Scientific and Moral Truth

Scientific and Moral Truth in An Age of Fact-Value Dualism

Introduction

I’ve just been accused of being anti-science and anti-technology. Accusations are always worse when they are true. But this is not true. It’s a complete misreading of my position. And it’s worrying. I want to nail this misunderstanding once and for all, because it is annoying, upsetting and debilitating. So it’s worth me spending some time to identify why this claim could be made.

In Being at One I consistently argue for the existence of an objective reality and for the possibility of gaining knowledge of that reality. This is a clear statement in defence of science as against the epistemic relativism of certain fashionable (‘postmodern’) modes of thought. And yet, because I criticise what I call ‘planetary engineering’, I am abused as being anti-science and anti-technology. This charge is based upon confusing different things – the institutional context and application of science, my focus on (mechanistic, reductionist) science as a Weberian disenchantment of the world, and the dualism of fact and value.

I try to do the difficult thing in my work, bridging the gap between theoretical reason and practical reason. The former is the world of science and our knowledge of the external world, the latter is the field of politics and ethics (of which economics was a branch in classical thought, and still is, as far as I am concerned.) Note that this view openly affirms science as our best check against reality, and openly affirms the existence of such an ‘objective’ reality, and argues that such a reality is more than human will, wishful thinking, perception and preference. That view of an ‘objective reality’ has been subject to much doubt in recent times. I do not share those intellectual trends for ‘fashionable nonsense.’ I try not to write on it and I try not to be abusive about, because that is counter-productive and is likewise a form of ignorant abuse. I have read the books on the ‘science wars’ by Sokal and Bricmont, and I supported their position in Being at One. It’s only fair to say that I also recently read the work of Luce Irigaray. I shan’t be dismissive, even though I disagree, because she has many insights that are well worth taking on board. Read widely and take what you can from the reading, think and add something of your own. But, if one has to take sides in the ‘science wars’, I think it is clear that I am with Sokal and Bricmont, recognising that, for many, they too missed the point and needlessly traduced the work of the people they criticised. I don’t need to be in this swamp. I’d prefer to state my views positively rather than have to take sides. I think that there is such a thing as human nature, innate qualities and transcendent norms too, I openly call myself an essentialist. These views open me up to accusations of everything from biological determinism to Platonic idealism. Stated simply, I think that there is a real world with a quality that is independent of human will, imposure and practice. A clear realist position (add whatever prefix you like). I affirm notions of truth and objectivity, reason and universality, innate essences. There is also a heavy strain of praxis-based philosophy in my work, the idea that human beings are creative agents involved in making history and making the world. You can place me somewhere between and beyond disclosure and imposure, wherever and whatever that is (I still haven’t found a name, although I have been reading Chinese philosophy that defines a very similar view, human beings having a creative role in the harmony or attunement that defines the world – need to write up the notes).

My view fully supports science and the pursuit of knowledge of the external world, and does so because the world matters, the truth about that world matters, because gaining such truth is possible, and is also desirable for many reasons, not least because human beings have, in the opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a ‘desire to know.’ Human beings are unique in this desire. And I defend that uniqueness. But I go further. And it is in this going further that I am in danger of becoming anti-science and anti-technology. I’ll tell you now that I am against scientism and that I am against the misuse of technology as a result of the elevation of means into the status of ends. I’ll make no apologies for that. Wittgenstein's philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times. I’m with Wittgenstein. ‘Wittgenstein’s forgotten lesson’ – forgotten by many, but not by me (https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/ray-monk-wittgenstein).

Alongside the desire to know, there is also the human quest for meaning. I see this as the same thirst and hunger to answer the questions of who we are and where we are. I don’t put the two questions against each other, with the one coming to trump the other. I am against overweening claims and encroachment of one domain onto another. There can, however, be a clash. Truth isn’t necessarily beautiful, is it? I shall return to that question.

I shall try to explain the difficulties of having to restore the centrality of morality without being guilty of an axiological extensionism or misplaced concreteness or rationalising conceit and enclosure.

Moral Reality and Truth

I have titled this piece scientific truth and moral truth to make a very clear and very strong point: that there is such a thing as moral truth or moral knowledge, that ethics is the field of practical reason or applied science, and that, in being a science, ethics yields knowledge. I hold the position that the case for moral reality and moral objectivity against moral scepticism is a strong one, that notions of good and bad, right and wrong, truth and falsehood are objective concepts capable of rational demonstration.

Aristotle taught that ethics is an applied science. It is a science (from the Latin scientia) in that it yields knowledge. It is not, however, an empirical science in the manner of physics and chemistry, because it deals with human beings and the unpredictability and irreducible complexity of human behaviour, rather than physical things. Some of the biggest errors and misunderstandings in this debate stem from conflating these two things, making human beings and human action conform to the criteria of scientific method in the natural sciences. That’s scientism and reductionism and it is unwarranted. To the extent that people make that standard the standard of truth, then entire areas of human life are devalued and denigrated. Another myth that is popular in the criticism of objective morality is that the existence of certain absolute truths is contradicted by the variety of these truths in practice. Actually, no, not true. It is certainly not true of Plato, for whom the immaterial ideas are indeterminate. What does this mean? Plato’s ideas are absolutely constant or transcendent, what Kant would call necessary a priori truths. As such, they are not the products of human creation and not subject to human alteration. Human beings can neither create nor change Platonic ideas in whatever way they see fit, hence they are transcendent, objective standards to which we must conform our behaviour, not a world that must conform to our will. To take an example, the Form of Justice is not the produce of human agreement. The ontological standard of justice stands outside of the agreements that human beings make in pursuit of justice. This idea is core to the notion of moral reality and moral truth and knowledge. It has been called ‘traditional morality’ and it is considered refuted by the evidence drawn from biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology etc which points to the lability and mutability and diversity of moral standards in time and place. This is mistaken. The idea that there are eternal objective standards runs throughout human history, and we can find variants of natural law, natural rights, and moral realism in many forms, but they all share the common core that places the ultimate norms beyond artifice and contingency. Why make this a central issue? Because to exchange moral objectivity for moral scepticism is to lose the very standard by which we come to check our actions against, evaluating them as good or bad, right or wrong, by a measure that is more than our prevailing prejudices, conventions, practices, customs, habits. Without that standard, there may well be moral behaviour – the moral sense is, indeed, innate, a statement that much treatment of this subject in biology considers a major discovery, but which is indeed a simple truth taken for granted in ethics – but ethics as a systematic discipline capable of holding behaviour to account in accordance with principles, precepts and codes will not exist.

And the idea that the variety of moral behaviour in time and place contradicts the notion of absolute or eternal ideas is wrong and based upon a misunderstanding, conflating two things which are to be distinguished. I commented above on the Form of Justice as standing outside the agreements human beings make in pursuit of justice. Those agreements take many forms, but the idea of justice remains the same. In other words, there is a distinction here between universals and particulars. Evidence for the existence of particulars is not evidence against universals. The disputes and disagreements at the level of the particulars matter morally because human beings believe that there are certain standards to which behaviour should conform, standards which derive from objective notions of morality and reality. The disputes are about more than power relations and conventions and force. Ethics is an applied science because it is concerned with the application of abstract principles yielding knowledge with respect to human behaviour to the particular and concrete problems of human action. Aristotle thus refers ethics to ‘concrete particulars’. He knows of the variety. But he affirms ethical standards that lie outside of that variety. It is in that sense that I understand the term ‘transcendent’. To argue against the supernatural and against God as the transcendent source of morality and the moral sense – which is how I read the tendency to moral scepticism in the literature informed by the natural sciences – is to miss the point. It seems motivated more by a desire to remove God and religion from the field. It’s not a war I care for, it seems motivated more by winning the fight between rival dogmatisms, and it is creating too much collateral damage in the moral field for human health.

To repeat, for Plato, the immaterial or transcendent ideas are indeterminate rather than determinate. That point is important to establish, because it removes the strawman from the debate, the idea that to believe in transcendent norms is to affirm some timeless, fixed, absolute, unchanging set of principles that are the same in all times and all places, regardless of contexts and circumstances. That is not how the transcendent norms operate. The content of these transcendent norms is not spelled out in concrete detail in the manner of a legal code. To explain, David Lay Williams presents the argument by way of an analogy with the game of chess.

‘While the goal of a chess match is always to corner the opponent’s king, there is nothing in the rulebook that explains how this is to be done. The method by which to achieve this will always be contingent upon the myriad circumstances that arise in the context of an individual game. Sometimes it will be wise to take the opponent’s rook; sometimes it will appear suicidal to do so. It all depends on context—almost.

Although context is a necessary variable to consider in the process, it does not function alone. This is because the player must always be informed by a strategy that leads to the ultimate goal—cornering the king. This means that whereas the individual moves are informed by context, they are not arbitrary. Such is the case with Plato’s ideas. We are given an indeterminate idea, for example, of justice. This becomes the goal of any state aspiring to be just. But the means by which it might be pursued will depend, in large part, on the practical circumstances. This is why the Athenian Stranger, for example, pursues detailed knowledge of the Magnesia before drawing up its laws. The indeterminacy of the ideas in ontological Platonism implies the necessity of this kind of contextual knowledge.’

I read books from the field of the natural sciences which present scientific rationality as the standard of objective truth, and note how often they presume scientific methods relating to the things of the external world to set the parameters of knowledge. All the things that make up human life come to appear somewhat vague, murky and biased in contrast, mere matters of dreams and wishes, hopes and delusions. In relation to morality, such books look at different standards in different times and places and conclude in favour of moral scepticism, relativism and conventionalism against moral reality, objectivity and truth, against transcendent norms. This is mistaken, and it is this encroachment of scientific truth upon the field of ethics as applied science yielding moral truth and knowledge that I contest. And I contest, too, the deleterious effects of that encroachment upon public and social life, because that view of rationality as exhausted by the criteria of the natural sciences has, in the context of the fact-value dualism, had an acidic and destructive effect upon society, removing morality from its role as an internal integrating and orienting force enabling human beings to manage and give meaning to their common affairs. And the fact is, as Williams makes clear above, an objective morality organised around transcendent norms is perfectly capable of addressing morality as it is played out in different contexts and circumstances. To separate universals and particulars, set them against each other, and pose evidence of the latter in time and place against the ‘immaterial’ non-existence of the former is to set up a false antithesis, set a non-problem, and resolve it on the side of an utterly false conclusion. A conclusion which has the wholly negative consequence of depriving us of morality as an applied science yielding moral knowledge. It is to open the doors to the world of the sophists, the world of Thrasymachus, the world where justice is merely the interests of the strong and the powerful, a world where might is right. I don’t like that world. And I will argue against it as politely and as reasonably as I can. And if, in the process, I discomfort those who believe themselves to be progressive in holding that the advance of scientific reason alone is the advance of human freedom and happiness, then they are in need of discomforting; because they are wearing blinkers; and they need to open their eyes to a genuine enlightenment, one that sees the existence of moral as well as scientific truth.

The entire issue could be settled immediately by emphasising a crucial point made by Aristotle:

‘Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature.’ (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk 1).

Aristotle proceeds to examine that question of the conventional and the natural. The point to take here, though, is that every science is only as precise as its subject matter allows. Ethics is an applied (or practical) science in relation to human beings and human action, not to physical things and physical causality. There is a precision in the latter in a way there could never be in the former. The two essential objects of ethics are human action and knowledge. Ethics is thus concerned with what the person has to aim at in order to act morally and be a moral being. And that, I affirm, amounts to more than self-image, self-identity, subjective likes and dislikes, opinion, preferences, prejudices, selfish interest. By rendering morality a series of value judgments, the modern split between fact and value, with scientific rationality exalted to the status of rationality as such, and value considered non-rational and subjective, we have been reduced to a condition of irreducible subjective opinion in our common practical affairs. All that there is is competing voices, incommensurate value positions or ‘perspectives’ (Nietzsche), with no way of deciding between them, since no common standard exists. The world thus becomes one of power struggles and the play of social interests, with victory going to the strongest.

In that situation, we need to recover morality and the idea of moral truth and knowledge quickly for our own good. The important point to establish is the epistemic one that these transcendent truths and norms are knowable in the right circumstances, and that our task is to create these circumstances in order to achieve, and live in accordance with, moral truth and knowledge. And we have to distinguish this form of knowledge from that of the natural sciences or the field of logic. We are dealing with human beings and their actions, not with things. It is inadmissible to expect the level of precision in human affairs that we find in physics, chemistry and geology, and neither can we expect the same necessity and certainty that we may find in mathematics. Human affairs are unpredictable in a way that equations are not, and human beliefs, habits, actions and proclivities and such like are immeasurable and unquantifiable and inexact in ways that, for instance, a molecular structure is not. Human beings have ideas, form plans and pursue goals in a way that rocks and trees and rivers do not. And, yes, they dream dreams, some which prove to be dangerous delusions, some which give us a reality far beyond the scope of those who would remain at the level of ‘evidence based policy.’ (OK, I’m being provocative again, but sometimes it is the poke in the eye that makes people see better). In fine, there is an ineradicable and utterly essential element of inexactitude in ethics, and this is its strength and not its weakness. To use this as evidence that there is no such thing as moral truth or moral knowledge is to make a massive error, an error which has deleterious practical consequences. Ethics as applied science precisely corresponds to the complexity and subtlety of the quandaries and dilemmas that real life in time and place confront persons with. That’s a modest claim. I could go further and argue that morality matters for much deeper reasons. It matters to the depths of the human soul. I shan’t comment further here, but these transcendent norms I write of are related to a transcendent hope, a hope that is much more difficult to demonstrate with the tools of reason and language. ‘If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.’ (Thomas Fuller). Call it sloppy thinking, or the crack through which all manner of erroneous beliefs and irrationalities seep into human life. But I think that a truth that hurts isn’t much of a truth in the first place. I shall return to this point with respect to the arguments of Benson and Stangroom in Why Truth Matters (2006). The view of truth they hold in that book is one very much modelled on the scientific method and is appropriate to the study of the physical world. It sets up a very one-sided view of rationality and thereby consigns much that matters to human beings to the realm of the non-rational (putting it neutrally, in truth, it is a view that denigrates whole realms of human experience and is, therefore, in my view inhuman).

Morality makes a difference. Human beings can never be indifferent, hence they feel injustice to the core of their being. The fields of biology and psychology are doing plenty to penetrate the murky world of motivations, desires, be­liefs and emotions. It’s good work. Far from arguing against it, I support it. And it supports my position that there is such a thing as human nature. The question has been cast in doubt by decades of social and cultural theory. I care little for it, and openly espouse Marx’s essentialist metaphysics (recognising that Marx came to set species-being in the context of specific social relations unfolding in the historical process – relativist? No, but a combination of the determinate and indeterminate as I argued above with respect to the ontology of Plato’s immaterial ideas). But the whole issue cuts deeper for me, deep to the mysteries of the soul. And that takes me beyond establishing the case for both scientific truth and moral truth, into another order of truth entirely. Eric Voegelin makes a significant comment on Max Weber in this respect:

His [Weber's] studies on sociology of religion have always aroused admiration as a tour de force, if not for other reasons. The amount of materials which he mastered in these voluminous studies on Protestantism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Israel, and Judaism, to be completed by a study of Islam, is indeed awe-inspiring. In the face of such impressive performance it has perhaps not been sufficiently observed that the series of these studies receives its general tone through a significant omission, that is, pre-Reformation Christianity.

E. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago, 1952,pp.19-20

Voegelin proceeds to explain this glaring omission as an implicit recognition on Weber’s part that pre-modern philosophy and ethics is more than capable of countering modern subjectivism:

'One can hardly engage in a serious study of mediaeval Christianity without discovering among its "values" the belief in a rational science of human and social order and especially of natural law'.

Voegelin’s point here emphasises to us that 'this science was not simply a belief, but it was actually elaborated as a work of reason'. The Weberian perspective, born of neo-Kantianism and the Cartesian turn inwards in philosophy, and of the fact-value dualism in rationalised modernity, never seriously engaged with the arguments of this older science. Voegelin sets the challenge: 'In order to degrade the politics of Plato, Aristotle or St Thomas to the rank of "values" among others, a conscientious scholar would have to show that their claim to be a science was unfounded'. I see the high acclaimed work of Alasdair MacIntyre, and the response he has offered to Hume, Nietzsche and Weber, as addressing this challenge and finding the truth of the matter to lie on the side of the pre-modern philosophers. I examined Kant the same way and found the same unwillingness to engage with the tradition that connects Aristotle and Aquinas. Perhaps Kant thought it unnecessary, since his target was to set the rational limits to metaphysical speculation. But that somewhat begs the question. If MacIntyre is right – and I think that he is – then the moderns and their philosophical and practical predicaments are in large part non-problems, or problems of their own making, problems capable of resolution by the philosophy of irreducible moderate realism.

To return to my main point, when it comes to human actions and human affairs, there will always be a degree of uncertainty and approximation. Ethics is about human persons, and not machines lacking in will, desire, motivation, consciousness. Human beings are moral beings who choose between different courses of action. They go wrong, and many times. We need a definition of truth that does not press too far in pursuit of a certainty and exactness that can never be had in human affairs. None of which means that we cannot have moral knowledge and that there is no such thing as moral truth. Aristotle called it simple, straight and right - every science is only as precise as its subject matter allows. Ethics is an applied (or practical) science in relation to human beings and human action, not to physical things and physical causality.

The Desire to Know and the Quest for Meaning

I put the desire to know and the quest for meaning together. But there is a little tension here that, under pressure, can open into a wide chasm. What status the quest for meaning should science reveal the universe to be meaningless and purposeless? Here is a question designed to open up a division in ways of looking at the world between science and religion. I go further than this, however, and seek to close the knowledge/will/meaning/action gaps. I try this, not by opposing each term to the others, but by intermeshing them so that they complement one another. I put it this way, scientific knowledge and technological know-how give us a clear picture of the real world and a capacity to act to transform that world according to wise ends, but they don’t in themselves make us identify with that world or make us want to act wisely. They do not, in themselves, motivate the will so that we act in accordance with knowledge. So I examine contexts and characters, social identities and relations, the entire social, institutional, moral and psychological infrastructure of human action and interaction. I try to give due weight to all factors and faculties in the making of a fulfilled human life. And that, it seems, is something that leaves me vulnerable to misunderstanding and attack when, it seems, all things of importance are in the remit of science and technology. They are not. They need to share space with all other forms of … dare I say ‘knowing?’

