I’m stumbling along with my project to enlarge and enrich our moral discourse by drawing upon the modern mountains of partially processed empirical knowledge, including some disturbing information about our inability to anticipate or prevent the development of evil in our own societies. I’m learning or relearning — at an elementary level — some of the most important tools of modern mathematics and physics, in particular those necessary to understand the revised, and still evolving, understandings of time and space and matter. I’m also reading history and novels again and have retrieved a few unread books by serious brain-scientists or evolutionary theorists. At some point, the pot will begin to boil, and I hope to find I’m cooking up something interesting.
In all of this, I would hope any readers would realize that I’m not making any sort of assault upon human freedom though I think standards doctrines of so-called free-will are in serious conflict with those inconvenient things called facts and — even more importantly — with any coherent stories to be derived from the various facts of modern neuroscience, evolutionary theory, history, literary explorations of human nature, and the actual working methods and recorded thoughts of the likes of Einstein and Feynman, Gilson and MacIntyre. (See Is this Evidence Against Free-will? for a discussion on experimental evidence that our free-will isn’t what we think it to be? Perhaps part of our moral problems are due to our misunderstanding of how we make decisions and of the sort of freedom appropriate to a human being.)
I’m charting out our world, our more complex world which has emerged as a living story. I’m also trying to speak, especially in my as-yet unpublished novels, about our relationships to others and to our world. I might state my preferences on how to best traverse this world but I’ll try to make those clear as I try to provide ways of describing human possibilities, immense territories with a huge number of possible paths. It will be up to individuals and communities to begin cutting paths through the woods or to begin exploring other sorts of wilderness regions, to try different ways of organizing their moral movements through this world. I’d be happy just to provide some of the concepts and words which might help make possible those efforts.
One need is words to speak of the different shapes of our moral spaces at different levels of our hugely scaled and immensely complex world, family vs nation as one example. I think we’ll see a great problem because we, or at least our community and religious and professional leaders on our behalf, have given a great deal of control over our lives to organizations which work top-down, killing all natural development just when mathematicians and other scientists are discovering the apparent dominance of self-organizing systems in this world. Our entire universe seems to be such a system and each living creature from bacterium to blue whale is such a system. Wolves interact in such ways as to set in motion self-organizing processes that form packs and even somewhat larger scale social structures when multiple packs interact on boundaries of their territories or when they move alongside each other to follow migrating caribou herds. Human beings form a dangerously rich set of interactive structures from the so-called nuclear family and individual friendships through extended families and local communities all the way up through nations to supra-national groups formal and informal.
The best that can be done right now is for historians or sociologists to tackle pieces of this big mess, without having a coherent ways to view or discuss human moral, social, and political life in a more complete way, without having ways for an individual to have a coherent view of his relationships to family and friends, to local community and national government, to church and larger-scale religious communities.
Think for a moment of a social, moral, and political problem which is tied to purely physical foundations: How do we move ourselves and our goods from one location to another, within our local communities, to other nearby communities, across the continent, and to regions on the other side of the earth? First of all, we Americans, and most others, of this age will think of this problem in false terms of the cold-war bureaucrats and cold-warrior politicians who reshaped the United States into a form more useful to them by way of building the highway system and otherwise stealing resources to create a car-centered life. When we fall into this bureaucratic view, we’ll see the United States, or any other country, as just a piece of real estate upon which we can impose a grid of interstate highways connecting to state roads connecting to roads which go to malls or through neighborhoods in suburbs or inner cities. You don’t have to study the works of Jane Jacobs or other critics of these highway systems to realize that such road systems designed top-down will not just provide for transportation routes. They’ll destroy or destabilize neighborhoods. They’ll put a town which will benefit from a bridge in conflict with the town on the other side of the river which might well disappear or change to a different sort of community if that bridge is built. Road systems, like market systems, should be built up in different layers starting from human communities which are concerned about their own ways of living and not about controlling other human beings or communities. This process of building up could involve a number of layers and the creation of complex interaction zones between individual communities and groups of communities. It should remain a bottom-up system, driven by the self-organizing processes in the communities at the bottom.
In other words, a simple road system, when designed in a simplistically rational way, begins to distort various sorts of social and political spaces, moving ‘social mass’ from one point to another or creating black-holes or intergalactic voids, all to suit the schemes of those at a higher level, the level of centralized and self-serving institutions. I’m writing as I think and won’t try to elaborate this sort of idea for now, but the point is that sometimes we might need Salvador Dali if we wish to have a realistic map of a road system scaled to its local effects on human beings and their flesh-and-blood communities. When we allow ourselves to be directed by, to have our understanding of our own communities shaped by, those in the centralized institutions, we see rectangular grids where there is really a crazy, twisted, organically-formed…something. Those who would control can’t even meet their own goals because they don’t see the world as it is, but they would seduce us into joining them in their delusions. The world is crazy-shaped but it’s amenable to rational and coherent discussions if we make the effort to develop words and concepts to deal with that world as it is and not as bureaucrats would have it. We also need to recognize that our inherited moral concepts and words, from smaller-scaled ages, simpler ages, ages without such powerful technology, are not adequate to our needs.
What interests me now isn’t a static view of our current state but rather ways of speaking of our movements upon the various social, moral, and political paths of our lives and of the lives of our communities. First of all, we need to recognize that that the paths we travel in our social and political and moral lives are themselves dynamic, being reshaped by our own movement, the movements of other human beings including the gathering into communities, and various changes in our physical environments. The paths we travel, the possible paths ahead of us, can be twisted by the actions of others and by the very existence of large-scale groupings of human beings which can distort moral space in the manner that a black-hole can distort spacetime.
We need to be able to qualitatively discuss our movements through moral, social, and political spaces. We need to be able to define and use invariant relationships that allow us to discuss relative distances as well as forces and so-called pseudo-forces which push us aside or spin us around or even suck us down into some pit. Even a great truth can be distorted by changes in the path or in other external conditions. It’s good to become a self-supporting and family-supporting worker but blindly doing so can make a human being into a widget of an evil bureaucracy. Your father minded his own business, went to the machine-shop each workday and brought home a paycheck to pay the mortgage and the taxes. A good man, good father and good citizen. If you do the same thing, you might be supporting a country turned towards evil ways. I hate to pick on the Germans of the 1930s all the time, but they provide a benchmark of sorts for a change in the moral spaces of the West. A man who was a hardworking factory supervisor in 1910 and lived the standard middle-class life was a morally responsible human being. His son who did the same in 1935 was a servant of evil. We should appreciate the problem of the common man in 1930s Germany who was not equipped to even recognize what had happened to him or to discuss it in coherent problems.
I’m still taking baby-steps, but I’m beginning to intuit a qualitative but disciplined way of speaking in which Germans traveled a path which remained upon a regularly shaped surface, corresponding to a reasonable manifestation of Western civilization and its traditional morality, but began skirting near a cusp of sorts by at least the 1920s and then moved over that cusp onto, perhaps, a funnel-shaped surface where a single misstep led to a slide down into a spout which empties into a moral pit of sorts. Such a slide can be seen as due to a moral ‘pseudo-force’ similar to gravity. Movements transverse to the general movement of a man’s community could also cause a pseudo-force which would induce a spinning and a curvature of that man’s movements, a moral Coriolis force.