The Three Moralities
hoping for the best
I just picked up, by accident, a book called From Religion to Philosophy: a Study in the Origins of Western Specualtion by F.M. Cornford. He is perhaps best known for a translation of The Republic of Plato.
Cornford says that back in the day, humans experienced life, the universe, everything as moral. When “a sin has been committed… all Nature is poisoned by the offense of man.” That is:
Nature is moral, so that her order is disturbed by the sins of man[.]
Greater than man, greater than the gods, is Moira: Destiny, Fate. Let us quote Cornford again.
[T]he ordinance of Fate is not a mere blind and senseless barrier of impossibility: it is a moral decree — the boundary of right and wrong.
Notice that in the Abrahamic, Axial Age religions, God is the arbiter of fate and right and wrong, and he has detailed the nature of right and wrong in rules like the Ten Commandments. And when we come down to the Enlightenment we say that right and wrong are defined by “natural law” and “natural rights.” And science.
Now it seems to me that the old idea of Moira, of Fate and Destiny, tell us of a world where humans are buffeted around by things they cannot understand but which surely must relate to human actions. And you knew when bad human actions occurred, because they led to bad results: failed harvests, still births, plagues and pestilences.
But after the Axial Age — and the advent of written scriptures — we get explicit tabulations of right and wrong. direct from God through his prophets.
In our modern age, where we have explained the world down to the level of quarks and up to the level of galaxies, we humans think that experts can work out the nature of right and wrong, and good and evil — our experts, of course, not the other guys’ experts.
So there are three levels to the question of right and wrong, three moralities:
In the beginning, nobody knew, but we could tell we had gone wrong when bad things started to happen.
In the Axial Age, God knew, and bad things happened if you broke God’s Law.
In the Modern Age, the experts know, and bad things start to happen if you ignore the experts.
This is all very well, but who is right? I say that nobody is right. I say that the whole experience of humans is a game of trial and error, of trying something out and hoping that it works. If it works, fine and dandy. But if it doesn’t work then it is Fate, or Destiny, or Satan, or Nazis or Commies, or climate deniers: yeah, someone is to blame.
But the fact is that we don’t have a clue. Agriculture might have been a good idea, but maybe, after another 20,000 years, it might have wrecked the Earth. The Industrial Revolution might have been a good idea, but maybe we are heading for disaster in a catastrophe of pollution and global warming and species extinctions. Maybe Democracy is a good idea. O maybe it leads to authoritarian regimes and disaster.
But I believe that all three moralities are missing the point. The fact is that we are all born we grow, we live, we grow old and die. And the best we can do is hope for the best, whatever the best is.
I say that the more we learn about life ,the universe, everything, the more we discover that we really don’t know a thing. The more we penetrate the mystery of the world, the more mysterious the world gets.