Chapter 3.          (conclusion)

Of course, there are the cynics, the ones who say that they don’t know or care whether we’ll ever find a way to set up universal standards of right and wrong. They see the pursuit of a universal moral code as a futile waste of time. But whether they focus on daily human lives or on history’s big trends, or their focus is somewhere in between those limits, I tell these cynics, “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this debate. 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.¹ Its only equal in sincerity is the living of a genuine life. A genuine person stays on in this world by conscious choice, not by inertia. A genuine person has created a vision of the world and how she can live with purpose and meaning in it, and so is still here because she chooses to be, even when, especially when, she knows the life she will live will be full of hardship. The sincere have guts. 

 

Insincere people may claim to be alienated from this world and the 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 manageable compartments of cynicism. But the disillusionment they feel now – on any issue, personal to global – is going to seem minor compared with the disillusionment which they will one day feel for themselves, one day when their 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 severely eroded the old beliefs in God and, thus, the old moral codes. And it continues to do so.

 

Second, that Science has refused, and continues to refuse, to take responsibility for the muddle it has made. It has insisted adamantly for decades that it has nothing to tell us about which of our actions are right or wrong.

 

Thirdly, due to our ongoing need just to manage our lives – and, more importantly, the power 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 get past our present perils.

 

In short, Science’s refusal to tell us anything about what our moral code ought to say is not good enough. Period. We have to find a code of behavior that will give us a way of life, one that makes our morals consistent with our Science, or in simpler terms, makes “right” consistent with “real”.

 

As promised, I will deal with the Supreme Being question in the last chapters of this book. But for now, let us first try to confront and, then try to quell,  “the worst” around us. And in us.

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien 

    (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 11.