Chapter 14.                       (conclusion) 

Today, however, war has made itself obsolete. Our weapons have grown too big. Our species very likely would not survive a World War III. Combining what we know from History, and our war habit, with what we know of our present technology leads us to envision, in not very long, a worldwide bloom of mushroom clouds, followed within a decade by images of our once beautiful, blue planet, burned bare and wrapped in clouds of radioactive smoke and ash.

On the other hand, we have to evolve. If we ever give up war, will we devolve culturally, grow sickly, then die out like a herd of deer that has no predators because it’s isolated on an island? Experts have said so. War, they insist, is ugly but necessary. A few are ready to risk nuclear holocaust, even initiate it.²

However, there is evidence to support the belief that humans may learn to live, multiply, and spread – that is, to remain vigorous – without constantly killing one another. The strongest evidence lies in how, in every society, there are some people who seek to settle apparently irreconcilable differences by negotiation rather than by violence. Some people can stick to the ways of Reason even when they're being attacked physically. 

 

 

       

     

                                                            Nelson Mandela (1937)

                                        (credit: author unknown, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

They are acknowledging implicitly that they do not believe any single set of values or worldviews – even the ones they learned as children – is the only “right” one. From a social sciences viewpoint, these peaceful members of society follow a values system that puts the lives of other humans ahead of any anxieties they experience when they see other humans living in ways that seem alien to them. And some of the most peace-loving figures of the 20^th century went through early years of extreme hate themselves. But they grew past those views and came to believe in peace and reconciliation. (As was the case for Nelson Mandela in South Africa.)

 

 

             

         

        Martin Luther King, Jr. (credit: Dick DeMarsico, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Another bit of evidence supporting the hypothesis that reason can be stronger than prejudice is the vigor evident in pluralistic societies, ones that have succeeded in integrating several cultures. A nation formed by merging many ways of life can work. Britain is an example. There Celts, Iberians, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Normans, and, recently, folk from all the countries of Britain’s former empire have blended. Folk who call themselves “British” today show physical and cultural traits from lands all over the globe. And they still have intra-cultural frictions. But those frictions are becoming fewer and less intense with every decade that passes.

Furthermore, we can see that, after a war, living patterns and values change in major, radical ways not only for the vanquished, but often for the victors as well – ways not anticipated by the planners on either side.

When I was a boy in the 1950s in Edmonton, Alberta, there were two German delicatessens in my city, and “dojo” was just a word in a few novels. By the time I was a young man, delicatessens and karate dojos could be found all over my city, a city whose men had recently won a war against Germany and Japan.

Today, Germany and Japan are two of the strongest economies in the world, and Edmonton schools contain students from almost every culture on earth. In retrospect, it seems stupid that 55,000,000 people had to die so the Japanese could learn to open up to the ways of the gaijin, and I could learn to love and trust people named “Kobayashi”. We in the West were the victors in that war, yet today we embrace many of the morés of the vanquished.

All of this evidence says clearly that we can integrate. The trick in the future will be to bring about these changes on both sides of every rivalry by planned interactions in commerce, sport, science, and art, and then intermarriage. Peaceful coexistence and reason instead of bloodshed. This will be hard, but not impossible. In this age of the internet, the global marketplace, and public education systems, it is getting easier by the day.

One way or another, changes keep happening in every human culture, whether the changes originate from within or without. But changes in ways of living aren’t always accompanied by people hurting and killing each other. And given that in the end driven by our cultural codes and morés, we all must respond to the same physical reality, there is reason to hope that we can create a universal culture. Peace-loving people, if they can become wise and motivated enough, may prove fitter for survival than the warmongers. Peace-mongers will just have to acquire a new, Science-based moral code and then learn to program it into the world’s children. Teach them to see the principles of right and wrong in the observable events of reality itself, then, to be both vigorous and respectful of others and, finally to practice these principles in all their actions every day.  

         

  

                                          A food custom: Russian pelmeni

                           (credit: Jorge Cancela, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

The evidence says that humans are capable of being open-minded, creative, and adaptable. From within ourselves, we can add perseverance to this mix: a passion for peace. There is hope for the memes of decency hitting critical mass in our species. For the survival of our world. For us.  

We should note here also that the variety of morés and values of our societies has led some social scientists and philosophers to claim every system of values is correct in its own context, and none is correct in any objective sense because we can’t observe reality in any objective way. We always see through our culturally biased goggles. Therefore, they claim, all moral codes are arbitrary.

This “postmodernist” view is a dangerous view to take. These people have the best of intentions: they want to encourage us to feel tolerant toward one another and get along. 

But their moral code is not assertive enough. If it can be said to aim at all, it aims to fill the gap left after social scientists, historians, and philosophers have deconstructed all presently existing moral codes. That task, like an irrational number, never terminates nor repeats. Modern social science, with its view of values as arbitrary, leads to moral paralysis. It enables dithering, not action.

Therefore, this postmodernist stance is not good enough. By its paralysis, it yields the field to the bullies of the world. And the bullies know what they want. They’ll march straight to it if we let them. This nonsense, uncorrected, will lead us to WWIII. That option, we have seen, is no longer a rational one. 

Humans need strong, affirmative guidelines to act and live by. What the moral relativists seem to be aiming to produce is a cynicism that sees itself as above critique because, in the realm of morals, it affirms nothing and, thus, can not be critiqued. But real humans have to make decisions daily in real life.

We need a global model of what is right, one that has a sense of direction and purpose and that is grounded in things we can all see. In this Age of Science, the only thing that fits this description is physical reality itself.

