Where Things Stand Now . . . [repeated]

[My posting of articles tends to be sporadic.  Beginning in 2009, there have been long periods of silence, sometimes of years, between.  What tends to happen is that I come across something that I feel needs urgent saying, and having said it, tend to let the mailings drift on until I get bored with the process and wind it up.  Therefore, as far as I’m concerned, the initial article or series of articles in any particular tranche of mailings tends/tend to be to be the most important.

The present series of articles began on July 6^th 2018, though it only finally went public in September of this year.  Before that it had been essentially private, and the earlier mailings are quite likely to have gone unnoticed.

The reason I mention this is that one of last weekend’s papers carried an extensive review of a new book, Science and the Good by James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky, dealing with the matter of ‘objective morality’: that is, the various attempts to argue into existence some sort of artificial and universalist human ethic that would do away with all previous moral systems and would provide the basis for solving all our problems, individual and otherwise, including global warming and providing the foundations for world peace etc. etc.

However, the book provides instead, at least according to the reviewer, ‘a closely argued, always accessible riposte to those who think scientific study can explain, improve or even supersede morality.  It [also] tells a good story, too, as it explains what led us to our current state of moral nihilism’.

The reason I bring this up is that it was a similar contention, argued to a similar conclusion, which provided the basis of my initial series of articles, beginning on July 6 last year.

On the dubious basis that someone might still be interested in it, I reprint here the initial mailing (the first in a series of some four or five) from the 6 July 2018.]

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There has long been a debate over the matter of nature versus nurture, though, of course, the commonsense opinion is that what is involved is a variable combination of the two.  But the materialist and left-wing point of view has tended to show a preference for nurture over nature.  Another name for this is the ‘blank slate’ position; in other words, we are born with no inherited programming, but instead, as it were, pull ourselves up by our own bootstrings.

It is easy to see why the materialists would prefer this alternative, since at a stroke it removes the likelihood of any input from outside forces, divine or otherwise.

But in recent years, studies in linguistics have begun to show that where language is concerned mankind does indeed share a common pre-programmed and unconscious inheritance.  All languages, it seems, are shaped according to the same inherent ground rules; the differences between individual languages being the result of geographical and cultural factors in the course of their development.

All of which makes sense, considering that they are translatable into one another and enjoy a similar structure of nouns and verbs etc. etc.

This means, of course, that at least as far as language is concerned we are not born as blank slates.  We are programmed for language, and without that inherited programming, language would be impossible.

However, more recent studies have begun to show that just as there are certain ‘anatomical, neurological and physiological’ structures underlying our capacity for language, there are also analogous inherited structures underlying our capacity for moral thought and our sense of good and evil, justice and injustice.

In other words, there is a certain unconscious moral programming written into the human heart, irrespective of whether we abide by it or not, and which influences us automatically.

Just as with language, this moral inheritance has become translated through time and isolation and culture into the myriad different, and often seemingly contradictory, forms that we see about us now.  Rather like a carpenter turning sheets of oak into chairs and tables and sideboards, the forms may be different, but underneath they continue to share a common identity of oak.

Now one has to admire the honesty of the moral scientists in publicising a conclusion, which, no matter how unlikely, threatens the possibility of a return to more traditional ways of thinking about mankind, its origin and its destiny.  The response of science, however, is to insist that any such pre-existing moral apparatus can still only solely be the result of material evolution, though as yet it cannot begin to explain the possible mechanics of such a development.

Philosophers have tended to take a somewhat different tack.  In general equally materialist, they seek to bring the idea of an inherited moral compass under their control by insisting that it is something necessarily primitive and in need of constant updating—by philosophers, of course.

[The initial series of articles ran from the one above to ‘Now we come to the interesting part . . .’  of 23 July 2018.  Though they tend to meander a bit, they can still be accessed via this platform.]