Whether we are discussing the cynicism of people who focus on events in their personal lives or the cynicism of people who study human history, or cynicism at any level in between, I tell these cynics bluntly, “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this debate because you wouldn’t be here.”

                                     

                                                  

                 Albert Camus, French philosopher (1913–1960) (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

As Albert Camus sees it, suicide is the sincerest of all acts.⁶ Its only equal in sincerity is the living of a genuine life. A sincere person stays on in this world by conscious choice, not by inertia. A sincere person has created a vision of the world and how she/he has purpose in it, and so is still here because he or she chooses to be, even when, especially when, the envisioned life will be full of hardship. The sincere have guts. 

Insincere people may claim to be disillusioned with this world and other people in it, but that simply can’t be the case if they are still alive and talking. These people are only partitioning up their minds, for the time being, into the manageable compartments of cynicism. But the disillusionment they feel now—on any scale, personal to global—is going to seem minor compared with that which they will one day feel with themselves, one day when their fragile mental partitions begin to give way. And it doesn’t have to be that way, as we shall see.

So, to sum up our case so far, what have we shown? First, that Science has undercut and eroded the old beliefs in God and the old codes of right and wrong. Second, that because of our ongoing need just to manage our lives and, even more importantly, because of our recently acquired and constantly growing need to manage wisely the physical powers that Science has put into our hands, we must replace the moral code we no longer believe in with one we do believe in. Perhaps then we will have a chance to live, go on, and get past our present peril.

If we can work out a moral code we truly believe in, and if it really is congruent with physical reality, will it lead us on to a renewed belief in a Supreme Being? That question is one I will set aside for now, but I will deal with it in the last chapter of this book. For now, let’s set our sights on trying to build a new moral code for this era, so that finally we may confront and quell “the worst” among us. And the worst in us.

Notes

1. Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Journal of General Psychology, 10 (1934). http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/heathwood/pdf/benedict_relativism.pdf.

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996).

3. John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

4. Harold Kincaid, Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

5. Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999).

6. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 11.