Chapter 3.            Part D

         If all natural law statements are seen as being only “temporarily true”, then Science can be seen as a kind of fashion show whose fads have a little more shelf life than the fads in the usual parade of clothes, hairstyles, make-up, television shows, and songs on the radio. Or put another way, Science’s “law statements” all become just more “narratives”, not really “true” so much as useful, but useful only in the lands in which they gain some currency and only for limited time periods, at best.

               

            And the logical flaws that can be spotted in empiricist reasoning are not small ones.

               

       Even the terms that natural-law statements contain are vulnerable to attack by the skeptics. Hume argued more than two hundred years ago that we humans can’t really know that any of the laws we think we see in nature are absolutely true because when we state a natural law, the terms that we use to name objects and events that we want to focus on exist only in our minds. A simple statement that seems to us to make sense, like the one that says hot objects will cause us pain if we touch them, can’t be trusted. To assume that this “law” is true is to assume that our definitions for the terms "hot" and "pain" will continue to make sense in the future as they have in the past. But we can’t know that these assumptions will hold in the future. We haven’t been to the future. (Maybe we'll all get enhanced into bionics shortly after birth, and we'll stop feeling pain altogether.)  

   

            Thus, all of the terms in natural law statements, even terms like “protons”, “atoms”, “acids”, “genes”, “cells”, “galaxies”, etc. are fabrications of our minds, terms that we create because they help us to sort and categorize our sensory experiences and memories of sensory experiences and so to talk to each other about what seems to be going on around us. But reality does not contain any things that are somehow qualified naturally as atoms, cells, or galaxies. If you look at a gene, it won’t be wearing a name tag that reads “Gene.” 

            Right from the start, our natural law statements must gamble on the future validity of our current mental categories, i.e. our humanly made-up terms for "things". The terms can seem sound, but they are still gambles, and some that humans once gambled on with great confidence turned later, in the light of new evidence, to be naïve and inadequate. 

                                           

                                                         Isaac Newton

            Newton’s laws of motion are now seen by physicists as being useful, low-level approximations of the subtler, relativistic laws of motion formulated by Einstein. The substance “phlogiston” once seemed to explain all of Chemistry. Then Lavoisier did some experiments which showed phlogiston didn't exist. On the other hand, people spoke of genes long before microscopes which could show them to the human eye were invented, and people still speak of atoms, even though no one has ever seen one. Some terms last because they enable us to build mental models and do experiments that work.  

            But the list of scientific theories that eventually “fell from fashion" is very long.

               

                                                                    Antoine Lavoisier 

            Various further attempts to nail down what scientific thinking does, and to prove that it is a truly reliable way of knowing, have been made in the last hundred years, but they have all come to insoluble conundrums of their own.

               

      The logical positivists, for example, tried to bypass Hume’s problems with the terms in scientific laws and to put the burden of meaning and proof onto whole propositions instead. A key point in the logical positivists’ case is that all meaningful statements are either analytic or synthetic.  Any statement that does not fit into one of these two categories, the positivists say, is irrelevant noise.

            Analytic statements are statements whose truth or falsity is determined by the definitions of the terms that they contain. For example, “All bachelors are unmarried men” is an analytic statement. If we understand the terms in the sentence we can immediately verify, by thinking it through, whether or not the statement is true.

Synthetic statements are ones whose truth or falsity we must work out by referring to evidence found in the real world, not in the statement itself. In Science, the needed evidence is found in human observations of the real world. “All substances contract when cooled” is a synthetic statement (not quite a true one, as observations of water/ice can show). So is “If a creature is a whale, then it is a mammal”.

The logical positivists aimed to show that the talk that goes on between scientists in all branches of Science can be made rigorously logical and, therefore, can lead us to true knowledge. They intended to apply their analytic-synthetic distinction to all statements in such a rigorous way that any statement made by anyone in any field could be judged by this standard. If the truth or falsity of a statement had to be checked by observations made in the real, material world, then it was clearly a synthetic statement. If the statement’s truth value could be assessed by careful analysis of its internal logic, without reference to observations and measurements made in the material world, then the statement was clearly an analytic statement. Idea exchanges that were limited to only these types of statements could be logically sound. All other statements were to be regarded as meaningless. 

The logical positivists argued that following these prescriptions was all that was needed to make the scientific talk that scientists engage in with each other, as they explain their research and size up the research of their fellow scientists, logically sound and so to lead scientists by gradual steps on to true, reliable knowledge of the real world. All other communications by humans were to be regarded as forms of emotional venting, empty of any real content or meaning.

               

                                                                  Rudolph Carnap 

  

  Carnap, especially, set out prove that these prescriptions were all that Science needed in order for it to work and to progress in a rigorously logical way toward making more and more accurate statements about the real world – generalizations that could be trusted as universal truths. (2.)

       

                                                    Willard V. O. Quine

 But the theories of Carnap and the other positivists were taken apart by later philosophers such as Quine, who showed that the crucial positivist distinction between analytic and synthetic statements was not logically defensible. Explaining what makes an analytic statement (e.g. “All bachelors are unmarried men”) analytic requires that we first understand what “synonymous” terms (like “bachelors” and “unmarried men”) are. But if we go into the logic carefully, we find that explaining what makes two terms “synonymous” presupposes that we first understand what “analytic” means. In short, trying to lay down precise rules for defining the difference between analytic statements and synthetic ones only leads us to reason in circles. (3.)

          

                                                    Hilary Putnam               

Quine’s reasoning, in turn, was further critiqued and refined by later philosophers like Hilary Putnam. As Putnam eventually put the matter:     

            “… positivism produced a conception of rationality so narrow as to exclude the very          activity of producing that conception.”

            “… the whole system of knowledge is justified as a whole by its utility in predicting      [future] observations.” (4.)

In other words, logical positivism’s rigid way of talking about thinking, knowing, and expressing ends up in a logically unsolvable paradox. It creates new problems for all our systems of ideas and doesn’t help with solving any of the old problems.

We can see that most of the laws that have been formulated by scientists really do work. They guide us toward ways of living that get results. Why they work and how much we can rely on them - i.e. how much we can trust Science - are a lot trickier to explain.      

         Chapter 3.                   Part C

         In the Empiricist model of human "knowing", the human mind notices how certain patterns of details keep re-occurring in some situations from one time that we encounter them to the next. When we notice a pattern of details in encounter after encounter with a familiar situation, then we make mental files, for perhaps "round things", "red things", "sweet things", or “crisp things”. Then we save the information about that situation-type in our memories. The next time we encounter that type of object or situation, we simply go to our memory files. There, by cross-referencing, we discover: "Apple. Ah! Good to eat." All generalizations are built up in this way. 

            To be complete here, we must also say that scientists now know most of the concepts that I use as I recognize things and respond to them are concepts that I was taught by the mentors and role models that I saw as a child. I didn't discover very many by myself. My childhood programming taught me how to cognize things. After that, almost always, I don't cognize things, only recognize them. (Why my childhood mentors programmed me in the ways that they did will be explored in upcoming chapters.)   

               

         Empiricists claim that all human knowing and thinking happens in this way. Watch the world. Notice the patterns that repeat. Store them up in memories. Pull the memories out and - when they fit - use them to make prudent decisions and to react effectively to life. Remember what works and keep trying. For individuals and nations, according to the Empiricists, that's how life goes. The most effective way of human life, the way that makes this process rigorously logical, is Science.

               

            There are arguments against this way of thinking about thinking, arguments against this model of how human thinking and knowing work, in other words. Empiricism is a way of seeing our selves and our minds that sounds logical, but it has its problems. 

            Opponents of Empiricism and Science have long asked: "When a human sees things in the real world and spots patterns in the events going on there, then makes statements about what she is spotting, what is doing the 'spotting'?" That human mind, and the sense-data-processing programs that it must already contain in order for it to be able to do these tricks that the empiricists describe, obviously came before any data processing could be done. What is this "equipment" and how does it work? Explain it to me. Philosophers of Science have had trouble explaining what this "mind" that does the knowing is, and thus what Science, the most rigorous form of knowing, is and is trying to do.

               

            For example, consider what it is that Science aims to achieve. What scientists want to discover, come to understand, and then use in creative ways in the real world are what are usually called “the laws of nature”. Scientists do more than simply observe the events in physical reality. They also strive to understand how these events come about and then to express what they understand in general statements about these events, statements expressed in mathematical formulae, chemical formulae, rigorously logical sentences in one of the languages of humans on this planet, or some other symbol system used by people for conveying their thoughts to other humans. A “natural law” statement must describe one of the ways in which reality works, and, to be scientific, the statement’s claims must be set down in a way such that these claims can be tested in the real world. 

       If your claims about this real-world truth that you have discovered are going to be worth considering, then scientists must be able to test those claims in some real, material way. Thus, any “natural law” statement that you make, to be of any practical use whatever, and to stand any chance of enduring, must first be expressed in some language or symbol system that humans use to communicate ideas with other humans. A theory or model that can be expressed only inside the head of its inventor will die with her or him.

       "Any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them."

            (verbal statement of Newton's law of universal gravitation.)

              

                           

                   (mathematical formula expressing Newton's law of universal gravitation) 

                    

                               

                         

               (The Pythagorean Theorem, a mathematical law, but is it a scientific one?) 

            The big problem occurs when we try to analyze logically just how true statements like Newton’s Laws of Motion or Darwin’s Theory of Evolution are. Do statements of these laws express unshakeable truths about the real world or are they just temporarily useful ways of roughly describing what appears to be going on in reality, ways that people follow for a few decades while the laws seem to enable scientists to predict events in reality, but that then are revised or dropped when new problems that they can’t explain are encountered? 

         Many scientific theories in the last four hundred years have been revised or dropped altogether. Do we dare to say about any natural law statement that it is “true” in the unassailable way in which “5 + 7 = 12” is true or the Pythagorean Theorem is true?

               

         This debate is a hot one right up to the present time in Philosophy. There are many philosophers of Science who claim that scientific law statements, once they are supported by enough experimental evidence, can be considered to be true in the same way as valid math theorems are true. But there are also many who say the opposite. For people in this second group, all scientific statements are tentative. They believe that, given a bit of time, all such statements get replaced by new statements based on new models or theories.

               

       Note that anyone who argues that scientific law statements are only our latest guesses about what is going on in reality is arguing against the reliability of Empiricism and its whole way of seeing what human knowing is. This is so because Science is merely Empiricism applied in its most practical form. To say that, in principle, there can’t be ultimate truthfulness in any scientific law statements is to deny Empiricism. 

Chapter 3.                   Part B 

A flawed view of the world can lead one to a lifetime of error and misery. Marxism's biggest error is its assertion that everything is political. It may be that Art and journalism can be shown to be influenced by the political philosophy of the journalist or artist. For Marxists, all human activities, even artistic ones, are either Marxist work that is helping to advance the Marxist cause, or fascist work that is hindering that cause.  

But Science is about physical reality, the reality that comes before political or artistic activities even begin. If we assert, as some Marxists do, that Science also must bow to the "will of the people", we will inevitably begin to tell our scientists what we want them to conclude, instead of asking them what the evidence in reality seems to imply.

A clear example is the doctrine called "Lysenkoism" in Soviet Russia. In that nation, in the 1920's, the official state position was that human nature itself could be altered and humans made into perfect "socialist citizens" by changing their outward behavioral traits. Make them act like utterly selfless socialist citizens, and they will become so, even in their genetic programming. This government position required that the Darwinian view of evolution be over-ruled because politics must rule Science.

Darwin had said that members of living species do not acquire genetic changes from having their external appearances altered; living things only change their basic natures when their gene pools are altered by the processes of genetic variation and natural selection, over many generations of evolution. In its determination to make "socialist men", Soviet Communism required that people believe the opposite, i.e. that the acquired characteristics of an organism — for example, the state of shrub being leafless as a result of its leaves having been plucked — could be inherited by that organism's descendants. (1.) For years, Soviet agriculture was all but crippled by the Party's attempts to make its political "truism" be true in material reality, for crops and livestock, when it simply wasn't.   

          

                                                            Clostridium botulinum 

Another example: I may think I know all about bacteria and how to can foods at home in sealer jars. If I’ve looked through microscopes, I may be confident that my picture of the microscopic level of reality is a true one. But if my knowledge of home canning only covers common bacteria, my limited knowledge of bacteria and of canning may prove to be a dangerous thing. The usual boiling water bath for foods canned in jars does kills most bacteria. But for a few microbes, boiling is not enough. Botulism is nothing to be played around with. Botulinum bacteria can be boiled to death, but their deadly toxins can survive boiling. My partial and inadequate set of beliefs about home canning might get me killed.    

Or consider a few even more basic examples. Even my senses sometimes are not to be trusted. I may believe that light always travels in straight lines. I may see, half-immersed in a stream, a stick that looks bent at the water line, so I believe it to be physically bent. But when I pull it out, I find that it is straight. If I am a caveman trying to spear fish in a stream, a blind adherence to my ideas about light will cause me to starve. I will overshoot the fish every time, while the girl on the other shore, a better learner, cooks her catch.

I can immerse one hand in the snow and keep the other on a hand warmer in my coat pocket. Then I can go into a cabin to wash my hands in the sink. One hand senses that the sink water is cold, the other, that it is warm. Can't I even trust my own senses?

When we seek to find some things in our experience that we can believe in absolutely, we are stopped by questions like: “What do I really know?” and “How can I be sure of the things that I think I know?” and “Can I even be certain of what I see, hear, and touch?” We are deeply aware that we have to have a core around which we can build the rest of our system of beliefs or we may, at some time down the road, suddenly find that a whole set of ideas, and the ways of living the system implies, are ineffective, even dangerous illusions.

Even a complete world view, learned, used, and trusted, may turn out to be a fraud. Nazism may sound logical, if I am told, as a boy, by teachers whom I trust that every race on Earth, including my own, must fight to survive. I may come to truly believe in their model of the workings of the biosphere of this planet. If I believe it, I may then infer that winning new land for my race and subjugating competing races is my sacred duty to my people. I and millions of like-minded comrades may march off to a war that gets millions killed before my nation loses and the war is finally over.

                                                           World War II cemetery - France 

   

The problem all along was that the Nazi worldview was built around a core set of lies. The Nazi ideas of race have no foundation in fact; humanity is one species. In Science, there is no "Aryan race". Different nations/cultures do compete and struggle to survive, and Germany was, and is, a nation that has had one of the harder struggles. But culture is not genetically acquired. Culture is learned, and therefore, cultures can be amended by education and experience. In addition, war is not the only way by which cultures can evolve. Germany, as a nation, changed profoundly after WWII, but then it went on, very successfully, in fact. It didn't fizzle out and vanish as Nazi leaders had predicted it would if it lost the war. Millions of Germans and of their adversaries died because of an illusion.    

Around our basic ideas, we build more complex ideas. These eventually lead us to ways of acting and living. Knowing how ways of thinking and believing lead to ways of living, and how flawed belief systems can lead us into suffering and even death, I now set out to try to construct a reliable core around which I can build the rest of my thought system. In my case, that effort will begin with an examination of the epistemology that attempts to build its core around not a political or religious ideology but physical reality.

   

                                         John Locke (the founder of empiricism) 

                                               David Hume (the most famous empiricist philosopher)

               

        In the modern world, the belief set that most people in the West use as their core is the one called "Science". Under its view, what scientists seek to know is what is real. What is this ocean of stuff in which we swim and how do the things in it work? But the harder we think about this question, the more it leads us to a deeper one. The crucial question is not "What is real?" but "How can I know what is real?". How reliable is the system that I use to take in and understand the impressions that my senses send me about reality? Trying to answer these questions leads us into the branch of Philosophy called "epistemology".   

         The epistemological view of most scientists and philosophers in the West today is called "Empiricism". It is a beginning point. Empiricism assumes that all that I can know is my sensory experiences and memories of sensory experiences, plus the concepts that I have learned that enable me to sort those experiences and memories, plan responses to events in my world, and then act out the plans. I keep and use those concepts that have reliably guided me in the past to more health and vigor and less sickness and pain.

               

            Our sense organs are feeding bits of information into our minds all of the time: textures, colors, shapes, sounds, aromas, flavors, and so on about the things around us. Even when I am not consciously paying attention, at other, deeper levels, my mind is aware of these details. I know, for example, when the noises outside suddenly contain the sounds of a car approaching or a dog barking. I detect headlight beams sweeping across my yard, crunching gravel in the driveway, etc. – sometimes even in my sleep. One spouse wakes up to the baby's crying; the other dozes on. One wakes when the furnace isn’t cutting out as it should be; the other sleeps. The ship's engineer sleeps through steam turbines roaring and prop churning. She wakes when one bearing begins to hum just the tiniest bit above its normal pitch. She wakes because she knows that something is wrong. Empiricism is the modern way of understanding this complex information-handling system. 

Chapter 3            Foundations For A Moral Code: Empiricism And Its Flaws

Part A

At first glance, it seems that what we most want to know is how this universe works so that we can then figure out how to navigate through its currents with more health and joy and less pain and misery for ourselves and our children. If we get the basics of our world right, we have a reasonable chance of figuring the rest out. If not, we’re doomed to wander off track, into harm, over and over. People who don’t make a desire for efficacy one of the primary ones of their lives tend not to pass their short-sighted values and ways of living on to their children because they tend not to have any. People who do want to find better and better ways to live do pay attention to the physical universe around them and as a result do transmit their genes and their belief systems more efficiently over time.

