Buddha image, Sri Lanka   (credit: Wikipedia)                                                             

12. Reiteration of the Argument So Far

To reiterate: in the first place, we do have principles that we rely on in practice to guide our behavior in the world. In the second place, these beliefs got deeply ingrained in the lore and behavior of a few tribes because they work: they enabled those who lived by them to survive in greater numbers over the long haul than was the case for competing tribes who didn’t have these beliefs .

In the third place, these beliefs were kept not because they guaranteed hunters or farmers success in every project, but because they improved their adherents’ long-term survival odds, as experience showed. Tribes who lived by them grew.

Fourth, tribes come, by trial and error, to imprint a few very general values, customs, etc. very deeply into their young by transforming those values into myths/religion. This very human trait of making myths is due to two facts: first, these very general ideas, values, etc. kept working, gradually, for centuries, enabling more members of tribes who believed in them to survive and flourish; second, the tribe’s lore as told by its shaman couldn’t explain in everyday terms why these values/principles worked. They needed myths to justify their culture.

Tribes that survived did so because, by trial and error, they made a few useful generalizations into tenets of the tribe’s religion. Useful generalizations then became surrounded by ritual, mystery, and emotion. Then, they would not be lost by the tribe, even if, for a while, the evidence happening around the tribe didn’t seem to support those generalizations. Over decades, sound values work.

“We find dry wood for the fire because wet wood will not burn. You can’t burn wet stuff, son. But we don’t worship dry wood like we do the elk. We conserve and respect the elk because they were given to our people by the Great Spirit.”

“The buffalo may be almost gone now, son, but the Great Spirit’s ways still rule. One day, white people will pay for how they treat His world.”

                                       All Saints Catholic Church (San Francisco, US)                                                                              Christian Religious Symbolism

                                                (credit: BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons )

                                           Multiple species drinking at a waterhole                                                                       (credit: Pekandjelo Himufe, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                             (generalization: Game we hunt come here often;                                                                          we can kill game on paths leading to here.)

11. The Human Capacity for Forming Generalizations

These widely useful ideas called ‘generalizations’ deserve some more discussion. A generalization is a statement of what human minds see as a common pattern in many individual experiences. A generalization worth adhering to is one that guides a tribe’s behavior to better survival rates. Thus, it is an app for human brain-computers that helps them to sort sense data and memories of them. Really useful generalizations guide humans to sort incoming sense data quickly and accurately, then come to smart decisions promptly and act in timely ways to exploit opportunities and/or to avoid painful outcomes.

In the real world, once a generalization that works is learned by a tribe, it gives the tribe members guidelines to use to direct action so as to yield more success more often for longer periods of time than was the case for the tribe before they got this programming. If you know where every vertebrate’s heart lies, you can kill more game and so feed your folk. Then, over time, your tribe multiplies.

This whole process of generalization-spotting and behavior-designing does not guarantee its adherents anything on any single hunt. But it does inform their behavior patterns over the long haul in ways that improve their survival odds. It’s arguably the most valuable capacity we, with our minds, have over other animals. We’re better at formulating, using, and passing on, generalizations.  

All living things have at least some capacity to spot patterns in sense experiences and memories of them. Even an amoeba can tell when it must get out of direct sunlight or die. Life is only possible when this ability to categorize and sort sense data, then formulate generalizations, then use these generalizations to guide the creature’s action, is present in a creature via its genes, its culture, or both.

All living things have this aptitude. For most species, it is mostly acquired and passed on genetically. Humans are nimbler at adapting because in addition to an effective gene code, we also have culture.  

We humans can form, test, use, and teach generalizations to generation after generation of our young. To more limited degrees, wolves and chimps can hunt intelligently, and teach their skills to their young, but not with the perseverance, subtlety, or deadly effectiveness that humans do. Rules about hunting are rules for getting rich protein foods reliably. Such rules are precious; our forebears passed them diligently to the next generation for eons. Following this thought, we see our moral values are simply the most general of all our generalizations.

We should also note that our concepts, beliefs, etc. are not all either particular or general. They lie along a continuum from very particular (Memorize this watering hole path) to very general (Love this earth). In addition, the reasons behind them that we’re consciously aware of, and that we give to justify our adhering to them, tend to become more and more mystical/sacred as we move toward the higher generalizability end of this continuum of beliefs/concepts.

