Chapter 4.                    (conclusion) 

Consider a further example: if we assert, as some Marxists do, that Science is just one more social construct that must conform to the will of the people, we inevitably begin to tell our scientists what we want them to conclude, instead of asking them what the evidence seems to show.

                                                           

                                        

                                  Trofim Lysenko (credit: Wikipedia)

 

A clear example of a policy that was flawed from its assumptions on up is the doctrine called Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia. In that nation in the 1920s, the official state position was that human nature itself could be altered and humans made into perfect “socialist citizens” by changing their outward behaviors. If they were made to act like selfless socialist citizens, they would truly become so, in their thinking and even in their genes. In fact, all species could be transformed in this same way.

 

This government position required that the Darwinian model of evolution be dropped. Dialectical materialism, Marxism’s base, was the true worldview. Under it, physical reality exists as a projection of the will of the people who have power, whoever that may be. In a Communist state, the workers get the power; the political will of the proletariat can shape all things, including physical reality and the human activity that works to understand it: Science. 

 

Darwin said that members of a living species do not acquire genetic changes via individual members of the species having their physical traits altered. Instead, physical traits of a species change when its gene pool is altered by genetic variation and natural selection: fitter species members surviving and reproducing in greater numbers than the less fit. Therefore, physical changes in a species, in anatomy and physiology, happen gradually over generations. 

 

But, in its determination to create its vision of reality, Communism required people to believe that the acquired characteristics of any organism – even, for example, a cat being hairless due to being shaved every day by its owner – could be inherited by that organism's descendants.¹ Regularly shaved tabby cats, for example, would have hairless kittens. For years, Soviet agriculture was crippled by the Communist Party’s attempts to apply its political “truism” to real crops and livestock. In essence, farmers were asked to deny what they were seeing. Withered wheat. Sickly cows. Deny reality.

 

Of course, the Marxist truism simply wasn’t the case, as many Russians on farms learned, to their sorrow. Reality is not a projection of the will of the workers, the owners, the aristocrats, the czar, or anyone else who manages to gain political power. It just is. Crops failed and livestock died due ultimately to a flawed basic assumption. In the above case, it was called “Lysenkoism”.  

 

Consider a few more basic examples. Even my senses sometimes are not to be trusted. I may believe that light always travels in straight lines. I may see, half-immersed in a stream, a stick that looks bent at the water line, so I believe it to be bent. But when I pull it out, I find that it is straight. If I am a caveman trying to spear fish in a stream, blind adherence to my concepts about a thing as basic as light may cause me to starve. I’ll overshoot the fish every time, while the girl on the other shore, a better learner, cooks her catch.

 

I can immerse one hand in snow and keep the other on a hand warmer in my pocket. If I then go into a cabin to wash my hands in tepid water, one hand feels the water is cold, the other, that it’s warm. Can’t I trust my own senses?

 

The examples above all show how urgent is our need for some solidly reliable core thinking concepts. Get your beginnings wrong, and everything else you reason your way to will be full of flaws.

 

Thus, the crucial first question in building a belief system is not “What is true?” but “How can I know what is true? How can I know whether my most basic beliefs about reality – like my sense perceptions – are really true?”

 

How reliable is the sensing/thinking system I use to observe reality and then to form basic concepts about it?  The branch of Philosophy that seeks to answer these questions is called epistemology. It studies the nature, methods, and limits of our knowledge – what distinguishes a true belief from mere opinion.

 

Around our basic concepts, we build more complex systems of ideas. Basic ideas eventually lead us to ways of acting and living. Flawed basics lead us into flawed ways of living that lead us to error, suffering, and death. Knowing these truths about ourselves should motivate us to try to construct a few fully reliable core concepts. Then we can build a moral system around them. 

 

Once we have in place a basic set of ideas that we really can trust – one that gets past political ideologies, childhood biases, and the shortcomings of our senses – we may build a moral system we can believe in. In this book, we shall aim to build a moral belief system that is as logically sound as we can possibly make it, from its base on up to the moral principles it gives us to follow in daily life. A way of thinking consistent both with the evidence of the physical world and with all the terms and operations inside the belief system itself.

 

Thus, in our next chapter, we shall discuss empiricism, an epistemology that claims to be built only on observable, real-world evidence, and to never fall back on assumptions or ideologies of any kind.

The way we begin will determine – to a high degree – the reliability of what we conclude. The moral code project we are embarking on is the most important one on which we could embark. We must do our best to get our beginning right. 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. “Lysenkoism,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 1, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism.