One way or another, changes keep happening in every human culture, whether the changes originate from within or without. But changes in ways of living aren’t always accompanied by people hurting and killing each other. And given that in the end we all must answer with our cultural codes and morés to the same physical reality, there is reason to hope that peace-loving people, if they can become wise and motivated enough, may prove fitter for long-term survival than are the warmongers. Peace-mongers just have to get very subtle about how they program their kids. Vigorous but respectful. From these and other observations of the open-mindedness, adaptability, and improvisational capacities found in major segments of all societies, we can draw hope for peace.

To close this chapter and return to the larger argument let me make one more implicit point explicit: even though all values are tentative for humans, and a bewildering array of values codes have been tested violently against one another in the past, no values should be called arbitrary. That word implies that our testing of cultures against one another is terrible but trivial. 

Our world, including the parts of it that we make, is always changing, so our mores and our values must also. But in spite of the apparent futility of war, new  values and morés are not arbitrary—that is, they are not all of equal merit, because they do not all lead to the same long range survival odds for a nation or for the human species. Some new values and the morés they foster work well, some badly. Some are moving society in an unhealthy direction entirely. Values have consequences for those who hold them; they are too crucial to be described by a term as casual-sounding as arbitrary. 

For example, clever strategies for survival pay attention to the energy flow patterns of the earth. The algae in the Indian Ocean multiplying, trapping solar energy. Forests doing particularly well this year in Central America. Soil left by the volcanic eruption years ago in Indonesia being particularly fertile. North Sea oil running out. A new dynamo that can tap the tidal power in the Bay of Fundy.

   

                                     tides in the Bay of Fundy (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

If we’re rational, we note and exploit energy supply opportunities and remedy energy supply problems out of choice, not luck. The objective of this book is to set humanity on a course by which we learn to live consciously and by reason. This will require that we envision and implement a way of life that, from the outset, is rational. 

Then, we will spot and exploit opportunities and remedy problems out of choice, not by luck. I repeat: we must create and learn to live by a moral code that is rational – founded in reason and evidence. If we don’t devise a code of values that proves both rational and practicable, then the lessons of history and the trends of technology tells us vividly that we are going to scorch or poison our planet—or both.

As I noted above, the variety of morés and value systems of our societies has led some social scientists and philosophers to claim that every system of values is correct in its own context, and none is correct in any objective sense. That they are all arbitrary. This is a false and dangerous conclusion to draw. These people have the best of intentions: they want to encourage us all to feel tolerant toward one another’s cultures and to get along. 

However, their moral code is not assertive enough. If it can be said to aim at all, it aims to fill the gap left after they have deconstructed all existing moral codes. That task, like calculating an irrational number, does not repeat and does not terminate. This analogy tells us that modern social science leads to moral paralysis. It does not enable affirmative action. Therefore, the postmodernist stance is not good enough. It will lead us once more into war, and that option, we have seen in this chapter, is no longer a rational option.