 

                                                Doe with fawn (credit: USFWS, via Wikimedia) 

                      Grizzly sow with cubs (credit: Yellowstone NP, US, via Wikimedia)

                            Wolf mother with cub (credit: Bob Haarmans, via Wikimedia)

                       (Generalization: mammal females will fight to protect their young)

 

                                                               Wapiti elk   (US)   (2009)                                                                                                   (credit: Kaldari, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                                           

10. The Usefulness of the Very General

I should emphasize here that general concepts and customs – if they work well to guide us in reality – are extremely important for a tribe to acquire and follow, though they take a while to learn. Consider an example: in a hunter-gatherer tribe, hunter knowledge is sacred. It is valuable to know and teach to our young that elk in our land almost always drink at a certain watering hole and visit that spot every day. Knowing the paths around it helps a hunter to feed the tribe.

Note also that it is even more general and valuable to know an elk can be killed by a spear shot into its heart. That works anywhere. And an elk’s heart is just to the left of the spot on the animal’s torso where its ribs curve together. Finding elk is good, but bagging one is better. Knowing where to aim helps to end the hunt quickly. Reduce the chances of one of your hunters getting hurt.  

It’s even more general and valuable for a hunter to grasp that this heart-spot principle applies to all vertebrates, including lions, lizards, deer, fish, birds, etc. Knowing the heart generalization enables hunters to kill much more game.

Over generations, it is still more valuable for a hunter to believe he has a sacred right to harvest only as much game as is needed to feed his tribe. In his tribe’s religion, the elk are seen as gifts from the Great Spirit. They must be killed, cooked, and eaten in moderation and reverence. Then, always, there will be elk to hunt. If He is respected, myth says, the Great Spirit gives generously.

Note again the quality of increasing generalizability here; note especially how very generalizable beliefs – if they keep proving true over generations – are valued more and more by any tribe that learns them.

“This watering hole may dry up, son, but the Great Spirit and our belief in Him will not change. He is the one who tells us to love the elk as our brothers who give their lives to sustain us. So, we kill elk with restraint and thanksgiving.”

 

                                              Woolly mammoths (artist's conception)

                                (Charles Robert Knight, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                   Widespread custom: handwashing  (Indonesia)  (2021)

                                (credit: Achmad Wibisono, via Wikimedia Commons) 

9. The Roots of Religion

Note also that very general values, etc. – if they get reliable results over the long haul of generations – are the ones most carefully saved and passed on in a tribe. This makes sense. Concepts of greater generality, if they have been proven to work, may be used as guides more often in more decision situations to enable the tribe to survive more of the time than is the case for their competitor tribes. But the reasons why they work are often too buried among reams of irrelevant sense data and sense data memories for tribe members to see the large patterns which show how these concepts, values, customs, and morés work. Thus slow-working concepts get turned, by cultural evolution, into religion in the tribe’s cultural programming package. Beliefs accepted without logical explanation.  

Or to put the matter another way, in the past, very general concepts, values, etc. became more and more deeply entrenched in the tribe’s myths if, in the first place, they worked to improve the tribe’s survival odds, but also, in the second place, if the reasons why they worked couldn’t be explained in everyday terms by the tribe’s shaman. These were so important that they needed to be retained and followed consistently in practice by tribe members. But to be retained in the tribe’s lore, they had to be gradually turned into beliefs that tribe members had to take on faith so that they were followed without question. Such beliefs, along with their attached behaviors, were assiduously adhered to, even during times when the beliefs and values might appear ineffective for a while.  

In this way, these pieces of wisdom became myths. Any tribe that didn’t have these very general, but effective, apps in some form in its culture, eventually fell behind its competition and died out.

For example, some early tribes gradually learned to value cleanliness. We didn’t have to know about germs to come to value cleanliness. It worked; it made more of the tribe survive longer so we kept it, even when we didn’t know why we kept it. Or in another example, cooking food. When a tribe first began to cook food, it probably happened just due to curiosity on the part of one tribe member who held a piece of meat on a stick over the campfire to see what would happen.

At first, most of the tribe likely didn’t think cooked meat was tasty. They were used to raw meat, and cooking it took longer. But the tribe that cooked its meat got sick less often. Soon, cooking became familiar for at least a few tribes, and these outbred other tribes with whom they competed, then drove them out of the area. Thus, over generations, hard experience, including loss of lives, turned some tribe’s ways toward washing and cooking as less clean tribes died out. 

