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.