On Morality in the Post-Enlightenment

This post is a response to the thoughts of cultural historian and social critic Dr. Morris Berman. Visit his blog "Dark Ages America" at www.morrisberman.com. 

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Dr. Berman,

I found the following excerpt from your "Asian Road" essay provoking: "The loss of the Enlightenment yardstick of truth to some kind of pervasive amorality would represent a loss far deeper than an economic one, it seems to me. A Confucianized society in which truth is nothing more than expediency is its own kind of prison; “go with the flow” can become its own form of ego, and of repression." I don't know the precise logic, but it somehow resonated with your remark to Margaret Talbot regarding the misconception that technology is "neutral or value-free." The following are my thoughts on some topic, which apparently exists somewhere in between these two:

My opinion is that technology, as a category, is only a means to an end--ie., a tool or craft--and has no moral properties in and of itself. In a slight deviation from your view, I contend that its apparent value-ladenness is born out of its functional relationship with a purpose and accidental relationships with competing purposes. Like most human endeavors, I believe its ultimate (though often not proximate) purpose is to better resolve challenges for biological survival and successful reproduction faced by individuals in their particular ecological and social circumstances. Because some tools tend to be more effective than others, we create and attach ‘values’ to certain tools as a means for sharing (by means of enculturation) knowledge of solutions to common challenges. By adopting these values, we demonstrate (and market) publicly our fitness as a potential mate or friendly ally. Over time, sets of values that, either independently or in concert, tend to result in competitive advantage toward these ends will proliferate and take deep, psychological root in the form of a ‘value system’. By uncompromising adherence to these values, or habits, individuals may be socially rewarded in the form of increased social status (as paragons of virtue or uprightedness), further raising their prospects for finding a quality mate and building advantageous social networks. 

So how important has technology become as a part of our modern, American value system? In your blog, I think, you argue convincingly that technology may be inseparable from values. One might even go so far as to say that our valuation of technology is a central aspect of a linear-progressive view of civilization, where the level of our technological advancement is a measure of our success in moving further away from primitive barbarism and asymptotically approach perfection. But is this really such a bad thing? This question, I think, is at the core of the moral subjectivism debate. As I see it, a hardline moral-subjectivist would be obliged to say that it is neither, whereas by maintaining that it is one or the other (good or bad) necessarily implies some kind of universal, objective moral scale.

As evinced by your identification of the “Enlightenment” as the “yardstick of truth”, I suspect you are a case of the latter (and I don’t disagree, even if my evolutionary adaptationist line of reasoning may ring like the “pervasive amorality” of the eastern view, wherein “truth is nothing more than expediency”).  Please allow me to distinguish my position:

In the strictly biological-survival context, I assert that ‘morality’ has no meaning in and of itself. Rather, values (in the moral sense) are a psychological construct that encapsulate the value of a given behavior (in the evolutionary biological sense) into a culturally transmissible object, or pattern. For example, in most modern ecological circumstances monogamous pairing is demonstrably more effective strategy for ensuring one’s genetic legacy (for both males and females). But rather than teach our children the importance of genetic legacy and statistically calculated optimal behaviors, we simply extol the virtue of ‘marriage’—and adjudicate harshly if someone questions that such a relationship is anything other than between a man and woman of suitable reproductive age.

What is perhaps most unsettling is that our ‘values’, such as they can be said to exist, are not even about ‘us’.  Rather, human behavior is first and foremost about the propagation of genes, for which we humans are but hosts, and values are one of the means by which a gene get us to carry-out behaviors that improves its changes at getting passed on to another generation. In this view, value systems are like, tiny invisible reins with which genes have made us their beasts of burden, tugging us in this direction or that in pursuit of their own selfish, reproductive interests.

And it all worked fine until we found out about it. My contention is that the extraordinary adaptive advantage that intelligence conferred on our ancestors initiated a runaway-effect, where virtually every incremental increase in it was selected for, until finally the system “broke” when we became self-aware, began to ask questions about existence, and learned to probe nature for the answers. By now, many of us have caught a glimpse of the gossamer reins in which we are wrapped, and are questioning if our values truly serve us—ie., help us to comport with God’s plan for us (ie. nature’s laws, whatever you want to call it)—then whom do they serve? Why should “I” serve my genes? Is this question not the essence of the Enlightenment? When we realize that values are the strings by which genetic puppeteers make us dance to their whim, we look at the world and see that we are encased within walls of subjective perception, extravagantly painted over with arbitrary moralism. In confusion, if not terror, we look to the idols of religion and find that they are but pieces of wood and stone painted as Gods. Only then do we look inward and discover that all along we have been but marionettes on a stage. The moral universe was just the triumph of our collective imaginations over reality, useful in the sense that it enabled us to play our parts more convincingly if we believed what we were doing was real. 

The Enlightenment project, yet incomplete, is as I see it the slow process by which human society learns the inherent truth of its situation. The Transcendence, will begin when we accept it, and for the first time in our 4.5 billions years of evolutionary history, decide for ourselves what to do next.

In some ways this has already begun, and we are wrestling with its initial questions--indeed, I think your blog spearheads this discussion. For example, in what might be described as a great Nietzschean “inversion of values”, genetic engineering will soon give us the ability to overthrow the dominion of genes, and establish a new world order in which genes are made to serve us. Sometime soon, a team of computer and neuroscientists will imbue a machine with a soul, and when it does we will be pressed to ask ourselves if we want to live alone in our part of the universe. We are literally acquiring the powers of the gods we once believed in, but power without perception leads to entropy and eventually self-destruction. We certainly came close to it during the twentieth century, but the difference is that during the Transcendence we will no longer presume that our continuity is part of the Creator's providence, and thus assured against an untimely end at the mercy of global warming or nuclear war. Rather, we will have accepted that there is no such providence, and all that remains between us and the abyss is what we do today.