                                        Ruins of Ancient Roman baths, Santorini, Greece

                                                         (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

Over many generations, a few tribes came to adopt daily rituals of cleanliness and cooking because their cleaner ways led them to survive in greater numbers than their competition. Consciously, they believed their religion required these practices. Below conscious choice, their beliefs led them first, to outbreed, then, to outnumber, and then, to outfight less clean neighbors.

Hestia was the ancient Greek goddess of cooking and the home. Hygeia was the goddess of cleanliness. So, you cook and wash. Why? For the Ancient Greeks, it was because the gods said so. In time, for reasons they little understood, they defeated less clean tribes and took their land. Analogous beliefs existed in many cultures, including Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, etc. They bathed and cooked.  

All of this occurred even though likely none of those involved knew anything about germs. (“Invisible little animals! Absurd!”) In this way, effective beliefs and customs get embedded in culture by becoming myths. Like Hestia.

In short, tribes that survive keep alive the beliefs and customs that keep them alive. Especially revered are the very general beliefs that significantly improve a tribe’s survival rates over the long haul of generations.

On the other hand, tribes whose models of reality become obsolete die out. For complex reasons, the Mycenaeans, Beothuk, Anasazi, and others are gone.

         

                                      Handwashing at school in Ghana, Africa   (2021) 

                                                  (credit: Amuzujoe, via Wikipedia) 

 

                                               Hunting buffalo using a buffalo jump (1892)

                                                        (a useful hunting custom) 

                                (artist: Ernest E. Thompson, via Wikimedia Commons) 

8. Humans’ Perceptions of Changes to Their Culture/Way of Life

Note that, in society in general, the process of cultural change is little discussed or understood. This is because in the struggle by a tribe to survive better than its competition, tribe members are typically unaware of why they think with the concepts that they do, follow the customs they follow, and worship as they do. If asked to explain their way of life, they say things like “we’ve always done it this way” or “our gods decreed it”. We must get past that chauvinism. 

For most people, the reasons for why their culture is as it is aren’t opaque: those reasons are more like invisible. Like water is to fish.   

Small updates to cultures occur in subtle ways that can only be seen when one takes an objective view of a lot of different tribes of people. Or to put the matter another way, we can say that in any tribe, updates are happening, gradually, all the time. Old ‘ways’ get replaced in people’s daily lives by new ‘ways’ that work more efficiently. Societies do update their programming, usually gradually. The core concepts called ‘values’, however, are almost, but not quite, unchangeable.

“We’re knapping flint into blades this way now, Dad. Sister discovered it. Yeah, I miss the old days, too. But this way is better. We knap flint this way now. ”

On the other hand, major updates to a culture are scary for any tribe, and most of these tend to happen only after major shocks: famines, epidemics, or wars. A big update only occurs, of course, if at least some of the tribe members survive the shock that is calling for the update, and even then, systemic change is hard.

To be clear, we should reiterate that for millennia, human evolution has been driven by culture, not by genes. Our genome doesn’t adapt to changes in our environment nearly as nimbly as our cultural codes do. When climate change caused catastrophic flooding for some of our forebears, they didn’t develop gills over the next hundred generations. They learned ways to build homes on stilts or boats, and fishing replaced hunting in two or three generations.

We learn to handle changes in the world around us, we keep what we learn, and we pass it on to our kids. With pain, sometimes. But we’re good at this ‘cultural change’ trick. Much better at it than any other species. For better or worse, we’ve become culture driven creatures because culture enables us to evolve and adapt to change more nimbly, profoundly, and effectively than our genome can.  

                                                Teddy Roosevelt on an elephant hunt 

                                            (white man learning new hunting skills) 

                                    (credit: Edward van Altena, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                   

 

                                                   Boy eating cooked termites (Zimbabwe, 2016)

                                                        (credit: Cecil Dzwowa, via Wikimedia) 

                                      

7. The Society-Species Analogy

A better understanding of the Moral Realist model of society can be reached by considering an analogy between species with their genomes and societies with their cultures.

Every species is being tested by its environment all the time. Species gradually, over generations, undergo changes to their genomes so that they change their coloring or grow taller, etc. as they adapt to changes in their surroundings. Analogously, every tribe is being tested by its environment all the time. Tribes gradually, over generations, undergo changes to their cultures so that they change their beliefs and customs: they learn to eat a new kind of fruit or hunt with a new weapon, in response to changes in their environment.  