I make no apologies for that approach. It’s an integral approach that Plato identified as the condition for a healthy, sane and balanced living. In arguing that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful go together, and that we seek them together with an integration of all our faculties, Plato points us in the right direction, the direction of a truthseeking that leads us to happiness. From the world of science, the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman agrees: “We echo Plato's philosopher king. It is not an accident that, for Plato, it is a philosopher, king of reason, who is king. But Plato himself was wiser than that: our human goals, he taught, are the pursuit of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful … we find our human meaning is a space of meaning including not just science, but art, politics, ethics, and the spiritual.” (Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred, 2008 ch 15). Such is my view - the reintegration of reason with the rest of our full humanity …. That is what living well and living right takes.

So how does that end up being anti-science and technology. Well, it doesn’t, as a balanced integration of all dimensions of human living. But, as a balance, it is about the sharing of space. It is in this way that I put the desire to know and the quest for meaning together to form an integral understanding that comprises not just science and scientific knowledge, but ethics, politics, music, art, dance, architecture, religion and spirituality. You name whatever it is that human beings do in satisfying the need for a healthy, fulfilled and meaningful like, I’ll put it into that space.

In The Really Hard Problem, Owen Flanagan argues that human beings make meaning through a "meaning space", meaning domains that include sciences, arts, law, politics, ethics, and spirituality. I agree with this, but raise the question as to whether the knowledge of the external world as revealed by science delivers meaning. Human beings seem innately predisposed to seek the truth of the world. In the opening line of the Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that ‘All men by nature desire to know.’ It follows that satisfying that desire is a part of human fulfilment. And that satisfaction is part of a meaningful life. But does knowledge itself make life meaningful? This is where things get tricky. Unless I am needlessly overcomplicating. I do. Frequently. But I don’t think I am here. Let me elucidate.

The Disenchantment of the World

The main predicament of the modern world is presented by Max Weber in terms of ‘disenchantment,’ the ‘dis-godding’ of the world, by which he means the stripping of value, meaning and purpose from the world. Weber’s thesis is that, as a result of modern rationalisation and scientific advance, we live in an objectively valueless and meaningless world. I need to make something clear immediately here, because this is where a lot of misunderstanding arises. I am most certainly not arguing that the world is objectively valueless and meaningless, quite the contrary. And I am not saying that ‘science’ as such reveals the world to be objectively meaningless and valueless. But I am saying that the dominant form of scientific rationality, (mechanistic and reductionist), has most certainly driven value, meaning and purpose out of the objective world. In light of that view, the only value that the world has is one that human beings project upon it. That, I say, is the dominant conception of the rationalised world we live in. And it shows in our culture and politics, in the reckless economic ‘development’ of the world and this is transgressing planetary boundaries. And it shows in the collapse of morality into arbitrary subjective choices. That doesn’t mean that there is no morality or that human beings have ceased to be and act morally. Morality is innate. Biologists who give us explanations concerning the origins of the moral sense show us that human beings possess an internal moral grammar. This is permanent and indestructible, whatever our social systems and culture. But it is how that grammar is activated, embedded and articulated – or not – that is my concern.

Here are some quotes from Max Weber along these lines:

“The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world'”.

‘Who — aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences - still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world? If there is any such 'meaning', along what road could one come upon its tracks? If these natural sciences lead to anything in this way, they are apt to make the belief that there is such a thing as the 'meaning' of the universe die out at its very roots.’

Was Weber right? There are times when I feel like one of these ‘big children’ when I argue for purpose and meaning and happy endings and, God help us, God. I’m asked for proof, I’m asked for evidence, I’m asked for facts, and I can give none. None that would satisfy our stern positivists. Give me the names of scientists who argue that the world is objectively valuable, meaningful, purposeful, animate … They exist, and I like them and their work. I prefer their work, but I am clear that my preference is a question of ethics rather than science. I am clear about my values. When I look at the scientific evidence for them … the view is contestable. My preferences in the science are not the dominant view at all. It is a minority view. And, frankly, is often dismissed as 'woo'. I can remember Richard Dawkins writing somewhere dismissing ‘psychic physics’, and he doesn’t like hearing about the ‘music of the spheres’ much either. I like that music. And I like these interesting scientists who think that the world is alive and meaningful. I know them and their work, and I share their views. I do intend – should I ever get time away from correcting misunderstandings and misrepresentations - to integrate my ethics, politics and philosophy with this ‘new’ science so as to define life as ‘a commonwealth of virtue.’ It sounds wonderful and, in my head, it looks wonderful. But it’s taking a lot of time. Until then, all I can ask is: ‘which is the dominant scientific view?’ And point out that the issue is not which is the right and wrong scientific view, but which is the dominant view, the view that prevails, the view which seeps into the culture and mentality of social institutions, places and practices. I don’t agree that science as such renders the world ‘objectively valueless’ and ‘meaningless’. But people should be aware that those arguing for a science that says otherwise are themselves contesting a dominant mechanicist and reductionist view, the view that I am contesting.

I’ll state the point at extremes here, just to magnify the truth. I have books by Rupert Sheldrake, Ervin Laszlo, Dana Zohar, Ken Wilbur and Fritjof Capra … You see where I’m going? I pick these off the top of my head, I could give numerous other examples. I’m very interested in the intersection between science and spirituality. It’s the kind of stuff that hard-headed scientists like Richard Dawkins dismiss as ‘woo’, ‘psychic physics’, something that reveals more about the psychic craving for meaning and nothing at all about physics. So critics from the world of science say.

At the funeral of Francis Crick, the scientist who discovered the genetic code for DNA, Crick’s son Michael declared that his father’s motivation was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but 'to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism'. I always thought of that as a very strange obsession. Iris Murdoch asks sagely, ‘It is always a significant question to ask of any philosopher: what is he afraid of?’ I see fear at work here. What are the scientists who are so obsessed by the need to destroy vitalism, the theory that living organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone, afraid of? And why are they so afraid of cooperation and mutual aid? Richard Dawkins took E.O. Wilson, himself a hard-headed biologist, to task for the way his work argued for a social evolution tending towards cooperative forms, what Wilson calls ‘the social conquest of the earth’. I like the idea. But, again, I shall make it clear I like the idea for political and moral reasons. Dawkins was similarly dismissive with reference to James Lovelock, denouncing his Gaia hypothesis as ‘pseudo-science.’ I make my commitments clear, I’m with Wilson and Lovelock on this side of science. Dawkins makes his criticisms on scientific grounds. As it turned out, he was badly wrong on Lovelock’s Gaia. And it needs to be asked whether Dawkins’ hasty denigration of Gaia was really about science or whether it was motivated by other commitments.

I’ll state the issue even more clearly – the scientific work that supports the views I espouse is far from being the dominant view in science, and scientists with impeccable credentials, such as Dawkins himself, give a good many scientific reasons based on research and evidence as to why views of a purposive, animate and creative universe are so much woo and wishful thinking. The dominant view is still that the world is objectively valueless and that in determining the question as to where value lies the accent falls on the human valuer. We live in a world of created gods and created values, with a constant danger of dissolving into a self-referential, self-validating subjectivism. So this is the question I nag away at. I do too much of it. But I do it because, for all of the great potentials of social movements and alternative technologies and energy infrastructures, if we don’t get the moral and social and institutional infrastructure right, our technics will continue to misfire.

Nietzsche and Nihilism

We live in Nietzsche’s world. According to Nietzsche, nihilism arises when 'the highest values devaluate themselves'. Nietzsche is far from being my favourite philosopher, and I take his collapse into madness to reveal something about his ‘joyous’ science beyond good and evil as a narcissistic self-importance that, far from being a coherent response to modern subjectivism, is merely its peak expression. Human beings need each other in order to be themselves, and that points to a social order equipped with a moral compass. Nietzsche, however, has the merit of having pointed out the emptiness of moral theories within modernity: ‘Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?’ Nietzsche deserves an answer. You will find it in Weberian disenchantment and rationalisation and in Marxist alienation and commodification, in the social relations, institutions and practices that organise the world around possession, exploitation and use, in the driving of value and meaning and purpose out of the world and its subjection to instrumental and scientific reason. And that view is far from a crude blaming of science and technology for our predicament. Anyone who thinks the thesis is as crude as that is plainly not reading. Technology is us, an extension of who we are, and what our societies are – as wise and as benign as we are, or as greedy, violent, stupid and blinkered. I’m interested in this notion of blinkering, these ‘mind forg’d manacles’ that William Blake referred to. Anti-science? Blake referred to science as ‘the tree of death.’ He referred to art as ‘the tree of life.’ If you think that that is anti-science, then you are wearing blinkers. He was a man of the Imagination. But one of the best books written on Blake was by mathematician and scientist Jacob Bronowski, whose television series and book The Ascent of Man turned a generation on to science. Remove the blinkers and start thinking more deeply than progressive delusions of an automatic connection between reason and freedom and happiness.

It is on this point that I am challenged, with a denial of the view that science renders the world valueless and meaningless. I have a very specific conception of science in mind here, and can give any number of examples to show that it is the dominant understanding. Be clear, this is not the same kind of argument that denies the awe and the wonder that can come from scientific investigation and understanding. I don’t doubt that science can take us into a world of deep mystery, as deep as anything produced in art, music and poetry, deep into the complexity of the real world. The words of Richard Dawkins express this wonder and mystery: ‘To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposed to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected ... The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.’ (Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. x).

I prefer to gaze in awe at the rainbow, and give thanks for such a sight, and consider it a reminder to us all to live up to the beauty of Creation. Scientists can do that, they will say, and do even more, they can see the rainbow from inside and outside, everything the artists and poets can do and see, and still more. That’s nice. That’s not what I am disagreeing with.

When Weber writes of the ‘disenchantment of the world’, and when I pursue the implications of that disenchantment in terms of values, ethics and meanings, it is not the aesthetic experience and meaning of scientific truthseeking that is in question – it is the value of the world as something independent of human subjective experience that is left in doubt. Scientific investigation reveals the world to be without value, meaning and purpose; it is what it is, and, in the words of Weber, it is only ‘big children’ who would want the world to be anything more than that. The world that science reveals is an objectively valueless world. Who, but deluded metaphysicians, moralisers, nature fetishizers, God-botherers, poets, artists, musicians, Gustav Mahler and myself would want anything more than that? The question is not so easily answered. For Weber, following up Nietzsche’s insights into the collapse of an overarching objective moral framework in light of the advance of the natural sciences, we have lost the grounds for our actions. The great religious systems which oriented human behaviour have lost their validity, and there are no grounds for erecting any objective moral edifice in their place. Does that matter? I say it does. For Nietzsche, the fate of modernity is nihilism. Scientists may well dismiss his views as hyperbolic. I think it would be unwise to dismiss such views. I think it would be wise to take the views of moral philosophers and social theorists seriously, rather than dismiss them as irrelevant for knowing nothing of real science. This kind of dismissal can be turned around easily – what do scientists know of true ethics? Morality is a part of social life, integral to the way that human beings order their world, evaluate actions, organise practices, determine ends. The problem of morality in the modern world is that, in light of the dissolution of objective grounds for a common or shared morality, there is no principled way in which conflicts between human agents can be resolved. This problem follows the split between the worlds of fact and of value following the advance of the natural sciences and its revelation that the world is objectively valueless. The problem is that this split has involved not merely a dualism, but the exaltation of scientific rationality as the dominant, even exclusive, form of rationality and the concomitant devaluation of morality as a series of subjective, non-rational, value judgements, merely subjective opinion. In an objectively valueless world, there can be no objective criteria in Nature and/or God for evaluating between rival moral claims. Morality has lost its natural and supernatural sanction and standard. We have been searching for new foundations ever since, in a reason that is innate and universal (Kant), in the phenomenology of intersubjective experience, in the idea that human interactions and exchanges generating an objectivity of their own that exists as a check on subjective actions, in pragmatism. But here is the problem, separated from a grounding in objective reality, modernity has proven incapable of supporting any of the competing moral theories with good reasons to accept their claims. These moral theories may offer an account of what individuals ought to do, but they cannot supply good reasons for individuals to act in fulfilment of those ought-to-do’s. Hence emotivism or expressivism is the dominant moral mode of the modern world, a world in which there is no good and bad, right and wrong, only likes and dislikes, subjective preferences. Given the dominant form of rationality and social identity in the modern world - self-interested, self-maximising individual agents within instrumental relations - a rational individual will be impervious to the moral appeals.

Is this a problem? My interest in the dissolution of an overarching framework of ethics, in the context of the ‘disenchantment’ of the world, is certainly a problem for what may be called ‘traditional morality’, with its notions of transcendent truths, norms and values. Shorn of its objective grounds, that framework becomes empty, incapable of motivating behaviour as it once did, incapable of supplying meaningful actions and practices. Nietzsche referred to this in terms of the death of God. A liberation? That’s one way of looking at it. But that would amount to accepting the eighteenth century view of ‘private vices’ leading to ‘public virtues’, the ‘invisible hand’ theorem which holds that, through the pursuit of individual self-interest, the general good is produced. There is no overall end, only self-directed goals, and, through these, an overall social order that is the best possible outcome for all issues. The general good is the result of no overall design or direction but of the unintended consequences of self-interested individual actions. There is, in fine, a gap between the intentional content of individual actions and their overall social result. Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ theorem is familiar and lies behind the libertarian commitment to free markets and free trade. No public virtue or overarching morality is required to produce the general good, only the untrammelled pursuit of self-interest within the law. The results are not so sanguine: individual freedom and rationality quite often issue in a collective unfreedom and irrationality. In my work, therefore, I argue for human beings coming together to submit to a voluntary internal constraint exercised through a moral and socio-institutional infrastructure so as to avoid an involuntary constraint imposed by ‘externalities’, the forces unleashed by incremental, individual actions returning to exert external collective force in the form of economic imperatives, material insecurity, climate change … It matters.

Morality is an integral part of every society. For social and practical reasons, morality matters. And the grounds of morality matters. Unless we entertain notions of an unmediated natural spontaneity in which untrammelled individual actions issue in a social good – I don’t find the view compelling, neither in its Romantic nor its free market forms – there is a need for constraint, authority and morality. I argue for the legitimate constraint of law and self-assumed obligation; for an authority that can be justified by reasons; and for a morality that can give good reasons to accept and act upon its precepts.

So the disenchantment of the world matters. This disenchantment I take to be a social fact and not a social fiction concocted by pessimistic sociologists and poets. And to qualify further, when I say ‘social fact’, I mean a view of the world that is bound up with specific social relations and institutions in time and place. Expropriation, annexation, quantification, reduction, commodification, commercialisation, the parcelling out of the world, the specialisation of human disciplines and practices, the separation of human agents from the means of human action, the separation of fact and value are all important social facts defining the modern rationalisation of the world. Modernity has created a dominant conception of agency and rationality, of what it is to act rationally. And this conception refers precisely to the self-interested, self-maximising individual who acts within instrumental relationships. I have been referring mainly to Weber here, but in truth, Marx states the problem much more precisely. Instead of an ahistorical Reason and process of rationalisation, Marx locates estrangement in capitalist relations of production. He also emphasises the dominant modern conception of agency and rationality when he refers to the self-interested individual as ‘active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers.’ (On the Jewish Question). The point is that morality and the idea of human beings being engaged in a joint project geared to the achievement of common ends has been dissolved into self-directed private goals, with who knows what as the general outcome. The general or public good, says the invisible hand theorem; human beings as the playthings of external collective forces says Marx.

I could end ‘debate’ here and now by dismissing Marx, Nietzsche and Weber as mere ideologues and social theorists whose trade is to peddle words and invent problems where none exist, dredging up fears to frighten folk with, offer fantasies to seduce folk with. The fact that Weber specifically ruled out such fantasies should caution us against being dismissive.

‘Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights.’

At the close of The Communist Manifesto, Marx gave us this ringing appeal: workers of all lands unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to win. But is it? In what way? Weber is identifying the problem at issue here: in a world shorn of objective value, there is nothing absolutely good or absolutely bad any more, no right or wrong, no truth and no falsehood. It doesn’t matter which group or class or party contending for external power wins, when there is no world to win and no point to any victory.

I have to pause again to make my own view very clear. I am not saying that Weber is right and that there is no good or bad, right or wrong, truth or falsehood. I have contested Weber’s views many times, through Marx, through Aquinas, and through MacIntyre. His rationalisation thesis has the character of an ideology which serves to conceal power relations and naturalise elitist politics and bureaucratic forms of organisation. He gives us a managerial and technocratic ideology, one that precludes democracy and democratisation. I disagree with him profoundly. But I have contested his claims not because they are wrong, but because they reveal a truth about a social order that has severed meaning from objective grounds, that has rendered the world objectively valueless in its dominant conceptions and practices and relations, and that has constructed a conception of rationality that precludes the possibility of moral knowledge and truth. I’ll put it this way, should civilisation come to an end with national rivalries in the context of ecological collapse, with human beings passively and powerlessly watching proceedings from within the confines of their ‘iron cage’, Weber would not have been at all surprised. He called the socialist alternative a delusion from the first.

Most of all, Weber showed that political powerlessness stemmed from moral pointlessness. The result of the dominant modes of capitalist modernity is that morality has come to be shorn of any normative and practical purchase in the social world, in the sense that those making moral appeals give no good reasons for anyone to respond to their claims. To repeat, the separation of fact and value issues in the separation of science and ethics, the former as the realm of reason, the latter a non-rational realm of value judgments and subjective views. Hence morality collapses into emotivism, in which morality is not about good and bad, but mere personal likes and dislikes, with deontology and utilitarianism attempting all manner of abstract rules and laws and calculations from the outside, seeking to direct and regulate and motivate from some external vantage point. Such abstract moralities change nothing about behaviours.

Modernity is thus characterised by a conception of rationality which places scientific knowledge at the centre and renders morality non-rational, a matter of subjective choice. Such a view affirms the possibility of scientific knowledge, but precludes the possibility of moral knowledge. That such scientific knowledge reveals the world to be objectively valueless reveals the moral predicament of modernity, removing both the natural and supernatural grounds of morality and thereby reducing morality to a matter of subjective choice and opinion, not of rational belief. So what? It leaves society without an effective overarching moral compass and internal orientation, without a common and shared meaning capable of uniting, motivating and obligating individuals towards other than self-interested ends, without the communities of practice that give, embed and produce meaning; it creates a dissonance between individual good and social good, opens up a potentially destructive, even lethal, gap between short-term actions and long-term consequences. And the greatest irony of all is that it undercuts the grounds of scientific knowledge and truthseeking itself. If morality is no more than a non-rational subjective choice, then there are no rational grounds to justify the value of science and truthseeking.

So it is for these reasons and many more besides that I take ‘disenchantment’ seriously. I take it to be a real problem and not an invented problem of disgruntled philosophers and social theorists. And I take it to explain something deep and far reaching about the moral malaise of the modern world. I state the problem at extremes deliberately to provoke the question: What malaise? Human beings are better educated, better fed, healthier and wealthier, and living longer than at any time in history, and they are doing so in greater numbers. There is less bigotry and intolerance, less prejudice, greater rights and freedoms in modern societies, and on the whole the life available in modern societies is better than the often insular, repressive, narrow communities of past times. Enlightenment, liberal democracy and capitalism have not only succeeded in raising the quality of life for millions, they have succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of a Smith, a Malthus, a Ricardo and a Mill, all of whom thought that the system would undercut its own grounds one day. Should Smith come back today, he would wonder what all the complaints were about. Wouldn’t he? As a moral philosopher before he was an economist, indeed as a political economist himself, I think Smith would be worried about the status of morals.

From Emancipatory Reason to Incarceration – the New Cave

So where is the problem? The problem lies in the unleashing of collective forces through human action, without the creation of collective mechanisms and means of constraining those forces for the common good. If we are happy to measure only the quantity of life, then a strong case can be made that the common good has been well and truly delivered. No other economic system could deliver the numbers that the capital system has succeeded in delivering. But what of the quality of life? Are we talking about mere psychological states here? The innate tendency of human appetites to overrun satisfactions, thus producing endless discontent?

It’s a view that is worth considering. In which case, science and technology, free markets and private business, Enlightenment and free trade, pluralism and rights – the world of your dreams and their realisation is here. Stop complaining and put aside fantasies of great political projects to realise some great truth. Such utopian ideologies sacrifice real gains in the present for the vagaries of a promised paradisal future to come.

I’d just ask here, does that ring true? My answer to that question is written all over my work. I can see the facts and could quite easily make the argument that the capital system has brought us to the best of times. And, just as easily, with climate catastrophe staring us in the face, in the context of economic crisis and instability, social inequality and unhappiness, I could argue that it has brought us to the worst of times.

So I make no apologies for putting aside appearances of health, wealth and enlightenment to examine the belly of the beast. And I declare it hollow, soulless and immoral. After a century of being fractured between a number of impotent moral theories, moral philosophy has started to reacquaint itself with its traditional position as the Queen of the sciences, bringing meaning and order to all other forms of knowledge. I am being deliberately provocative here in citing Dante’s view, medieval metaphysician and Christian and surely the kind of moralist that the modern world has grown out of.

‘The Crystalline Heaven, which has previously been designated as the Primum Mobile, has a very clear resemblance to Moral Philosophy; for Moral Philosophy, as Thomas says in commenting on the second book of the Ethics, disposes us properly to the other sciences.’

[Convivio (II, xiv, 14)]

I like to read some Dante to calm me down, a little. Dante concludes that ‘if Moral Philosophy ceased to exist, the other sciences would be hidden for some time, and there would be no generation or happiness in life, and in vain would these bodies of knowledge have been discovered and written down long ago. Consequently it is quite evident that this heaven may be compared to Moral Philosophy.’ (Convivio (II, xii, 18).

So much medieval metaphysics, surely, long since eclipsed by scientific advance? I’m not so sure. I do affirm the unity of the true, the good and the beautiful, and I do agree that ‘Apart from metaphysical presuppositions there can be no civilisation’ (Tomlin 1947:264). I think all change for the better in human history has always been through the symbiotic interaction of material interests and metaphysical/moral motives. And I think that if we are to succeed in bringing about the Age of Ecology, then it will take precisely that combination of forces. I frequently cite E.F. Schumacher in this respect. Schumacher is well-known for being the exponent of appropriate or alternative technology and for being the writer of Small is Beautiful, a call for a scaled economy of human dimensions. He was expert and practitioner in the field of technology. He made alternative technology one of his two conditions for the healthy ecological society of the future. Environmentalists responded most of all to Schumacher’s call for ecologically appropriate technology. They forgot, if they ever knew, his second condition for ecological health, a condition which for Schumacher was the most important condition – ‘metaphysical reconstruction.’ He even wrote a book called Guide for the Perplexed to reiterate and reinforce that point. The book received nothing like the attention that Small is Beautiful achieved. I make the same argument Schumacher makes when it comes to metaphysics and morals. Like Schumacher, I believe there is a moral malaise at the heart of modernity. If I am anti-science and anti-technology, then so too was E.F. Schumacher – which means not at all. Critics are not looking deeply enough at the problem. This is a problem that you cannot see in the shallows.

I am not just stating or restating morality as the centre of human life. I see morality as an integral to the life of human beings as social beings, something that is integral to communities of character (Hauerwas) and practice (MacIntyre), something that gives internal meaning to life, that gears, orients and directs activities and provides meaning with respect to social forces, issues and affairs of common interest and concern. We can leave such things to free trade and the market, and wait on the promise and the expectation that the endless accumulation of material quantities will satisfy the quest for meaning, freedom and happiness. I just think that if this was going to happen, then it would have happened by now. There is no shortage of material quantities in the modern world. The promise of more of the same begs the question as to why an awful lot of the very thing desired has yet to suffice. The answer is simple: the accumulation of means is quite distinct from the expansion of meaning. In the words of liberal economist John Maynard Keynes: ‘Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’ (Keynes, J.M., ‘A Short View of Russia’ in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932).

Do we want to live in a world that has internal union, public spirit and social unity beyond endlessly haggling over the possession of goods and pursuit of wants? I do. And that requires morality, morality as something more than the spontaneous product of individual self-interest via the invisible hand. To be successful in this enterprise, there is a need to take the social content of morality seriously. And that means addressing the social forces that Marx and Weber drew attention to with respect to the commercialisation and rationalisation of the world. Modern moral theories have proven impotent here, incapable of generating claims with any practical appeal or purchase. Academic philosophers of a Kantian deontological or utilitarian or consequentialist persuasion have sought a disinterested external vantage point from which to weigh and measure social issues. Kant, the modern moral philosopher I have most time for, gives us a legalism which seeks to constrain and regulate, but not fundamentally alter, behaviour. Modern morality lacks any purchase in social life, it speaks past social identity. The social identity connecting individual and social good does not exist, so moral appeals lack social relevance. All that there is is the calculation of advantages and regulation of actions. No wonder emotivism has been the dominant mode, mere likes and dislikes, a moral counterpart to the economy of subjective preferences registered on the market. The result has been moral emptiness and irrelevance. Morality is an aspect of social life, but when that social life is dissolved into self-interested atoms, then there is no morality in terms of a common and shard code of behaviour claiming common assent. All that there is, is what Keynes refers to as a congeries of possessors and pursuers, with a neutral legal framework above maintaining the civil peace. This has brought material benefits. With the perennial promise of more to come. Stick or twist?

If we want to live with more coherence and more stability, in accordance with ends we can identify and give assent to, which give shared meaning and direction to our lives, then we will have to twist, not for more quantity, but for more quality, doing much more through being with a lot less of having. And this means recovering morality as a dimension of social life, something that is constitutive of that social life, to be mobilised through social practices and capable of orienting and guiding those practices. It means that human beings cease to be self-interested individuals using each other as means to personal ends, with the result that all become ‘playthings of alien powers’ (Marx), and instead become citizens associating together in a common space in order to determine consciously as rational and moral beings the common ends by which they live. That’s my view. That’s why I take morality seriously, as both philosophy and social practice, something more than an unintended consequence of free and spontaneous actions, something more than a legal regulation, but as an active force through which human beings order and give meaning to their existence. And I argue that a condition of such moral direction is to develop a critical awareness of the social context and content of morality.

And that brings me back to Marx’s alienation thesis, Weber’s rationalisation thesis, and this notion that the disenchantment of the world robs the world of objective meaning, value and purpose. Of course, if the world does indeed possess inherent value, meaning and purpose, then it can never be stripped of those qualities. The critical point refers to a scientific or philosophical conceptualisation of the world, not the world as such, which remains whatever it is, regardless of axiological conceits and conventions. The problem is that it is through this axiological extensionism that we structure our mental and moral existence; we see the world through our concepts. Our understanding of rationality holds that science is our best guide to the real world we have. If that science sees the world as without value, meaning and purpose, how could we disagree? And what grounds would we then have to give value, meaning and purpose to our lives? Kant sought to give new foundations through reason, something innate and universal and therefore capable of generating an objective force through intersubjective relations and experience. It’s the best solution we have, but it is complicated and convoluted and legalistic and … it doesn’t quite catch fire in the heart and soul. I want a global warming that sets the heart and soul on fire, not the planet.

If we lack natural and supernatural grounding, Kant’s self-legislating reason and community of co-legislators in the realm of ends is the best we can hope for. With a supporting socio-institutional infrastructure. I just have a feeling that it is self-defeating, bringing us to something like Weber and his ethics of responsibility, morality as non-rational subjective choices, for which we can supply no good reason.

There seems to be something of a way out through the promises of a science that takes us out of the mechanistic and reductionist paradigm. That’s the science that sees us as part of a participatory, purposive and animate universe. The Weberian ethics of responsibility was part of a reduction of morality to mere subjective preferences and choices. If the world was objectively valueless, then any value it could have would be the result of human imposition. The source of value thus lay in the human valuer rather than in the valuable world. Human beings are thus charged with the duty of making meaning in a meaningless universe. The only problem was that such choices and actions could only ever be subjective, and hence lacking in an objective significance, without an objective standard against which to check them to determine whether they are right or wrong, good or bad. In short, such choices and actions would be meaningless and could never create meaning. Such a subjectivist ethics is self-defeating. It was a response to the reductionist view that the world is objectively valueless. And it led to the dissolution of an objective moral framework, opening up the modern era of vacuous and impotent moral theories and the subjectivism the moral marketplace.

In focusing on disenchantment as a demoralisation and showing how Weberian themes of rationalisation come to infuse the social order, there is the impression of engaging in an anti-science discourse. There is a cultural pessimism here that could be traced through modern German theory, all the way up to Horkheimer and Adorno and The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Herbert Marcuse and One Dimensional Man and such like. The fact is that I use Weber to state the problem and the predicament. I see Weber as posing the challenge. And I meet the challenge by saying that within Weber’s own terms, there is no way out of the ‘iron cage.’ This leaves us mired in a cultural pessimism, unless we look closer at Weber’s premises and start to challenge the terms he sets. And then we start to see the way out. Because the problem is not as Weber states it, in a general process of rationalisation, but in specific alienative and exploitative social relations which ensure reason takes a repressive rather than a liberatory form. And such a view ceases to identify science and technology with an inexorable progress into an inescapable ‘iron cage’, and instead recovers technics within appropriate social relations bringing about human freedom and happiness and, indeed, meaning and morality. Such is the Marxist view I established at length in my doctoral work.

But …. that is the optimistic view. That is the revolutionary view that has proven so difficult to achieve. Weber was a pessimist. He warned that socialism was no solution to the problems of the iron cage. On the contrary, it was the culmination of the repressive features of rationalisation, the housing for the new serfdom. Socialism would give us not Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat, but the dictatorship of the officials. I make no apologies for taking Weber seriously. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and there are huge gaps between social realities and socialist ideals, gaps which bureaucracy and worse is more than likely to fill.

I shall carry on supporting the optimistic view. But if the worst should come to the worst, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. That won’t be the fault of science and technology, of course. These are human activities, extensions of who and what we are, mirroring our stupidity, violence, greed, generosity, brilliance, intelligence, creativity – sides of human nature that are enhanced or inhibited through our social relations. And it is at that level that these issues of knowledge, truth and morality will be decided.

Science and Scientism, Morality and Moralism … and the need to distinguish one from the other.

As for science …. The science that gave us the objectively valueless world is the mechanistic and reductionist science that may well not always be the dominant conception. There are other scientific views now that point to the world as anything but dead matter. Life, purpose, meaning, value, creative agency are all integral parts of the participatory, animate universe. The world is indeed good, as God told us in Genesis from the first. Does it matter if it God or science that tells us this? Actually, yes, it does. The scientific commitment is, first and foremost, to truth, supported by evidence, reason, logic. Not stories, myths and wishful thinking. The world is what the world is, and all we know of that world is what our scientific concepts and investigations reveal it to be. I have numerous books from the field of science which point to a creative, participatory universe, a world in which value, agency, life, will and consciousness are inherent and/or emergent. That is a picture of an objectively valuable world, a meaning-laden, purposive, world in which human beings are active as co-creative agents of an emergent nature. That’s a view that resolves the old dichotomy of disclosure or imposure of truth and value, whether meaning is revealed by contemplation or created by praxis, by seeing human beings as doing both by being integral parts of a meaningful, valuable and ceaselessly creative universe. Theist or atheist, Good God or Good World, it matters little, the result is the same.

It is very much a work in progress for me. I have been trying desperately to get to work on Being and Place, and have had to make do with scattered pieces of writing as and when I have time. Of course, I start by setting the problem and sketching the solution. And that means harping on Weberian themes a lot more than is healthy. It has given a false impression of cultural pessimism, and has kept me away from an integration of virtue ethics, character-construction and social formation with insights from physics, biology, neuroscience, ecology and psychology.

And so I am wide open to the attack of being anti-science and anti-technology, because I come to the fact-value dualism, the view of the world as objectively valueless, and the way that mechanistic, reductionist science opened up an era of created and imposed truths and values, subjective preference, non-rational value judgments. We are living in the aftermath of Marx’s, Nietzsche’s and Weber’s world, and we are still in that world. And it will take more than the latest theory or passing fashion in physics to give us a more secure grounding. Waves, particles, chaos, M theory, parallel universes, the field, where are we with physics? The quantum self and the quantum society, sounds very … I like the old word of commonwealth. I take ethics seriously, and ethics is always something more than a naturalism, and something more than science and what science reveals about the real world at any one time.

In presenting Weber’s disenchantment of the world as the basis for argument, I am not arguing that this account is the right one. I use it because it allows me to state the predicament and the problem we face, show what it reveals about modernity and morality, in order to get to the real source of the ills. In that sense, Weber’s rationalisation ceases to be a true representation of reality as an ideological rationalisation of social practices and institutions that are shaped by specific social relations. In fine, Weber gives us an institutional inertia that naturalises what should be historicised – and as a result gives us an apology for the very things Weber claims to lament. Our scientific knowledge empties the world of meaning and value, our technological know-how destroys the world as it transforms it, in the name of progress, reason turns repressive through rationalisation. Weber portrays a horror story that, after a century of total war, death and destruction, with ecological catastrophe on the horizon, seems all too true. And there is truth in it. But rationalisation is ideological in that it conceals the real truth – the fact that the source of these ills lies not in reason and rationalisation – not in scientific disenchantment and the transformation of the world through technique and organisation – but in specific social relations, relations which assume a possessive and exploitative approach to the world, which separate human beings from the world and from each other. The important point is that, on Weber’s premises, there is no way out of the iron cage. Reason is inescapably repressive. Kant’s self-legislating reason delivers not freedom in a community of co-legislators, but the repressive iron cage. But once we locate the problem not in reason and rationalisation but in an alienated system of production, then we see the solution: these social relations that structure and orient knowledge and know-how are subject to conscious human intervention and alteration.

Such was the view I developed in my PhD thesis, and such is the view I continue to affirm. I don’t blame people who accuse me of being anti-science and anti-technology too much, because I write too much, and should just remain quiet until I have written, polished and published the definitive argument.

At the same time, it is important to get this point – Weber is not simply wrong. Do I think that all that modernity amounts to is an ‘iron cage’ of human misery and oppression? I use Weber to talk about modern civilisation and its discontents. If Weber was simply wrong, then we could just ignore him and go past him. The same with Nietzsche. I refer to Nietzsche a lot. Not because I like Nietzsche. I don’t like him, I think he is misguided and wrong. But he was right about the status of morality in the modern world – and that is plenty to be right about. Weber and Nietzsche set the challenge to meet. I argue with them at length in order to meet that challenge. And in doing that, I probably sound more sympathetic to their views than I am.

I’ll put it this way. I could state directly that the world is good and objectively valuable and ground our moral meaning and practice. And ignore a whole lot of moral controversy concerning nature and reason and teleology and the ought/is convention. It would be pleasing to do that. But not very intellectually satisfying. And I would know that anyone with a modicum of philosophical or scientific understanding could destroy the position, if they even felt the need to (which they wouldn’t, they would safely ignore).

I’m just glad that what I wrote on planetary engineering and management came out before the Eco-Modernization Manifesto, before the evidence that the likes of these people were in the pay of the GE food companies, before the documents showing that their intention was to divide the Green movement from within. In criticising planetary engineering I seek to get at the social and institutional biases that impinge upon science and the use of technology, proceeding from there to note that scientific knowledge and technical know-how need to be supplemented by practical reason. Objectivity very quickly goes to the wall when political and economic interests intersect with scientific practice, a simple enough point, which constitutes a defence of scientific knowledge and technological know-how as against their misuse. I’m only sorry that, as a reaction, I went closer to the planetary fetishizing position – Nature as benign and good – than I would normally do. False antitheses born of a civilisation imploding from within under the weight of its own decadence.

If it’s anti-science and anti-technology to say that science and technology do not in themselves constitute a philosophy of living, then I am guilty as charged, proudly so. It takes more than technique to create a culture and a way of life. The fact that there are scientists and technologists who do openly dismiss the views I express – they are numerous - as anti-science/technology indicates how deep the problem is.

Here is planetary engineer Steward Brand in Whole Earth Discipline:

‘Arthur Herman traces the origin of romanticism and its decay narra­tive to one man and one event—Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution of 1789. Rousseau embraced an imaginary primitivism and declared, "Everything degenerates in the hands of men." His vision of a return to innocence and freedom seemed to be at hand with the over­throw of the French monarchy. The intelligentsia of Europe thrilled to the coming of a new dawn in 1789, and then watched it turn into blood and terror by 1793. With that trauma, the romantic stance became one of despair and defiance, and it has remained so ever since. Following the deep seam of romanticism through successive centuries, Herman finds it leading through Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (1918) directly to Nazi Germany. "Hitler's generation was the first Euro­pean generation raised on cultural pessimism." There is a troubling Green thread in the Nazi movement…’

I am currently writing on Rousseau, Rousseau led to Hitler, Bertrand Russell wrote in The History of Western Philosophy, so it seems my anti-science, anti-technology strain is proven. Either that, or these planetary engineers are very much the arrogant miscreants busy despoiling the planet in their claims to be making it better that I said they were in Of Gods and Gaia.

And I am happy to come to the defence of Rousseau too. This passage makes it clear that if either Herman or Brand have even bothered to read Rousseau, they haven’t understood him. This is second hand, second rate criticism, the stock in trade of liberal hacks. Rousseau’s entire argument is predicated on human beings exchanging the licence of their individual life in a natural state for the richer range of possibilities of living together in a civil state. He couldn’t have been clearer. The confusion comes from the inability of certain minds to differentiate the argument for going forwards to the fuller and differentiated realisation of human nature in a civil state that corresponds to the human ontology from a primitive yearning to return to the undifferentiated unity of the natural state. Kant understood the argument easily enough and put Rousseau alongside Newton as architects of the modern era, the one the master of the moral world and the other the master of the physical world. Still, don’t let reason get in the way of a good prejudice. Rousseau is an easy target, but to keep rebutting the same charges gets boring after a while. As for the connection of Rousseau with the French Revolution, Rousseau’s Social Contract was hardly even read before the Revolution. Further, it is crystal clear that Rousseau envisaged a city republic in the manner of his home town of Geneva, not the large modern centralised state. What is true is that Rousseau was critical of the emerging modernity for its iniquity and inauthenticity, hence his demand to move forwards to the future civil state.

I digress (as usual).

The is/ought distinction is part of this problem, because to challenge that distinction, it is said, is to open a crack which invites ‘wishful thinking’ – political and religious ‘ought-to-be’s’ – to pour into the world and our knowledge of it. It’s a difficult enough issue without constantly being hectored in ways that miss the point or dismiss the issues at best, misrepresent the positions at worst.

Accusations of being anti-science and anti-technology miss the point. People egregiously misinterpret one position I develop (the critique of planetary engineering, which explicitly refers to science/technology in the service of political and corporate interests within specific, and alterable, social relations), conflate it with another, distinct, position (the fact/value distinction in the context of a mechanistic and reductionist science revealing an objectively valueless world), and draw utterly fallacious conclusions – that I am guilty of a moralising repudiation of science and technology.

I locate the problem in social relations and argue for a transformation of these social relations in order to liberate our technics. I did precisely that in the critique of planetary engineering. My critique of planetary engineering is aimed precisely at those working for corporate interests, reducing science and technology to commercial exploitation, not engineers as such. But I do raise questions of science and scientists and technologists with respect to the field of practical reason – politics, ethics and economics – what questions do those with knowledge and know-how ask? Who do they serve? It’s dangerous and difficult ground, and I am vulnerable to misrepresentation. I would ask that people read carefully.

The idea that the critique of planetary engineering is the same thing as a rejection of science and technology is easily disposed of. That seems to be the main accusation. Not guilty, the very opposite, a defence of the science and technology against their expropriation and misuse. The implications of science and technology with respect to ethics, politics and economics …. I don’t buy the idea of innocents and beautiful souls untainted by interests. I don’t exonerate anyone from responsibility for their actions and choices. No one can point to their place or function or role or position in any organisation or chain of command to say they could do no other. And I don’t believe in some anonymous ‘History’, with its ruses that excuse.

I am a stern moralist on this point, because if individuals refuse to take moral stands and make moral choices, then we will never regain a moral order and repersonalise the world, because no collectivity can act morally without the existence of moral agents. Let me quote Leszek Kolakowski at length, because he states the view cogently:

‘Real social involvement is moral involvement. For although a great political movement that seeks to shape the world in its own image is called to life by the world's needs, and though its funda­mental direction is determined by the development of social rela­tions, nevertheless each individual's participation in any specific form of political life is a moral act for which that individual is wholly responsible.

No one is relieved of either positive or negative responsibility on the grounds that his actions formed only a fraction of a given historical process. A soldier is morally responsible for a crime committed on the orders of his superior; an individual is all the more responsible for acts performed—supposedly or in fact—on the orders of an anonymous history. If a thousand people are standing on a river bank and a drowning man calls for help, it is almost certain that one of the spectators will leap in to save him. This quasi-statistical certainty concerns a thousand people, but it does not eliminate the need for a moral evaluation of the specific person, that one in a thousand, who does jump into the river. Experience can assure us that one such man will be found in the crowd; and this certitude is analogous to those rare historical pre­dictions that occasionally come true. But to be that precise person who, out of a thousand potential rescuers, carries out the predic­tion, which was based on large numbers, one must perform "by oneself," as it were, an action subject to moral judgment. By analogy, if there exists a social system which requires criminals for certain tasks, one can be sure it will always find them. But it does not follow that every individual criminal is absolved of re­sponsibility, because in order to designate oneself for the role of such a tool of the system one must be a scoundrel "by oneself," one must voluntarily perform a specific act which is subject to moral judgment.

Thus we profess the doctrine of total responsibility of the individual for his deeds and of the amorality of the historical process. In the latter we avail ourselves of Hegel; in the former of Descartes. It was he who formulated the famous principle, whose consequences are not always visible at first glance, "There is not a soul so weak that it cannot, with good guidance, gain an absolute mastery over its passions." This means that we cannot explain away any of our actions on the grounds of emotion, passion, or the moral impotence to act differently, and that we have no right to transfer the responsibility for our conscious acts to any factor which determines our behavior; because in every instance we have the power to choose freely.

This assumption—which, as I have mentioned, can be accepted without contradicting the deterministic interpretation of the world—must also be extended to all the justifications we find for ourselves in historical necessities and historical determinism. Neither our personal, supposedly invincible emotions ("I could not resist the desire"), nor anyone's command ("I was a soldier"), nor conformity with the customs of one's environment ("every­body did it"), nor theoretically deduced exigencies of the demi­urge of history ("I judged I was acting for the sake of progress") —none of these four most typical and popular rationalizations has any validity. This is not to say that these four types of determina­tion do not actually occur in life, but merely to state that none of them releases us from individual responsibility, because none of them destroys the freedom of individual choice. Individual action remains in the absolute power of the individual. We walk the main roads of our life on our own:

Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you You must travel it for yourself.

—Whitman

I stress that we are concerned with moral responsibility. The soldier who executes his commander's erroneous orders—orders which are inefficient as military tactics—is not thereby responsible for the loss of the battle. A soldier who, on orders, participates in the mass murder of civilians is responsible for homicide. His moral duty is to not carry out the command. Only on this basis were we able to try SS men.

That is why, regardless of what philosophy of history we may wish to accept, we will be rightly judged for everything subject to moral appraisal that we do in its name.

And it is not true that our philosophy of history decides our main choices in life. They are determined by our moral sense.’ (Kolakowski, Marxism and Beyond, ch 7 Conscience and Social Progress).

The idea that science and technology are benign fields, and those who choose to work in these fields are full of good intentions, reveals a progressivist delusion that needs to be discomforted. That is no defence against the issues I try to raise with respect to ethics. One of my points here is that personal choices are without content: if there is no objective truth, then it doesn’t matter what one chooses, because there is no objective standard or criteria available to justify this choice or that. Some choose to become scientists and technologists in order to do good in the world. I commend them. I regret that my view is understood to denigrate or devalue their choices. But that is to misunderstand the point I make. I shall repeat it very simply. If there is no objective morality, only what Weber calls an ethics of responsibility, then morality is merely a matter of subjective choices, in which case it doesn’t matter what one chooses - there is no way of evaluating it against an objective standard, no way of saying that it is good or bad. Or, it matters to the individual, but in terms of a general significance in relation to others, it doesn’t matter. A good action is merely a personal preference, no better and no worse than another person’s preference for another action, which may be considered much less good …. If we were to have standards of good and bad… Again, to repeat, that is precisely what the predicament of morality is in the modern world, it has lost its objective grounding and hence ceased to be a rational practice capable of deciding between good and bad, right and wrong. I bitterly resent the view that somehow it is I who is being perverse, eccentric and malicious in devaluing the moral choices made by people who decide to train in the fields of science and technology in order to serve people in the world. That spectacularly misses the point at issue, and saddles me with the queer view that belongs properly to the conceptions and institutions and conventions I am at pains to uproot. I shall try again. It is not I who argues that the world is without objective value and intrinsic meaning, that is the dominant view of science since the scientific revolution overthrew Aristotle and teleology and vitalism, and there are countless scientists who sing hallelujah in being reminded of that triumph. And here is the point, since the world is said to be lacking in objective value and intrinsic meaning, moral philosophers such as J. L. Mackie (and there are many more expressing this dominant view) are quite right to sneer disdainfully at the ‘queerness’ of the view that the world might contain values. Mackie thus questions how objective values could relate to or co-exist with those characteristics revealed by natural science; the means by which we could come to know of them; and what possible relevance they could have to our existence (Mackie 1977:38/42). That’s the dominant view, that’s the Weberian world we are in. And I point out the ‘queerness’ of that world, which renders the clearly good intentions and moral choice individuals make to serve the good of others in the world non-rational, subjective, and no more right than the choices of other individuals to serve only their self-interest. I could state this simply. To be meaningful, choice means picking, through a considered deliberation, between alternatives which are significantly different from each other, better or worse according to certain qualities which can be judged by some standard outside of them. It follows that meaningful choices have causes which relate a predilection or preference to objective qualities. Actions based on choices lacking such causes would merely be arbitrary. As Mary Midgley argues: 'A being which was all will and no natural tastes could no more use its freedom than a blob of plastic jelly.' ‘Queer’ indeed. I trust I have made myself clear. The issue cannot be made any clearer than that. There is something wrong with dominant conceptions of rationality that make what intuitively and instinctively and emotionally seem such right and good and moral choices mere expressions of personal preference, of no more significance than the choices of other individuals.

I have focused on Weber’s ethics of responsibility. But the same points apply to the existentialists’ attempt to create meaning in a meaningless world. It is self-defeating. The choices, whatever they are, can never have meaning, not in the sense of being rationally justified.

I make an issue of this because there is a certain defensiveness and sensitivity when it comes to scientists and technologists and engineers, as if their work is being denigrated and their motivations are being impugned, but there is no concern at all with respect to those who take morality seriously. Let me put it this way, imagine if I was to make a statement that there is no scientific knowledge, that science is really only a matter of opinions and judgments, with no rational way of separating truth from falsehood. There would be outrage at such a nonsensical statement, and rightly so. And yet, the very same people, quick to protest at the denigration of scientific truth, would not see much of an issue if I was to say that there is no such thing as moral truth, that morality is merely about value judgments. That’s the statement I find upsetting. It really amounts to a sidelining of morality, reducing it to the status of arguments over favourite football teams, pop songs, food and beer, a mere matter of taste which can never be rationally settled. And that amounts to a disabling of morality. There are no good reasons to take it seriously. It is a view designed to silence moral criticism. And I don’t like it one bit. And I will oppose those who thus seek to silence morality, or make it secondary to other things, an unintended consequence of other actions.

People take it for granted that you have to work hard for science and scientific knowledge. When it comes to ethics – insofar as people don’t vomit or reach for a gun at the mere mention of the word – they think it is easy and comes naturally and no-one has to work at it. All schoolboys know the difference between right and wrong …. Yup, it’s kids’ stuff, and anyone who needs more than kiddie level knowledge is plainly an immoral character in need of instruction. Actually, character formation and moral practices within social formation are much harder to achieve than scientific knowledge, explanation, and training, and it’s for want of the former relative to an excess of the latter that this civilisation will perish. It’s an advanced malady, clearly.

And scientists and technicians are not the innocents many like to claim. They have been involved from the first in the blinkering of vision. Let’s not take anyone’s claims of good intentions at face value. We don’t do it in politics and religion, and I see no reason to do it in science. Read the words of Francis Galton justifying eugenics. He argued that a eugenics policy would result in the human species becoming ‘less foolish, less frivolous, and politically more provident than now. Its demagogues who 'played to the gallery' would play to a more sensible gallery than at present. We should be better fitted to fulfil our vast imperial opportunities. Lastly, men of an order of ability which is now very rare would become more frequent, because, the level out of which they rose would have itself risen.’ He presented eugenics as a new religion. ‘The improvement of our stock seems to me one of the highest objects that we can reasonably attempt. We are ignorant of the ultimate destinies of humanity, but feel perfectly sure that it is as noble a work to raise its level ... as it would be disgraceful to abase it. I see no impossibility in eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind.’ (Francis Galton, 'Eugenics: its definition, scope and aims', American Journal of Sociology 10.1 (1904).

It is important to underline the fact that eugenicists were not people motivated by evil, quite the contrary, they presented eugenics as an enlightened practice improving the human stock and eliminating needless suffering. In 1904, at the London Sociological Society, sociologist Benjamin Kidd raised some concerns with respect to eugenics: ‘It might renew, in the name of science, tyrannies that it took long ages of social evolution to emerge from. Judging from what one sometimes reads, many of our ardent reformers would often be willing to put us into lethal chambers, if our minds and bodies did not conform to certain standards.’ (Francis Gallon, 'Eugenics: its definition, scope and aims', American Journal of Sociology 10.1 (1904).

My point is this – we cannot take individual personal choices at face value, and conclude that these choices are good because a person’s intentions are good. In order to distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong, and hold individuals to account for their choices and actions, we need objective standards and criteria of moral evaluation. In their absence, these choices and actions are arbitrary and non-rational, there is no way of saying that this course of action or choice is better than another, what one individuals wants, likes and prefers is just as good as what another one wants, likes and prefers, so long as there is no harm.

Fact and Value – Putting Theoretical Reason and Practical Reason Together

I’m a stern moralist? I think truth matters. I think morality matters. And when I describe morality as the field of practical reason I mean precisely that – morality is rational, an applied science capable of yielding moral knowledge, knowledge we can come to have and act upon, assimilate into our characters and our lives, guiding our actions and enabling us to make the right choices.

We are heading for a 4C temperature increase, at least, on the planet and with that will come the collapse of the basis of civilised life on earth. There are reasons for that, and searching for them is not for sensitive souls. The great liberation of mechanistic Newtonian science disenchanted the world, promised heaven on earth – Robert Boyle’s ‘empire of man’ - and proceeded to kick the biosphere over the cliff, never to return. Sorry for the bluntness, but such things are beyond good manners. In that context, I’m letting no-one off the hook.

I don’t see any way out of this. First order arguments are logical, you can say ‘yes’ to them, they are true, simple as that; second order arguments are ideological in that they involve political and moral commitments and so you can keep on saying ‘yes/no’ to them without end. The obvious conclusion is that the first arguments are stronger than the second. They are. I like the argument. It is appealing in its simplicity and its force. The problem is that the first argument deals with the simpler stuff, the second argument deals with human beings. So it is a conclusion that merely brings us back to the original problem of how to relate statements of fact and statements of value, how to bring the world together, how to effect the transition from theoretical reason (knowledge of external reality) to practical reason (the world of politics and ethics, the social world we live in). The ‘real’ world is not just some physical datum, it is a social world, and that world is indeed a ‘yes/no’ world divided between identities and interests. To repeat a point I made at the beginning, morality is about human persons, not machines, and to expect human affairs to have the precision and certainty of the sciences of things is to be guilty of an inhumanism. So I keep trying to do the really difficult thing and show how the logical and ideological may, or may not, mesh. At risk of being boring, but I shall repeat this again, there is an objective reality and there is an objective truth about that world. Knowledge of that world is possible and science is at the heart of gaining that knowledge and learning that truth. The transition from theoretical to practical reason I talk about involves a practical recognition and understanding and embedding of that objective truth in the social world. I therefore stand firmly by the idea of objective truth concerning an objective reality, a real world that is independent of human concerns and interests. At the same time, for the same reasons, I affirm that there is such a thing as moral truth, an objective morality, and that it is possible to come to recognise and live in accordance with this morality. That, it would seem, is the most contentious part. There are many on this planet who would prefer not to know truths that impinge upon their desires, dreams and delusions. We see that clearly with respect to the denial of scientific facts concerning climate change. But those truths are also moral truths, and here we see denialism of epidemic proportions. Rendering morality merely a matter of value judgments is a way of making morality merely a private concern and, as such, of no public significance. It’s a silencing of the moral voice, and I will continue to protest it. For so long as the worlds of fact and value remain detached from each other, the fate of human civilisation is imperilled.

So I argue for putting the worlds of fact and value together. That, I have come to appreciate, is well-nigh impossible when scientists and those of a scientific persuasion continue to denigrate, devalue or dismiss ethics and politics as secondary considerations, full of murk and bias, ignorance, prejudice and stupidity, and continue to argue for science and fact alone as capable of doing the work of practical reason. It cannot, and failure to overcome the impasse with seal the fate of the human race. It is the field of practical reason which shapes the way in which we live, that determines how we assimilate and use knowledge and know-how. Those who maintain this fact-value distinction – and that is the convention of the age – dismiss my approach as a deviation from fact and logic for moral and political reasons. But the failure to bridge those knowledge/action/policy/practices gaps will send us to oblivion. I know the response back to my words – I am peddling fear, making threats, engaging in bullying and blackmailing, because the arguments I make are neither compelling or cogent. I can say no more.

There are deniers of science out there. The interesting thing to note is how prevalent the denial of ethics is and the extent to which this is not even seen as a problem. Ethics is somehow read as following information, knowledge and enlightenment – as a secondary consequence of science in other words. And it’s delusions like that that will doom the species. More peddling of fear, I know. But, denied a rational voice, what option do I have as a moralist?

But let me take this anti-science accusation head-on, because this is a delusion that needs dispelling once and for all. I continually point to an external reference/objective reality, which is the basic defence of science and the scientific method, as against plural ‘ways of knowing.’ For the alternative to that ‘objective’ view, check the discursive turn in cultural theory! Good grief, a notion that is right at the centre of all the social constructivist drivel that makes science merely one form of knowing, embedded in power and culture. Read Sokal et al, people I have quoted favourably at length for what they say about the discursive turn. I’ve spent my entire life against rootless and fruitless word-spinning. You know, boring old Aristotle and his principle of non-contradiction. It wasn’t very fashionable, at least not when I was trying to make my way. I was very much aware of having to swim against the irrationalist tide. Imagine looking at the notice boards at coming presentations and events and seeing all manner of exotic and esoteric theory to come. I couldn’t understand a word of it, and so felt inadequate and stupid. Until I realised that since I understood Plato and Aristotle, Kant, Habermas and many others, this other stuff I couldn’t comprehend was … well … incomprehensible. Grandiloquent phrases concealing a poverty of thought. Gibberish in fact. I’ll take no lectures at all on being anti-science. I’ve had enough experience of people spinning complicated but intellectually empty theories in various ‘studies’ departments to last a lifetime. I damned it as a scarcely reasoned nihilism then, and I will continue so to do.

Here’s Nietzsche, whom many intellectuals and leftists adore:

"Science, along with morality and religion, is to be understood, not in terms of objective truth and falsity, but in terms of the aspirations, projects, hopes and fears of its proponents. The scientific picture of the world is an expression of a particular kind of will to power, and to seek objective guarantees of its veracity is a timid evasion."

That is an explicit denial of an objective truth and morality about an objective reality that is independent of human creation, convention and will. When I quote Nietzsche, I do so not to argue that he is right, but to argue that he reveals a truth about the social world we live in, a world that is unmoored and unanchored in objective truths. That world is a world of sophists cut adrift from transcendent norms, values and truths. You can’t have them, says Nietzsche. Hume stands without refutation. Kant tried and gave us the true, the good and the beautiful as projections of reason. But upon what is this reason based? Only itself, and the fact that it is shared with others and therefore possesses a certain objectivity. Id that enough? I don’t think so.

Nietzsche’s statement subverts science’s claim to check claims against a reality that is in some way independent of concepts, discourses, values. I quote Nietzsche in order to say he was right about a society that has lost its external reference points/objective bearings – religious, moral AND scientific (people love Nietzsche’s quote about the death of God, but fail to appreciate how much Nietzsche is saying is dead with respect to objective truth) - but wrong about reality and knowledge. No good or bad, no right or wrong, no truth or falsehood, only perspectives says Nietzsche. THAT, for me, states the problem and predicament of the modern world, a nihilism without ends. I’m not arguing that this is the world as such. Timeless truths remains timeless truths, whether we recognise them or not. Bidden or unbidden, God is always present, as that old phrase of Erasmus, rediscovered by Jung, puts it. But a world of self-legislated reason is a human world. And that is a self-made social world in which reason – now identified with scientific and instrumental rationality - undercuts its own grounds. And, yes, behind this rationalisation is commodification and quantification, both – capitalist relations and determinist materialist metaphysics (atomism/accidentalism) hand in hand.

No matter about the truth or otherwise, it doesn’t seem to matter if all or none of it is true; we live, after all, in a postmodern world, where the message is everything, and, at the same time, for the same reason, nothing.

If truth is all about perspectives – Nietzsche’s view beyond good and evil – then why shouldn’t it be subservient to political and corporate power, to ideological commitments, to eugenicist programmes, religious bigotry, wishful thinking? What possible reason can there be for thinking that any of it matters if Nietzsche is right and that, instead of objectivity and scientific and moral truth, there is nothing but particular wills to power? All the good intentions and personal choices to do good in the world do nothing to alter the demoralised, disenchanted terrain on which those choices are made. Where worlds of fact and value are separated to the devaluation of the latter, then all those personal choices are empty; they are merely subjective and non-rational. And this is a clear case of reason undercutting its own grounds, for once morality becomes a non-rational domain, then there is no rational basis for defending the value of scientific truthseeking. There’s the malaise, and it is institutionalised. Just dismissing it as a non-problem opens the doors to all manner of ersatz collectivities and would-be-saviours and prophets.

Objective Reality and Objective Truth

In my own time in academia, I tried to impress the social and cultural theory department with Plato. They were singularly unimpressed. Naively, I was trying to make a good impression. Uncomfortable amongst lecturers, people who were skilled at teaching, I really tried my best to show what I really could do. And Plato was my chosen philosopher. He was probably the worst choice I could have made. Deconstructionist ways of thinking and writing were ascendant; truth, objective or any other kind, was out of fashion. To argue that philosophy might have something meaningful and rational to say about the human condition was to be guilty of a naive 'metaphysics of presence'. Or, worse, some lust for power. Philosophy was the domain of dead white males. I was white, I was male, but at least I wasn’t dead. I thought I had a chance. But deconstruction was the 'paradigmatic theory of the age'. And I was not part of it. I was naïve in holding that there was such a thing as truth, as distinct from Truth in intimidating authoritative capital letters or ‘truth’ in boo-word inverted commas. Simple soul as I am, I pursued truth. And I called my thesis ‘Rational Freedom’, in the belief – a value I consider to be rational – that there is a connection between reason and freedom, that the more we are guided by reason, the more we are free.

I learned that rational freedom is not a view that is sexy enough for academia. To get on, you had to play the Theory game. What’s this? Let David Lehman explain. He recalls being told at a Modern Language Association (MLA) convention for literature scholars, that: ‘If you want to make it in the criticism racket, you have to be a deconstructionist or a [cultural] Marxist or a feminist. Otherwise you don't stand a chance. You're not taken seriously. It doesn't matter what you know or don't know. What counts is your theoretical approach. And this means knowing jargon, and who's in and who's out.’

Armed with Plato and Aristotle, what chance did I have? I had Marx, true, but the Marx I argued for, was an essentialist, as someone who believed in a distinction between appearance and reality, who held that a thing was something essentially and essentially something, who believed in such a thing as human nature, and who even used the word truth without putting it in capital letters or inverted commas. And now a wealth of books in my area coming out affirming the existence of transcendent norms and truths! I have been ignored, but now feel somewhat vindicated. But now get abused of being against science and technology!

Here is something I wrote in Being at One, a statement that affirms the value of science.

“Astronomer Martin Rees “considers it important to acknowledge the aston­ishing bounty science has heaped upon us. 'We are safer than ever before,' he says. We should be concerned by the real threats that confront us, but we should appreciate the fact that 'for most people in the world, there's never been a better time to be alive.'

‘Proof of this fundamental truth can be found in countless statistics and reports. Or we can simply spend an afternoon reading the monuments to our good fortune erected in every Victorian cemetery.’ (Gardner 2009 ch 12).

The point is this, whatever the nature of the threats and crises that face us, we are better placed to meet them than any generation before us has been when facing their problems. But our problems are greater, comes the response. Greater than the Black Death, Fall of Rome, the war against Hitler? We have immense material resources and technological powers and communications, global connections, expert knowledge in the full range of disciplines. What on Earth is stopping us? The politics of fear saps the energy and steals the future from us.”

That’s what I wrote in Being at One. So why do I take the line I do? A line that is critical, of science and reason and … everything? Is Weberian disenchantment indulging in what I call the ‘politics of fear’ in the above quote? It could be. And I probably go too far. But it’s not the fear that’s the important bit, it’s the realities that need to be brought to the surface.

Beauty and Truth – And Hard Truths about False Realities

I can cite any number of scientists and rationalists who would accuse me of peddling non-problems as the politics of fear. Try the atheist argument of Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom in Why Truth Matters 2006 (a book that gives postmodernism, deconstruction and other assorted irrationalisms and nihilisms a sound thrashing as well as religion).

“Is there anything very emancipatory about this sort of blind alley? Where we confuse the scariness of suggested dangers with the likelihood of their reality? Where alarmist jeremiads of this sort rely on brazen mischaracterizations of science that go uncorrected? Not in our view. Epicurus and Lucretius thought of their project as emancipatory: liberating the Hellenistic Greeks and the Romans from irrational, unnecessary fears of gods that either didn't exist or didn't meddle with humans, and death that no one experiences because the dead don't experience anything. The postmodernist project all too often seems rooted in an opposite impulse: not to liberate people from unnecessary illusory fears, but to generate new ones, and having generated them, magnify and entrench them. To tell spooky stories about power, regimes, authority, status, elites, expertise, that can sound bizarrely like paranoiac ravings about Freemasons and Illuminati. To tell heart-rending stories about disenchantment, alienation, reductionism, materialism, and the murder of spirituality, poetry, meaning, wonder, that make one feel as if attending the death of Tinkerbell. Fears created and magnified rather than debunked and dissipated. Is that emancipatory?”

It’s a view that renders power and knowledge benign, the only problems come from the peddlers of ideological illusions. You see, there’s never been a better time to be alive. Marx on the left, Weber on the right, and the madman Nietzsche nowhere, just a load of deluded ideologues. I just have a feeling that … things might not be so simple.

“Rhetoric is not emancipatory because it represents the replacement of truth by will.”

Does anyone really think that I do that? I do emphasise the importance of willing the truth, but that is a very different notion indeed.

Try the full quote – I can multiply a million of these from people who assert science as the arbiter of truth and everything else as made up mythologies.

“Rhetoric is not emancipatory because it represents the replacement of truth by will. It is a Rube Goldberg contraption: a feeble contrivance of duct-tape and paper clips linking is to ought. But truth and will are two entirely different kinds of thing; will can do a lot, but it cannot determine what the truth is. A world in which people decide (wilfully) to pretend that it can, may be a lot of things -unified, reassuring, simplified - but emancipated is surely not one of them. That world is the Vatican's dream-world, where the pope declares what is true about anything he is moved to declare on, and his subjects accept that without further investigation. Mind-forg'd manacles, in short.

In the end, this boils down to preferences. Even the preference for a world where the lies of genocidal tyrannies are eventually corrected is still ultimately a preference. A highly reasonable, well-grounded preference, but still a preference. If we didn't have minds and emotions, and the moral thoughts that go with them, mass slaughters would just be something that happened, like rain.” (Benson and Stangroom 2006 ch 8).

I love how they quote Blake – only to abuse him later. “But scientists with real experience of enquiry and discovery think that Blake, Keats and Wordsworth were simply wrong, and that so are their contemporary avatars.”

My point is that the raising of scientific rationality as the only form of rationality and the concomitant devaluation of morality as non-rational subjective preference/value judgements leaves the very ‘preferences’ the authors justify here without a rational basis. It’s a view that undercuts its own ground. That’s the problem I deal with – a rootless and fruitless knowledge that goes nowhere its apostles want it to go, regardless of their good intentions, choices and preferences.

And I'm not so sure that the Romantic poets were so wrong either. I'll come back to Keats later.

‘Every religion, practically every philosophy, and even some of science, all bear witness to the tireless, heroic and desperate effort of humanity to negate the contingency of its own existence.’

—Jacques Monod

I select Monod here deliberately, because he presents the conventional view clearly and directly. His is the extreme view, but it is backed by countless other scientists. It is this view from the world of science that empties the world of meaning and significance and strips objective morality of its natural – and supernatural – grounds. It is an austere faith in which the ‘heroic and desperate’ effort of humanity to discover meaning must take the form of an heroic despair that accepts that we live in a meaningless universe:

‘Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings and his crimes.’

Monod (1972), p. 160.

A clear statement of disenchantment, one that leaves us shorn of grounds for a shared moral code. All that there could be is a non-rational ethics of personal choice. And that is precisely what Max Weber offered in his ethics of responsibility. And that, I argue, is not only the collapse of morality as a system of shared morality capable of uniting, inspiring and obligating individuals in collective action – morality, that is, as capable of performing an integrating and orienting function in social life – it is the collapse of private morality too. For regardless of one’s personal choice and any meaning it may confer on individual life, that choice is empty and lacking in content. There is no objective reference point to make any personal choice meaningful or true or right.

Monod states the view that science strips the world of the mysteries upon which metaphysics and other non-scientific speculation has been parasitic.

‘Developments in molecular biology over the past two decades have singularly narrowed the domain of the mysterious, leaving little open to vitalist speculation but the field of subjectivity: that of consciousness itself. There is no great risk in predicting that also in this area, for the time being still "reserved," such speculation will prove as sterile as in all the others where it has been practised up to now.’

Monod (1972), p. 37

It’s not a view that I like but, of course, truth isn’t always beauty, and it can hurt. Either truth matters, or it doesn’t. Do we continue to prefer millenary dreams and wishful thinking to hard truths about hard realities? There is no purpose in the world, so we have to write it into life, and proceed to live in accordance with the ends we set ourselves. Such is Kant’s solution. Weber is a neo-Kantian, and his ethics of responsibility show how Kant’s universalism and intersubjectivism can easily fracture into subjectivism. Shorn of grounds in ontological nature, not to mention supernatural sanction, we are unmoored and adrift. From the standpoint of mechanistic and reductionist science, both traditional animism and the kind of modern organicism that I favour (the process philosophy of A.N. Whitehead I love), are mere projections of the qualities and purposes of human life onto the meaningless inanimate world around us. And such projections are invalid. This is the ‘pathetic fallacy.’ As Monod puts it, organicism and dialectical materialism and all such human systems to find meaning in the universe are forms of animist belief, a belief which ‘consists essentially in a projection into inanimate nature of man's awareness of the intensely teleonomic functioning of his own nervous system.’ Such belief, Monod states bluntly, is invalid. We have no option but to face the hard truth, we are on our own, mere accidents in a meaningless universe.

At this point, I cannot but think of the words of Lewis Mumford. ‘If human life has no purpose and meaning, then the philosophy that proclaims this fact is even emptier than the situation it describes. If, on the other hand, there is more to man's fate and history than meets the eye, if the process as a whole has significance, then even the humblest life and the most insignificant organic function will participate in that ultimate meaning.’ (Mumford 1952: 61/62). That view is my view. It is a belief, and I make no bones about expressing it as such. Which is precisely why I make such an issue of challenging the reduction of morality to a series of non-rational, subjective, value judgments. Because I think that the belief I express here is a value capable of rational justification. It is, in other words, more than a like, a preference, a dream, an illusion or an example of wishful thinking.

And it is more than a ‘necessary presupposition’ upon which all significant, meaningful human action depends (although it is also that).

I love the work of Kant. Kant sought a way out of the problem with his rational system of ethics. For Kant, transcendent norms are not given in nature but are projections of reason. Reason is innate to all human beings and is therefore universal, meaning that such projection of reason is capable of generating objective grounds.

My view on Kant’s solution is that it involves created truths. Once he sets up rationality and the universal law, Kant refers to God, the immortal soul and free-will as ‘necessary presuppositions’ of moral action. He can’t prove these things, and he is explicit that his approach puts an end to the errors of metaphysical speculation. But he cannot dispense with such things. So he offers them as ‘necessary presuppositions.’ I can see why he needs them. I can’t see how he can offer good reasons for anyone to accept them. Intellectually, as a philosophical system, Kant’s solution begs the big question. The symbolical anthropomorphism by which we come to see God as a human invention, a powerful symbol we create to serve our own ends, relativizes the absolute and absolutizes the relative. Kant’s symbolischer anthropomorphismus involves a projectional fallacy, as do all human constructions of truth, value and meaning.

In the view of mechanistic, reductionist science, life is merely a cosmic accident lacking in meaning and significance. As Monod put it, ‘the Universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man.’ Monod concluded his book Chance and Necessity (1970) with the conclusion that follows from such a view:

‘Man knows at last that he is alone in the Universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.’

Makes you feel good, doesn’t it? Paradigms and standpoints and worldviews are the very things that mould and fashion societies and civilisations. Mentalities and modalities go hand in hand. Now just imagine what kind of social order would be erected on the basis of that bleak vision of Monod (and remember that his view expresses a dominant view).

Nobel prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg is another scientist who presents this world-as-meaningless view. In The First Three Minutes (1977), his account of in the history of the uni­verse, he recollects an airplane journey in which he contemplated the Earth he observed, concluding: ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.’

I can challenge the view by pointing to the work of other scientists. Take Freeman Dyson, another physicist, who wrote in Disturbing the Universe (1979): ‘The more I examine the uni­verse and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.’

You see, folks, reliance upon science can get us so far, but no further. Here are two top of the range scientists, with impeccable credentials and careers in the same branch of science, who know as much as anyone knows about the universe upon which they comment – and they draw diametrically opposed conclusions about the universe. Settling disputes over facts is the easy part; when it comes to the implications of those facts for the way human beings see the world and live their lives, science can inform, but it cannot decide. So what can decide?

In High Flight, poet and aviator John Gillespie Magee Jr (1922-1941) described flying high above the earth in terms reminiscent of Dante’s wheeling and circling around in the Empyrean, an image of a deeper journey into the soul:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air...

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark or even eagle flew --

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

That’s not a view that would command much respect from those who want naturalist explanations. And I’m not even sure it is a view that would appeal to religious folk. I mean, do we actually know where to find the face of God? I take the view we can see God in the face of the other. And that other is people, places, things, everywhere, nowhere, wherever. But here’s the problem, if we take the natural sciences as our best, even our only, rational check against reality, then we face an impasse. I have just quoted two eminent scientists working in the same field, looking at the same thing, and drawing two entirely different conclusions. We are left having to make a choice as to which view we find more plausible, which makes more sense. And that choice cannot be one made by science alone. That is a moral choice. And in a situation in which moral choices can only be made on a non-rational basis, the issue remains unresolved. That leaves us choosing in terms of which view makes most sense of our lives. And, paradoxically, that means that the exaltation of scientific rationality as the only or dominant form, rendering morality non-rational and subjective, allows religion and religious ethics back in. If there are no rational grounds for choosing right and wrong, good and bad, then there are no reasons to exclude religious ethics. In fact, at this level, there are more reasons to embrace a religion that offers hope in a meaningful universe than there are to accept a science that offers only heroic despair in a meaningless universe.

Weinberg, in the book cited above, refers to human life as ‘just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes’ and of Earth as ‘just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe.’ It shouldn’t surprise any of us that living under the shadow of such a science that we stand in front of the ecological abyss. The world is nothing and life is meaningless, there is no larger purpose than hedonistic selfish satisfaction. Let’s loot the planet for our own personal gratification while we can, because nothing matters. No wonder the central dynamo of modern society is a global heat machine that is burning up the planet. Greed filling upon the hollow hole of the human heart with material quantities is likewise eating up the planet. No, I don’t like this view of science, I don’t like it one bit, and if I am told to grow up and recognise hard truths rather than embrace millenary dreams, I’ll deliver a few hard truths myself.

My views go back to Aristotle, a biologist, the world’s first scientist, as the new book by Armand Leroi makes clear. And Aristotle thought that his work in biology had clear implications for ethics and politics. On this basis, I question the modern philosophical convention deriving from Hume that distinguishes between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought-to-be’, and in this manner I challenge the view that natural science has nothing to say about ethics. I believe there is such a thing as moral truth, and I think that the natural sciences have plenty to offer in determining that truth. But ethics is ethics, and it stands on its own independent resources. Aristotle was clear on this point. This view is not, however, conventional, and most will recognise a fact-value dualism, holding that once we move from facts to their meaning and significance, then we exit the realm of science. I challenge that view and I challenge the dualism it rests upon. In leaving the domain of science, on this view, we enter the domain of morality. And here is where we see the problem in the context of the fact-value distinction. For the realm of morality is the realm of value judgments, irreducible subjective opinion lacking objective standards capable of settling moral issues. That means that there are no non-rational ways of settling questions of meaning and significance. That leaves us mired in a world split between harsh truths and millenary dreams, heroic despair and pathetic delusions. Between Weinberg’s view and Dyson’s view, I prefer Dyson’s. And in light of that preference I can go and search out the science that supports that view. But that does not mean that that preference is firmly grounded in science. It means that I have made an ethical choice and found the supporting evidence with which to back it up – and in the present context, that choice on my part is a non-rational subjective choice.

Can you see where I’m going? I am concerned not merely to challenge mechanistic, reductionist science with another view of science, that is not the main issue, and settles nothing with respect to the status and character of morality. I am concerned, too, then, to reclaim morality as a meaningful, rational system of shared meaning and universalizability, something capable of orienting society and commanding general respect and appeal.

My own work is concerned to challenge the fallacies of mechanistic, reductionist science, the hard truths concerning the inanimate, purposeless, meaningless universe peddled in the name of science. I am not a scientist, so I will take a risk here in exercising judgment – I say that the premises of this scientific doctrine are fallacious, and that this science takes the form of an ideology that delivers us into the hands of the megamachine, a bogus metaphysics and a bogus religion of false idols and machine gods. In the very least, the natural parameters within which chance and contingency operates are such that evolution in the di­rection of increasing complexity was almost certain to happen.

Monod's view that ‘the Universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man’ is plain wrong, factually and logically. Since life is present in the universe, the universe must have been pregnant with life. However else could we have got here? I look at Monod’s statement here and can make sense of it only by proposing two virgin births – which I am sure is not what atheist Monod had in mind at all. All this effort to shy away from intelligent design gives us the miracles of supernatural origin.

There is a French proverb that I found in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers: ‘The most beautiful girl in the world can give no more than what she has.’ Or, to put it another way, whatever that beautiful girl gives, she could only have had to begin with. We can see what we have, and we can safely conclude that the universe had it to give all along – life, agency, meaning, purpose, will, consciousness. These things characterise the nature and the life we have now, therefore, we can conclude, the universe must have had them in potential or emergent form, ever since the Big Bang. As to what that fact signifies in terms of origins and ends and intelligence and purpose and direction .. we have science, philosophy and religion to fight it out through conceptual means. But there is a reality beyond that axiological extension, an uncontained and uncontainable excess that is core.

This is my view – that human being are co-creators at work within a ceaselessly creative universe. That’s my view. That’s the view of Stuart Kauffman, who describes nature’s endless creativity as ‘God enough.’ Is it? Those who take the view that nature is purposeful, animate, meaningful, creative and participatory, containing life within it, argue that it is. And there are scientists who develop this view. I give the question continuous thought, and time and again I come back to the self-defeating fallacies of created truths, pointing to the need for an ethics that is (relatively) independent of nature and therefore in some sense transcendent.

I have a book by Robert Hinde called Why Good is Good (2002). It offers a view of morality that is informed by natural sciences. It argues that human nature is such that human beings are to organize their values and behaviour as if we were guided by certain basic principles, some of which are concerned with cooperation in order to help others, some of which are concerned with advancing self-interest. Hinde argues that these tendencies are present in all humans and are therefore pan-cultural. The moral precepts and conventions that stem from these foundations, and which order life in a society, gain their specific shape in time and place as a result of mutual influ­ences between ideas about what people ought to do and what people actually do. Hinde concludes: ‘This approach carries the implication that there is no need to search for a transcendental source for morality …’ With a naturalistic explanation, there is no need for transcendent sources. Such is the claim. This also follows from the arguments of the likes of Kauffman and Owen Flanagan. The thesis seems reasonable. I shall present it as Hinde presents it.

‘There is no implication that moral precepts are simply there in our biological heritage or in our experience: both are essential. Thus it will be argued that moral codes are constructed, maintained, transmitted and amended by humans interacting with each other, and thus depend on human nature (in the restricted sense discussed below) and on experience in the physical, psychological and cultural environments of development. If this thesis is accepted, it renders unnecessary any appeal to a transcendental source.’ (Hinde 2002 ch 2).

That does seem reasonable. But here is my problem with all such arguments (and the same applies to Kauffman’s notion of taking morality into our own hands through a view of God as a human invention, a powerful symbol that we have responsibility to use wisely). The recognition that all human values are (self-) created values begs the question of their universal content and assent, that is, of the objective standard or criterion by which all values are determined, evaluated and justified. How can moral principles, precepts and codes that are self-consciously created or constructed in this way be justified? That is not to deny the fact of moral action, behaviour and choice. Human beings will behave morally in accordance with their innate and universal moral grammar. That’s not the issue. The issue is the status of moral principles, precepts and codes – the content of moral values and choices and the standards by which they can be rationally justified (and not just asserted or preferred as a matter of interest). Hinde, having promised so much, completely flunks the question:

‘it is sufficient to take the view that their justifi­ability, which implies an arbiter or an outside standard, is in a sense irrelevant to the question of why moral codes are as they are, and why they differ between cultures; what matters here is how they came to be accepted by the members of the society in question.’ (Hinde 2002: ch 2).

I can agree with every word here, and do argue for education and socialisation and the embedding of morality in the practices, habits and customs in the forms of the common life. That’s how we practise morality. But that begs the question as to just what this morality is. It is for this reason that I quibble when I come across a biological or naturalist approach – with which I agree to a very great extent – which claims that it is able to dispense with transcendent standards. Time and again, I find that it has evaded the question or denied its importance. Hinde finally returns to this, the key question, in the final chapter of the book. As with Kauffman and Flanagan, Hinde is strong on naturalist explanation for moral behaviour, weak on the content and justification of moral principles, precepts and codes. Human beings develop and practise morality, and here are the naturalist reasons why. As to content and justification …. it is obvious we need ethics for that. So when I get people of a scientific persuasion telling me (and they do) that morality is simply the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, which every school boy and girl knows by the age of eight, I know that they are still failing to see the point at issue. One just has a moral sense, it’s as simple as that. This view, which is an all too typical response in an age that has lost the capacity to deal seriously with moral thought, is hardly very helpful, in that it merely repeats as fact that we all know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, whilst leaving unstated just precisely what we mean by right, wrong, good, bad. That moral complacency, I suggest, arises from a time that has lost its objective foundations and frameworks and is ‘beyond good and evil’ in identifying morality in personal choices and value judgments. My preference, my like, my want, my morality. Which leaves the issue wide open as to what happens when there is disagreement between individuals as to just it is that constitutes pleasure, knowledge and virtue, let alone the wicked problems that arise through actions that yield immediate pleasure for individuals but which may prove to be harmful, even lethal, for all in the long run. But, yes, we all have a moral sense. That’s a start. There is an innate and universal moral grammar say biologists. St Paul in Romans calls it the moral law written on every heart. We can argue over origins. That’s not quite the important point at issue here, however. I want to identify any commonalities in actions that are subjectively perceived to be good in order to provide a connection between intuitive understandings and objective standards. Why? Because without that common morality, that sense of a universal, binding truth that can be rationally identified and supported, there is no morality. By that somewhat extreme statement, I mean that not only will there be no morality in the public sense of orienting and guiding society from within, there will be no private morality. I take private morality not to be morality at all. There will be personal choices and decisions, but they will lack a moral quality in the sense of relating to others. Those choices and decisions will lack a significance outside of the individual agent, which means that they lack content even in personal terms.

I could just as easily say that every school boy and girl knows all about the world around them by the age of eight, and be just as blinkered and wrong. Knowledge that is expressed and not merely tacit requires effort, and that applies to morality as much as it does to science.

The French proverb I quoted from The Three Musketeers is accompanied by this comment from Dumas: ‘such as were only beautiful gave their beauty’.

In the words of Keats, Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, and that that is all we know on earth.

Arguing that ‘truth matters’, Benson and Stangroom take Keats to task: ‘Romantic poets had many virtues, but rigour of thought was not always one of them. It's hard to think of a less true generalization.’ The authors proceed to list an awful lot of hard truths with respect to life on earth, history's many instances of massacres, war crimes and ethnic cleansings, about which there is nothing remotely beautiful.

‘It is no great wonder then that we do not always love and embrace the truth. We suspect that at least part of the truth (in some times and places, nearly the whole of it) is that we are a nasty, short, brutal species with a strong taste for torture and murder, that whenever there is an opening we make serious sustained energetic efforts to eliminate whole branches of our own kind, that even in peaceful times we persecute and coerce and extort labour from each other, that anything the smallest bit admirable, disinterested, ameliorative about us is only a thin surface element, a bit of gold leaf or paint a millimetre deep, while the greedy murderous savage goes all the way down, to solid bedrock.’ (Benson and Stangroom 2006 ch 1).

Benson and Stangroom’s central thesis is that ‘truth matters’ and that truth trumps all other considerations, however harsh and upsetting. And they adopt an atheist position in delivering these hard truths. And bring us back to this idea that we live alone in this meaningless universe: ‘This truth or suspected truth is all the more unbeautiful in light of our situation. Thrown' into the world, as the existentialists liked to put it, with only each other - more of the brutal murder-prone primates - to call on for help.’ ‘So it could be said that we have good reason to hate and fear the truth; to resist and reject it in order to take refuge in more emollient, cheering, hopeful interpretations.’ No wonder, then, that the authors dismiss religion as a comforting illusion for the immature and cowardly.

‘Religion and related modes of thinking such as New Age, Wicca, paganism, the vaguely named 'spirituality', are where this outcome is most obvious. Public discourse features talk of God-shaped holes, of a deep human need for 'faith', of the longing for transcendence, of the despair and cosmic loneliness that results when God is doubted, and the like; and such talk has a tendency to be prescriptive rather than descriptive: to say, or imply, not 'people are happier when they believe in a deity, how sad there seems to be so little reason to think such a belief is true', but rather, 'people are happier when they believe in a deity, therefore it's wicked to say the deity isn't there', without apparently stopping to notice that there may be reasons to prefer true beliefs to false ones.’ (Benson and Stangroom 2006 ch 1).

This passage precisely sums up an entire book I have written on God, physics and the search for meaning. I put the argument more persuasively than this. But clear and concise thinking has the merit of highlighting stupidities, irrationalities and absurdities.

Or, maybe, I tentatively suggest, that, for all of Benson and Stangroom’s concern with truth trumping all things, they have a pretty narrow, stern and skewed view of truth. The hard truth about our unbeautiful reality reveals nothing about the beautiful world our behaviour perverts and destroys, and everything about that perversion and destruction. In other words, at risk of being sloppy thought, I’m with Keats and the poets on this, and I’m with the tradition that affirms the unity of the true, the good and the beautiful. “Seek truth and beauty together; you will never find them apart.” (Francis M. Cornford, "The Harmony of the Spheres," 27).

Robert Hinde is sensitive to the potential conflicts that open up in the search for scientific truth and its moral and social implications. ‘Most people see virtue in seeking after truth. But many (though by no means all) scientists now believe that there are certain lines of research that should not be pursued because their probable social consequences involve moral issues: the development of weapons of mass destruction is an obvious case in point. In many cases, however, the issues are not so clear. For example, the activities of scientists earnestly pursuing the truth about human nature have been decried because of the social implications that might be drawn from them. That bad science can be used for political ends was clearly demonstrated by Lysenko's advocacy of the inheritance of acquired characteristics in the USSR. But it is not only bad science that is susceptible to criticism because of its social implications. Clear examples here are attacks on the application of biological principles to human behaviour on the ground that they justify racism.’ In exploring the biological and psychological bases of morality, Hinde, therefore, recognises ‘the possibility that even good science can be misused.’ With respect to the examination of the psychological bases of religious systems, he writes that ‘some see scientific truth as an overriding good, others hold that it may undermine a religious orientation that brings peace of mind to many people.’

What is truth? We can only answer that question with reference to the object of truth. The truth of what? If we are just examining the physical truth of physical things, then matters are fairly straightforward. But what about ideas that art and culture and literature express certain truths about the human condition that are beyond statements of fact and logic? A dogmatic insistence that a form of truth appropriate to the natural sciences and the study of physical objects is applicable to human relations and experiences and actions can only be expected to cause upset, and not because people prefer millenary dreams and wishful thinking to truth, but because truth is a much more complicated, much richer thing than strictly scientific methods can contain.

Despair and Hope

If there are hard truths on this planet that human beings would prefer not to know, then something somewhere has gone badly wrong. That’s my hard truth for the likes of Benson and Stangroom. And I don’t see a belief in God as a comforting illusion protecting us from hard truths. I don’t have a jaundiced view of the world or of human beings. I see morality as being about joy and about giving thanks for the miracle of life. Jonathan Sacks challenges those, such as Bertrand Russell, who offer a heroic despair in order to counter the hard facts of facing up to life in a meaningless universe. In ‘A Free Man’s Worship’, Russell writes:

‘That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspi­ration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffold­ing of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's salvation henceforth be safely built.

A magnificent piece of writing, a tour de force. But Jonathan Sacks turns the words around to produce almost exactly the same peroration in praise of faith:

That man, despite being the product of seemingly blind causes, is not blind; that being in the image of God he is more than an accidental collocation of atoms; that being free, he can rise above his fears, and, with the help of God, create oases of justice and compassion in the wilderness of space and time; that though his life is short he can achieve immortality by his fire and heroism, his intensity of thought and feeling; that humanity too, though it may one day cease to be, can create before night falls a noonday brightness of the human spirit, trusting that, though none of our kind will be here to remember, yet in the mind of God, none of our achievements is forgotten - all these things, if not beyond dispute, have proven themselves time and again in history. We are made great by our faith, small by our lack of it. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding hope, can the soul's salvation be safely built. (Sacks, The Great Partnership 2006 ch 1).

The choice between the two views (of what is deep down the same thing, viewed from different perspectives) cannot be resolved at an ideological level or psychological level, nor in terms of rational proof or disprove. You can’t prove either view right, nor, as Kant demonstrated, can you disprove either view. All we can do here is apply Ockham’s razor – never multiply entities without reason – and see which arguments says the most with the least assumptions. Victory goes to the more parsimonious argument. And that favours Russell over Sacks. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as Carl Sagan said. It all goes back to William of Ockham. But David Hume is a good modern source for radical scepticism: ‘A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence’, and ‘No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.’ (Hume, David (1748). An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, chap. 10.4). Likewise, Laplace writes: ‘The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.’ Marcello Truzzi says: ‘An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.’ (Marcello Truzzi, On the Extraordinary: An Attempt at Clarification, Zetetic Scholar, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 11, 1978).

It is in these terms that Russell would counter Sacks’ rewriting of his unyielding despair through scientific knowledge as a transcendent hope based on faith in God. These views are central to the scientific method and the pursuit of truth. But … that emphasis on logical rigour, analytical clarity and facts yielded by sense data render us silent on so much that is central to human life and its meaning. Here, I can do no more than suggest that logical positivism and it’s stern demarcation of sense from non-sense is far from the last word on the world and the truth about it. And I shall offer Mikael Stenmark and his book ‘How to Relate Science and Religion’ (2004). Here, Stenmark shows that not everything in life is covered by a critical method limited to fact and logic, and that things that are not rational in those terms are not, thereby, irrational, but non-rational or arational – and no less significant in making for a meaningful and fulfilled life.

Yes, as Benson and Stangroom argue, this opens up the crack through which all manner of untruths may pour – it is the invitation to dream and fantasise, seek consolation in comforting myths, indulge in delusions, drown the truth in a mass of illusions. (This is the same Benson and Stangrom who accuse people such as I who argue in terms of alienation and disenchantment of peddling a ‘politics of fear’ …) I can only emphasise, with Stenmark, that there is no justification for the weakening, still less the overthrow, of empirical, rational and moral controls in making space for and in recognising the legitimate claims of the arational and non-rational. And, simply, being human is all about balancing these claims as human beings, without having to rely on the authority of the stern priests of scientific rectitude, rational correctness and moral probity. Logical positivism is not the arbiter of truth, things are not so simple and never will be. We need to take all things into consideration, weigh all things up, and decide: which view makes most sense of a meaningful, happy and fulfilled life. And that affirms a much larger and richer view of truth than is available on strict empirical and logical terms. Fact and logic, blinkering from the richness of human experience in the full and in the round, such rationalists put their faith and find their comfort in the monochrome. Ethical dilemmas cannot be resolved by mathematical formula or by statement of facts. But I know the response to that claim: Feynmann said 'Scientists need philosophers the way birds need ornithologists.’ Which just confirms to me that nature needs neither scientists nor philosophers parcelling up the world, naming and framing it, defining and categorising and archiving. At least Plato understood the world as a living, organic wholeness and was leary of all those who would divide it up. For William Ophuls in ‘Plato’s Revenge’, Plato was not just the great rationalist, he was a shaman. He argues that Plato has been greatly misunderstood as a rationalist, emphasising the mystical and shamanic dimensions of his thought and relating them to Daoist and Native American worldviews.

In my own work, I have presented Plato’s philosophy in terms of an organic or essentialist rationalism.

(https://www.academia.edu/3203135/The_Common_Ground_vol_2_Political_Ecology)

Plato incorporate the primal roots of Greek civilisation in his conception of creation which perceived the world to be a living organism. In Timaeus, he argues that the creator created ‘a single visible living being, containing within itself all living beings of the same natural order’ (Plato Timaeus, trans HDP Lee, Harmondsworth Penguin 1965:54 42-3). Plato thus offered a cosmological interpretation of the world as a single, living organism.

‘Desiring then, that all things should be good and nothing imperfect, the god took over all that was visible .. and brought it from disorder into order…

For the God, wishing to make this world most nearly like that intelligible thing which is best and in every way complete, fashioned it as a single, visible living creature .. with sense and reason.’

And from where we are standing now, on the brink of an ecological catastrophe, that objectively valuable world presented by Plato looks very appealing indeed. The important point to grasp is that Plato expressed a holistic conception of the world. Rather than a reductionism that broke the world down into parts, each to be parcelled out to a narrow specialism, Plato saw the whole picture. Plato thus recounts how the creator made:

this world a single complete whole, consisting of parts that are wholes, and subject neither to age nor disease. The shape he gave it was suitable to its nature. A suitable shape for a living being that was to contain within itself all living beings would be a figure that contains all possible figures within itself. Therefore he turned it into a rounded spherical shape… And he put soul in the centre and diffused it through the whole and enclosed the body in it. So he established a single spherical universe in circular motion, alone but because of its excellence needing no company other than itself, and satisfied to be its acquaintance and friend. His creation, then, for all these reasons, was a blessed god.

Plato 1965:44-5

In wondering who the birds have need of, I’d suggest they’d be appreciative of Plato’s view of a living organism.

But if I was forced to choose between hope and despair, I’d choose hope every time, in that it is of a piece with choosing life – insofar as life is a choice.

In 2000, T.C. Boyle published A Friend of the Earth, a novel set in 2025 in a California recently devastated by ecological collapse, where numerous animals have become extinct and rain falls heavily for the majority of the year.

‘Looking back’ he says ‘I should have probably moved the date forward to 2015. We live in a very different world to the one that 19C novelists lived in. It’s a godless world, without hope’. Boyle is gloomy in the extreme. ‘It’s all over. This planet is doomed. In a very short time, we’re probably not even going to have culture or art. We’re going to be living like we’re in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’.

So that’s where progress has brought us? This is how it ends. The loss of culture and art, a pervasive meaninglessness and hopelessness, the fall of civilisation, the destruction of nature, the end of life itself. Look at all these things and ask with John Ruskin: ‘Are they not what your machine gods have produced for you?' (John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, vol. I p 270).

With Lewis Mumford, I argue for hope, not a hope detached from realities and the means and motivations for acting well, but a hope that is grounded in life, visions, virtues (as qualities for successful living) and values. But, simply, in hope.

Without food man can survive for barely thirty days; without water for little more than three days; without air hardly for more than three minutes: but without hope he might destroy himself in an even shorter time.

Mumford 1952: 30

‘I never understood why it should be considered more courageous to despair than to hope. Freud said that religious faith was the comforting illusion that there is a father figure. A religious believer might say that atheism is the comforting illusion that there is no father figure, so that we can do what we like and can get away with: an adolescent's dream. Why should one be considered escapist and not the other? Why should God's call to responsibility be considered an easy option? Why should the belief, held by some on the basis of scientific determinism, that we have no free will and therefore no moral responsibility, not be considered the greatest escapism of them all?

There is absolutely nothing in science - not in cosmology or evolutionary biology or neuroscience - to suggest that the universe is bereft of meaning, nor could there be, since the search for meaning has nothing to do with science and everything to do with religion.’ (Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership ch 1).

Of course, there again is the key question – can science leave the domain of fact and make statements with respect to the meaning and significance of facts? I think it can, I think we can get past the is/ought dualism – and I also know that the area is nothing less than complicated and fraught with dangers. It involves much more than naturalist explanations of moral behaviour. It requires ethics. I don’t state my position the way Sacks does – I seek to bring philosophy, science and religion/ethics together rather than fight out a turf war between rival disciplines. But that conclusion ‘everything to do with religion’ follows from those accounts of science that picture us as living in a pointless, meaningless world, a world of hard facts and unpalatable truths, and voices that are silent on values.

That’s not my view. Sacks states the view from the other side of the divide. I want to end that divide between fact and value, science and ethics/religion. But Sacks does make an argument which shows why we can never dispense with transcendent truths, norms and values, for all of the attempts of those pursuing entirely naturalist explanations.

‘In ancient times the gods were at best indifferent, at worst actively hostile to humanity. Scientists like Jacques Monod and Steven Weinberg say the same about nature today, and within their own terms of reference they are right. Nature is sublimely indifferent to who we are and what we deserve. There is nothing moral about it; it carries no meaning within it. Myth and science in their different ways tell us how the parts are related. They cannot tell us what the totality means.

Only something or someone outside the universe can give meaning to the universe. Only belief in a transcendental God can render human existence other than tragic. Individual lives, even within a tragically configured universe, may have meaning, but life as a whole does not. Bertrand Russell was right. Take God out of the equation, and we are left with unyielding despair. On this he was more honest than most of his successors.’ (Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership 2011: 30).

Truth may well not make you happy, it can be hard and uncomfortable, say Benson and Stangroom. Laying myself open to charges of sloppy thinking, I say that if it’s not beautiful, then it isn’t true. But here is the place at which I am in danger of leaving the world of truth for the world of wishful thinking. If the parameters of truth are set by the strict terms of logical positivism – statements of empirical fact and logic, with all outside of these as non-sense, then I live in a world of nonsense. But here I return to Wittgenstein’s well known argument from the Tractatus: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ (Tractatus 7). And I repeat, it is the silent bit that is the most meaningful and the most important. The limits of your reason and your philosophy are not the limits of life and its living.

Beyond Naming and Framing

Is there meaning in the world? Is there purpose, is there an end? Human beings would like a happy ending, a story that makes life and its little ups and downs worthwhile. As a lover of Dante’s Comedy, I can only answer in the affirmative. I think the world and the meaning of life (how naïve to think there is such a thing!) amounts to more than statements of fact and logic. There’s more to life and its living than is dreamt of in logical positivism, Horatio. Shakespeare knew. Dante knew. The poets know. Or, I should say, the poets ‘know’.

From ‘The Ancient Sage’

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

IF thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive

Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,

There, brooding by the central altar, thou

May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,

By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise,

As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;

For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake

That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there

But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,

The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within

The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,

And in the million-millionth of a grain

Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,

And ever vanishing, never vanishes,

To me, my son, more mystic than myself,

Or even than the Nameless is to me.

And when thou sendest thy free soul thro’ heaven,

Nor understandest bound nor boundlessness,

Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names.

And if the Nameless should withdraw from all

Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world

Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark.

‘And since—from when this earth began—

The Nameless never came

Among us, never spake with man,

And never named the Name’—

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,

Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no

Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,

Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,

Am not thyself in converse with thyself,

For nothing worthy proving can be proven,

Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,

And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith

She reels not in the storm of warring words,

She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’,

She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,

She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,

She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,

She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls,

She hears the lark within the songless egg,

She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!

Nothing worth proving can be proven, nothing worth saying can be said – they can be done though! And that is my point. Life and its living is not merely an intellectual search which requires clarity of language and conceptual articulation. ‘Wherefore thou be wise’, stop trying to prove the unprovable, and stop arguing over the unsayable, and just find your place in the world and play your part. And that is to affirm a reality that is beyond naming and framing.

‘As time remains free of all that it frames,

May your mind stay clear of all it names.’

• John O’Donohue

In recognising the claims of the poets to see deeper realities, in praising Dante for being committed to his impossibilities, am I entering the realms of anti-science? I sail in those waters. I’ll quote Erich Heller writing on Goethe and ‘the idea of scientific truth’ in The Disinherited Mind, and referring to ‘the region of metaphysics, an area which is strictly out of bounds for the brave soldiers of the positivist age, and full of the unspeakable dreads and bogies which inhabit the nursery-tales told to the children of science.’

That’s quite some abuse of positivists. And Goethe affirms quite a conception of scientific truth:

‘Nature is fundamentally innocent, and Goethe's genius is in communion with Nature. Hence there can be, for Goethe, no catharsis, only metamorphosis. It is never with the spirit of a transcendent God or with the spirit of Man that Goethe's potentially tragic heroes are reunited after their dramatic crises. When the crisis is over, they are at one again with the spirit of Nature. They are not purified in a tragic sense, not raised above their guilt through atonement, but enter, as it were, a biologically, not morally, new phase of life, healed by oblivion and restored to strength through the sleep of the just.’

Heady stuff! And as a lover of William Blake, ‘mad Blake’ himself, I have no fear of dreads and bogies. I don’t think that counts as anti-science. It does mean that I believe that ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ (Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio).

Talking of Heller, here is a passage which shows the Weberian vision of the world as a social Hell of our own making, a comment on self-made man and his undoing in his self-made world, and an affirmation of an objectively valuable world that is independent of arbitrary human values and wilful projects.

‘Life is frightened out of its highly enlightened wits by the return of ancient nightmares: the tales of the sorcerer's apprentice, of dwarfs with magic powers. The promise of Heaven for the poor in spirit is understood to mean that, on earth at least, they should be educated into clever people able to manipulate and let loose the technical installations of Hell. And in art, there are sounds most skilfully organized, furies expressed in the most virtuoso fashion, and proud of signifying nothing. Whole systems of aesthetics are evolved to justify this state of affairs. A world emptied of meaning seeks to escape from the infinite boredom of its meaninglessness by the magic of words without flesh, and forms without content. And, indeed, the attempt to distil poetry from the things or ideas that form our 'real' world would be in vain. Poetry, we are told, is enchantment, and all things and thoughts have been robbed of their charm in the bright daylight robbery of utility and abstraction. Yet for Goethe things and thoughts shared that luminous concreteness which is the quality of a world with all its dimensions intact. Remember what he called ' thinking' in a passage of his Second Sojourn in Rome, where he describes his impression of Raphael's 'Transfigurazione': 'The kindred spirits among us were confirmed in their convictions,' he writes; ' Raphael, they said to one another, is distinguished by the rightness of his thinking.' And thus he interprets the two levels of being, represented in that painting: 'How can one sever what is above from what is below? The two are one; below there is suffering and neediness, and above active mercy, the one reflecting upon the other in mutual inter­change. Is it then, to express the meaning of this painting in a different way, at all possible to separate from the real its ideal relevance?' (Erich Heller, Goethe and Nietzsche, The Disinherited Mind).

For all that creative human agency accomplishes via the technical transformation of the world, possessing it, building political and economic systems which organise the terms on which the world is possessed, parcelled out and used, the quality of the world remains intact and remains whole in all its dimensions. So, against disenchantment, I maintain the view that the world is objectively valuable. My concern is to bring the self-made social world of human beings into accord with that ‘real’ world. And in taking a critical view of technology – individuals educated into being ‘clever people able to manipulate and let loose the technical installations of Hell’ – the target is not technology itself, but the human ‘manipulators’. My concern is with character construction, educating human beings into … being human, setting their actions within right relationships, and organising them with a view of right ends. Examined in this light, it is an argument for human beings to take morality and responsibility into their own hands, rather than engage in some bogus salvific reasoning, this need to rely on external saviours in whatever form. If technology is not our saviour, neither is it the architect of our doom. Responsibility is in our own hands. So, if I contest the great visions of the future to be delivered by technology, I also contest the idea that technology bears the weight of our self-destruction. Both the optimists and the pessimists make a fetish of technology by turning it into a power that is independent of human beings, social interactions, relations and directions.

Self-Made Man and His Undoing

Jonathan Kingdon is a zoologist, a science writer, artist and research associate at the University of Oxford. He states the point very clearly in his book Self-Made Man and his Undoing. (also titled Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction. 1993). He points to the power of technology in the human transformation of the world, and the human self-transformation. Kingdon notes how, in being ‘drawn further and further out of our biological matrix, we have become more and more dependent on an all-embracing but loveless technology to see us through. Under this impassive influence we have become orphans of our own technology.’ Kingdon notes the paradox of emancipation involved here. Technology has been instrumental in warding off starvation, disease and the rigours of climate. And in doing so, it has bought us time and space from natural necessity in order to engage in activities that erode the biological and ecological bases of life. Removed at some distance from the personal costs and direct consequences of our individual actions, we have proceeded to eat away at the foundations of human existence. Kingdon’s focus here is upon population pressures: ‘If there is any lesson for the twenty-first century in prehistoric societies it will lie in a return of much fuller and more demanding responsibilities to the men and women who choose to have children. The present trend towards degrading the value and shirking the costs of having kids will have to be reversed. It is to be hoped that the twenty-first century will seek the ways and means of giving a greater value to fewer offspring.’ That’s an issue I have somewhat ignored in my work, for the reason that I think it is a diversion from what we need to be doing anyway – redistribution of resources and recalibrating the global economy within new social relations, geared to new ends (zero carbon, circular, degrowth economy, shifting power and resources to human communities). If we can achieve that, we will indeed have a chance of getting to grips with the population problem. I don’t see any other solution that is either feasible or palatable or both.

Kingdon hits the nail smack on his head with his conclusion: ‘This cannot be a mere technical fix but will involve a social and spiritual revolution.’

‘We cannot make a scapegoat of the technological revolution that has pampered us yet passed by the emaciated victims we see on television. It is an extension of what we are. If we are greedy and selfish technology will be a faithful mirror. Left to its own dynamics technological and industrial innovation trashes products, places and people. Technology is at once social shredder, racial churn and political furnace. It is for the children of technology to humanise their parent or, like Saturn, it will consume them. Self-made Man and his society will be undone. If the twenty-first century sets out to build a new sense of family it has powerful tools to help in the task. If it doesn't, its antithesis - increasing conflicts between haves and have-nots - is inevitable.’

If we cannot make a scapegoat of technology – and I argue that this is indeed wrong – then neither can we make a god of it. It is not technology in itself that will doom us or save us, only we can do those things to and for ourselves. Material sufficiency and virtuous action within right relationships are the key. And that involves ethics. Morality matters, and it matters as something more than private subjective choices and value judgments. The hard part in human salvation – taking responsibility – lies in reclaiming morality as a common and public good capable of integrating, orienting and direction society from within, achieving a voluntary collective internal coordination of human affairs, as against an involuntary external constraint in the form of the collective force of economic, supranational or ecological necessity.

We have made ourselves and made our world. But it has come at a cost in terms of biological and ecological health. That is not the fault of technology, it is our fault. And if we cannot blame technology for our predicament – potential extinction – we cannot expect it to save us, for precisely the same reason – it is we who are responsible. Hence the very heavy stress I place on ethics, as boring as it may seem. If human beings are charged with taking morality into their own hands, taking responsibility for our salvation, then it is upon these questions that the future of the human race depends.

That is a pretty direct and forceful statement in favour of a ‘self-made man’ coming to rely on his own reason and resources. Note, in ruling out technological saviours, the same argument precludes all saviours of any kind. That creates a tension for me. Because I argue against notions of self-creation, the anthropocentric idea of human beings as self-conscious masters of their own world. Instead, I see human beings as co-creators in relation to a larger world outside of human agency, the more-than-human world that enfolds, nourishes and sustains all life. Hence, the call to take morality into our own hands has to be qualified by a view that responsibility is not the same thing as complete control. There is always an ‘anarchic excess’, something outside of human reason, and part of our responsibility involves coming to recognise the existence of that core, and respect our relation to and dependence upon it. This, I take, to be integral to the spiritual revolution that Kingdon calls for. The social revolution entails setting our technics within the right social relationships, ensuring our powers are directed to ends we set ourselves, not driven by external economic and institutional imperatives and natural necessities. We therefore devise appropriate steering media organising our relations to each other and our interchange with the social and natural environment.

Beyond the Abstractors and Detractors

As for Goethe, he expresses his faith in an objectively valuable world that is marked with the imprint of the divine. He sings the praises of that world, in defiance of all interference, manipulation, nullification, commodification, expropriation, despoliation, disenchantment, diversion and perversion, affirming an intrinsic value and goodness that endures the sleights and blights of abstractors and detractors:

‘And so I am your perfect likeness, I who have taken on myself the glorious image of our sacred books: as on that cloth of cloths there was imprinted the countenance of the Lord, so, within my quiet heart, was I, refreshed, despite negation, hindrance, robbery, by the serene image of faith.’

That is spiritual revolution enough. This is Goethe’s answer to the question of how to balance the desire to know and the quest for meaning. This is how Goethe resolves the problem of values, a question that he considers to be more fundamental than the question of the certainty of knowledge. As Heller concludes:

It is the realism of the symbol; not of the obscure symbol thrown up by the collective unconscious of the symbolists, invading the husks of dead memories with dreamt and undreamt-of significances; nor of the symbol which refers to abstractions, in the manner of an allegory: the kind of symbol which the young philologist Nietzsche in a preparatory note for The Birth of Tragedy regarded as the sign of a dying art because it intro­duced, furtively and in flimsy disguise, abstract notions - but the symbol in its original meaning, defined by Nietzsche in the same note, in a strikingly Goethe-like manner, as 'the language of the universal '. This realism of the symbol is the common property of all great art. It does not strain after an ideal sphere which may redeem the prosaic unworthiness of this world (as Schiller's art does), nor does it seek deliverance from the terror of truth in the healing unreality of the 'schoner Schein' (as Nietzsche sometimes believed), nor does it self-consciously call on dreams and nightmares pleasantly or unpleasantly to ruffle the boring smoothness of life's sur­face. It describes; and in describing it opens our eyes to what really is. And what really is is not a dream or shadow, nor the meaningless agony of the Will, nor the abstractions of Reason, but the living revelation of the unfathomable. Yet why should the unfathomable be beautiful? Because it can only be comprehended by the unfathomable, and the only truly un­fathomable faculty of man is love. Thus the realism of the symbol becomes the artistic vindication of the reality of a lovable world.’ (Heller, The Disinherited Mind).

In other words, I am trying to reclaim ethics against a world colonised by abstractors and detractors – without thereby becoming an abstractor or detractor myself. And I’m finding it difficult to achieve. Find the symmetry/balance/harmony/justice at the centre of the universe and cleave to it. And hope that, in making critical comments with respect to imbalances and their destructive consequences, people will not take it personally as an accusation levelled in their direction. We all need to reject cave mechanics and see the world as whole again. You know, share what we have with others in the meaning space.

Pan-Cultural Characteristics and Pan-Cultural Moral Principles (transcendent norms in biological forms).

In Why Good is Good (2002), Robert Hinde writes at length on the biological and psychological bases of morality, and offers plenty in terms of a universal human nature with which I agree. He refers to ‘pan-cultural psychological characteristics’ and ‘pan-cultural moral principles.’ I just refer to the natural law and the idea that there is an innate and universal moral grammar, something permanent and indestructible across time and space. Hinde doesn’t directly tackle the issue of the source of this grammar head-on. But, in a way, he doesn’t have to. If he can demonstrate his case that the source of morality lies in human nature and how this is expressed in culture and through relationships and experiences in context, then he doesn’t need to refer to a transcendent authority. That is what he does and, as I say, I agree with plenty. I, too, locate morality in human nature, and I do affirm that there is such a thing as human nature, and I do indeed welcome the insights of biology and psychology into ethics. Put this way, it isn’t very different at all from the essentialist position I develop. But it is different. And I hope that people will see the clear differences in light of all that I argue above. I have introduced these arguments towards the end so as to save the reader from long, tedious criticism. Anyone who has lasted this far into the narrative will be able to see quite clearly where Hinde and the biological approach to ethics goes wrong. Hinde thinks that his view renders the need for a transcendent grounding of ethics redundant. I show that his view demonstrates precisely why that transcendent grounding is needed. I also show that Hinde doesn’t actually appreciate what this grounding is, and is instead concerned with ruling out God and supernaturalism. If all that there is, or all that we, as physical beings, could ever know, is nature and human nature, then indeed, there is no need for the supernatural argument. Or, if we do have need of a supernatural argument as some kind of necessary or comforting illusion, a tale we tell each other, or a transcendental ideal we give to ourselves as a standard to live up to, then indeed it could only ever come from nature and human nature. But that is to restate in the crudest form Kant’s transcendental idealism and the idea that ideal standards are projections of reason. That remains a transcendent position. And anyone who is inclined to think this mere philosophical pedantry should think again, because there is a danger of a scientism coming to throw the baby out with the bathwater, throwing out the transcendent norms crucial to moral life and behaviour with the God they so obviously despise.

Hinde points out the implications of this naturalist explanation: ‘it can be said that the present enterprise was undertaken in the hope that it would help to provide a firmer basis for morality than the shaky transcendental underpinning that it has at present’ (Hinde 2002 ch 13).

That’s quite a claim to make, given that it promises to resolve an issue that has plagued ethics since its beginning. But I just see a blindness in the pursuit here. Because the natural law tradition itself combine transcendental justification with a conception of human nature which affirms certain innate, universal and essential properties. So the issue is not settled so easily by pointing to certain features of human nature. What would settle the question is coming to show not merely that morality has bases in human nature but that morality has its basis, its source and origin, in human nature, and that this human nature is capable of giving itself a morality of content capable of justification. It is here that things get tricky, because Hinde clearly equates transcendent with a supernatural God. His argument, if it succeeds, goes against such supernaturalism. It isn’t effective against the idea of transcendent norms as such. This may sound like semantics. But I think it is possible to identify the transcendent norms I defend with the pan-cultural psychological and biological properties and moral principles that Hinde refers to, in that they both imply an ‘objective’ standard beyond time and place by which to evaluate particular societies and practices and judge them good or bad. In truth, that’s not what Hinde does, and his view expresses a worrying relativism that precludes a moral denunciation of actions which, through socialisation, are considered normal inside particular cultures, but abhorrent by those from outside those cultures. Hinde’s view is that criticisms here are based upon cultural differences and not moral principles. I completely disagree. And the fact that Hinde’s position would leave us morally silent in face of all manner of crimes against the human person as well as non-human animals, on account of cultural norms and customs, shows precisely why we need transcendent norms, even when grounding morality in human nature. Natural law can do everything Hinde wants, and can certainly incorporate the findings of biology and psychology, and it can do more besides – it can give us an ethics that is more than a naturalism and more than a cultural relativism. That is precisely why ethics needs to be grounded in transcendent norms, values and truths. I leave the issue of whether these are a supernatural God as in the Christian tradition, a natural theology as in Taoism, or the Platonic unity of the true, the good and the beautiful open.

What is natural, what the moral code prescribes, and what is right

Hinde recognises that to argue that pan-cultural psychological characteristics influence, and in the long term determine, moral codes does not mean that what is natural is right. ‘It is natural to act cooperatively and prosocially, but it is equally natural for behaviour to be motivated by selfish assertiveness.’ (Hinde 2002 ch 15). That’s not a statement of any great insight, and it is somewhat worrying that he has to address this commonplace in the last chapter of his book. Throughout, he has spoken of how the identification of the biological and psychological bases of morality would render recourse to transcendental authority redundant. In truth, he has engaged in a lot of naturalist explanation of moral behaviour, and absolutely nothing about actual ethics. The book is a profound let-down in that respect, and shows why ethics is ethics and biology is biology. It shows exactly why we need to be cautious of statements that ‘truth matters’ and trumps all other considerations with respect to comforting illusions, millenary dreams and wishful thinking. It tells me that those pursuing such truths have a narrow conception of what constitutes truth and meets its strict criteria in mind. What does Hinde’s biological and psychological approach give us? An explanation of the moral behaviour of human beings, in all its varieties and dimensions, but nothing when it comes to actual ethics, only a repudiation of an absolute ethics and a transcendent source. In the final chapter he acknowledges, but does not address, the obvious objection to his approach: ‘Nor does the view that the psychological characteristics that affect the acquisition and elaboration of moral codes are likely to have been products of natural selection mean that precepts, developed by the mutual influences between individuals and their culture, are necessarily 'good', 'right', or appro­priate for the cultural circumstances prevailing.’ We know! What we want to know is precisely what this notion of ‘good’ and ‘right’ is, just what ‘truth’ is – and by what standard … If there is no standard, then ‘good’, ‘right’ and ‘true’ are merely whatever they are accepted to be in any time and place. Worryingly, that does seem to be Hinde’s view.

‘The criteria of survival and reproductive success by which the basic psychological characteristics were selected are not the same as those we use to assess moral codes in the world today. In the short term, most precepts that we call moral tend to swing the balance in favour of prosocial or against selfishly assertive behaviour, and in most circumstances they provide the guidance we use and are such as to preserve stable interpersonal relationships and societal integrity. In the long term, by and large, most of the moral precepts we observe are compatible with the biological requirements of individuals and lead to viable societies. But they often conflict, and do not always provide a simple guide to action. For instance, there are circumstances in which we might think that individ­uals, and even the group to which they belong, should look after their own interests. And some precepts and virtues have been promoted to favour the interests of individuals or groups within a larger society, and involve the manipulation of others.’ (Hinde 2002 ch 15).

Different times and places have different moral standards… A profoundly underwhelming conclusion. And Hinde does at least acknowledge that we may well require more when it comes to staking out a meaningful and coherent ethical position. He sums up the position he has developed in painstaking detail in the course of fourteen chapters.

‘Thus I have suggested that the answer to the question implied by the title of this book is threefold. We see some actions, virtues and attitudes as good, and others as not so, because of the manner in which natural selection has shaped human nature; the mutual influences between human characteristics and the cultural factors that influenced and have been influenced by them over the course of human history; and the relationships to which each individual is exposed (and influences) during childhood and later. (Hinde 2002 ch 15).

And then he asks: ‘But is that enough? Does this account of how people have come to accept certain actions as good or right and others as bad or wrong provide a basis for deciding how people ought to behave?’ No it isn’t, and he knows it! He has given evidence himself as to why his explanation of the moral precepts is ‘inadequate’ (his word): ‘they do not always allow us to judge what is right and what is wrong. They may conflict, but nevertheless we act as if making a judgement about which course of action is more 'right' or less 'wrong'. New moral problems arise to which the accepted precepts give us no obvious answer. And we may judge the moral code of another culture to be 'wrong'.

At this point, I would step in and point out the need for transcendent norms as necessary in giving us the objective standard by which to evaluate and criticise specific actions and resolve conflicts in specific societies and cultures. Hinde sees the problem, but rules recourse to transcendent grounding out:

‘Does all this mean that we must look for an external source of values? Given that the moral precepts of the society sometimes appear to be inadequate as guides to behaviour, are we to assume that there are absolute values 'out there' with which we should compare our moral precepts and on which we should fall back when the precepts fail? Though again trespassing on the province of moral philosophers, I shall argue that there is no case for seeking absolutes outside the trans-generational relations between human nature and human cultures.’ (Hinde 2002 ch 15).

I would have thought that if Hinde could justify such a big claim, he would have done so already in the previous fourteen chapters, rather than leaving it to the concluding chapter. Of course, there is a need here to remember that Hinde’s concern here is to rule out a supernatural explanation. I think it is telling that, even at this late stage in the debate, he still feels vulnerable to the claims made for the necessary support of a supernatural God.

‘Many hold that the precepts themselves, and guidance when they seem inadequate, can come only from transcendental authority. That seems to me (and here I confess my bias) to be a convenient fiction for many but hardly a solution. I take this view in part because the guidance is always mediated by a human being.’

Hinde focuses only on the religious dimension, arguing: ‘Often the mediator is a priest or other religious specialist, but even when the subject feels in direct contact with the deity, the nature of that contact is determined by the characteristics of the experiencing subject. Furthermore, if the precepts or guidance are god-given, stemming from a theistic pronouncement, the nature of that god is a matter of great interest. In practice, most deities have a mixture of human and improbable characteristics. Insofar as their properties are human, the source of morality lies in human nature, whether or not morality itself does. Insofar as the properties of the theistic source are anthropomorphically improbable, like a creator god with the ability to be everywhere and know everything at once, or like the absolute principle of tao, one may suggest that the deity was constructed in part to maintain (or in interaction with) the religious system.’

‘In that case, it would also imply an influence from human nature, the very absence of some human limitations making the deity more effective. The present approach cannot show that to be the case, but does supply an alternative to an independent theistic source for morality that seems to render belief in such a source unnecessary. And, if morality does not come from a transcendental power, it must stem ultimately from human nature.’ (Hinde 2002 ch 15).

Ok, this brings us to Kant and the idea that the world (that is, the human world, the only world that human beings are capable of knowing) is constructed by the innate human cognitive apparatus. Any kind of authority or ideal will be constructed and mediated by human beings. This is Kant’s symbolic anthropomorphism and his notion of the true, the good and beautiful as projections of reason. If this is accepted, then we live in a world not only of created gods but of created truths. And if God is dismissed as a ‘convenient fiction’, to use Hinde’s terms, or as a ‘necessary presupposition’ (Kant’s terms, referring also to the immortal soul and free will), millenary dreams, illusions, fictions and wishes, in the views of those concerned with scientific truth – then that truth itself falls under the very same category. You see, it is not only morality that becomes subjective, non-rational, constructed, conventional and relative – it is science too, and for the same reason. The strict criteria of scientific rationality takes us into a world beyond good and evil, right and wrong, true and false – a post-truth world in which both science and morality become mere preferences and choices with no supporting argument or justification other than what particular societies find acceptable or convenient.

Hinde’s specific claims are aimed against the notion of a transcendental or supernatural God. That leaves my minimal case for transcendent norms grounded in nature and human nature untouched (leaving aside the case for God and religion that I make on wider grounds). At this point, Hinde comes to challenge the idea of a rational construction of ethics, that is, the idea that morality is rational and objective, containing notions of moral truth and knowledge – the view I support here.

‘Others would say that morality can be rationally constructed or justified, or that we know 'intuitively' what is right and wrong. If 'rationally constructed' implies the existence of an external standard against which its construction could be monitored, it would appear to involve a dualism differing only in degree from belief in a transcendental authority. As a product of human rationality, it usually takes the form of one or more axioms, such as that the moral code should favour the greatest good of the greatest number; if such axioms are not god-given, they must themselves be a product of human nature. And if morality is known to us through an 'intuitive moral sense', that again is in effect saying that morality stems from human nature, and leaves the question of the nature of that intuitive sense open. With any reference to an 'intuitive sense' we must beware of the 'instinct fallacy'. Just as the postulation of an 'eating instinct' to explain eating behaviour in itself explains nothing, so does an 'intuitive moral sense' fail to explain the moral judgements that we make.’ (Hinde 2002 ch 15).

A statement which does no more than argue that morality is grounded in human nature. The question is continually begged, but never answered, what is the content of and justification of this morality?

‘I have also indicated that natural selection has acted not to promote rigid characteristics, but lability according to the prevailing circumstances -and in particular the development of an appropriate balance between prosociality and selfish assertiveness. In turn, systems of moral precepts have been elaborated, though differing in some respects in content and in balance between cultures. Our behaviour is guided by the relation between the moral precepts embedded in our self-systems and our perceptions of our own actual and intended action. It is that relation that we refer to by the term 'moral sense'. (Hinde 2002 ch 15).

‘The extent to which prosociality dominates differs also across cultures, according to their circumstances. In judging another society, the distinc­tion between pan-cultural principles and possibly culture-specific precepts is critical. Societies or groups whose moral code contravenes the pro-sociality/reciprocity principle are seen as wrong. Thus both the moral codes that justify death squads and the Nazi concentration camps, and the individ­uals within those groups whose actions contravene the Golden Rule, are to be seen as wrong, though the behaviour of the individuals may be seen as 'understandable' in terms of the way in which they have been socialized or coerced.

The Golden Rule is evidence of a transcendent norm, by the way, however different the way it is applied in time and space. Anyone acquainted with Plato can point out something very obvious missed by this book – it is possible to affirm transcendent norms and argue that their application is indeterminate, taking different and appropriate forms in specific contexts. That’s exactly how Plato argued the case. But the identification of the biological and psychological bases of morality in this book is to be welcomed all the same. It is indeed useful to have at a time when some of the livelier minds in the field of social and cultural studies are doubting whether there is such a thing as human nature. And are still inclined to run a mile from the idea that biology has anything to teach ethics. I think we can go past notions of biological determinism.

From the first, I was suspicious of Hinde’s claims that his biological and psychological explanation of morality could dispense with transcendent sources, and by the time I came to final chapter, with the key questions unaddressed and unanswered, my suspicions were confirmed. He gives us a cultural relativism and no more, leaving the moral voice silent in face of patently immoral acts because they were and are deemed normal according to the norms and customs of particular societies.

‘But practices in another society that merely contravene the precepts or practices of one's own, such as some incest prohibitions or dietary restric­tions, may be seen as strange by outsiders, but are not necessarily judged by them as 'wrong'.

However, beyond that, when we judge the moral codes of other societies the standards that we use tend to be those we apply in our own culture. Thus, individuals brought up in democratic countries tend to judge totali­tarian regimes as too restrictive of individual autonomy and freedom, while those brought up in a totalitarian regime with little knowledge of any other may see democratic countries as egoistic and unsocial.’ (Hinde 2002 ch 15).

This merely points to cultural differences in order to deny notions of an absolute morality – and that is the facile end of the argument. I’d expected a dramatic clinching argument, once the inadequacies of naturalism had been suggested.

‘It therefore seems unnecessary to postulate any criteria of what is right and wrong, and thus any source for morality, beyond the products of the interaction between our own self-systems, the ways in which we perceive ourselves and others to behave, and the moral code of the culture in which we live. Most of the time the moral code serves us pretty well. Sometimes it fails. When it fails and a decision must be made, we attempt to minimize the emotional response to discrepancy between the proposed action and our moral codes. In the longer term, a rational approach may help us to adjust the code so that it makes a surer fit with the basic principles. It is those prin­ciples, and what we see as the contextually appropriate balance between them, that we use as the ultimate court of appeal.’ (Hinde 2002 ch 15).

That’s a content free pragmatism that begs the question of just what moral criteria is available to allow us to judge actions within human interactions in specific societies. There is no pre-given morality, but a morality emerges from within human experience and interchange. How can we call it morality? By what standard can we designate it morality? It can only be moral by some standard, which Hinde would call external, absolute or transcendent. The argument that it’s moral because sufficient people in time and place call it moral merely begs the question and, if it takes the form that there is no pre-given morality, so therefore human beings ought to create one in their interaction, it just contradicts itself. And in the end, the simple truth is that there is something plain wrong with a view that leaves us silent in face of crimes against humanity, just because these behaviours were and are normal in particular societies given their norms and socialisation and customs.

‘Take the even more dramatic case of a society in which widows are burned. Nobody from a Western culture would hesitate to condemn such a practice as wrong. But it is necessary to distinguish between the cultural practice and the moral judgements of those who implement it. We have no doubt that the cultural practice is wrong. It contravenes the prosociality principle and denies the widow what we see as her essential rights as a person. But those within the culture see the practice as morally right.’

No, not all do. Take the institution of slavery, either in ancient Greece or the USA. Slavery may well have been considered normal, and Aristotle may well have argued that slavery is natural, but there were always voices affirming transcendent values who pointed out that slavery was wrong. And it is always through such voices speaking out, being heard and influencing others from which moral improvement comes. We say such things are morally wrong, not culturally wrong. The uncomfortable point is that such false fixities are deemed correct for social and cultural reasons – they suit dominant power relations – so they can be said to be culturally right but morally wrong. Hence the importance of objective or transcendent moral standards which give people the strength and courage and convictions to voice objections on moral grounds.

Hinde asks: ‘But can we condemn those who are acting according to precepts that they have had no opportunity to see other than as right?’ ‘That in turn raises the even more difficu lt question of what constitutes an opportunity to subscribe to a moral system other than the prevailing one.’ ‘Thus, I have argued that the impression that moral judgements depend on an outside source or standard is mistaken.’ ‘We may judge the moral systems of other cultures to be wrong, but should not condemn the actions of individuals in such a culture if they have had no opportunity to know another.’ (Hinde 2002 ch 15).

Hinde’s conclusions here show precisely why we do need a transcendent standard. In his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King jr, jailed for protesting racial segregation, puts his protest in clear, cogent and unanswerable natural law terms:

‘You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.’

http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/annotated_letter_from_birmingham.1.html

A clear case for transcendent norms, truths and values, and perfectly compatible with an examination of the biological and psychological bases of morality. This is the case for natural law, renewed, informed by insights of natural science, shorn of unnecessary metaphysical claims, but natural law all the same. Some things are just morally right, and some things are just morally wrong, regardless of what the prevailing norms and customs, conventions and institutions of a society or culture says.

‘In conclusion, what is natural is not necessarily right ..’ We know, those schooled in the natural law tradition know this. Natural law is not the law of nature but nature seen through the critical eyes of reason, examining nature normatively, and distinguishing between good and bad behaviours. But, yes, the emphasis on universal human psychological characteristics suggested by a biological/psychological approach is very welcome.

The Song of the Earth

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”

― Gustav Mahler

“But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.”

― Gustav Mahler

“I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.”

― Gustav Mahler

I’d like to end with my favourite composer, Gustav Mahler. The man’s music is sublime. Mahler could be described as a man who desperately wanted to believe in God, but just couldn’t, and agonised over the fact. He was an agonistic agnostic. And his music was beautiful. And his music was proof enough for me that truth is beauty and that beauty is truth – heart rending, soul stirring and tearful. A man of musical genius, ethical power, an educator and a leader.

Mahler’s Third Symphony is a paean to Nature. Mahler explains it in these terms:

‘Just imagine a work of such magnitude that it actually mirrors the whole world – one is, so to speak, only an instrument upon which the universe plays… my symphony will be something whose like the world has never heard before! … in it, the whole of Nature finds a voice’.

Mahler to Anna von Mildenburg

"I saw your very soul naked, stark naked…. I felt your symphony. I shared in the battling for illusion; I suffered the pangs of disillusionment; I saw the forces of good and evil wrestling with each other; I saw a man in torment struggling towards inward harmony…. Forgive me, I cannot feel by halves."

Arnold Schoenberg to Mahler about this symphony.

The Mahler Symphonies

A synoptic survey by Tony Duggan

Symphony No.3

The Third Symphony is Mahler’s hymn to the natural world and his longest work. It was largely composed in the summer of 1895 after an exhausting and troubling period that pitched him into feverish creative activity. Bruno Walter visited him at that time and as Mahler met him off the ferry Walter looked up at the spectacular alpine vistas around him only to be told: "No use looking up there, that’s all been composed by me." Mahler was inspired by the grandeur around him at the very deepest level of feeling and also by visions of Pan and Dionysus. In fact by a sense of every natural creative force in the universe infusing him into "one great hymn to the glory of every aspect of creation", or, as Deryck Cooke put it: "a concept of existence in its totality."

To deliver a convincing performance of the Third I believe the conductor must do two things before anything else. Firstly, in spite of the fact that the work falls into Mahler's "anthologising" strand, along with Das Klagende Lied, the Second and Eighth Symphonies, the overriding structural imperative linking the six movements must be a pattern of ascending steps based loosely on the evolutionary ladder within broadly-based Pantheistic cosmology.

In these terms the six movements are:

1] Inorganic nature summoned into life by Pan, characterised as summer after winter 2] Plant and vegetable life 3] Animal life 4] Human life represented as spiritual darkness 5] Heavenly life represented as childish innocence which, when combined with 5, brings 6] God expressed as, and through, Love.

Mahler’s original titles for these movements were: 1] "Summer Marches in" 2] "What the Meadow Flowers tell me 3] "What the Creatures of the Forest Tell Me" 4] "What Night Tells Me" 5] "What the Morning Bells Tell Me" 6] "What God Tells Me"

Back to the ceaselessly creative universe. God enough?

‘That which draws us by its mystical force; what every created thing, even the very stones, feels with absolute certainty as the center of its being... is the force of love. Christians call this "eternal blessedness." It is a necessity of man for growth and joy.’

• Gustav Mahler

‘What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.’

• Gustav Mahler

Mahler’s hymn to the natural world.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/Mahler/Mahler3.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AwFutIcnrU

Bruno Walter speaks about Gustav Mahler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq4aah5364A