Overcoming Our Values

“Humanity today is like a walking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world.”

“We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

E O. Wilson – The Social Conquest of Earth

History has seen science destroy the mythic cosmology of the Catholic Church. Science still finds heavy resistance as its biological evidence destroys a mythic story of divine creation of humanity. Currently there is increasing evidence that the free will that we base our legal and moral systems on is also an illusion. Neuroscientists are pursuing the likelihood that all values are illusory in that they cannot be found in nor reliably represent the world of fact.

Neuroscientists investigating the “living brain” with new technology have discovered that the brain executes a decision and then informs the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of consciousness. Our consciousness labors under the illusion that it is making the decision. We literally do not know we have made a decision until after it has been made. While the time gap between the two events is miniscule, this fact raises fundamental issues for morality and law, both based on the assumption that people know what they are doing.

One of the consequences of values gradually submitting to the rule of fact is that values, which have been a major source of human mayhem (think the Middle East), can be measured against human well-being as it is defined by the real world. A major problem with values is that they can be completely arbitrary and attached to anything, including human fantasies, and for any purpose. Values are beyond any testing or evidence, yet they are capable of marshaling immense force from the people who believe them. They are controlled by nothing and applied to everything. As neuroscience and other sciences reveal more about how they function in the human brain, values will be brought to the bar of fact, hopefully before they destroy us all in some conflagration of ideologues.

But, it may be asked, how would society function without moral values? One suggestion was made by Samuel Butler in his satire of values-ridden Victorian society titled Erewhon published in 1872. Human behaviors in Erewhon  are not morally good or bad, they are healthy or sick. Thus when there was a transgression of Erewhon’s laws the malefactor was sent to the “Straightener” to be healed. It is relevant to note that the law now accepts the condition of the accused’s body and brain as relevant to determining moral responsibility. It was not that many centuries ago that  moral values were so detached from reality that courts were trying animals for transgressing the law, frequently as possessors of evil spirits.

An important thing to notice about Butler’s Erewhon is that it is concerned with reforming society, not the individual. It uses a fictional society to criticize Victorian society and describes what happens to individuals when that change is made. Conservatives generally argue that the individual has to be reformed as a condition for societal reformation. I think this is frequently a cop-out because they know full well that such a prescription will lead to continuing inaction as individuals face the daunting task before them. In a world of 8 billion people social change is the only vehicle for accomplishing the needed changes in mankind if humanity is to survive.

In this connection, E.O. Wilson in his above cited book, points out that social animals and insects have a far greater record of survivability as a species than nonsocial species. In a world where socialization, especially when expressed as a pronounced division of labor, is the best guarantee of species survival, we have a culture focused on the individual, especially, the pronounced individualism of Ayn Rand and the Libertarians.  Legislators in Oklahoma have rejected federal tornado disaster aid on the basis that Oklahoma is a go-it-alone state. We thus have major political movements rejecting, and denying others, the very basis for long-term species survival. Talk about detached values!

In any event, the real world must become the bedrock of our values. We have had enough of competing value systems detached from reality. Free floating fantasies sparking mass slaughter and indifference to the real plight of humanity compounded by the rapidly increasing lethality of our weaponry and the increasing competition for resources insure the end of civilization if not our species. 

This is not to rule out the possibility of converting values to the facts of the real world as distinct from merely basing our values on facts. The feasibility of this can be seen in Carl Sagan’s use of the  “billions and billions” of galaxies in the universe, so immense that human imagination cannot grasp it; we must have mathematical formulae to deal with its immensity. It has many of the properties attributed to god and can by its sheer immensity and complexity engender the awe many people reserve for their deity. It supplies an inexhaustible resource for the human search for meaning and, most importantly, it is rationally addressable.

Humanity’s survival presents a task of unprecedented, multidimensional complexity, fraught with murderously fanciful beliefs and traditions. Our species has much to learn about itself and its environment and very little time to do so. We progressives must be a vehicle for bringing science, its methods and its demand for convincing evidence to the arenas of societal decision making.

Bob Newhard