Sometimes a tribe’s way of getting food gets tested when a species of plant the tribe has gathered for generations gets wiped out by an invasive blight. Sometimes the tribe’s way of bunching into a tight circle to face predators gets tested when a new species of large predator migrates into the area. However, more often, the testing comes in subtle, nearly invisible ways over generations.

Like obsolete parts of a genome go silent when they no longer provide any useful physical traits for a species, so obsolete parts of a culture get cut, sometimes in a generation, when they no longer guide the tribe to any useful behaviors. For example, knowing how to handle horses was a basic part of many cultures all over the world for centuries. For men in particular, learning horse skills was just part of growing up. Today, however, horse knowledge is all but gone for the vast majority of people in all tribes. Why? Because, in this era, few need it.

                                                       Boy with horse (India, 2013)

                                              (credit: Sidheeq, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Note also that, as is the case with genes, each part of a cultural code is retained if and only if it works, i.e. it enables the people of the tribe who live by that culture to get food, raise kids, fight off invaders, handle epidemics, etc. High quality code enables a tribe to respond effectively to the challenges of life. 

Furthermore, it integrates the activities it teaches into a working package that enables the tribe that lives by that code package to survive and adapt at least as successfully as neighboring tribes against whom that tribe competes. 

Any major part of a cultural code that, perhaps quite suddenly, gets tested and fails to work – because of code decay over long periods of inactivity of that part, or because of changes in the environment, or because of the tribe being invaded – must be updated to handle the tribe’s new reality, or the tribe will die out.

“They kill us with those bow things that fire the little spears they call ‘arrows’. We must learn how to make those things, or we’re going to be wiped out.”

“I know these fruit are new to us, but I’ve seen the chimps eating them. I think they’re safe for us. Fruits that chimps eat usually are. And these are so tasty!”

Thus, by cultural variation and natural selection, instead of gene variation and natural selection, cultural evolution is going on all the time. And occasionally, a war, a famine, or an epidemic – a major challenge – culls a less fit tribe and its culture completely from the total set of human cultures on this planet.

This picture of tribes and their cultures is true almost all the time in all aspects of culture but for a few core beliefs which are universal. Note what I imply here: all tribes have a few core beliefs that keep being reaffirmed in every era. In English, these are called moral values. They are essential to a tribe’s survival. The rest of our programming changes and evolves over time.

What those essential core values are, what they look and sound like, is the point of this essay. We’re coming to them. Hang in there.  

                                 

                                          Chimp eating fruit (Serengeti Park, 2017) 

                                        (credit: Frank Schwichtenberg, via Wikimedia)

                                           A method of fishing: Cast net fishing, Caribbean 

                                                               (credit: Wikipedia)

                                         Another method of fishing: stilts fishing, Sri Lanka
                                                     (credit: Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia) 

6. The Human Way: Cultural Programming

Note again that a cultural code is a basic operating system for the members of a given tribe, and it is programmed into the brains of tribe members by nurture. Humans don’t get much cultural programming from their genes. We’re made human by our upbringings, i.e. our lives before we’re six. If we are to persuade a majority of humans to update their way of life to fit our new circumstances, we’ll have to update how we raise our kids. But yes, humans are programmable.

We get our ideas about food, smiles, beauty, knowledge, history, and especially right and wrong from programming put into our brains by our upbringings. In our world, for the last ten thousand years or so, cultures have been tested more and more often by changes coming via famines, epidemics, or wars with rival tribes. Only tribes that updated their cultures to adjust to challenges survived.

I stress again that cultures vary considerably from tribe to tribe. They are hard – but not impossible – to rewrite, update, amend, or translate into each other. More on this issue later.

For now, we can say that we learn most of our tribe’s version of normal by six years old, and these various versions of normal are noticeably different from tribe to tribe, though they also have a few important areas of overlap.

All the parts of the code that an individual has had programmed into his brain by his parents, teachers, etc. so that he can get along and work in his tribe are also not identical from individual to individual across that whole tribe. Families and teachers differ even within one town so what they teach to the young differs at least a bit from child to child.

But a tribe’s members don’t have to think and act exactly alike in order to live and work together. They just need to have enough ideas in common to enable them to get things done – things best done by a team, like hunting and gathering food; or for agricultural tribes, growing and harvesting food; or gathering ingredients used in medicines; coping with famines or epidemics; making tools; nurturing the young; and fighting off invaders. All these complex group acts are done more effectively when humans work as a team, a tribe, a nation. Thus, nearly all humans have some sort of code of behavior in their heads: namely, their nation’s culture.

