Afghan woman in full burka (credit: AlfredoGMx, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                  The Fall of Kabul 

As I write today, Afghanistan is falling to the Taliban, an Islamist group that wishes to impose a hard version of Sharia law upon the people there. They were in power before 2003 and are returning to power once more. In spite of literally trillions of dollars (twelve zeroes in a trillion) worth of military gear, training, and so on, the Afghan army collapsed almost immediately when the American forces there who were backing that army began to leave. The Afghans had the gear and the training, but apparently not the will to fight hard for their own country. The will back in the U.S. to go on with this distant war that was taking so much money and still costing American lives had basically given out.

The terrorist Osama Bin Laden who had found safe refuge in Afghanistan under the old Taliban regime and who had planned the attacks on the U.S. in 2001 had been tracked down and killed during the years when the U.S. was in control of Afghanistan (he was actually found and killed in neighboring Pakistan, in a fairly remote border location). The will in the U.S. to continue the Afghan war – to go on fighting for a nation that was divided, confused, and full of graft and corruption – has eroded almost completely. In short, most of America just wants out. Americans are sick of their young people coming home in body bags, sick of spending tax dollars on what appears more and more to be a hopeless cause. The basic weaknesses in the Afghan nation that made Western-style democracy so difficult there – especially graft and corruption from the top to the bottom of their society – were apparently not going to change at any foreseeable point in the future. Gradually, America gave up.  

But does that mean that the West and its way of life have begun to lose in what has often been called a “clash of civilizations”? I don’t think that the rise of an Islamist state in a remote, poor (though beautiful) country indicate anything of the sort. In the view of society that I call “moral realism”, I believe that a solid case can be made for the view that this is just a temporary recursion in the long struggle between the fundamentalist ways of several world religions of the past and the more modern way of life we call “Western”.

                                   Niall Ferguson (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Niall Ferguson thinks that the “killer apps” that the West has mastered and incorporated into its whole way of life are competition, science, private property, consumption, medicine, and hard work. And he is only one modern thinker who has looked at this puzzle. Other historians have had other theories.  

In fairness to the Afghanis and to Islam more generally, I don’t think that the clear advantage Ferguson claims the West enjoys in all these aspects of national life is as clear as he makes it out to be. The Middle East was the civilized world during the times of the Crusades. The society that lived by the tenets of Islam in those times was superior to the peoples of Christian Europe in medicine, the consumption that comes via larger markets and more trading partners, science, and several other aspects of their societies’ ways of life. And I know that debates about who had more open markets or better work ethics could go on endlessly.

But I’ll skip ahead to what I see as the bottom line.

In the moral realist view of what is happening now in Afghanistan, the Taliban will eventually, inevitably lose out again to the West.

Why? Because their view of what an ideal society should be is fundamentally flawed. In the moral realist view, all societies live in, and must answer to, the physical universe. In that universe, uncertainty is a given for all societies and, in fact, all life forms, including the individual and whatever larger entities, like societies (or colonies of bees or herds of buffalo), that individual may be part of.

In this quantum universe, events are not locked by the laws of that universe into unchangeable sequences, as the determinists would have us believe. But events aren’t just random chaos either.

The events of our universe happen as probabilities gradually favor one event more and more over all other possible events that might occur at any moment in time that we might be considering. The hurricane’s landfall site in Florida or South Carolina is not knowable two weeks in advance of it hitting the coast. In fact, the storm’s growing to hurricane strength is not knowable that far ahead. Our best weather experts can only tell us odds and keep re-calculating those odds day by day and hour by hour. 

And we can’t predict for certain where a new virus will emerge, or a drought will wipe out a crop. We have similar difficulties with predicting which kids in a kindergarten class will end in prison and which ones will have largely successful lives. We don’t know any of these outcomes for certain. But we can assign them fairly reliable probabilities based on our past experience with similar events.