        

            So we want to understand this world and our place in it. However, as we study this problem in a general way, we realize that there is a deeper problem. We begin to wonder just how reliable our basic information-processing system, i.e. the human-brain-hardware-human-mind-software, is. Can we trust the faculties that we use to gather information about our world? How easily can our perceptions and any reasoning based on those perceptions be fooled by our own yearnings or fears?  

                                            

                                

                                                                        Karl Marx 

Consider, for example, a girl that I knew when I was at university in 1971 whose core beliefs were all Marxist. How she yearned for Marx's vision of the world to come true. For her, all the troubles of the world were attributable to capitalist manipulations and conspiracies and only a world workers’ state would ever create a decent life for all people. The fact that the communist states of the world at that time were rife with corruption, for her, was always somehow due to the capitalists in other lands. The harsh living conditions and the secret police that obtained in these states were temporary measures that would be remedied as soon as the capitalist dogs had been eradicated from the earth.

She had so utterly deluded herself that I used to feel weak as I listened to her. She saw oppression in the faces of all of the workers that she passed as we walked the campus. She saw fascist symbolism in every poster of every concert being advertised on the notice boards. Her eyes were working, but what she "noticed" as she walked through her day was deeply biased. She used to carry a list of government people that she and her friends were going to assassinate “when the revolution comes”. I wonder where she is now. But I know that she taught me something: she taught me how fully humans can delude themselves. 

Since then, of course, Communism has failed totally; the world has learned that centrally planned economies wither. However, she was just one of many sincerely deluded people I met over the years who left me wondering, “Which of my own beliefs can I trust? Can I trust my moral beliefs? Can I trust my everyday ones? Can I even trust what I see?"   

Chapter 2.                               Part F

It seems bitterly unfair that the same Science that eroded our moral beliefs then offered nothing to put in their place. But what seems far more cruelly, diabolically ironic is that at the same time as Science was eroding our religious/moral beliefs out from under us, it was putting into our hands technologies of such destructive power that we can’t help but wonder whether any individual or group of individuals could ever be moral enough to handle them responsibly.

               

         We are living in a time of terrifying uncertainty. We now have the weapons to scorch our planet in one afternoon – so totally that the chances of our species surviving in that post-apocalyptic world are effectively zero.

Furthermore, even if we escape the holocaust of nuclear war, we are also steadily polluting our planet. We know that we are, but we can’t seem to stop, even though the vast majority of the scientists who study the Earth and its ecosystems say that the point of no return is rapidly approaching. To people who have studied the Earth and its systems, the risk of environmental collapse is even more frightening than that of nuclear war.

Large numbers of us, in the meantime, “lack all conviction”. Without a moral code to guide us – one that we truly believe is founded in the real world – we are like deer on the highway, stunned in the headlights, seemingly incapable of recognizing our peril.

               

            All reasonable, informed people today know these things. In fact, we are so weary of hearing what are called the “dire predictions” that we don’t want to think about them anymore. Or we think, get scared, and then go out with our friends to get inebriated. There seems to be little else one ordinary person or even clusters of rich and powerful persons can do. The problems are too big and too insidious for us – individually or collectively. Shut it out. Forget about it. Try to live “decently”. Hope for the best.

               

         For me, none of these answers are good enough. To ignore all of the evidence and arguments and resign myself to the “inevitable” is to give in to a whole way of thinking I cannot accept. That way of thinking says that the events of human lives are determined by forces that are beyond human control.

I disagree. I have to. I believe true philosophers must.

Whether we are talking about the cynicism of people who focus on events in their personal lives or the cynicism of some of the people who study all human history, or at any level in between, I have to tell these cynics bluntly: “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this debate because you wouldn’t be here.” 

  

                          Albert Camus, French philosopher (1913 - 1960) 

  

            As Camus sees it, suicide is the most sincere of all acts. (6.) Its only equal in sincerity is the living of a genuine life. A genuine person stays on in this world by conscious choice, not by inertia.  A genuine person is still here because he or she chooses to be. The other kind of person may claim to be totally disillusioned with this world and the people in it, but that simply can’t be the case if he or she is still alive and talking. These people are only partitioning up their minds, for the time being, into the manageable compartments of cynicism. But the disillusionment that they feel now – on any scale, personal to global – is going to seem minor compared to that which they are one day going to feel with themselves, one day when their fragile partitions begin to give way. And it doesn’t have to be that way, as we shall see.

So, to sum up our case so far, what have we shown? First, that Science has undercut and eroded the old beliefs in God and the old codes of right and wrong. Second, that, because of our ongoing need just to manage our lives and because, even more importantly, of our recently acquired and constantly growing need to manage wisely the physical powers that Science has put into our hands, we must replace the moral code that we no longer believe in with one that we do believe in. Then, perhaps we will have a chance - a chance just to live, go on, and get past our present peril.

If we can work out a moral code that we do truly believe in, will it then lead us on to a renewed belief in a Supreme Being? That question is one that I will have to set aside for now. But I will deal with it in the last chapter of this book. For now, let’s set our sights on trying to begin to build a new moral code for this era, so that finally we may confront and quell the “worst” among us. And in us.

Chapter 2.         Notes 

1.http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/heathwood/pdf/

  benedict_relativism.pdf

2. Kuhn, Thomas; “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, 

   third edition; The University of Chicago Press; 1996.

3. Searle, John; “Minds, Brains, and Behavior”; 

   Harvard University Press; 1984.

4. Kincaid, Harold; “Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences”; 

   Cambridge University Press; 1996.

5. Harris, Marvin; "Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times"; Altamira Press; 1999.  

6. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus; translated from the French by

    Justin O'Brien; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975, p. 11.

Chapter 2.                    Part E 

         In the meantime, by the end of the fighting, the political, religious, and business leaders in every sector of society appeared to be out of answers. They went on spouting the platitudes that had got them and their nations into the horror to begin with. The moral systems appeared bankrupt. Paralyzing doubt began to haunt people in every level of society, from the rich and powerful to the ordinary to the poor. 

         If the morals of the West had led to this, then, people could not help but think, maybe Science was right about the Bible. Maybe the moral beliefs that it recommended had all been a fraud. Maybe there were no moral rules at all. Darwin’s model of the living world had portrayed “nature red in tooth and claw”. Survival of the fittest. That seemed to be the only credible model left. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. 

         Before the Scientific Revolution began to erode God out of the thinking of the majority of the citizens of the West, even if people couldn’t grasp why bad things sometimes happened in this world or why bad people sometimes got ahead in spite of, and even because of, the suffering of others, people could still believe God had His reasons and the code of right and wrong still held. God was watching. Matters would be sorted out in time. The liars, manipulators, thieves, bullies, and killers would get their just deserts in time. We just had to be patient and have faith. The people, in large majority, believed the authorities’ official spiel.

         But World War I was just too huge. With the scale of the destruction, the pathetic reasons given to justify it, and the amorality of Science gnawing at their belief systems, more and more people began to suspect and fear that, just as Science had said, there was no God, the Bible was a collection of myths, their leaders were a bunch of deluded incompetents, and the old moral system was a sham. And then, things got worse.

              

                                  British Army bulldozer burying bodies at Bergen-Belsen

                     

              

                                  British soldiers forcing German guards to load bodies

         Following the First World War, to exacerbate the moral confusion and despair, the man-made horrors of the twentieth century began to mount. They are so many and so ugly. The Russian Revolution and Civil War. The worldwide Depression. World War II, six times as destructive as World War I. Hitler’s camps. Stalin’s camps. And on and on. But we don’t need to describe any more. The point is that they were the actions of a species that had gained great physical power at the same time as it lost its moral compass, or, more plainly, its ability to handle that power responsibly.       

     

         The big question - "What is right?" - keeps echoing in an empty hall, and the big fears that go with it have only grown. Where will the code that we need to guide our behavior in international affairs, business, or even everyday matters come from now?

         From the nation to the person, some coherent code must be in place in order for us to function, even if that code is mostly programmed into the subconscious. People without any basic operating code in place can’t act at all. They are called “catatonic”. The problem today is that, for millions of people all over the world, the old moral codes that used to guide all that human beings did are fading. World War I was the first in a series of real world shocks that have deeply rocked all of our beliefs - our beliefs about the value of our Science and, even more deeply, our beliefs about our codes of right and wrong.

         So let me reiterate: the worst fact about our moral dilemma in the twenty-first century is that, collectively, the gurus of Science, though they have been able to achieve amazing things in the realms of machines, chemicals, medicines, etc., have had nothing to say about how we should or should not be using these technologies. Many of them even go so far as to claim that “should” is a word that has no meaning in Science.