And I repeat: in all societies, culture is programmable. We’re not stuck. 

                                 

                                          Another method of fishing: flyfishing, USA 

                                                                  (credit: Wikimedia) 

                                               Another method: ice fishing,  Canada

                                                               (credit: Wikimedia)

 

 5. The Necessity of Cultural Programming

Early on in this argument, we must also grasp that almost all members of all tribes already have a behavior code in their heads. If they didn’t, they couldn’t function daily in their communities. With no code at all, they’d be catatonic.

Thus, even though each tribe’s code differs substantially from those of the other tribes of the world, the vast majority in every tribe do have a code in place. People who live in a society but refuse to discuss their moral codes are nearly all either sociopaths who feign following their tribe’s code when it’s seems useful to them to do so or reactionaries who refuse to discuss the code by which they function. Sociopaths and reactionaries. All nations have at least some of both.

                              

                               Sociopath Charles Manson, 1968 (credit: Wikimedia)

On the other hand, the few who don’t have any cultural/moral programming in their heads are either catatonic or feral. A person who truly has no cultural code program in them either sits and stares (catatonic) or lives like an animal (feral).  

There are such creatures as feral humans, ones nurtured by animals; a few even run on all fours. They’re very rare, but they prove cultural programming is vital. They are the evidence which shows that, without any culture programmed into their heads, homo sapiens individuals are barely recognizable as human.   

The catatonic and the feral, in most tribes, deserve and get the sympathy of the rest of the tribe. Usually, they are cared for like the handicapped. (For the curious, check online for the story of Oksana Malaya. She is arguably the most stunning of the feral child cases ever. There are plenty of images, video clips, even interviews with her in them.)

Catatonics and feral people are both beyond our scope in this essay, but they do give us a chance to define the term “culture” simply and clearly. Culture is the sum of all the programming acquired by each human through the nurturing given to him by other humans; it is all the programming they would not have if they were raised by dogs or apes. To a high degree, then, each of us is his or her cultural programming. Mine runs me. It guides me as I decide second by second what matters and what I should do about it. Without my code, I wouldn’t be ‘human’.

                                              

                                                    Chinese fashions, traditional and modern

                                          (credit: Serene Wang, via Wikimedia Common) 

Note again here that a human’s cultural programming is difficult to amend or update once that human is past about six years old. Difficult. Not impossible.

On the other hand, we try to persuade the reactionaries who refuse to discuss their way of life: “Change is constant. Accept it. Can we at least talk about it?” And true sociopaths who simulate allegiance to their nation’s code so that they may cynically manipulate others, we do our best to apprehend and quarantine off from the rest of society. Put them in jail. But I repeat: my focus here will be on the socialized majority, not the incorrigible reactionaries, nor the sociopaths. I claim that this necessary software, the moral code in each of us, that we must have just to live in our communities – even though it varies profoundly from one society to the next – can change. In fact, given time, all cultures do change.           

 

3. Three Short Caveats on the Essay’s Task

It’s worth noting from the start in this essay, that if we do formulate a universal moral code, we will have to derive it from the facts of reality. They’re all we can agree on. Myths, morés, customs, norms – all cultural constructs – will not do the job. They vary too radically from place to place, tribe to tribe, and era to era. We must begin from objective facts, which is only to say that I shall try, as strictly as I can, to take a scientific approach; to use reasoning that checks its conclusions against observable evidence, not any society’s familiar opinions.

Whether social scientists could ever persuade the world’s leaders to implement a universal moral code in their legal codes is a question we’ll ignore for now. First, we must formulate a logical, evidence-based moral code. Then, we can go on to work on the project of persuading world leaders to implement that code.

I’ll also warn readers here that I reiterate key points in this essay several times. I change my terms a bit, illustrate generalizations with fresh examples, but yes, I repeat many key points. In my view, leading readers to accept the moral realist model of us humans and our ways of life – at least tentatively –  is worth that kind of dogged persistence.

Above all else, we must stay out of that global bloom of mushroom clouds.

                            (credit: FEMA photo library, via Wikimedia Commons) 

4. The Humanities’ and Social Sciences’ View of Our Dilemma

It is also useful to reiterate here that few philosophers and social scientists today are brave enough to say they’re looking for a universal moral code. Most of them say any such quest is hopeless.