We can say days in advance of its making landfall that a hurricane is now likely to be a 3 or a 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale and often say, with good probability of being accurate, that it will hit the Miami area or the Charleston area or wherever our models indicate by 4 p.m. two days from our prediction.

The events of the physical universe’s unfolding are governed by probabilities, not certainties, but they are not chaos either. We humans have learned over the generations to intervene in the sequences of events and improve the odds of outcomes we’d like to see while we decrease the odds of outcomes that will be bad for us. Within degrees of freedom. I can’t stop the hurricane, but with good warning, I can get out of its path. And I can work hard to plant, weed, harvest, and process food crops, and to prevent the spread of disease, and affect the odds of many possible futures for myself, my family, and my nation.

Once we grasp this fact, we can look separately at the ways humans respond to this physical universe/reality. How do we deal with living in such a challenging place?

We begin by believing in our own free will. I can’t do everything, but I can almost always do some things, and I can choose among those somethings and pursue a path that I predict will lead to good outcomes for me and my family.

Why would I want to worry that much and spend so much time planning and working that hard? Because if I do, I am more likely to live and to pass on my beliefs and customs to my children. If I become utterly resigned and cynical, my odds of surviving and of my children and my culture surviving drop. Over generations, societies that teach their kids to keep the knowledge acquired from their forbears and to keep using and adding to that knowledge, outbreed and outproduce the less free and knowledgeable societies they are competing with.

So in my view, Niall Ferguson is at least partly right. A society’s morés and beliefs are ultimately what make it a tough competitor in the survival game. He is seeking a model that explains events and trends in history by looking at different nations' and civilizations' worldviews and belief system. Software explaining the actions of hardware. In that effort, he has set his sights in the right direction. 

But Ferguson does not explain why his six “killer apps” have worked, and the “apps” he talks about are not the heart of the matter. On the other hand, moral realism does explain the workings of these deep roots of our “ways of life”.

The uncertain, probablistic nature of reality ensures that a society that works to accommodate and adapt to that basic fact of physical reality is going to win out over all competing societies in the long haul.

What morés does a society need to have in place in order to accommodate or adapt to this basic fact of reality? Moral realism maintains that a society adapts to the probabilistic nature of the physical world by keeping among its citizens as high a degree of variety, of varied talents and lifestyles, as it possibly can.

It helps a society to encourage kids to be versatile. Be a scholar, an athlete, a musician, and a leader, my child. But even more, a society’s odds of surviving go up as it teaches its kids to welcome and encourage diversity in their towns and nations. When a challenge hits a society, as is guaranteed in this uncertain world, that society has better chances of adapting successfully to the challenge if it contains many varied kinds of people than it would if its people were more uniform.

The evidence of history, most of the time, supports this moral realist view. The homosexuals in Nazi Germany almost all went into deep cover after the “night of the long knives” when the leaders of the SA, who were mostly homosexuals, were all assassinated in a single night. Hitler saw the SA as an unmanageable element in his society that he had best eliminate. But the German public were told a different story. These men’s homosexuality was given as the excuse for their being so suddenly and ruthlessly murdered. That drove gay men to stay low profile. 

In the meantime, homosexuals in England were more tolerated. Alan Turing, in particular, who was openly homosexual, probably did the most of any person in those times to win the war for the Allies. (The shameful way he was treated after the war is a topic for another post.) 

The Americans cracked the codes being used by the Japanese in the Pacific. They had in their ranks many who could speak and write Japanese. The Japanese never cracked the Americans’ main code because it was Navajo. Only a few thousand people in the world spoke Navajo, they were all loyal to the U.S.

Many of the twentieth century’s challenges that came not from war but from famine or disease were solved by the citizens of the pluralistic West. The vaccines for polio, smallpox, diphtheria, bubonic plague, and whooping cough all came from the West. American crop scientists first bred the grains that led to the massive increases in yields called the “Green Revolution”.  

I could go on, but the point, I think, is clear. A society’s being pluralistic is a huge help in its struggle to survive. Its being largely monochrome lowers it survival odds.

