Note to readers: I am driving to Edmonton tomorrow. 11 hour drive if all conditions are good. Any delays or detours and it is sometimes 12+ hours. I've driven the route many times, I'll be fine, but the point for this blog is that I will not be posting tomorrow. Then I'll be back on Thursday. Have a sweet day with a nice helping of meditation and contemplation. 

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                                                               Liberty Leading The People 

                                       (credit: Eugène Delacroix [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons) 

I have been mulling over this problem of what makes right right for more than fifty years, from the time that I was a child, through a long career teaching in the public school system, eight years of formal post-secondary study, three degrees (two undergraduate, one graduate), stints in agriculture, six rock bands and business, time spent raising three kids, and a lot of life. However, I feel all these experiences neither add to nor detract from my case. They aren’t relevant. The case must stand on its own.

It is also worth noting that the ideas, historical records, texts, and perspectives I discuss in this book are mostly those of a man who was born into, and moulded by, a Western culture. Certainly, plenty of other usable perspectives are available in the world today. But I am a son of the West. I can speak with at least some useful degree of conviction only on the ideas and history I’ve learned about in my country and its schools. However, the conclusions I draw in this book are universal; they can be extracted by logic from the historical records and daily life circumstances of any nation.

This book is an attempt to solve the dilemma of our time. I think I’ve untangled that dilemma. My hope is that those who stay with this book to the end will find that the reward—a thinking system that enables them to organize all their ideas, professional, moral, and personal, into one clear, consistent, coherent whole—will more than compensate for the effort they have invested in reading the book in full.

I have to try.

   

                                                                                    The Boating Party  

                                   

                                        (credit: Mary Cassatt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons )                                                       

Notes

1. Emrys Westacott, “Moral Relativism,” International Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012. http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-re/#SH3b.

2. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Mariner Books, 2002).

3. David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance (Greystone Books, 1997).

4. Albert Einstein, from a telegram to prominent Americans, May 24, 1946.

5. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3.3.4 (1739; Project Gutenberg). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm.