The Moral High Ground

A secular answer to fundamentalism

By J. Andrew Ross
January 2006

We humans are not as separate from each other as we may like to think. Each of us is not only an individual and a member of various groups but also part of a natural order that locks all life on Earth into one ecosystem. Our striving for separate goals is bound by our need to fit smoothly into the natural world.

Nowadays the natural world includes the fruits of technology. A world cluttered with machines and cities does not need to be worse than one filled with trees and animals, but we do need to plan it carefully. Managed incompetently, it can turn sour and push its human parasites to extinction. Part of the planning we need is a policy toward ourselves.

The policy must be based on a conception of what we are and what humanity represents for life on Earth. Are we beings who maximize our consumption of manufactured products in the process of pleasing ourselves to death? Are we embodied souls whose highest goal is to return at death to the realms of glory from which we emerged at birth? Answers at this level carry ideological baggage that we need to check carefully.

For a person in a stable community, such questions can often be answered in humble terms. A person naturally strives to live a decent and productive life that leaves the community better than he or she found it, and to enjoy some happiness along the way. Practically speaking, what precedes birth or follows death is only meaningful in terms of the life of the community. And happiness is a by-product of a good life, not an end in itself. A person who fulfils dreams and plans in a supportive community achieves happiness and has no need of glorified visions of birth and death.

The human community as a whole can scale up an answer along these lines to glimpse the role of humanity in the bigger story of life on Earth. If our species sinks into extinction in a world that seems better than it was when humans first appeared, the last humans may be able to die happy. If we can realize our human projects effectively and without too much strife, we can hope to achieve fulfilment as a species before our descendants in the great flowering of life replace us.

So what is it that humanity as a species will add to the universe? To answer that, we can look at what life has achieved so far on Earth. It is hard not to be self-serving. Humans are the latest and most efficient products of an evolutionary development toward the increasingly organized exploitation of natural resources for functionally defined goals. Previous species had limited horizons, but we have broken through to global organization. Previous species were mostly limited to genetic transmission of information between individuals, so they adapted only slowly to changing circumstances. In our global civilization, information flows and organization exceed all previous bounds by orders of magnitude.

Our machine-based civilization is the primordial soup for life-forms that have the potential to transcend us in the ways that matter most. As people with dreams and plans, we work hard to do what we can. With the help of machines, our ability to do so has leaped massively forward. Our ancestors dreamed of conquering continents but we dream of reaching the stars. More to the point, our ability to realize our new dreams is unthinkable without increasingly sophisticated machines. Human outposts in the solar system will be dwarfed in scale and practical importance by the robot infrastructure we set up to sustain them.

Here on Earth, a human life is a drop in an ocean of living and lived activity that is transforming the surface of the planet in a process whose end we cannot expect to understand. We need no more understand it than birds or fish understand what humans are doing to the world. But it is organized human activity that has started this process. By leveraging our best ideas we can glimpse the long view.

Our most refined ideas come from science and technology. Here we can see the fuller picture, not only the physical universe and the biological world of genes and neurons but also the infrastructure of cars and computers and businesses and burocracies that shape modern life. Here we can see too the evidence of global warming and resource exhaustion that constrain our future. Further, we can see analogies and symmetries to inform our moral judgments, such as the equivalence of different races and sexes or the similarities between species. We can even judge the logical strengths and weakness of various traditional ideologies that still hold many people in thrall.

The traditional ideologies that loom largest in any 2006 plans for how to pursue life on Earth are the Abrahamic monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All share a vision of a transcendent reality that gives meaning and purpose to the human drama between birth and death for all who have faith. Many believers conceive this transcendent reality to be quite separate from the practical world of everyday life, but this is a mistake. A reality can only be relevant to life on Earth if its transcendence is a matter of perspective. We can see our lives from a higher perspective without losing our roots in the here and now. And here and now we have practical issues to address.

The practical issues that should not be held hostage to Abrahamic ideologies include questions of governance, administration and morals. For many of them, good secular strategies have been developed that leverage science and technology and fit harmoniously in a world of personal and political freedom. To follow these strategies, we need to put religion in its proper place. It is a plain fact that human beings are embodied as psychic agents implemented in biological structures living in a physical world. Any real meaning we can find in our lives is immanent in that fact. So militant fundamentalism based on any Abrahamic foundation is a posture rooted in obsolete philosophy. It has no rightful place in any worldview with healthy roots in psychophysical reality.