Thus, to come to the case we are currently considering, the Taliban in Afghanistan are doomed to lose to the West and vanish into the footnotes of history because they are going the wrong way. They want more and more uniformity in their citizens. That is counter-productive over the long haul in the survival game.

A simple example of this mistaken view in action lies in the Taliban’s policies regarding women and girls. Once the Taliban are fully in power, they have said clearly that girls will not be allowed to go to school, and women will have to stay in their homes unless they are accompanied by a male of their household if they go out, and then they will have to wear the full burka costume. The Taliban, in this competition that I keep speaking of, are about to bench half of their team. Half of their fine minds in science, mathematics, literature, and for that matter politics – in short, in every field – happen to be female. Women are just as likely to be good at writing computer code as are men. And finding cures for diseases and running businesses and government departments and on and on.

Bottom line: moral realism predicts that the Taliban will lose, though it may take a decade or two. A decade is very small in the scale of history.

The Taliban will eventually lose because they are wrong. Morally wrong? We could never in a millennium convince them of that. But they are wrong in their view of hard, physical reality. They will lose. Their society will decline into poverty for reasons very similar to the reasons for the defeat of Islam in previous centuries. Too many rules. Too many restrictions on the lives of citizens. Too little variety. Their smartest, most productive citizens will begin to exit the country well before desperate poverty sets in. They are even now as I write. They feel that the life they are being forced into is out of touch with reality in a deep way. Which it is.     

Does Afghanistan look pretty discouraging to Western eyes in these days? Yes. But moral realism says that the situation will turn around. Reality guarantees it.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a hopeful day.

                                           Taliban fighers, August 2021 

                                  (credit: VOA, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

           

                       Horace Mann, public education advocate in the U.S. in 1800s 

                                            (credit: Matthew Brady, via Wikipedia)

An Analogy For Consideration

 

I write today on an analogy between biological ecosystems and social ones.

We humans live inside of social ecosystems that function and maintain their balances within much larger biological ecosystems. Canada (my country) and Canadian society exist inside of a temperate climate in latitudes above the forty-ninth parallel. Switzerland and Afghanistan have no seacoasts. Britain, on the other hand, is only about 1000 km. from top to bottom, but it has 31,000+ kilometers of seacoast (counting all of its islands). And so on. Social ecosystems exist inside of biological ones.

But it’s the social ecosystems, the societies, that I want to focus on today.

Why are they so important? Because the vast majority of us absorb most of the programming by which we live our lives from the people around us during the time from when we are born till when we are seven years old. After that, we can change our programming, but doing so is very hard and takes months or even years of work, both in support groups and with therapists.

But note also that these facts imply that humans are programmable, which is a hopeful thought. I can’t alter the programming that makes me breathe. That programming is written into me at the genetic level. But I can learn to stop being mean to members of the opposite sex, even though in my society, men and women are not kind to each other. I can change my ways even more readily if I realize the one I’m really angry with is my alcoholic, abusive father (or mother). Genetic-level programs are nearly impossible to change; cultural ones are not. 

Which brings me to my point today.

If changes to our individual programming can be made, then in theory it should also be possible to reprogram whole nations. For example, we could retrain a whole nation to stop being pervasively militaristic and warmongering. By war? By beating them up, in other words? That’s one way, and it can bring some improvements over long periods of time. Generations. But there are other ways. Trade. Cultural exchanges. Economic cooperation. Sharing of technologies.

Now notice also that we can extend this analogy between social reprogramming and biological reprogramming much further.   

Our immune systems can be reprogrammed to adapt to challenging changes in our ecosystem. That is what vaccines do. They train the immune systems of humans to respond effectively to a virus, one that most people in the population may not have been exposed to before. And vaccines work. Evidence says so.

My argument today is that a society can be programmed in an analogous way to respond to social challenges that history has shown are dangerous. We could, for example, “vaccinate” a nation against totalitarianism.

