Eventually it will be clear whether earth’s experiment with our species has been a success or a lethal mistake. We may learn how to end war, reverse environmental devastation, stabilize the world’s economy, and take care of each other, and we may not. We prize our big brains and our adaptability, but we have used our cleverness to produce inventions that amplify our power to poison and destroy, and we may not be sufficiently adaptable to deal with the changes we ourselves have brought about. We are like an adolescent at the wheel of a fast sports car. The area of our brain that says “Driving at 80 miles an hour by moonlight is a bad idea” is rarely fully developed until we reach our twenties. If so, that would help explain why teens are often characterized as impulsive, aggressive, incautious, impressionable, disinclined to think about the consequences of their actions, and too impatient to reflect on their mistakes.
That characterization may sound familiar because it describes many of us who are not teen-agers, and the governments under which we live. Perhaps humanity has only reached its adolescence, and needs a little more time to develop some common sense and caution. In a family of four, there may be time for everyone to learn from their mistakes, but patience may be the wrong prescription when we are talking about the family of man in the 21st Century. We are no longer the equivalent of a threat only to ourselves and the family car because those adolescent habits now threaten the survival of our way of life, and of everything we value.
Our species may be terminally flawed, but we are also capable of love, language, understanding, creation, and compassion. It is within our power to solve our problems, save the planet, and make happiness the rule rather than the exception. Our problem is, and always has been, to figure out how to do that.
Many who have noticed that we remain the greatest threat to our own survival have sought ways to stop the exploitation and slaughter that has been with us for so long. Moralists, often supported by religion, speak of values, virtues, rights, and obligations. They say that God commands us, or that the universe requires us, to do this or that, or to be unselfish, honest, or loving. Morality and religion have tried to guide us to a “better” world where more of us “do the right thing,” but the actual effect of moral and religious commandments is debatable. We learn that God commands us not to steal or kill, and that everyone has a right to life; but we also learn that God has ordered massacres, that every rule has exceptions, and that there are rights capable of overriding even a person’s right to life.
As we survey the mega-buffet of incompatible but enticing moral systems it may seem as if our task is to reach out and grab the right one, the one that can show us our true duty, help us distinguish between good and evil, and tell us how we ought to live. But we are no closer to finding this out now than we were in Socrates’ day, so it may be time to shake things up by changing the goal of our search. The moral truths we are trying to grasp may only exist as projections of our own feelings and frameworks. This, at least, would explain why so many people with utterly incompatible views are absolutely certain that they are right.
Whatever the explanation of our diverse moral beliefs and our failure to end our conflicts, the strategies we have employed have not worked; or they have only worked well enough to get us into our dangerous and deteriorating situation. We are stuck, and we would like to go forward, but we can’t do that until we develop a shared and non-distorted view of our situation and, I would add, a clear understanding of our use of language. Only then will we be able to avoid the traps set for us by our language, and by those who use words to manipulate us. Only then can we hope to get beyond the rhetoric and the fictions essential to both religion and morality. What will heal us and our society is a diet of the best information we can come by, as fully understood and as deeply realized as possible. If our friends and our leaders don’t tell us what is really going on, and if we aren’t capable of listening when they do, we will continue to make decisions in ignorance, and then all the morality in the world won’t help us.
If philosophers have any contribution to make to the tangled debates of our day, it is to help us in our noble quest to figure out as much as we can about life, the universe, and everything. If, for example, there really is no god, then almost all of us would be better off facing this fact squarely. We can learn to cope with finitude, and then we can move on to construct a life free of the superstitions of people long dead and utterly misinformed about the most elementary facts of nature. If, like religion, morality is also built on a belief in things that are not real, why wouldn’t we choose to move on to some reality-based system of discipline and control?
In what follows I plan to argue that we have a better chance of achieving many of the goals cherished by both religious thinkers and moralists if we are able to leave religion and morality behind. Some of most gentle and generous people in the world are motivated neither by religion nor morality—and this is one thing that leads me to hope that if we can restrain our tendency to moralize, and then learn to listen to others and to our calmer and wiser selves, we may find a way to leave our hectic adolescence behind and find the path that leads to a life of harmony and joy for all.