is only an area in space-time where interfering quintillions of waves of subatomic fields cause illusions of matter that are detectable to our senses and so to human consciousness. These temporary constellations of particles act on our (temporarily stable) sense organs in such a way as to produce impressions of solidity, weight, shape, texture, and colours and so on in our (temporarily stable) brains.²

But according to quantum theory, these things I think I’m seeing are temporary. If they are given enough time, they will collapse. Exactly how any one object or particle will collapse and what it will become next we cannot ever say with certainty. We can make predictions, some with very high degrees of probability, but we cannot “pre-know” any event with certainty no matter how clever or well-supplied with data we are. Cause and effect don’t always connect. Odd things, external and internal, sometimes interfere.

                                     

   

      Artist's conception of giant meteor entering earth's atmosphere (credit: Wikipedia) 

I can’t know when I try to stretch out my arm that my arm will stretch out. One day it may not. When that day will come, I can’t say. I can’t know whether the sun will rise tomorrow or whether the pen I just bumped off of my desk will fall to the floor. A giant meteor may strike the earth tonight. My pen may get caught in a kind of anti-gravity field that, until today, I knew nothing about.

I can’t know anything for certain, ever, period. I can only calculate the probabilities that I will experience these events and objects. I base my estimates of these probabilities on my memories of past experiences, on generalizations formed by studying those memories, and on beliefs and habits acquired from my culture. My estimates are accurate most of the time. But I can’t know anything for certain.

In the terms of everyday human experience, this means that change one can plan for is not real change. There is only one rule, which is the rule that says that there are no rules, or at least not any hard and fast ones. Or, as the old saying has it, life is full of rude awakenings.

Chapter 13 – Modern World Views

The new worldview that can be used as a base for a new moral code begins in the most difficult branch of modern science, quantum theory. Quantum theory can be translated into a worldview and then into a base for a moral code. And the moral code that can be derived from it is not really that far from one that, at least in theory, we should already be familiar with.

   

           C.S. Lewis, writer, academic, literary critic, lay theologian and Christian apologist

The problem for centuries has been that the kind of behaviour most people in the West felt was morally right could not be integrated with what science said was materially right. The deterministic universe that scientists have described for hundreds of years seems to imply no moral code at all. Science and moral philosophy have long been at loggerheads. Some in Science went so far as to say that moral values, and even the very ideas of right and wrong, are fantasies.

Descartes’s solution was to posit two realms, one of mind/spirit and one of matter/body, and assign moral philosophy to govern the first and science to govern the second. Even some fairly recent thinkers—for example, C.S. Lewis—have argued that, since our sense of right and wrong is so deeply ingrained in all of us, it must be real and so it must come from some source other than the material world. Therefore, he insisted, our deep sense of right and wrong, that is, morality, proves the existence of a spiritual dimension underlying all of physical reality.¹

But most people in the West today do not reach Lewis’s heartening conclusion. This view of science and religion as being incommensurable and irreconcilable—a view being advocated by many scientists and moral philosophers alike—is not an encouraging one for most people. (This view has been dubbed NOMA for non-overlapping magisteria i.e. realms or fields), a term first coined by Stephen Jay Gould in 1997.) 

The influence of scientists and the scientific way of thinking keeps rising in the public consciousness. As it does so, most people in the West have increasingly come to feel that if there is only one reality and only science can describe it, then because science has been silent about what right and wrong are, there really are no such things as right and wrong.

Yet all the signs indicate that if we don’t define our moral values in modern terms and we continue to blindly follow our old value systems—the inconsistent, hypocritical codes that developed in the Roman world, the medieval world, or even in the Enlightenment (out of the Newtonian world view) that let us march over other nations and even nature herself—then we are going to destroy our world.

But there is hope. We have a new world view. The question is, can we derive from it a new code of values? Let’s see what we can do with the worldview of the new physics.

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

Whether a given species will still be around further on in the natural history of the world is dependent on many factors such as changing climates and mutation rates of other species (especially those that are its food, its competition, and its predators). But the entire system keeps expanding relentlessly, as is shown by the way the amount of biomass on our planet has been increasing since life began here about three billion years ago.

While the model of human cultural evolution presented in the rest of this book will not satisfy Popper’s most rigorous early demands, it will do what we need it to do. It will give us categories and guidelines that will lead us toward lifestyles with better odds of our surviving over the long term. The cutting edge of the physical sciences, the deep principles of the life sciences, and a new model of human culture, I will try to show, contain between them the pieces that we need to build a new model of society and a new code of right and wrong, one that all of the human race can subscribe to. That creative process alone – which will combine the best insights of Science with the best of our human traits of reason, imagination, and compassion – may yet save us from the planet-wide bloom of mushroom clouds that lies before us.

Notes

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

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

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

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

   

                   Karl Popper, conversing with Cyril Hoschl (1994) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

However, this new theory will not satisfy the demands of the most exacting philosophers, such as, for example, Karl Popper and his disciples.¹ Popper loved the physical sciences and considered them to be models of what science should be, but he found Biology disappointing because he felt its foundational theories (notably the theory of evolution) could not be tested in neat, clear ways to see whether they could be falsified. He wrote off the social sciences pretty much completely.

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

Biology is not that neat. The theory of evolution can be tested only in ways that, if successful, may make it seem more likely to be true. In his early work, Popper did not even want to call Biology a science. But gradually, over years, he came to concede that some theories could make probabilistic, Bayesian kinds of predictions rather than neat, causally linked ones and could still be rigorous enough to be properly called scientific. The psychological theories of Adler and the historical ones of Marx weren’t useful and were not science, but Popper came to see that the theory of evolution was.²

At this point, it is important to stress that whether or not political correctness approves of the obvious conclusion we are heading toward, it is there to be drawn and therefore should be stated explicitly. The Enlightenment worldview and the social system that it spawned got results like no other ever had. It just worked. European societies that operated under it kept increasing their populations, their economic outputs, and, more tellingly, their control of the physical resources of the Earth. But, it is also important to stress that the Westernizing process often was not just. Western domination of this planet did happen, but in the twenty-first century, in most of the West, we are ready to admit that while it has had good consequences, it has had plenty of evil excesses as well.

                                         

   

                  Naval gun factory, Newcastle, England, c. 1911 (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

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

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

But I stress again that the world views, values, morés, and behaviour patterns that we humans live by are not all, as cultural relativism claims, of equal survival value and are not part of our way of life because of random events in the world or random impulses in us. Beliefs have consequences in the physical world for the people who hold those beliefs and some systems of beliefs get better results than others. 

                                           

                       Occupy Wall Street protestors, 2011 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

The idea of democracy evolved until it asserted constitutionally that the protecting of the rights of every citizen is the most important reason for its existence. All of this came about from the melding of Christian respect for the value of every single human being, Roman respect for order and discipline, and Greek love of the abstract thinking that questions the forces that be, even those in the physical world. Representative democracy based on universal suffrage was the logical goal of the Renaissance and Enlightenment world views when they were applied by human societies to themselves. The Romantic Age simply showed that the adjusting and fine-tuning takes a while. And it continues.

In the meantime, what of the Enlightenment world view? Inside the realm of Science, the Enlightenment was still entirely in place and, in fact, was getting stronger. The Romantic revolt left it untouched, even invigorated. Science came to be envisioned, by scientists, as the best way to fix the ills of society.

Under the scientific world view, as Newton and Laplace had said, all events were to be seen as results of previous events that had been their causes, and every single event and object became, in an inescapable way, like a link in a chain that went back to the start of the universe. The giant universal machine was ticking down in a mechanical way, like a giant clock.

While the Romantic revolt ran its radical course, governments, industries, businesses, armies, schools, and nearly all of society’s other institutions were still quietly being organized along the lines suggested by the Enlightenment world view. The more workable of the Romantic ideals (e.g. relief for the poor, protection of children) were absorbed into the Enlightenment worldview as it kept spreading until it reigned, first in the West, then gradually in more and more of the world. 

   

                       Crewe locomotive works, England, c. 1890 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

                               

        

                                                  Battle of Gettysburg aftermath (credit: Wikipedia) 

In the United States, the idealism of the American version of the Romantic revolt attempted to integrate the Enlightenment ideals of reason and order and the superiority of these Western ways with Romantic ideals that re-asserted the value of the individual. This produced painful excesses: genocide of the native people, enslavement of millions of Africans, and, one of history’s worst horrors, the US Civil War.

America had to undergo some difficult adjustments before it began to integrate the Christian belief in the worth of every individual with the respect for the law that enables individuals to live together in peace. But the slaves were freed, and the government began to compensate the native tribes (with reserves of land and with cash) and take them into the American mainstream (with opportunities for Western-style educations), or rather, to be more accurate, Americans began moving toward these ideals with more determination, and they continue to do so into this era, as do all modern states.

