Chapter 4          Finding a Foundation for a Moral Code

 

If we want to stay loyal to our Science and even use it to build a new moral code that works, what we want to know first is how the universe works, i.e. what we must deal with in the reality that Science says is out there. Then we can use that base and build a code that will guide us through the universe’s obstacles and currents with better odds of more joy and less pain. If we get the basics right, we’ll have a reasonable chance of figuring the other details out. If not, we’ll be misguided by our basic assumptions, and doomed to wander off track, into pain and death, over and over again. As we build, so shall we go.

 

People who don’t make a desire for real world effectiveness the primary focus of their thought and lives don’t pass on their values and ways of living because they die out. They lose babies to childhood diseases. Or they can’t feed their children or themselves. People who do strive to find effective ways to survive in greater numbers pay attention to the universe around them and, as a result, survive in greater numbers to transmit their ways forward. Their beliefs and customs survive in their kids.

 

Therefore, it seems logical that we should begin to build a new moral vision and code by trying to learn all we can about our world and how we fit into it.

 

However, as we ponder this problem, we see there is an even deeper problem, namely the reliability of our basic information-gathering system – i.e., the human brain and the mind in it. Can we trust the senses we use to gather information about our world? And, can we trust our ways of forming concepts about the workings of the world from our impressions and memories of it?

 

For example, in the realm of sensory perceptions, color-blindness renders some people incapable of seeing subtle differences between shades of red and orange. And color-blindness is just one of the things that can warp our view of the world even at the sensory level. Our senses are not perfectly reliable.

 

Then, biases we learn as children can make us notice some details and totally miss others. How many Europeans would spot cougar tracks if they walked by them in a Canadian forest? A traditional Cree would never miss them. In his world, missing signs that a cougar is active in his area could cost him his life.

 

      

         

 

                                  Karl Marx (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

On the topic of biased perception, consider the complex example of a girl I knew at university in 1973 whose core beliefs were all Marxist. Her view of reality was totally shaped by her political ideology. For her, all the world’s troubles were due to capitalists’ conspiracies; only a world workers’ state could ever create a decent life for all people. The fact that the communist states of the world were rife with corruption and cruelty was always due to capitalists in other lands. Harsh living conditions, secret police, and prison camps in Marxist states were “temporary”; they would be “remedied” as soon as the capitalists had been “eradicated from the earth”.

 

She had so utterly deluded herself that I used to feel weak as I listened to her. She saw oppression in the faces of all the workers we passed as we walked the campus. She saw fascist symbolism in every poster on the notice boards. She carried a list of government people whom she and her friends were going to assassinate “when the revolution comes.” Her eyes were working, but what she noticed as she walked through her day was utterly biased. She was unshakably determined that everything she experienced in every facet of life must conform to Marxism in every detail.

But however deluded she seemed in my eyes, she taught me something: she taught me how profoundly humans can be deluded by a flawed idea system, even when their senses are working perfectly.

 

Since then, of course, Communism has failed totally; the world has seen that centrally planned economies wither. But that girl was just one of many sincere, deluded people I’ve met over the years who left me wondering, “Which of my beliefs can I trust? Can I trust my moral beliefs? Can I trust my everyday ones? Or even ones about physical reality? Can I even trust what I see and hear?”

 

Flawed beliefs about the physical world can lead us to error and pain. In its practical tests in the real world, Marxism’s biggest flaw turned out to be its insistence on its own infallibility. This claim taken as an axiom means that a Marxist workers’ state will tolerate no debate, no opposition, and no other political parties. Marxist states create totalitarian institutions that then open the way for tyrants. Over and over, we have seen that once institutions that enable tyranny are there for the seizing, a “seizer” always arises. 

 

But Science isn’t about who the latest seizer is. Science is about the reality that comes before political thoughts even begin.