Yes, Bayesianism tells us that, as new, more detailed data about physical reality come, we must keep trying out new, more detailed worldviews and morés for responding to reality. But no, Bayesianism does not say all these worldviews are of equal merit. Bayesianism tells us that we should choose the model giving us the best experimental results, or more probably, we should pursue several promising lines of research on every question, and direct resources more and more to the ones proving more and more fruitful. Bayesianism is not relativism. Bayesianism is a method that lets us bypass relativism to get on with observing, modeling, testing, and living. (See Harris’ Anthropology and Postmodernism. ³)

In the analogous situation for scientists themselves, they couldn’t do research without models and theories to guide them as they planned their experiments. Without a model to guide research, scientists would be buffoons wandering through rooms full of computers, gauges, and beakers, with no clue as to what they were doing there. With no moral code grounded in reality to guide us in real life, especially in inter-cultural contexts, we’d become absurd buffoons. 

So, let me be blunt: postmodernism leads to the consequence of resigning this planet over to the bullies. When tolerant citizens can say only what they are against, but never what they are for or why, the bullies with their “will to power” (Nietzsche’s and Hitler’s term) will sway the masses and get their way – by trickery, threats, promises, and willfully inflicted pain. 

The Western Allies in the 1930s did not call themselves postmodernist moral relativists, but relativist ways of thinking, conscious and unconscious, were already influential in the West, from Nietzsche on, and arguably much earlier (Hellenistic Greece). The consequence was that most leaders of the nations that might have stopped Hitler, Mussolini, and Imperial Japan had no stomach for such action. In fact, many prominent citizens in the West admired the fascist leaders and said so openly. (Even Roosevelt said early on he was impressed by what Mussolini was doing in Italy.⁴⁾ The consequence of these leaders’ confusion was WWII and the deaths of fifty-five million people. Parallel situations fill the History texts right into our own time.

 

                                    

     

   

              Benito Mussolini (credit: Martianmister, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

The practical problem for the moral relativists of the West today is that, while they may see morals as being relative, other nations are programming their citizens with the belief that their nation is right, and thus the further belief that they must spread their culture until it controls all of this planet. In such states, democracy is seen as a weak, pathetic delusion for dithering fools.

Aggressive, jingoistic, smug, self-righteous, bully leaders have always existed. Democracies have to be motivated to face them if we are to have a world in which we can discuss our options at all.

But relativism paralyzes all motives. We must do better. Careful reasoning says we can. Not relativism, but not jingoistic nationalism either. 

We have to build a more assertive moral code than moral relativism offers. Furthermore, this code will only be considered acceptable by viable numbers in today’s world if it integrates our worldview – that is Science, our best model of reality – with the code itself. Then, many cultures will be able to form and co-exist. Harmonizing them all is what will be required of us if we are to survive. If we are to live, we must find our way to global democracy.

The task of maximizing our species’ potential by creating a new, radically democratic culture is daunting. Falling back on traditional, tribalistic ways of thought is more comforting. But the depth of our anxiety at the thought of a true global democracy is also an indicator of how free we humans really are. We are scared by the thought that …maybe …we could really remake us.

We can already see that some values don’t work. In today’s world, with the weapons we now have, both values that encourage chauvinistic militarism and values that create moral inertia are not survival oriented. They will bring us to disaster. We have to find a third way. Not a return to any of the traditional moral codes, but not moral relativism either.

Reason is our way out of this dilemma. It could give us a moral code that all of us could agree on because the code would be grounded in physical evidence that all of us can see. 

War is not inevitable, any more than ancient morés like female infanticide are, as long as we don't give up on our resolve to outwit war and prevent it. 

A universal moral code would not end the diversity of cultures on this planet; it would simply provide a means by which disputes between cultures could be settled by negotiation and compromise – without anyone having to go to war. 

Then, by commerce, art, sport, intermarriage, and international law to handle disputes, the integration of cultures could take place. The theory is sound. Gradually, nations would cease to be adversaries because, gradually over generations, they would integrate into one pluralistic, democratic nation made of many sub-cultures, each participating and contributing to the whole in ways, mostly, agreed upon by both the sub-culture and the whole body politic.

 

 

 

                          Artist’s conception of a park area inside a space station 

                                 (credit: Donald Davis, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Now, we can leave the war dilemma and return to building a new moral code. 

We have arrived at the step in our reasoning showing that a society’s concepts and morés are all intimately connected to its worldview. We have also dealt with the war digression. 

Now we can go back to examining how worldviews of the past shaped the moral codes – and lives – of real people. Then, when our cultural evolution model is well established, we’ll use it to explain what our best current worldview – Science – is implying for us in moral terms. A new code, of right.

Notes

 

1. Layne Cameron, Nora Lewin, “Social Status Has Impact on Overall Health of Mammals,” Michigan State University Today, March 12, 2015.

http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2015/social-status-has-impact-on-overall-health-of-mammals/?utm_source=weekly-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=standard-promo&utm_content=image. 

2. Dr. Stephen J. Cimbala, “War-Fighting Deterrence: Forces and Doctrines in U.S. Policy,” Air & Space Power Journal (May–June, 1983).  

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1983/may-jun/cimbala.htm.

3. Marvin Harris; Anthropology and Postmodernism; pp. 62 – 77 in Science, Materialism, and the Study of Culture, edited by Martin Murphy and Maxine L. Margolis, University Press of Florida, 1995.

4. “Benito Mussolini,” Wikiquote, the Free Quote Compendium. Accessed April 21, 2015.  http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini.