Introduction

I will introduce this essay by saying the hardest thinking you will do in trying to understand what follows won’t be in understanding the premises, reasoning, evidence, or thesis it contains. The hardest thinking that lies in the way of this essay’s becoming persuasive to you is the thinking you must do to unthink what you now believe about right and wrong. I’m asking you first, for a little while, to suspend what you think right is. That isn’t easy, but it’s necessary if you are to get the point that this essay is trying to make. Then, I’m confident, your idea of right will come back to you updated, reinvigorated, and stronger than ever.

For most people, getting past their accepted and assumed ideas of right and wrong is a baffling, almost inconceivable task. So much so that they never see their moral values – i.e. their ideas about right and wrong – as they really are.

Postmodernists go so far as to say that, for all of us, amending our most deeply programmed ideas isn’t possible. They claim that my basic ideas even of things like whether the hue that I’m painting with can be called ‘blue’, what a sarcastic tone of voice sounds like, or what something gross smells like – ideas I learned from family, friends, and generally from my culture as I was growing up – are what I use to put together any further thinking I do, and that this is true of all of us from about six years old on. Thus, the basic ideas of right and wrong that each of us has differ from individual to individual even within one tribe and considerably more from tribe to tribe. The task of thinking past our culturally programmed concepts about right and wrong isn’t merely difficult. For every one of us, says postmodernism, it’s literally inconceivable. We lack the concepts.

In real situations like, for example, tasting a new kind of cooking, you will not be able to eat juicy pieces of meat if you are from any of the cultures in the world that teach their people to loathe blood. For millions of the world’s people, that meat isn’t juicy. A ripe mango or apple can be juicy. That meat is bloody. It’s revolting. If forced to eat it, millions in many cultures today would vomit. But in other cultures, there are millions who love a juicy steak. The difference between these groups of people is not physiological; it’s cultural. That’s how powerful cultural programming is. It can override appetite. And if that’s true, it must utterly determine the ideas that we use to think about right and wrong.

                                                    Rainbow in Alaska                                                                   

     (How many colors? What are they called? Are these terms social constructs?)                                     

                                (credit: Eric Rolph, Wikimedia Commons)

In another example, in many parts of the world, in the same rainbow we’re both looking at, I would see – or more accurately, I’d name – seven colors, while a local citizen would name five. And we’d both believe we were right. (The Himba people of Namibia, for example, say there are only five colors in a rainbow.)

But I say the postmodernists are wrong, as the evidence shows. Whole nations, whole civilizations even, can change their ways of thinking. It just takes time.

In the 1600s, the vast majority of Europeans didn’t want to accept that the earth was not the center of the universe. The way the sun crossed the sky, the Bible’s account of the creation of the universe, and the arguments of experts going back centuries all proved that the earth was the center of the universe. To believe otherwise wasn’t just disrespectful to the Church; it was absurd. (“Look at the sun, moon, and stars above you, fool! They move around the earth!”)

To most folk in the 1800s, Darwin’s idea that all life had grown from a few cells, stressed, mutated, and multiplying for millions of years, seemed absurd. Again, the evidence of how species stayed the same over generations and how experts’ opinions all agreed proved that the Biblical story of creation must be correct.

By and large, we don’t believe the churches’ view of either of these phenomena anymore. Galileo was right. The images taken from outer space clearly say so. Darwin was right. Insects and bacteria, for example, mutate into new species when we stress them with pesticides or antibiotics. Other species are a bit slower to evolve, but the evidence is indisputable: evolution works.  

So, contrary to the postmodernists, I assert that human thinking can change. Changing thinking from an old model of reality to a new one takes a few reviews of the evidence for some people, while others never give in. The thinking of most people ranges between these two extremes. With the most obstinate, all we can do is teach their kids to think better. Explain the logic, show them the evidence. In the meantime, the parents gradually die off, and society’s thinking changes. (Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the classic on this topic.)

Opinions do evolve, for whole societies as well as individuals. So, let’s see what we can say about some current views on right and wrong – i.e. moral values – and, maybe, update common ideas about them for all of us.  

                  Earthrise (taken from the moon) (NASA photo, via Wikimedia)