Boris Pasternak, dissident Russian writer of Doctor Zhivago 

                                 (credit: Monozigote, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 3.                            (continued) 

Another thoughtful criticism is that Moral Realism as a worldview offers those who believe in it (i.e., believe in democracy) an intimidatingly rough road because the values/morés and customs/behaviors of democracy must contend with many in our world who are hostile to freedom.

There are cultures that simply assume that my life is not mine to squander. My parents did not raise me; my nation did. My homeland was kept peaceful and plentiful by the toil and sacrifice of millions of people, many of them gone now. I owe those people the goods or services that I can produce with my talents. For example, I may play guitar, but only if I practice hard, and once I have achieved a high degree of virtuosity, I provide a minimum number of entertainment units for my fellow citizens weekly, playing state-approved music. I am required to do so. I do not have a right to play when I choose or what I choose. I am a child of my nation. I must learn to be a dutiful one and do the work assigned to me.  

On the other hand, there are also millions in other lands who say my life belongs not to me, but to Oloron or Birgitta or Allah or Brahman or Manitou or whatever they call their supreme deity. I am directed very clearly by scripture or by oral traditions to live a life of hard work and obedience to all the deity’s commands. For such people, the idea that I can do what pleases me is ludicrous and evil.

And let us not mince words here: the model of human life set down by most of the cultures of history, including those of the nations of the West, tended almost always to be of this strict, prescriptive character, whether political or religious.

But Moral Realism can answer these criticisms too. It says clearly that a society will do better over the long haul of generations if it lets people choose their lives as long as they don't directly harm others. Some may live in the bush for decades, but most won’t. Humans are a gregarious species. And if a few live in the bush, they may come out after decades there, playing music that astounds their whole society. They may emerge having solved the hardest problems in Math, Genetics, Sociology, Physics, etc. Geniuses come from diverse and unexpected quarters. 

Freedom. It is powerful in the hearts of its adherents because they were trained to see it as vital, but we should stress again that the freedom moré was acquired most likely by a gradual process of lucky breaks and human imagination too subtle for us to even guess at now. Then, it grew among some of our early ancestors because it shaped tribes in ways that helped them to survive. Freedom works. We may love both freedom and our fellow citizens, even the strangest of them, and then, from hundreds of them, we may get …nothing. But once in a while, one of them makes a bow and arrow or a computer, or grows a new bean variety, or invents a device that we can’t now even imagine. Because he is free.

The innovator, wherever he/she lives, will have learned discipline to face the entropy of reality. He’ll have accrued a lot of wisdom by the time he discovers his innovation. He may even have gone to quality state-funded schools. But what he then owes his state is respect for the law and no more. A wise state funds its schools knowing that they shape a democratic population and, now and then, a genius. Moral Realism tells its adherents to expect adversaries, domestic and foreign, and still revel in their freedom, not because it feels good, but because it works.

This is also a good place to admit that sometimes that genius, for years, is lazy. Or he may set up his own lab at 17 – and make wonders. Moral Realism tells us that a culture that fosters freely chosen human ventures is, in the big picture, worth the losses to society that those ventures sometimes incur because when people choose their lives, they commit their hearts to them. And, of course, when that one-in-a-million genius arrives, she/he changes society profoundly.   

In the moral realist view, even the fact that freedom frightens a lot of people is a good thing. Fear of being alone makes humans form societies; in society, we divide up the labor. And for a few who have only one friend, or none, the loneliness is not loneliness; it is solitude. In it, they can create, unimpeded.

                                author Frank McCourt (published first novel at 66) 

                               (credit: David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons)