The Only Problem

“I am absolutely alone in my essential ethical position, and therefore useless.”
- Lord Acton

There is only ever one problem in life, and that is, ‘what do we do next?’ Two things are necessary to answer this question. Firstly, we need to know how doing whatever we do next is likely to affect the universe. This will affect the options open to us for future action, and hence our probability of obtaining whatever ultimate effect on the universe we desire. Secondly, we need to have some consistent idea of what ultimate effect we desire. The first things we need- to help us in assigning probabilities- are reason, science, and a knowledge of history. The second thing is a set of absolute moral axioms, like the principles of Euclid, from which a moral law can be built.

The problem with our society today (and probably with all societies everywhere at all times) is that for the most part those who have science have a narrow science, and no faith; and those who have faith have a fossilized faith, or a nebulous faith, and no science. So we bumble along.

Some of the most intelligent, reasonable, scientific people I have known have been absolute blackguards and fiends; among the wisest words of moral instruction I ever heard were uttered by a man who believed the world was 6000 years old, that the Gospel arrived in Australia in 1958, and that 99.99% of the world’s population was predestined to eternal suffering. I have noticed that those who do have science or religion are more optimistic than those who neither; and that those who have both are often so unreasonably cheerful that they shake the foundations of our society with each step they take. They know where they are aimed, and how to get there, and their one sorrow (yet what a great sorrow, what a tremendous burden) is that they cannot by any effort of will or imagination bring the rest of humanity along with them.

I guess I am, with my customary cosmic arrogance, claiming a place for myself at that near-empty intersection of these two sets; people who have a workable understanding of reason and science, and people who have a grasp of the eternal moral law, or tao. Though since humility has to be an integral part of the latter, I guess I can’t be claiming a place for myself. Which means that I am, with a yet deeper level of cosmic arrogance…
And with this cosmic arrogance, I will briefly pontificate on what is wrong with how we provide ourselves with these two essentials for determining what to do next.

“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.”
- Max Planck

What is wrong with scientific education?

It is too narrow. Every scientist has a sense of the amazing potentialities of their own science, the problems being overcome in their own narrow area of science, yet they do not know what problems are being overcome in the narrow specialty next door. They do not know how to fit what they know into an overall picture of the universe. In the overall picture of the universe we have figured out, you cannot feel lost; you can only feel wonder. You know ‘where you are’; you know ‘what you are doing.’
A scientific education that ignores history is also too narrow, because history teaches us the limitations of human nature, and discourages us from advocating ridiculous experiments in social engineering. One thing history teaches us is that scientists who lift their noses from the bench are very likely to advocate ridiculous experiments in social engineering.

“Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.”
- Lord Acton

What is wrong with moral education?

It is too narrow. Our culture labours under a false dichotomy between ‘obeying the rules’ and ‘making up your own rules’. This is a byproduct of thousands of years of Judaeo-Christo-Islamic civilization, where moral axioms were ramified into a bewildering tangle of laws, which were then codified and fossilized, in the Talmud, in canon law, in the Hadith, in the voluminous writings of the Baha’i prophets. We could conceive only obedience to the rules, or disobedience. Both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ religion in the west is flawed, for we can conceive of modernizing religion only in terms of a loosening of restrictions, which in practice means bowing down before the most ephemeral fashions of the century we live in.

Between order and chaos lies complexity, and complexity means life.

Between ‘obeying the rules’ and ‘making up the rules’ lies ‘figuring out the rules’, and this means internalizing that set of inviolable moral axioms that can be discerned in the analects of Confucius, in the sagas of the Vikings, in the prophet Isaiah, and seeing how they unfold into a set of limit conditions proscribing the actions lawful to us in each situation.

Now I must go out and pay my library fines, in obedience to the moral law…