Thus, in the larger picture of all of these events, the upheaval called the Romantic Age imprinted into the Western value system a deeper respect for the ways of compromise, which resulted in the institutions of modern, representative democracy. These guided people toward balance and kept their various countries from devolving into chaos. Democracy was, and is, our best hope for creating institutions by which people use reason and debate instead of war to find a balance in each generation between the security-loving conservatism of the establishment and the passions of the reformers.

Lesser sideshows in the swirls of history happen. These are analogous to similar sideshows that have happened in the biological history of this planet. Species and subspecies meet, compete, mingle, and then thrive or die off. But the largest trends are still clearly discernible. 

The dinosaurs are long gone, and so it also goes in human history. A viable new species of society keeps emerging in what can properly be called a synthesis. In a compromise, two opposing parties each give a bit of what they like in order to get a bit more of what they want. What happened at the end of the Romantic upheaval was like what Hegel called a synthesis, a melding between a thesis and its antithesis, but it was also something more. As conditions changed and old cultural ways became obsolete, the synthesis that arose was a new species of society: modern representative democracy. A new life form, vibrant and unique. 

The one significant interruption in the spread of the Enlightenment’s values is the period called the Romantic Age. The meaning of this time is still being debated, but in my model, which sees a kind of cultural evolution in the record of human history, there are only a couple of interesting points to note about the Romantic Age (roughly, the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s).

                         

    Romantic imagination: "Abbey in an Oak Forest" (artist: Friedrich) (credit: Wikipedia)

First, it reaffirmed and expanded the value of the individual when the Enlightenment had gone too far and made duty—to the family, the group, or the state—seem like the only “reasonable” value, the one that should motivate all humans as they chose their actions. Romanticism asserted forcefully and passionately that the individual had an even greater duty to his own soul. I have dreams, ideas, and feelings that are uniquely mine, and I have a right to them. Paradoxically, this philosophy of individualism can be very useful for a whole society when it is spread over millions of citizens and multiple generations. This is because even though most of the dreamers produce little that is of any practical use to the larger community and some even become criminals, a few create beautiful, brilliant things that pay huge material, political, and artistic dividends.

                                    

                           Drawing of guillotining during French Revolution (credit: Wikipedia) 

In the second place, however, we should note that as a political philosophy, Romanticism produced some painful excesses. In France, for example, the citizens were passionate about their ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but once they had overthrown the hereditary kings and nobles and set up an idealistic people’s republic, they didn’t know how to administer a large, populous state. In a short while, they fell into disorder. Then they simply traded one autocrat for another (Louis XVI for Napoleon). Their struggle to reach an enlightened view of the deepest nature of humans, and to understand how a system of government that resonates with humans’ deepest nature might be instituted, took longer than one generation to evolve. But the French did begin evolving resolutely toward it. After Napoleon’s fall, a new Bourbon dynasty was instituted, but the powers of the monarchs were now severely limited, and after some more turmoil, the new Bourbon gang were also ousted. Democracy evolved – in erratic ways and by pain, but it evolved and grew strong, and is still evolving in France, as is the case in all modern states.

                                                                     

          

                                 English physician, William Harvey (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Some of the new beliefs were anathema to medieval thinkers—but the new beliefs worked. They enabled this “enlightened” subculture within society to solve problems (e.g., navigate the oceans, cure diseases, predict eclipses, boost production in industry and agriculture, and, especially, make increasingly deadly weapons). This new subculture within Europe’s nations was therefore able to increase its community of followers and its range of influence at a rate that the old Church and aristocracy, in the end, could not match. As was noted above, science continued attracting new followers because the miracles of science can be replicated; science works.

                                                                 

                         

                                Marie and Antoine Lavoisier (artist: David) (credit: Wikipedia) 

This scientific way of thinking was further employed by geniuses like Isaac Newton, William Harvey, Michael Faraday, Antoine Lavoisier, and others. Its gurus piled up successes in the hard market of physical results. Of those who resisted the new way, some were converted by reason, some went down in military defeats, some worked out compromises, and some just got old and died, still resisting the new ways and preaching the old ones to smaller and smaller audiences. The Enlightenment, as it is now called, had taken over.

Other societies that operated under world views in which humans were thought to have little ability to control the events of life are to be found in all countries and all eras of history, but we don’t need to discuss them all. The point is that the advancing worldview by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, around the planet, was the one we call scientific, or what is also called "the Enlightenment view".