LUCIFER AND LAMB
Why & How We Will Restore Moral Boundaries
By
Jay B. Gaskill
I. MORAL BOUNDARIES AS LIFE
SUPPORT
Without
clear moral boundaries, civilization will succumb to its demons. All civilizations represent institutionalized
systems of allegiance. For any civilization to survive more than generation or
two it must rest on a robust underlying moral foundation from which its
governing structure, laws and systems for the allocation of accountability
derive their legitimacy. This ethical foundation and the implementing rules and
norms of governance are a civilization’s normative
infrastructure. When that
infrastructure fails, a civilization dies.
The normative infrastructure of
modern Western civilization has been damaged by mindless empiricism, doctrinaire
philosophical materialism and malignant skepticism. Collectively these forces have done something
that has never been accomplished before: they have undermined confidence in
morality itself, except as social convention.
This is an invitation to nihilism.
Our common moral infrastructure
has been under attack for the last 150 years by intellectuals whose weapon of
choice was the acid of comprehensive doubt. That weapon was originally aimed at
the legitimacy of archaic authoritarian institutions, especially at hereditary
rule and theocracy. The attack proved
very effective in the developed world, but the acid did not return to its
bottle. It has continued its work, eating away at the supporting foundations of
civilization itself, much as it did early in the last century in pre-Nazi
Unless civilization recovers
robust confidence in its own value, the tendency of its intelligentsia to
wallow in suicidal irresolution will precipitate the actual suicide of the
civilized social order. The prospect of
a new dark age looms, but is far from inevitable. This is an optimistic take on
our circumstances, one that begins in realism and asks us to see the deep
continuities on which reasonable hope is founded.
II. RESTORING “LAMB”
The
quest for the restoration of the deeply embedded ethical principles sustaining
civilization’s Legal And Moral Boundaries (LAMB) is too important to be left to
the academy and the clerisies. The
current situation will not be resolved by denial or complacency. Inaction is
not an option.
Some members of the intellectual
community have recognized the scope and seriousness of the damage, and are
braving the slings and arrows of political correctness in the academy as they
work slowly to repair the damage. But
their attempts to repair what the skeptics have undermined are being fought at
every turn. Just one example: Think of the striking success within intellectual
circles of the attacks on religious authority.
Consider: if religion fails altogether, is there another equally
powerful (and benign) source of moral
authority?
Although the immune system of
civilization has been weakened by cultural and moral relativism, until
recently, the so called common people have been inoculated by common sense. But
their immunity is relentlessly being compromised as an amoral ethos invades the
popular culture here and in
Lucifer has loomed large in
theology and human myth as the rebellious angel who was cast out of heaven by
the One True God and thereafter remained a trouble maker for all time. The Lamb is the classic symbol of
propitiatory sacrifice, the notion that by offering up innocence to deity,
humanity can earn favor from the One True God.
These ideas have enjoyed tenacious resonance in human culture because
they capture deep aspects of the human condition.
The present age has been
dominated by the themes of rebellion against authority and the sacrifice of
innocent men, women and children on a monumental scale. Very large forces are still afoot in the
world and we humans may not have yet seen the worst they can do.
The cultural and philosophical acids loosed in the last century or so cannot dissolve everything. Even the stubbornly pervasive notion that ethics and morality are merely human constructs is beginning to run its course. Recovery of our essential boundaries is possible. A secular - religious consensus is within reach. But civilization is more fragile than we would like to think. We can ill afford to wait another century while the professional philosophers grind out solutions piecemeal.
Lucifer and Lamb are cultural echoes of Stage One Monotheism, that period in theology when the One True God was recognized as supreme over all lesser gods. In Stage Two Monotheism, only one deity was recognized. We are on the threshold of Stage Three Monotheism in which deity (by that or any other name) is recognized as the supreme unity of all being.
The quest for profound and elegant integrations of theory has driven modern science. I believe that the discovery of the fecundity and heuristic power of integration at all levels of human discourse and thought will rescue human ethics from its current fall toward the abyss.
“Lucifer And Lamb” is an acronym capturing the insight that Lucid underlying continuities in fundamental ethics exist such that, when they are fully recovered within the social order, the necessary legal and moral boundaries will be naturally determined.
The prophet’s vision of the lion
and lamb lying down together is about the deep human thirst for integration of
seeming opposites. A simplistic homogenized monism denies or apologizes for
evil. But there is a deeper sense of moral integration that preserves and
defines moral boundaries. That integration
will lead us to moral renewal. The gift
of the “lamb” is the insight that our legal and moral boundaries can save us.
III. FALLING WATER
“It is clear now to everyone that the suicide
of civilization is in progress. What yet
remains of it is no longer safe. It is
still standing, indeed, because it was not exposed to the destructive pressure
which overwhelmed the rest, but, like the rest, it is built upon rubble, and
the next landslide will very likely carry it away.”
Albert
Schweitzer, The Philosophy of
Civilization, p 2
“The
political and economic conflicts and complexities of the last few decades have
brought before our eyes dangers which even the darkest pessimists of the last
century did not dream of. The
injunctions of the Bible concerning human conduct were then accepted by
believer and infidel alike as self-evident demands for individuals and
society. No one would have been taken
seriously who failed to acknowledge the quest for objective truth and knowledge
as man's highest and eternal aim.
“Yet
today we must recognize with horror that these pillars of civilized human
existence have lost their firmness.
Nations that once ranked high bow down low before tyrants who dare
openly to assert: Right is that which serves us!”
Albert
Einstein, Out of My Later Years, pp
9-10)
Certainly, Schweitzer and
Einstein were prescient. In jettisoning
the sanctions of traditional religions, the 20th century’s prevalent secular
ethical systems suffered an immediate and pervasive crisis of authority. When analyzed carefully, the post-religious
belief systems were based on naked normative assertions lacking ultimate
authority, or they were an attempt to recast the ethical contents of particular
religious belief systems in secular terms.
In the worst cases, they were attempts to dress dreadful authoritarian
ideologies in neo-religious garb. Eric Hoffer’s
classic analysis in The True Believer[1]
made the compelling case that Soviet Communism and Hitler’s National
Socialism adopted secular-religious organizational forms strikingly similar to
that adopted by authoritarian religions.
No
ethical system can prevail if it depends solely or crucially on imitation, nor
on arbitrary assertion of value. No
ethic will be capable of exerting a constructive force in human affairs unless
it is grounded in something more fundamental than the transient opinion of
political leaders or the fragile consensus of popular preference. And no ethic
will long survive if it is not convincingly rooted in the accepted verities of
human experience. Twentieth Century
secular ideologies offered a hollow solution to the problem, one in which mob
enthusiasm temporarily (and disastrously) masked the ridiculous pseudo
scientific theories of Marxist social engineering and the malevolently racist
eugenics of National Socialism.
We can
drift for a time, but not forever. As Dostoevsky wrote, “Without God,
everything is permitted.”
A legal
career that brought me into intimate professional contact with a criminal
population in the thousands over the span of three decades, has given me a
special insight into Dostoevsky’s observation.
A Few years ago, I was enjoying another day in my practice of criminal
law as a Public Defender in the City of Oakland, California. While walking back
to my car from the downtown County jail where I had met with a murder client, I
overheard a conversation behind me. A
few feet away on the sidewalk I noticed a woman in her twenties and her child,
a girl about nine or ten.
The
pair had obviously just visited a prisoner charged with felony assault. “See,” the mother was saying to her girl, “if
you cut somebody, you can end up in
there.” That exchange, not an isolated incident in my practice, spoke volumes
about the deteriorating condition of our society. The tone of the remark was flat,
conversational. There was no sense at
all that the woman was communicating an event of moral significance. It was
as if she had said, “See those weeds? If you don’t cut the grass, that’s what
your lawn will look like.” The content
of the remark was coolly practical, without emotional judgment, something of
the order — “If you go 45 on that street you will get a ticket.”
I
invite you to place yourself in that conversation. As someone who enjoys a firm
sense of the “rootedness” and validity of ordinary
morality, assume you are talking to your own child. Someone your daughter knows has knifed
somebody, causing grave injury, and is in jail for felony assault. Imagine what you might say and how you would
probably say it. First, consider your
tone. You would feel a gut reaction to
the event, a sense perhaps captured in the “My God, how could he have done
that?” or “I hope you never hang out with him!”
Every part of you would tend to communicate to your child that the act
of assault itself was wrong. Whatever
your words, you would be speaking in a context in which the given was - “We
don’t do that. It is wrong.” What was
important about that mother’s remark was the context that it revealed, a
context in which basic morality was simply absent, just as if you were talking
about color to a blind person.
I
picked this vignette out of many because it was not an isolated sample from an
atypical population, but the harbinger of a trend noticed over two decades and
literally thousands of criminal cases. This is like finding dry rot and a
termite in your kitchen floor, then finding telltale powder along the bedroom
walls, and in the bathroom. There never
is just one termite. Without question, my experience has shown that the general
criminal population has deteriorated over thirty years, resulting in far more sociopathy, far less conscience. That population, whether rich or poor, white
or otherwise, is increasingly dominated by individuals for whom common morality
is not an innate feature of reality (occasionally violated as a result of human
weakness), but is merely a set of invented game rules, themselves utterly
without authority.
In
short, the state of affairs foreseen by Schweitzer and Einstein before World
War II persists and worsens. This culture remains in deep crisis, visible at
all levels. With the retreat or outright
collapse of supernatural belief systems supporting ethical foundations among
the best educated intelligentsia, ethics is in an eerie state of suspension,
and imminent free fall.
Years
ago, I imagined moral foundations of civilization as a giant bucket of water,
in which the outer wall of the bucket represents the network of theistically
grounded ethical belief structures, placing the ultimate basis for ethics
outside mere human convention and invention.
Then I imagined a series of frames.
That was frame one. In frame two,
the bucket becomes transparent. In frame
three, the bucket is suddenly gone. The
water, momentarily bucket-shaped is quivering.
This captures the present situation among the prosperous intelligentsia.
And
frame four?
IV. EVIL AS CATASTROPHIC CLARIFICATION
Evil clarifies.
I was
in
I believe that our
capacity to recognize evil is innate and allows us to “reverse engineer” if you
will the core affirmations that evil in its various forms seeks to deny or
destroy.
When confronting
prospective evil the core nature of the threat matters. Think
of an earthquake or tornado, and contrast an example of large scale, human
directed malevolence, like the Nazi death camps or the Pol
Pot massacres. In common natural disasters, structures and the physical basis
for life are imperiled. Our response is
calibrated accordingly. When purposeful
human malevolence looms, we are threatened on the immediate physical level, but
we are also attacked on the level of our deepest values.
This is
why true evil draws us back to our core values.
Any recognized
confrontation with evil illuminates the core ethical values that tend to unite
all that it threatens.
An
ethic may be defined as a set of values, ideal behaviors, or norms which are
asserted to apply to the one who asserts it and to other individuals. An ethic is distinguished from formal law in
that an ethic is asserted to apply whether or not the sanctions of organized
society will be employed to enforce it.
Like general law, a principled ethic applies to those who would impose
sanctions as well as those who would be sanctioned. But an objective ethic does not depend for
its normative authority, as does general law, on the particular views of
individuals, either collectively or separately.
An
objective ethic implies supra-cultural validation.
We must
assume the task of ethical restoration can be done. What, then, might be the broad outlines of a
successful objective foundation for ethics?
I propose the following:
So,
having confronted evil, I am able share the conviction of those humanists and
religionists alike who are confident that there is a universal good that
transcends our sectarian perspectives. These perspectives converge on several
core affirmations from which the ethical sensibility arises. As conscious, living, intelligent beings with the innate capacity for
empathy and creative inspiration we share three affirmations: life, creation,
and conscious intelligence. All
affirmations begin with life affirmation, which leads to affirmation of
conscious being, and proceeds to reverence for all creation. I note these three
affirmations are so deeply entwined that any discussion of one cannot be
separated from the others.
Conscious
being is the property of life itself having awakened; this is meant in the same
sense that life is the property of the universe that localizes and intensifies
the tendency toward self creation. Conscious being is the venue of
significance, without which the question of value would be incoherent.
Conscious being presents three (at least three) powerful, life-enhancing
capabilities: compassionate empathy, foresight, and creative innovation. This
suggests the moral purpose of conscious being as well as its provenance. In
this way, consciousness and life affirmation necessarily lead to creation
affirmation, though the deep understanding of the universality of the processes
of creation, of the roots of life and consciousness in the processes of
creation.
Life
affirmation, respect for conscious being and reverence for creation are the
innate affirmations of the enlightened being.
For the theistic religions, they are at the heart of the human -- deity
relationship. For humanists, they are
the foundation stones of the core human agenda.
For civilization, they are the governing normative principles.
Our
respect for the integrity of conscious being and our reverence for creation in
all its forms, directly support the values of human dignity and creative
freedom, among others.
As I an
ethical realist, I know that our universal values are protected within almost
any civilized enclave more than in a brutal state of nature. But it is a simple
fact that not all social conditions and regimes support these values equally.
We require the infrastructure of a civilization harmonized with life,
consciousness, and creation.
I note
that the value of creation, alone, provides us with an interesting test of
social organization. In that moment of
liberation when an evil regime is defeated, human creative activity resumes and
music plays. When evil seizes control,
the creative community attempts to escape.
The creative ones are the canaries in the mine. These insights permit a
definition of evil on “Edmund Burke” scale: Evil is present in any serious, purposeful
challenge to the human role in creation, and to all the other universal values
on which human civilization rests; evil incarnates an agenda and conduct that
constitute an authentic threat to life, consciousness and ongoing creation.
And I
have expressed my hope and prediction that the spiritual significance of
creation by human agency in all its forms, the innate holiness of the human
creative enterprise as it serves and enhances life and conscious being, will be
at center stage in the spiritual practice and ethics of the 21st century. It is
often said that the opposite of evil is the good. I think the opposite of bad is the good. But the opposite of evil is the
numinous. Our species’ holy encounter
with creation is at the center of ethical recovery.
V. OVERCOMING RELATIVISM & EMPIRICIST DOGMA
The widespread cultural and moral
relativism are products of the dominant academic world-view, where all of our
important knowledge is the product of empirical verification, in short, the
gift of “science.” The destructive corollary is that the rest of human
knowledge (including our moral insights) must be founded in superstition or
personal preference.
Throughout
academic and scientific circles, penetrating deep into the educated
intelligentsia everywhere, among key opinion leaders, educators, and the media,
a new world-view prevails. Not unfairly,
it can be described as a bleak, relativistic naturalism. Its key features are:
Any
culture that lacks a unifying framework of thought and belief capable of
resolving fundamental philosophical conflicts tends to find real world
conflicts irreconcilable. Accommodation
seems a value in itself, including accommodation with evil. In the absence of an agreed objective
foundation for ethics, the resolution of ethical questions is left to the
subjective views of those who are affected, including those in power. In the real world of events, this means that
the resolution of conflict oscillates between fragile consensus and force. In this context, nihilism becomes the
response of an equally “valid” point of view, lacking only the “legitimacy” of
those who occupy positions of formal authority.
This situation is no more stable
than falling water.
These
views, collectively, are the “dead universe paradigm.” It is so powerful in academic circles that
those with religious views must cloak them under the euphemism “spiritual” or
are otherwise shamed into silence. The
foundations of civilization are being eaten away by these ideas. Their cumulative effect, in modern terms, is
very much like a computer virus. But the
core of the notion is hollow. Our universe can only be considered dead by excluding life and conscious
being. If we represent the emergence of
the meaning and purpose of the universe, the dead universe paradigm is false.
VI. THE DECLINE OF LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY
When the authority of ethics and
the ethics of authority are in decline, the need for the rediscovery of a
common source of moral authority that is independent of human political
institutions is so urgent that people are driven to “any port in a storm.”
Secular humanism (in its materialist form) and pragmatic utilitarianism were
temporary ports that over time have provided inadequate shelter, separately or
together, for the damaged moral infrastructure. Moral systems that are rooted
in the lowest common denominator are far too vulnerable to hedonism,
particularly in the torrential from unleashed by the modern media driven culture.
By
devaluing principle, the current materialist, hedonistic culture encourages the
morality of imitation. In this milieu,
particular elites, endowed by circumstance with the prestige conferred by
worldly success, glamour, or access to special knowledge, have become a source
of moral emulation.
Three modern
elites stand out in the developed world by virtue of their cultural prominence and
the inadequacy of their contributions.
In ascending order, these are the cynical academics, the shallow entertainment
media personalities, (particularly the movie stars who become economic and
foreign policy experts), and the narcissistic professional sports figures. The first are largely disqualified by virtue
of having adopted a value-free empirical materialism, the second, operating in
a sort of New Age fog, are disqualified by having only the vaguest idea what
they are talking about, and the third demonstrate the utility of having a good
criminal defense attorney.
The
current versions of secular humanism have bought us time by attempting to carry
forward an essentially religious value structure as a unilateral secular human
stance. I believe this effort is failing, in part, because of the absence of a
deeper universal basis for ethics. I
believe that much more is needed.
Although secular humanism did buy the culture time, it was not (and is
not yet) an adequate response to this crisis, because it is inherently
incapable (in its present form) of providing an answer whether the physical
universe has any purpose, because, within the current secular humanist
framework, that question is irrelevant. And whether moral values have objective
authority is also irrelevant. In place
of these notions, humanism supplies the stance that we humans alone determine
our own purposes, values, and norms. I find this view is as incomplete as the
world-view of an infant whose moral horizons are the edge of the crib, the
maternal presence, and the next bottle.
Whatever
the cause, the failure of contemporary secular humanism to connect to the
deeper universal, to incorporate discovered ordinal principles, and commit to a
satisfying methodology -- other than an appeal to a crude Benthamite
materialism to resolve moral conflicts -- is crippling. Jeremy Bentham’s
utilitarian ethic, based on a materialistic “greatest good for the greatest
number,” begs the fundamental ethical questions and invites the mob rule of a
society in the grip of an anti-ethic.
Ironically, the defense of Bentham’s own
country against the Nazi war machine was successfully conducted by men and
women whose heroic devotion to the cause was fueled by far deeper moral
convictions than utilitarian thinking is capable of providing. To ascend to the next level, humanism must be
able to provide a convincing answer to at least three questions:
VII. CHALLENGES TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT & RELIGION
We face the virtual collapse of
the best features of the Enlightenment consensus, and the rise of
neo-tribalism, in the guise of political correctness and interest group
politics. However laudable the development of
what we might call “oppressed category” consciousness in the last
decades, these and other movements also reflect the adaptation of individuals
to the angst of a value-free, secular environment, in which each individual is
left to reinvent a moral code without reference to God, the Tao, or other
ultimate authority. Left in this bleak situation, individuals automatically
seek larger affiliation and identification as a substitute; movement, race,
gender, and gang supplant religion or theistic belief. This is the predictable
consequence of the collapse of ultimate normative principle.
Religion
has lost its grip on the intelligentsia and on the dominant western culture,
not only because the empirical spirit of the age has eroded theistic belief,
but also because the appended ethical structure seems too narrow in the context
of the modern culture. I strongly
believe that contemporary discussions of ethics must squarely address the
question of self -benefiting choices and others’-benefiting choices. In any reasonable discussion of this issue,
an intelligent 21st Century audience will find that the ethics of predatory
nihilism and salvic self-immolation are equally
irrelevant.
The
task of recovering a robust and meaningful ethical system intelligible and
persuasive to the 21st Century human mind requires the integration of all
natural, core human goals, values, and interests in a comprehensive ethical
framework that makes sense at every level.
This is
a particular challenge of religion and its allies. As a practical matter, no proposed ethical
system that ignores self-benefiting choices, or places them in polar opposition
to others’ benefiting choices can flourish in a culture that has discovered the
value of freedom and self development. Any viable ethical framework able to
flourish in this century must necessarily be comprehensive and richly textured
enough to include the full range of all ethical norms, values, motivations, and
considerations that commonly operate in human affairs. Even so-called negative
values, like the pursuit of power and recognition, must be fully integrated,
the continuum from self-denial to greed must be acknowledged, and models
developed to guide individuals along this continuum. In this enterprise, objective principles
remain essential. And it will be equally
crucial to develop contextual models for the implementation of normative
principles. While context issues such as
scale and relevance can change outcomes even within the framework of an agreed,
universal value system, principle itself must survive, lest we descend again
into rootless relativism. The restored foundations of ethics must be well
integrated.
VIII. ELEMENTS OF RECOVERY
The identification of social,
economic and political interests, qua
interests, does not provide the basis for the resolution of conflicts among
them. Indeed, much of the difficulty
with the current cultural situation is that all ethical issues, in the absence
of governing moral principle, have degenerated into a contest between competing
political interests that, in turn, are fragile coalitions of other sectarian
interests.
I
propose that five elements of agreement, by taking us out of interest-based
ethics, move the bar a long way toward the restoration of the restoration of
civilization’s ethical foundations.
The
restoration of a viable, universal ethical framework, grounded in objective
reality, must be the overriding task of philosophical thought until the
foundation of ethics has been rebuilt.
In effect, I am proposing that we must find ways to bridge the gulf
between theism and its potential allies, a cognitive bridge that will rebuild
the foundations of the ethical infrastructure.
There
are several promising, parallel lines of development. The ecumenical movement and the efforts of
theologians to demonstrate the broad, underlying ethical consensus that already
exists among major religious traditions offer the prospect of important
progress. But religion as such faces
major obstacles in this Century because of the growing secularism among the intelligentsias
of the developed world.
What we
are calling the “dead universe paradigm” must give way before ethics can fully
be restored to the status of discovered truth.
If a paradigm shift does occur, I see at least three convergent lines of
development that will bear fruit in the next two decades, assuming enough
resources and attention are brought to bear.
From
superficial Benthamite utilitarianism, we can expect the
emergence of a deeper and more sophisticated realism; in effect, a deepened,
integrated empiricism can lead to the rediscovery of the embedded social universal
norms that make up the systemically necessary normative architecture of every
functioning civilization. We can
reasonably expect that these discovered norms will be fully consonant with the
underlying religious ethical consensus.
The key
to the robust authority of such a development is an underlying paradigm shift
away from extreme materialism. This
shift will allow these common norms to be seen as discovered universals,
aspects of the deeper reality that emerge from the situation of conscious
rational beings in community.
From
secular humanism, we can expect a paradigm shift from a focus on the apparently
contingent situation of Homo Sapiens on the third planet of one solar system,
to a deepened appreciation of the inherent situation of all conscious rational
beings in the universe. Again, a
metaphysical shift from materialism yields a deepened understanding of the
common situation of conscious rational beings and of the norms necessary for
them to thrive. And it will be
accompanied by the discovery that the practice of moral integrity is as
essential to interpersonal life as homeostatic integrity is to biological
functioning.
From
religion in general, we can expect the continued development of non-sectarian
religious thought and renewed relevance to immediate human needs. This will necessarily be accompanied deepened
integration of three elements: (1) ongoing
creation and our relationship to it as a supreme normative demand; (2) the full
range of human concerns as the proper subject of useful theology; (3) what we
might call the “world scripture,” i.e., the totality of rational, spiritual,
and esthetic knowledge of the universe.
I am a
robust optimist, but even my optimism must be tempered by the lessons of
history. Time is of the essence because human society abhors a moral
vacuum. The events of 9-11-01 in
Manhattan, Washington D.C. and a Pennsylvania field should have served to
remind all of us that this world has not seen the last of abhorrent, militant
authoritarianism. Evil in its various
forms will always exist as a background pathogen in the human condition, ready
to take hold when and wherever our species’ grasp of the underlying moral order
is sufficiently weakened.
Each of
the benign alternatives to the next Dark Age represent possible lines of
cultural development. These benign forces must be in play now rather than
later. Their success crucially depends
in turn on our culture’s breakout from the self-imposed boundary conditions of
a crabbed and unrealistic materialism.
IX. A
SECULAR-RELIGIOUS CONSENSUS?
The
deep underpinnings of human moral belief – mostly religious in provenance –
have been gravely weakened by the intellectual and social developments of the
last two and a half centuries. There has
been a sharp decline in the popular belief in the possibility of any post
mortal sanctions or rewards for human evil and good; among the world’s
intelligentsia, such belief systems are rejected as superstitious or even
delusional. But the surviving secular moral systems have failed to meet the
challenges posed by cultural and moral relativism. As a result, nihilism and
atavistic authoritarianism have appeared like opportunistic infections to
attack civilization itself, just as common diseases make inroads into
populations with compromised immune systems.
It bears reiterating: When he normative infrastructure of civilization
has been weakened, civilization, itself, is at risk.
A realistic basis for a
secular-religious consensus about the ultimate foundations of ethics now
exists. Those of us who recognize the need to repair and restore civilization’s
damaged moral infrastructure need to make that happen. Whatever our other
affiliations and perspectives, we are in agreement about the nature and urgency
of the problem and the need for solutions that bridge the secular / religious
divide.
We need to overcome moral
relativism before more damage is done to the culture. However our world views
vary (though we may come from secular, religious or less definable perspectives),
we need to be united in the belief that the deep basis for morality is not a
mere human invention. From a variety of backgrounds and disciplines we can
reach a robust consensus that the enduring foundations of ethics are embedded
in the very fabric of the reality we inhabit, whether we understand that fabric
in terms of the deepest human traditions, the discoverable truths about the
“life, the universe and everything”, the ultimate ground of conscious
experience, or the mind of God.
I propose that the underlying
foundation of all valid universal ethics is the “human condition” itself, that
is the inherent condition of any living rational conscious being with innate
creative capacity living among others in a state of civilization. I am persuaded that this human condition, or
inherent normative position, is common to all creatures who experience “I am”
in the world. This insight tends to break out of the particularism
and parochialism typical of the humanism of the last two centuries. A
sufficiently deep and comprehensive understanding of that situation, the true
“human condition”, yields a number of very fundamental normative alignments.
These are the natural universal normative alignments which embed deep ethical
principles. From these core precepts, all of the general ethical claims,
virtues and prohibitions that apply to conscious beings similarly situated can
be generated. This resulting body of moral rules and principles constitute the
deep normative infrastructure of civilization. The need to recover our species’
deep ethical foundations is urgent.
X. BREAKING THE MATERIALIST
SPELL
Core
assumptions, often unexamined, can govern the thought and discourse of whole
era. An authentic shift in the way
reality is understood must take place among many of our intelligentsia before a
general recovery of our ethical foundations can take hold. The educated world
is still enthralled by the vision of “world-as-machine”. For many of them the
topic of ethics is like esthetics; questions of right and wrong are matters of
preference, politics and taste, essentially outside the realm where the real discoveries about reality are made.
This article is too short for a full
philosophical exposition about the nature of reality. But The topic is necessary
to any discussion of ethical foundations because the materialist mind set
refuses to see human morality and ethics as more than behavioral descriptions
and culturally conditioned preferences.
The comprehensively mechanical explanation of “life, the universe and everything” is patently incomplete. Recovery from our current morally compromised circumstances requires us to break the spell of comprehensive materialism, to overcome once and for all time the notion that all reality can, in essence, be reduced to “matter and energy”.
Those of you who are comfortable with theism and/or Plato’s conception of reality (temporarily out of favor among many physical scientists) will recognize parts of my argument against doctrinaire materialism while noticing its original elements. I believe that there is a reasonable reconciliation the artificial (and destructive) fractures that were created by the philosophical materialists of the last two centuries.
When you are lost at sea but
within rowing distance of a large land mass, even a crude map and compass can
mean the difference between drowning and mooring. While much work remains to be done by the
professional philosophers and theologians, I am confident that the general direction
outlined here will take us to land.
To the doctrinaire materialist, physics
and chemistry, biology and a few other scientific disciplines are the total
explanation of “all that is, seen and unseen”.
An uncritical commitment to this view denigrates humankind’s greatest
esthetic and moral achievements as mere fluctuations in bio-electric
circuits. It is as if the difference
between the characters of M. Gandhi and Charles Manson could be fully captured
by measuring their alpha brain waves. Or it is as if one could measure the
essential difference between Mozart’s Requiem and a recording of similar length
taken in a cattle slaughterhouse by measurements of air pressure changes over
time. No purely physical description can capture these things. We all know better. But we let the materialists
hold the center stage even when ethics are being discussed.
Narrow materialism as a comprehensive explanation of everything, including our inner spiritual and esthetic lives, ultimately fails because of the hubris of its proponents and our own common sense. The very enterprise of science depends on a world view whose reality models, mathematical and otherwise, are effectively regarded as discovered organizational properties of reality, properties that are, in essence, non-material. The advent of computer technology has vividly demonstrated the unique status of information as something that, while carried or stored in various physical media, enjoys an ontological status that is independent of its immediate physical manifestations. And information, qua information, can produce physical effects that are quite independent of any physical/mechanical metric. Consider just two examples. One command string actuates the bomb, another does not. One design configuration of a process performs the same work more efficiently, consuming less energy than another. These are differences caused essentially by information content, something to which physical science can assign no mass value and no energy value. Nor can science locate the number system or the laws of geometric relationships in any part of space-time. In short, Plato was on to something.
When addressing the question of
the foundations of human ethics, we need to achieve a more comprehensive and
integrated understanding of the “I am” in the world, one where both the “I am”
and the world have correlative material and non-material components. The “I am” state (in essence our local
experience of conscious being) is no biochemical accident. It is the defining property of all
intelligent self conscious being localized in the space-time organized realm,
i.e., of conscious individuals living in “event space”. The fact that “I am” has no adequate
explanation within the materialist mindset reveals only the obvious: that this
emperor (i.e., materialism as the comprehensive explanation of life the
universe and everything) is very naked indeed.
XI. THE DRAMA OF EMERGING
BEING
Our
place in the world is not an absurd violation of the laws of chance. Life is neither bleak nor meaningless because
there is a central narrative of the “world” that supplies an answer the
“meaning of life” question.
The drama of the world depends on a little secret: It is still a work in progress. The universe, this world and all the worlds are still “under construction”. And we conscious living beings are part of the construction party.
The study of organization has
generated an extremely important insight into reality: Complex systems tend to
manifest additional levels of organization via the phenomenon of emergence. If (as I believe) “Plato was on to
something”, emergence can be seen as a sort of phase transition between a
Platonic existent (a form, design or relational existent) in the non-material
realm into “event space”. After the fact, of course, we are able to say that
the emergent was always latent or potentially
existent in the physical realm.
Again, while the full exposition
of my point would takes longer than a single article, I am persuaded from this
line of reasoning that the principal meta-drama of the world consists of the
emergence of successive iterations of Meta Being into event space, where MB
represents the essential design template or configuration of all possible forms
of conscious being. The really important piece is that the emergence into
“event space” of Meta Being consists of its partly
conscious aspects or “reduced
resolution” copies if you will,
and that you and I are among them. This ongoing drama is the central feature of
every local “event space” regime/region.
Those of you who tend to reject
classic theology might think of Meta-Being as the ultimate Platonic form, the
master archetype of conscious being in the same sense that an engineer might
concede that nature has prefigured solutions to many engineering problems. But
having done that exercise, you might then think about how a purely
material/physical description of your favorite work of art would leave out the
very essence of the work that made it your favorite. Think of MB as a lifeless
archetype or design if you will, but consider that your preferred description
may well be omitting something essential.
Meta-Being is an ancient
conception, but one that can be re-understood contemporary terms. I suggest
that this One ultimately differentiated and perfectly integrated Being has
enjoyed a presence in religious and receptive secular thought from the
beginning of human discourse.
The ongoing emergence of MB in
the world always is taking place within developing, finite settings that cannot
possibly contain its full expression. In
religious shorthand, this is the notion that the world cannot ever fully hold
or encapsulate God. [Religion tends to hold the converse view.] In secular
shorthand this is a version of Plato’s notion that the world can only
approximate perfect form (here expanded to include much more variegated and
complex forms/algorithms/designs than in Plato’s examples). In either
conception, the takeaway notion is that the world is incomplete and that we
humans, as conscious mortal beings, are carrying the imprint/blueprint of
ultimate being into the universe.
The ongoing emergence of latent MB
is mediated through complex exchange relationships among conscious (and
pre-conscious entities). This is a process that in its earliest phase was
manifest in biological evolution and is recapitulated in symbolic form in
important aspects of human cognition. Unlike the processes of natural
selection, we humans tend to sacrifice hypotheses and drafts rather than whole
species. But in a very real sense, the
creative faculties of the developed human mind represent a similar process
concentrated and greatly accelerated. By various means over time, the world
achieves creative differentiation within successively more comprehensive
integrations; apparent chaos reveals emergent order.
Therefore “randomness” does not define the world narrative, nor subtract the meaning that its drama brings to it; instead, random/chaotic processes in nature operate as a necessary component of all ongoing creative processes in event space. In effect, randomness/chaos is the portal through which innovation can enter an otherwise mostly law driven, deterministic word.
Creative possibilities are
generated in the mind in a way that a rigidly deterministic process could not
indefinitely mimic. This is why creative mental processes occasionally seem
chaotic to the uninitiated. But there
are also moments of seemingly unbidden inspiration when remarkably beautiful
and ordered solutions and “messages” appear on the mind’s stage.
XII. THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUS
BEING
The foregoing discussion sheds a good deal of light on the ultimate nature of consciousness itself, though I would hardly venture to claim as the materialist philosopher Michael Dennett prematurely did, that consciousness is now explained.
The mind/brain is an acutely information sensitive instrument, capable of mining the realm of event space for form and information, detecting very subtle implications and relationships, many of which seem (very plausibly to me) to be held only in Plato’s realm of form space. Our species’ information sensitivity and processing capabilities are much more powerful in these functions than a rock, say, which can capture a Pleistocene footprint without a shred of understanding, and much more rapid than the processes of natural selection. After all, the glacially slow trial and error processes of biological evolution can take a species the better part of a million years to develop flight technology. Yet Homo Sapiens’ cognitive equipment was capable of advancing from the wheel to a moon rocket in a fraction of that time.
The recorded accounts of human experiences of inspiration (whether creative, scientific or spiritual) all capture a similar sense of the sudden emergence of information where before it was absent. To understand how information exchange (whether “God messages” or scientific/creative inspiration) can occur without a classic mechanical medium requires an expanded conception of ontology.
Again, this is a condensed discussion. But consider the implications. Assume that we live in a fully integrated reality wherein: (a) The physical/mechanical realm is only one phase of an existence that fully integrates the material and non-material realms. (b) Consciousness/mind is an information sensitive receiver of acute sensitivity that bridges the material and non-material phases of existence operating in both. (c) Mind space is the realm in which conscious being experiences life.
To understand mind space as an
emergent phase of reality that exists both in and outside space-time is so
fully consonant with common sense that I am tempted to say that this view is
self verifying.
In this view, we humans are
emergent individual self-conscious beings whose essential cognitive structure
approximately mirrors the nature of Meta-Being, but we only partly instantiate
its full nature. Meta-Being retains a separate but invasive presence that is in
active relationship with all conscious beings in space time via a process of
information exchange.
Therefore it is in the very
nature of conscious intelligence that the mind simultaneously occupies and
links two ontological phases of existence, the material realm of event space
and the non-material realm of form space.
Science mines the realm of event space for the information it manifests
that sheds light on the form and structure of the material world. As it does
this, the scientific mind is also traveling in Plato’s “form space” from which
theories, mathematics, and relational insights are derived.
The human mind is capable of mining all reality for information. In this conception, “mind space” links to “form space”. The link to ethics flows from the notion that all reality is fully integrated in a way that links form space, the innate design of biological conscious being and the inherent circumstances of that being as it necessarily exists in the world. In this way, the human mind contains the capacity for ongoing access to value space, if you will, the sub-realm of form space from which all ethical precepts are derived. [The basis for this derivation is outlined in XIII following.]
This view of the relationships
between nature and humanity, the material and the non-material, is a fully
integrated one in which Meta-Being (in whatever terms MB is named or described)
becomes the ultimate integrating feature of all reality.
To my non-theist friends: Please
note here that a significant ethical question is beyond the capacity of strict
atheistic materialism to answer. Consider how you might answer this
question: Given any ethical principle
that I believe does apply to me, why should I care, especially as to
consequences of my actions and failures to act that will only appear after my
personal death?
Philosophical materialists cannot
provide any authentic answer to this question. Yet civilization’s ultimate survival
depends on the persuasive force of post-mortal ethical authority or an equally
powerful functional equivalent. An answer is available, but to get there one
really has to acknowledge and use the deep connections between what we are
calling value space, mind space, form
space and event space in order to
begin to understand why caring about one’s own existence leads to valuing that
which lies well beyond it.
XIII. THE INHERENT ALIGNMENTS
OF BEING
Recall, a definition of
ethics:
Ethics is
the set of norms, prohibitions and virtues, that are understood to Operate
(i.e., to have intrinsic authority) whether or not they are enacted into formal
law, or whether they are or are not followed or agreed to by any given set of
individuals. Cultural and ethical
relativism are really anti-ethical positions in that they deny this status to
all norms, hence the current problem for civilization.
Common
sense tells us that surely ethics in the classic sense are real, that is, they
are discovered, not invented. I propose that they can be derived from The Human
Condition (i.e., that of all of all other living conscious intelligent beings).
There are three sets of three normative alignments that proceed from a deep
understanding of why we humans care about fundamentals at all, and what
conditions (developmental and interactive) require us to discover, learn and
apply the rules of ethics to our own actions and to others. The three main
categories are Vector, Exchange and Integration-- referring to the core sources
of human ethical motivation (Vectors), the face the world presents to us as one
dominated by Exchange relationships and processes, and our own developmental
need for Integration.
Each of these three groups of
alignments contains its own set of three sub-alignments:
A. The Vector Set
Life almost always favors its own existence. Were it otherwise, the death impulse would have long ago extinguished any species that harbored it for more than a transient moment in a small part of its population. Like other “obvious” features of reality, it is tempting for some to dismiss as trivial that the universe is so constructed such this self-validating feature of the life impulse would be the case (even without taking into account the mounting body of evidence for the anthropic calibration of many fundamental constants in nature). But the fact of emergent purpose in the universe cannot be ignored, nor can its inexorable link to the biological imperatives that make up its platform. It is hardly surprising that the conscious mind emerges with a strong, built-in desire to life.
These are deeply related
alignments.
The 3 developmental vectors of “I am” consist of:
1. Life Affirmation
2. Creation Affirmation
3.
Affirmation of Conscious Intelligence
As the three development vectors
emerge in individual consciousness they begin to acquire the force of purpose. As this happens, they undergo a
process of mutual, self-reinforcing integration. We quickly learn that
conscious intelligence serves the individual’s life affirmation/survival
impulse (or at least does so when it is functioning optimally) and also becomes
(again optimally) the venue for individual creative activities. Ethics emerges as these three alignments knit
together and, though a process of incremental universalization,
we humans begin to integrate and value instances of life, creation and
conscious intelligence as they appear in the world around us. As I mentioned in
the earlier discussion about evil, conscious being has developed life-serving
faculties that in turn predispose it to acquire an ethical predisposition: the
capacity of foresight, empathy, and creative innovation. I would now add to
that short list, the desire for integration, and note that the tendency to
value universalization is a natural product of the
human cognitive predisposition to achieve ever wider fields of integration.
Natural progressions from “I affirm the value of my life” to “I affirm the
value of Life in general”, and so on, are essentially wired into the
developmental path of intact, intelligent healthy beings.
B. The Exchange Set
As newborn infants we do not understand exchange. Mother
provides and we receive. The capacity to
grasp the reciprocal nature of exchange as a general world principle marks the
beginning of the adult mindset.
The three exchange relationships that confront “I am” in the world are:
1. Physical exchange
2. Social exchange
3.
Information exchange
What we call the “world”, the
realm of space-time bounded event space, is characterized by complex interwoven
exchange relationships. Atomic exchange,
metabolic exchange, social / economic exchange, and information exchange are
all deeply related examples of the pervasiveness of exchange as the defining
dynamic feature of the “world” we inhabit. The accountability and reward
exchange relationships of any civilization represent emergent exchange
structures designed to facilitate and foster the living conditions of its
members. For theists, deists and others in the spiritually minded disciplines,
information exchange is the venue for spiritual exchange, which is the
essential feature of the “I >> Ultimate” relationship.
C. The Integration Set
I am proposing that integration,
seen as a property of overall existence and as a normative principle in its own
right, is the secret key to metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Integration is the fact / value interface
that transcends the ontological divide described by Kant and others.
The integrity of an organism is
essential to biological functioning. As
a general world principle, a degree of integration is the necessary condition
of cooperating systems. Within the realm of science, the holy grail of the
successful theory or scientific explanation is the comprehensive integration of
all the available data. It should be no surprise
that biological integration is closely linked to health at any number of
levels.
The three developmental integrations of “I am” consist of:
1. Self/ “I am” Integration. A note: Mental illness and other cognitive and moral disorders can all be shown to represent failures of internal integration at some level. Our term, integrity, captures the essential normative thrust.
2. Self/Other “I am” Integration. A note: The common term for the tendency to achieve integration with another self is love. The capacity for love seems to be innate to any healthy, well integrated personality.
3.
Self /Ultimate “I am” Integration (Ultimate “I am” as
Ultimate integration). There is a growing body of evidence that almost every
thinking person will sometime experience at least a glimpse of this sense of
integration with ultimate being (or beingness). Some theologians might call the experience
grace while more secular minds might report the experience as a moment of awe
and inspiration. Carl Sagan, a nominal atheist, eloquently described this feeling
in his description of the earth seen from space in The Pale Blue Dot.
My non-theists friends please note: When approaching the topic of ethics at the most fundamental level, you can’t really escape the notion of Meta-Being, even if you only use it as a normative archetype or a necessary referent. In this connection, I am reminded of Martin Buber’s formulation of the normative relationships that are at the core of human ethics. He wrote of “I – thou” (as opposed to I – it) and “I – Thou” (where the capitalized “Thou” denotes Meta-Being, making the relevant relationship in human ethical discourse a triad).
The underlying moral foundations of the
culture are seriously damaged. The processes of restoration require us to
recover the basis for objective, trans-cultural moral principles. Religion
cannot accomplish this task alone. The task: (a) Recover the foundations of
ethics. (b) Integrate ethics with reason and realism. (c) Restore robust legal
and moral boundaries. (d) Repair the normative infrastructure of civilization.
(e) Reinvigorate the self confidence of civilization.
XIV.
THE CASE FOR CREATIVE CIVILIZATION
This
argument can be condensed to a single paragraph: On a very immediate level, the
problem is one of integration of ethics and necessity. Neither ethical
principles nor civilization itself can long survive separately. I am proposing,
as a threshold unifying notion, that all authentic ethical and moral systems
necessarily are organized around the core affirmation of life, particularly
human life. This leads quickly to the idea that our lives (and even our
competing ethical/moral perspectives) can best thrive in the context of a
civilization that is designed to protect those basic conditions needed for safe
and productive human interactions. This
insight alone will take us a good deal of the way to a renewed, robust
foundation for human ethics. My closely related
proposal is that, among civilizations, those constructed and conducted in order
to protect and promote specifically creative
human activities are best suited for ultimate human survival. Here is a point by point exposition of that
argument:
XV. REASONABLE MORAL
DISAGREEMENT
One
of the perennial lessons of history is that many of our insights, opinions, and
approaches to the core human issues have changed while some have remained more
constant. The advantage of achieving clarity about the foundations of human
ethics is that it will help us to make reasonable judgments about the areas of
social disagreement that touch on the true ethical fundamentals and those that
don’t. As an example of the first, the sought for clarity permits us to condemn
slavery while understanding exactly what
we are condemning and why we are able
to do so with confidence. Examples of the second might enable us to better
frame our disagreements about whether and under what circumstances to permit
certain under-age sexual activity, and to refine the opposing arguments in
terms of agreed fundamental principles.
Creative disagreements can be
defined (for these purposes) as those ethics-based or ethics-driven
controversies in which each side is capable of making a rational appeal to the
relevant fundamental ethical principles, but that the resolution is dependent
to a greater or lesser extent on testable experience. I propose that any protocol for creative
disagreement would have these six features among its necessary elements:
To clarify the kind of setting in
which such a protocol might work, let’s consider one hypothetical example: New
neurological fetal research radically alters the abortion discussion for most
people when it is discovered that brain activity in a 20 week old fetus is
consistent with the capacity to feel pain and to engage in dreams. [I stress
that, as of this writing, this discovery is just a hypothetical.] Those for whom the abortion question is not
resolved ideologically (e.g., some by opposing abortion from the moment of
fertilization, others only from the much later moment of fetal viability
outside the womb) would presumably be unaffected. But for the rest of those in
the discussion, the research may well affect the ethics of the decision to
terminate a pregnancy for reasons other than the protection of the mother’s
health. Option six might represent the
tolerance of jurisdictional differences with different rules affecting the
question.
The scope and gravity of the
novel ethical questions raised by technology represent a serious challenge to
all traditional ethical systems, and present a particular challenge to a
civilization crippled by a damaged ethical infrastructure. Unrepaired,
the damage may be serious enough to trigger serious destabilization of the
social order.
XVI. CREATIVE CIVILIZATION AND SURVIVAL
If
authentic ethics proceeds from recognition of the three shared human
affirmations -- life, creation (including the human creative endeavor itself)
and conscious intelligence, certain things naturally follow. The mutual
integration of these three affirmations, and the need to protect these values
in the context of human exchange relationships, gave rise our species’ greatest
social technology, the invention of civilization.
Creative civilization –
humankind’s latest version of that social technology – emerged in the last few
hundred years. As a specific development in social technology, creative
civilization was designed to mediate the conditions of social exchange and to
further each of the three core normative affirmations, while giving special
support for the conditions that foster and protect human creative activity. The
protection of free human expression is a specific characteristic of a creative
civilization.
At the outset, civilizations
emerge to protect their members from outside predators. Sooner rather than later the social order
must protect its members against internal predators as well. The project of sustaining human civilization
requires the establishment and ongoing defense of a set of legal and moral
boundaries which individually and collectively operate to optimize the
conditions in which human life, conscious intelligence and creative activities
can flourish. Thus, there are critically important arrangements necessary to
sustain civilization. These include the institutions that support law, enforce
rules of conduct and allocate responsibility. For a number of reasons, both
practical and moral, the laws of civilization need to be fairly closely aligned
with fundamental ethical principles, though not all ethical precepts need
necessarily be written into the formal legal structure of a given social order.
None of the core legal
prohibitions common to the major functioning civilizations (such as those
against theft, fraud, assault, murder, kidnapping and so on) were arbitrary or
accidental developments. All of the major criminal prohibitions adopted by
civilizations can be shown to be related to the interest in promoting the
primal value triad (life, creation and conscious intelligence) and fostering
the conditions needed to protect civilization’s members as they enjoy the
fruits of these values. The English Common Law is an excellent example of an
accidental field test in which rules and norms were generated in bottom up
fashion over several generations of dispute resolution. That the behavior norms revealed by that
process are highly similar to the core behavioral precepts of Buddhism,
Confucianism, Judeo-Christianity and all other functioning secular civilizations
represents a degree of imitation to be sure (in the sense that the principle of
the wheel, once implemented was copied) but also represents a social example of
convergent evolution, much as the aerodynamic configuration of a dolphin’s fin
resembles that of a trout. There is an underlying schema.
Within the last 200 years,
various civilizations have begun to develop rules and institutions to protect
the freedom of creative expression; this represents a predictable development
in our species’ greatest social technology given the growing understanding that
the incubation of creative activity requires a certain protected scope of
creative expression. I am persuaded that our species’ ultimate survival is tied
directly to the success of creative
civilization.
When
we humans travel in space and encounter another civilization that has developed
entirely separately from ours, I am confident we will immediately recognize the
structure of that alien civilization and we will recognize the supporting
normative architecture. Given my
original premise that all ethics is driven by the three primal alignments
described, I would expect to find these values and the attendant civilizations
designed to protect them among the “little green men and women” of other
worlds. And I am confident that the longest surviving civilizations will be the
creative/adaptive ones.
Of course there is another scenario. If we allow human civilization to wither for lack of attention to its normative infrastructure, it will die. The extra-terrestrial archaeologists will pour over our ruins, wondering “Where did they go wrong?”
Copyright © 2005 by Jay B. Gaskill
This piece was first posted on “The Policy Think Site”
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Copyright © 2005 by Jay B. Gaskill
For permission to copy, publish, distribute or print, contact:
Jay B. Gaskill, attorney at law, via e mail: response@jaygaskill.com
[1] There are a number of editions of this book, dating from the original one published by Harper and Row in 1951. I had the privilege if seeing this passionate, coherent, trenchant self educated longshoreman twice when I was a law student in the late sixties. He was a robust, stocky man with the autodidact immigrant’s earned self confidence. He maintained from life experience that the “common” people were “lumpy with talent”, and that the intellectuals (especially those who never had to rub shoulders with “ordinary” people) were dangerous when left idle. As he saw it, the failure of civilization to keep the intellectual class busy, productive and happy was a potentially fatal mistake.