Le Moustier Neanderthals 
                               (credit: Charles R. Knight, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 3.                          (continued) 

The next criticism of moral realism emerges logically from the first, and it says that the precepts of moral realism are cliché, obvious, and banal. There is nothing new in Moral Realism, and if an understanding of this aggregation of ideas, morés, and customs could transform even a portion of humanity into a fully rational and responsible society, it would have done so by now.

The reply is that there is nothing obvious in reality that points people toward the morés of courage, wisdom, freedom, love, and balance. Recorded experience passed down over generations, with reason working on that store of knowledge, has led us to the partly effective, fragmentary sets of morés and customs that we have now. But however fragmented and incomplete it may sometimes seem, our current world culture is not obvious; it is a huge leap beyond what the small bands of hominids shivering and cringing in the forest had just a few millennia ago.

For the majority of humans, courage, wisdom, pluralism (freedom), human rights (love), and balance do not come naturally. Even a wish to avoid pain is not what makes us work at our chores. The gap between the stimulus of famine and the response of agriculture is just too wide to be explained as a way of stopping pain. What led us to agriculture was cultural programming. We are mostly creatures of our nurture. We just need to keep in mind that those cultures must always enable us to answer to reality. Physical, empirical reality.

When we study our whole species, we see that some groups of people here and there have learned by hard experience over many generations that a few morés, values and customs equip their adherents to survive in greater numbers over the long haul of many generations.  Our cardinal virtues were learned gradually in harsh, multi-generational ways. Then, tribes that used these morés grew and flourished.

In our times, with Moral Realism to guide us, that hard way of learning the deepest truths of existence – by famine, plague, and war – could be eased, shortened, then, more and more, obviated altogether.  

Entropy and quantum uncertainty are so ubiquitous as to be nearly invisible. With our cultures, we are like fish who never study water; they take it for granted. The most profound effects of universal traits like entropy and uncertainty are only seen in subtle ways over the long haul of many generations. 

So let us emphasize the key insight here: if courage, wisdom, freedom, love, and balance are valued in many lands and are embedded in many cultures, that is not because they are obvious; it is because they work; they shape the daily lives of the tribes that survive. In short, our prime values are unique, given the ways by which other living things evolve. Other species evolve mostly by natural selection working on genetic variation. Humans evolve mostly by natural selection working on meme variation. We evolve by culture, not genetics. And the cultural mode has proven amazingly effective, but only over the very long haul of many generations angling to survive in this harsh world.  These are two points that argue against our ever seeing our values obvious or cliche.   

Until now, tribes have had to learn to respond to entropy and uncertainty by whole nations’ going through slow rounds of trial and error lasting generations. In daily life, we are immersed in our own tribe’s familiar morés and customs. In the past, these did change, but by hard trials and errors, such as wars, revolutions, famines, and plagues. And some tribes that hit an overwhelming challenge or got deeply programmed into chauvinism, xenophobia, and reactionary ways simply died out.

Adjusting the balances of courage and wisdom, freedom and love in this slow, painful way gave us the hybrid virtues of perseverance, foresight, and work. Balancing freedom with love gave us democracy and human rights.

Following this model, we can say that the refining by pre-historic tribes of the first effective morés and customs led us - over millennia - to a better way to do all our learning: science. Science is just a systematic way of learning from experience.

When will cultural evolution end? It won’t. Marx was wrong on this point. Human culture will no more be perfected than reality will be perfected. It keeps changing. Since there will be no end to change on our planet or in our universe, there must be no end to cultural evolution. Not if we want to live.

We’re on the brink of moving at least some of the human race into colonies in space stations, on the moon, or on Mars. We’re on the brink of moving human minds, personal awareness and all, into more and more complex cyborgs. Or into genetically modified dolphins, elephants, or ravens. And so on. Progress will end when we end. Who would venture to say he wants that?

So in further response to those who see Moral Realism as banal, we can say that the tribes of humanity have been and are, in their experiments with the human condition, free. What uncertainty gives us. We can play a lot of variations on the human theme and still adhere to our basic values, which is why the array of cultures in our world is, at first glance, so bewildering. But in every human culture, the basic virtues of courage, wisdom, and work, pluralism (freedom) and human rights (love) are discernible because they ease their adherents into and through the future, which always lies open to infinite possibility. 

Folk who deem such morés banal are not getting just how free we really are. If our daily lives have come to seem banal, it’s because we have made them that way because of tribal responses to pain. We work because our ancestors were seeking to avoid famines, plagues, and wars. They found ways that reduced the frequency of those bouts of suffering. As whole tribes, we flinched away from pain. But always, we were free, both then and now. The adjusting goes on. 

Moral Realism exhorts each of us to pursue her/his own interests and passions because that path is the best way for each of us to serve our fellow citizens and the democracy that serves us all. When we follow our hearts, we do our best work. From our living by a balance of courage, wisdom, and freedom, we get a pluralistic nation and a vigorous economy, though it did take us a long time to work out this model.    

But banal? No. Prudent. Sagacious. Prescient, even. But not banal.

Reality is stochastic: it is full of hazards and opportunities. Against that backdrop, we see our banal morés became banal because they work. Could they make us into a rational society? Yes. If enough of us learn the moral realist model, use it to inform our discussion and implement our findings with determination. We aren't floundering anymore. We just have to reach a critical, self-aware social mass. Compared to the alternatives, this choice to be rational would be hard. Lazy and stupid come easily to humans. But yes, it could give us the tools to become fully rational.

                                                                   Cyborg 
                                        (credit: Matankic, via Wikimedia Commons)