We could educate our future citizens, our children, to recognize and respond to things like: arbitrary arrests of dissenters; enacting of laws that forbid citizens from criticizing the regime’s policies or leaders; closing of media outlets that criticize the regime; building of special camps for citizens convicted of “nation-threatening” crimes. History has shown us many signs to watch for. Our kids could learn, in school, how to organize demonstrations, stage “media” events, get interviewed on television, etc. And to further counter the jingoistic beliefs that we know are basics in totalitarianism by simply being decent to each other.

Most of all, in my view anyway, the kids could learn to detect and counter all attacks on the public schools. To demonstrate, for example, against laws that require teachers to swear allegiance to the regime. To reject curriculum that has been re-written to bring it into line with government ideology. To challenge any measures that encourage children to report to their teachers remarks that sound disloyal to the regime, remarks made at home by their parents. (Both Nazis and communists have done this with school kids in the past.)

We know the signs of this deadly social disease called “totalitarianism”. Or fascism, Nazism, communism, etc. Different disguises for the same malady.

Could a society be “vaccinated” against it? I think that public education that is up-to-date, rigorous, tolerant, and compassionate is the only real way we have to achieve that kind of political immunity. Not a perfect solution (a free press also has to be in the bigger picture of a vigorous society, along with some other elements), but liberal public education is the crucial ingredient. If it is present, a society can survive a lot of other assaults and deficiencies. If it is absent, the other elements of democracy are not going to be enough to save that democracy.

Do you want to do your best to help your nation survive as far on into the future as you can? Support public education, folks. Not private, not parochial. They don’t reach all kids and they aren’t set up from the starting assumption that we want most of all to preserve the nation that made our children’s getting a good education possible in the first place. Public schools. The vaccine for a nation.

Now in spite the pall of climate change hanging over us, have a hopeful day. Thoughtful, concerned, well-educated kids might even solve that one. (How I hope that it may be so.)  

                                         Modern U.S. kindergarten 

                          (credit: woodleywonderworks via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                     Abraham Lincoln (1860) (credit: Mathew Brady, via Wikipedia)         

 Thinking of Lincoln Today

I have spent much of my life trying to work out a code of ethics grounded in observable, objective, material, empirical reality. And I have, at least in my own judgement, done so. That is what the book that I have put up on this site four times, in successive iterations, has explained. A universal moral code.  

But no matter what code of ethics we live by, it gets tested, and we get tested, most acutely in the material world when we interact with other human beings.

So how does moral realism do in real life?

On this subject of interacting morally with others, let’s remind ourselves of some basics. We live in a quantum universe, not a random one, but not a deterministic one either. Events follow each other in sequences that are not inescapably linked by laws of Newtonian physics, but rather succeed each other in ways that are shaped by probabilities. And living things can intervene in these sequences and alter the odds of subsequent events occurring. Humans especially are very good at raising the odds of those events that they would like to see happen and lowering the odds of those they want to avoid. We learn from mistakes and store up what we learn in our cultures, then pass the learning on to our children. This is how moral realism sees us functioning in the real world.

All of this scenario depends on human judgement, which is always subject to error in every one of us. I can’t foresee every pandemic, but I can say with a high degree of confidence that new viruses and bacteria are going to come along to attack us every so often. Why am I confident that this will be so? Because it always has been so, as far back as we can see into our past. And we understand fairly well how viruses mutate and evolve. And we understand fairly well how our immune systems gradually build resistance to any new virus that comes along. So we make predictions and take precautions, and respond (via vaccines) and we survive in much greater numbers than we would have if we hadn’t taken those measures. Our cultures in today’s world have taught us all of this.

Similar things can be said about how we try, with much success actually, to forecast what the weather and the climate are going to do in both the near and distant futures and when our food production might get hit by a drought or a new insect pest. The point is that humans in a quantum universe have free will. We can’t make everything we would like to see happen really happen, but we can avoid many hazards and improve the odds of good harvests, and so on.