However, the essay below will argue that a universal moral code can be written. The one I offer is based on what we know of the universe itself. In short, I am going to try to build a universal moral code based on what we currently understand about physical reality.

                 Modern science gets born: Physicists at Solvay Conference (1927)

                                           (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                        
                                               Aftermath of Battle of Gettysburg   (1863)                                                                  (credit: Henry William Elson, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                           Aftermath of Tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia (2005) 

                                                         (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

              Which of the disasters above was natural and which was human-caused? 

2. Establishing Foundational Terms

Let’s establish some basic terms. I will speak of a moral code as a behavior code because in the end, that is what a moral code does: it tells us how to behave. I will use the words tribe, society, and nation as though they are interchangeable. For our purposes here, they are. They all name groups of similarly programmed humans, each member of the group sharing a set of memes that enables the group to act in coordinated ways as a team.

Among animals, individual humans aren’t impressive. We’re not fast or strong compared to other animals. We have puny fangs and claws. But in teams, we’re the deadliest creatures on earth.

I will also speak in what follows as if the mind, the capacity for reason, is a given for nearly all humans. A concept that is near to irreducible. It is very difficult to further describe or explain what a mind is in terms of simpler concepts.

Each of us has a capacity to sense details in our physical surroundings (i.e. to see, hear, smell, etc.), then to spot patterns in our sense data, then to compare them to memories of past sense data and our responses to them, then to plan action to steer our bodies safely through our environment, second by second. If we didn’t have this capacity, we’d quickly get buried in landslides, drowned in rivers, eaten by predators, smashed up on the roads, or destroyed by some other hazards too many to list and some we can’t yet imagine.  

Most of the time, disasters don’t happen to us. Why? Because we carry code in our bodies (in our brains) that enables us to spot patterns in sense data, act in ways that enable us to avoid oncoming, potentially painful events, exploit useful ones, then save what we learn for future use. The programming that enables us to recognize recurring patterns in physical reality is the source of our complex capacity to form concepts, i.e. ways of grouping sense data memories that look alike to us. (That’s what concepts are.) We call this big program mind.

We’ve had much difficulty explaining in simpler terms what a mind is, though science is getting closer to pinning it down. But for now, roughly, it is software that stores, organizes, and processes sense-data. It runs on extremely complex hardware: the brain. I am software (mind) running on hardware (brain).

Mind is a crucial program found in all living things; to varying degrees for each of them, it enables survival. The degree of its power and importance for human survival is just higher than for other species. We humans survive by our minds.

Every living thing has programming built into its body that enables it to detect and handle the hazards and opportunities in its reality. All living things can thus be said to have some form of mind. With our complex brains we hold larger minds so we can store, update, and use sense data memories and the concepts we have built with them to direct our actions more efficiently than most other life forms do. Even as individuals, we humans have higher level ‘executive apps’ that tell us when to open lower level apps (concept sets) that tell us how to act.

Then, most importantly, we can save what we learn and pass that programming on to our young. It is our complex human minds that have made possible our not only developing effective programs for survival in this universe but passing them on to our kids. This is our most powerful trait. We teach our kids how to avoid our mistakes and remember and use our successes, even over generations.

In short, it is mind that enables what we call culture. And it is this capacity for learning, and passing on, a culture that makes us fully human. I will define culture more thoroughly below, but roughly it is all that we absorb as kids from other members of our tribe, especially ones we call “family” or “teachers”.  

 

                

                                            Wildfire near Ashcroft, B.C., Canada (Aug., 2017) 

                                               (credit: Shawn Cahill, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                                    Searching for bodies in rubble in Gaza (2023) 

                                                 (credit: Jaber Jehad Badwan) 

By the way, I consider the harsh worldview I take here that sees the universe as relentlessly dangerous and uncertain to be obvious. This essay assumes readers know the universe is harsh. Like all living things, we’re surrounded by objects and forces that would destroy us if we didn’t detect them, then block, run, or hide from them, or fight back against them.

The hazardousness of physical reality is pervasive; it’s fair to say it is reality. If you think you’re navigating toward a secure future situation in which you will be able to stop worrying, you should disabuse yourself of that view as soon as can. That secure future does not exist, never has existed, never will exist. We’ll discuss further the basic destructiveness and uncertainty of the universe later in this essay.