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 cultural
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.
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
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 says, 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)
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