Thus, in this quantum universe, it is also guaranteed that we all will make at least some decisions and take at least some actions that we will later come to regret. To wish we could take back. Those aren’t “sad facts of life in the real world”. They are more hopefully seen as evidence of just how free we really are.

Why? Because sometimes when we make a mistake, especially in how we treat other human beings, we can make amends later. Make the wrong, right. And with some mistakes, our wisest course is to let them go. And I’ll stress again: we all make mistakes. We use our best judgement, decide, and act. But no measures we take for the future succeed all the time. But we have to act. Reality demands that we do. So we do the best we can with what we know at the time. And under a moral realist code – always – we aim to restore and maintain balance, in ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world, because we see our societies as evolving ecosystems. Balance is the “good” in an ecosystem view.  

When we recognize these truths, we can forgive those of our brothers and sisters who may have done things that hurt us. Let the past go. Start again. It is loving, and even more in the long haul, it is wise to do so. We, too, have made mistakes.

Why is this matter on my mind today? In truth, I have been thinking about it for weeks, but today contained a special bit of news from the U.S. that I have been mulling over since early morning. It could serve as a paradigm for us all.

CNN, the cable news network, showed some footage this morning of a man in an Arkansas hospital who refused to get vaccinated against Covid 19, but who has now contracted it. He is very sick. He may die.

He is repentant and contrite and very afraid that he might have passed the virus on to some of his family members. In short, he has realized he made a mistake.

All I could think, immediately and viscerally, was: “Oh, no, buddy don’t die. I may have at times in the past few months felt a lot of hostility toward people like you, but I never once wished for them, or you, to die.”

What’s interesting about this anecdote is that it reveals sharply how democracy enables, even enhances, our capacity to forgive each other.

Yes, there is a lot of anger in some parts of the U.S., and not just over Covid, against what people in those regions see as the corrupt and cynical masses on the coasts who profess to believe in no moral values and who show only callous indifference, even mockery, to those with less education.

And their feelings now, after decades of being mocked, are something like: “We’re not listening to you anymore. Period.” That’s the stance of many in the South and in the Rust Belt.

This situation must change on all sides. And democracy shows us a way out.

Americans have learned to forgive each other before. The Civil War especially saw Americans do terrible things to each other. But after the war, President Lincoln was still able to say, in his second inaugural address:

 

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

 

After all he had endured for his nation – the hundreds of thousands of casualties that he felt personally, his young son dying of typhoid fever in 1862 and his wife succumbing to a crushing clinical depression for months afterward – Lincoln could still speak of malice toward none. He had no smart-aleck remarks for the citizens of the defeated South. No mocking innuendos.  

America must get that back. That policy of reconciliation didn’t work perfectly, partly because Lincoln died not long after that speech and partly because some on both sides still carried a lot of anger long after the Civil War. But the nation succeeded a lot more than it would have if Lincoln and large sectors of the North had inflicted as large a penalty on the South as they could have done. The U.S. restored a large measure of balance and went on.

Liberals: however much you may rage inwardly against the kinds of tactics that some of Donald Trump’s minions and supporters have employed, only those people who have broken the law, as in the Jan. 6 insurrection, should be dealt with. One at a time. In the courts. And liberals would also be wise to remind themselves constantly that those few hundred were not representative of all 70+ millions who voted for the man liberals so love to despise.

Democracy – the real-world form that moral realism takes – provides paths by which feelings of rage and fear may be worked out rationally. Then, in the plan of democracy, the hottest heads on all sides cool down. Decency and sense, measured responses to real crimes, can prevail.

Keep thinking of Lincoln. Five million white citizens in the 1860s South did not shoot him in Ford’s theater. Just one man did. Lincoln died still holding up a model of restraint and forgiveness. And not just to Americans. He belongs to the ages.  

And America?  America is alive, well, and recovering her strength once again.

                Abraham Lincoln (1863) (credit: Alexander Gardner, via Wikipedia)