OBJECTIVE MORALITY? REALLY?

No self-respecting scientific materialist would give the notion of objective morality the time of day. Values are not things, but qualities, he would object, and as such are not amenable to measurement, and therefore do not exist. But CS Lewis argues, you may recall, for just such a concept, in an appendix to his The Abolition of Man, in which he lists the moral precepts that the major religions of the world have in common. Just as reproducibility of experimental results in science establishes "facts" – reproducible measurements – as confirmations of an external reality, so the appearance of comparable guidelines and codes of good behavior across religious boundaries provides us, says Lewis, with confirmation of the objectivity of values in the form of morality - a firm, albeit hierarchical foundation for universal, ethical behavior.

This "proof" Lewis found necessary because of the valueless "flatland" being disseminated in the UK back in the early 1940ies by a couple of liberal-materialist educators. Their misguided work was an outgrowth of the cult of rationalism (promoted by Francis Bacon, then grasped more firmly after the Enlightenment, but which seems to have had its genesis as far back as Plato and Aristotle, who advanced it as an antidote to the as yet untrammeled subjectivity of the Sophists!). Rationalism has since accelerated into a full-blown nihilism with the advance of technology, and now forms the foundation of Globalism, as articulated by Yuval Harari. 

Objectivity - basically, belief in knowledge of the independent existence of things - is useful as a theoretical tool, but has no reality philosophically, and is lethal when the mainstream science that believes it is captured by politicians, as it has now been. And this exposes a central paradox: the world we apprehend is inescapably human-generated, that is to say, political. Mainstream science consists (entirely) of scientists. The world arises in the instant of being apprehended, as an undefined, quality experience from which we make sense with the help of the people with whom we must agree about its nature – i.e. scientists, and our community - positing the existence of things that account for our immediate experience of quality. Whatever consensus is then arrived at - by demonstration, coercion, censorship, gaslighting and bloodshed - is termed "the facts", or (today) "objective reality". This activity, so utterly universal and important, forms the substance of human history, and it is, as I say,  political. It leads, inevitably, to the creation of political borders, demarking the incompatibilities between independently-arising world views. Our resulting world is inescapably ethnocentric. We are, we hubristically assert, in command of "the facts"; other cultures, we declare condescendingly, merely have "beliefs". 

Scientific materialism attempts to reestablish, through faith in "objectivity", the certainties originally provided by religious faiths, but devoid of their morality. Science cannot objectively evaluate a difference between babies and bathwater. By asserting the existence of an objective reality entirely independent of humanity's thoughts about it it similarly disposes of immeasurable God as objectively unverifiable. The resulting universe is a deterministic machine. It then tries to fill the moral vacuum it has thus created by claiming, with unselfconscious irony, that Man can now be God! But in a materialist, deterministic universe there can be no free will, so it's unclear how human godliness could manifest under such conditions. This further irony is in turn papered over, by the introduction of what Harari calls human "agency", i.e. independent will by another name. 

So we are left with, I think, an insufficiently clear articulation of the real situation we find ourselves in, namely, that we are of-a-piece with the universe, yet alienated from it by thought. Thought raises, then justifies, the illusion of separation from Creation - first, with mythical tales like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, then with claims of an objective world "out there".  As a unique expression of Creation humanity cannot claim - despite all the efforts of deterministic scientism - to apprehend the world in any other way than through itself. When politicians claim to "own the science" they are power tripping, pretending a universal, scientific objectivity for their edicts that simply does not exist. This is nothing other than the claim of Papal Infallibility, updated - but with less justification!  

  

Globalism turns out to be yet another iteration of organized religion, offering certainty while seeking world domination, this time via technology, which at last promises elitists the Holy Grail of total control.  Ultimate control means complete lack of freedom for the governed. All physical and natural processes and phenomena are to be monitored, measured, and regulated. Neuralink and related technologies will complete the bio-convergence of humanity that is already under way, culminating in Klaus Schwab's dream of transhumanism via the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

A growing army of fellow heretics is searching for an authentic substitute - a replacement - for scientistic globalism as currently conceived. CS Lewis has pointed out a way to that end: a system of real morality (as opposed to the arid, virtual, flatland of expediency that is the contribution of the religion of scientism), based on a recognition of the objectivity not of "things out there", but of the human experience, which is the only real thing we know and from which everything else that we call "objective" derives. Our commonality will be rediscovered by sharing our personal truth with, yes, openness and honesty engendering trust and fostering loyalty, in pursuit of communal truth with courage, integrity and mutual respect, and not in a post-truth, Orwellian dystopia, blindly going along to get along in collective submission to an artificial reality masquerading as some external, "objective" world, sustained through fearmongering and subterfuge by power-drunk politicians with God complexes!  Whew! 😀 

 

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Pablo