Farmers' Market (Noosa, Australia) 

                                     (credit: Misaochan2, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 2.                     (concluded) 

All humans are valuable as long as they are not aggressors. Live and let live. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. These may be a familiar adages, but now we can see why the ideas are morally right. Under the Moral Realist way of thinking, the survival index of the practical, lived balance of love and freedom is very high.

Note also here that the values/morés of democracy enable markets to flourish. In unhealthy markets, bullies with vested interests push some sellers out of the marketplace. This is not democracy, not rule of law, and not smart business.

When goods and services of many kinds have to compete fairly and openly in free markets, then the best rise to the top. Consumers will – over the long haul – buy things because they work, not because bullies are hawking them.

A healthy market is a socially created ecosystem. No other system of trade has yet proven nearly as efficient at moving capital to places where it can do the most good in a timely way. But markets don’t flourish in centrally planned economies, however learned and benevolent the planners may think themselves to be. There is too much to know in this universe; no one person is as smart as the culture as a whole.

Note also that markets only flourish in societies that contain the rule of law. When sellers can be bullied out of the marketplace and contracts are regularly broken, a market sickens and dies. Rule of law neutralizes those toxins.   

To bring discussion of this belief/moré back to the reality we inhabit now, we can say that the education systems of the world should teach students to pursue their dreams (freedom) and to encourage their schoolmates, who may think very differently than they do, to pursue their dreams (love), while practicing self-discipline (courage) and diligent learning habits (wisdom).

Note another nuance of the Moral Realist model here: balance – the ecosystem element that must be there if a society is to stay vigorous – can be very tricky in real life, even for people who think they have the morés and customs that their society calls “right” memorized and practiced to perfection. Life is filled with our attempts to imbue our decisions and actions with balance. Always has been.

Life is full of questions like: “Do I need to be braver here or wiser?” “Is this a time for compassion for others or for investing myself in my own plans?”

This balancing goes on without letup because the physical world is shaped by entropy (you must act) and by probability (you will get hit by at least some surprises no matter how carefully you plan).

This insight tells us not to envy or resent any other humans. Everyone’s life has difficult, painful parts in it.  If you carefully examine the life of any other human you might envy, you discover that they’ve had their share of disappointments and heartaches. Always.

Another aspect of democracy concerns our policies and actions toward the poor and unfortunate. When due to dysfunctional environments while they were young or bad luck later or both, some persons fall onto hard times, they rely on the compassion of their fellow citizens. So what should the rest of us do about les miserables? What actions would be both wise and loving here?

What is apparent from the evidence we now have is that the more we work to return citizens who are not contributing to the nation back to roles in which they are contributing – for example, as artists or in helping professions helping those who still suffer – the better our whole nation does. The balancing of real morés/beliefs/virtues in real life is hard. Life is hard. But not impossible.

Courage, wisdom, freedom, love – they all must be balanced in real life. But it’s because of our struggle to inject courage, wisdom, freedom, and love into our actions that we are not now a timid, little Neolithic tribe. Values morés work. 

Finally, to combine courage, wisdom, freedom, love, and balance, we can add that a key part of this education program – a key part of its plan to put wisdom into young people – should be the study of the Social Sciences and Humanities: History, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Sociology, with the cultural materialist model of human evolution informing the curriculum throughout. We must make our species self-aware if we are to survive in these complex times.  

Courage, wisdom, freedom, love, and balance. All tugging at our decisions all day long. We can debate and compromise, make mistakes and fix them. Then, peacefully, we can evolve.

The case for Moral Realism is now made. Time to deal with some of its critics.

                                            Ruins of ancient Roman marketplace 

                                  (credit: Norbert Nagel, via Wikimedia Commons)