Or…
Are they? That is, are the roots really amoral? More appropriately, do we humans see wrongly when we separate moral order from other sorts of order, raising moral order to angelic, ethereal realms? Once upon a time, when the West was truly Christian, we Western men did that with human nature. By tying Christian beliefs into these confused beliefs, we sought to protect “human dignity” from any hints we’re cousins to chimpanzees, more distant cousins to bears, still more distant cousins to alligators and eagles and sharks and so on. We paid a price: when we try to see ourselves as not quite creatures of this world, by trying to see the world of the resurrected as a realm of pure spirits rather than a completed and perfected version of this world, we badly damage the credibility of revealed truths—directly and indirectly by ceding our central role in a civilization which then advanced by leaving behind its Christian foundations. That the West has no other foundations and is now something of a low-flying castle in the sky is largely the fault of Christians who failed to see God’s Creation as it truly is rather than as we would wish it to be for our comfort and convenience.
I’ve dealt with these issues, but I risk repeating earlier thoughts because of the problems being caused by both Western Christian leaders and the so-called power-elites of the West as they thrash about, trying to save their own power and wealth—even at the risk of destroying what is left of the West, what could be used as part of the foundation for reforming or rebuilding a once great civilization which promised even more greatness. Powerholders in the Vatican and other powerholders in Western Christianity have joined with the various sorts of neo-cluelessness in idealizing morality and human communal structures. In this way, they seek to hold onto power they no longer are capable of even understanding, let alone using properly.
Though there are many roots and stems of this great weed, I’ll deal mostly with the intellectual side of matters.
This incoherent behavior of those who hold power in the West comes from a strange way of thinking among many in the West over recent centuries, even some who were extremely intelligent. In the spirit of the times, I could claim those many in the West, including most Christian leaders and intellectuals, apparently acquired their understanding of order and moral order from some book titled: Order and Moral Order for the Totally Clueless Who Wish to Remain Totally Clueless.
So many claim to be modern to the nth degree and have failed to integrate the modern understandings of order into their thought. Though I’m more interested in the mathematical aspects, I’ll further narrow my focus by writing about this issue from what might be called the Darwinian viewpoint. Roughly speaking, selection processes including Darwinian natural selection as well as—for example—guided selection processes such as those which guide the early zygote to the state of embryo and then on to adult organisms are empirical implementations of the abstract processes of development explored in recent decades by mathematicians and other scientists.
Life didn’t jump from an oceanic swarm of eat-or-be-eaten critters up to Francis of Assisi, George Washington, and Albert Einstein. It also didn’t jump from the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees to human beings of such high achievements and (mostly) good moral order. It didn’t jump from early hominids to Hammurabi, let alone to da Vinci or Goethe.
Civilized human life partly developed by way of barbarian warlords who could organize military raids and handle the logistics of taking captives to the slave-markets, by way of similar men building irrigation systems with labor extracted from human beings without a hint of representation, by way of the brutal conquests of the Chinese emperors as well as Mongols or Manchus and by way of decentralized conquest of European lands by Indo-European warlords…
Humans can only develop into civilized human beings, their tribes into civilizations, if they have the proper characteristics. The family lines of those particular humans gain those characteristics by way of natural selection, including selection for good social characteristics in the cases of human beings, voles and some other rodents, elephants, whales, and so on.
There is a nasty matter which arises just because the political theorists and practitioners of recent centuries, non-Christian and anti-Christian as well as Christian, have ignored the realities of evolution in positing that the abstract reasoning abilities of all peoples and of all individuals in those peoples have risen in unison. It’s likely that many peoples are missing either the abstract reasoning ability or the proper emotional settings to be properly disturbed by, say, brutal war crimes committed by the leaders of their tribe or kingdom or empire or state.
In general, it takes a high level of reasoning ability to understand the huge and complex human communities of the modern world, to be even potentially self-governing in a meaningful way rather than just being cattle to be manipulated by political machines or demagogues.
Geneticists tell us that a high percentage of Y-chromosomes in Western Europe, China, and probably most regions of civilized order came from a small number of men who were almost certainly great military and political leaders, though I’d guess that many blacksmiths and horse-breeders and others who had knowledge and skills important to the warriors also left a fair number of descendants. At the same time, political and military power seems to have given reproductive advantages to male-lines over many generations, so that the paternal lines of even successful merchants and technologists might have dwindled; many of those other men might have left us most of their genetic heritage through their daughters.
It is hardly surprising that the order of Indo-European warlords established the foundations of what would become Christian Europe. It is hardly surprising that the real but incomplete morality of warrior-bands is still with us in the West. It is hardly surprising that modern attempts to idealize morality as something above and beyond this Einsteinian and Darwinian universe is entangled with forces of moral breakdown, that is, idealists threaten the real foundations of higher morality and that could lead to a breakdown of higher morality.
The rise in IQs across Eurasia occurred rapidly over the past 10,000 years in apparent synch with the development of more advanced stone tools and weapons and then the development of metal technology, of semi-nomadic agriculture leading to true agriculture, of organized warfare and also the organized movements of somewhat larger groups of peoples—logistically complex movements since women and children and elderly men were in the migrating groups. All of this seems to have also been entangled with the development of harsh forms of order imposed by warriors, including the organization of larger-scale agricultural operations with the likelihood that clueless subsistence farmers were rounded up with threats of spears so that they could dig the irrigation ditches and settle into regions under the control of one warlord or another—the ancient works of Hebrew scripture give us stories of such complex events and make us aware that much suffering came with the benefits of urban living with its technologies.
It’s far from clear that modern Western forms of liberal social organization and their associated forms of liberal morality will last. It’s far from clear they are the best of currently possible ways to organized our human communities and to develop our systems of morality with rights and duties.
It’s quite possible that we of the modern West have misunderstood the nature of order and of moral order so that we have simply exploited the material wealth and ordered communities we inherited, turning those communities into unstable forms so that the next few generations will inherit a civilization in ruins.