This commentary is by Robby Porter of East Montpelier, a self-employed woodworker and owner of small hydroelectric projects, and the author of “Doodlebug, A Road Trip Journal” and ‘Concrete and Culture,” a book of personal essays.
I had an unusual college education, four years of classics, only primary texts, heavy on philosophy, no textbooks, no elective classes — The St. John’s College Great Books program.
There are a lot of things, good and bad, you can say about the Great Books experience. For instance, it causes you to look at the big picture, which makes you fret over questions like this: In a culture capable of providing recreational space flight for rich people, depriving poor citizens of medical care, housing or food is a cultural choice, so why have we made this choice?
First, some background. When you read the writings of the ancient Greeks, the Bible, the Romans and so on and so forth up to modern times, you get to experience the development of the Western intellectual tradition. What becomes apparent is the dominance of the Bible in Western thought and especially morality, until fairly recently.
The scientists, starting with the astronomers, gradually displaced the authority of the Bible on the subject of how the world works. Eventually Darwin’s “Origin of Species” reduced all creation myths to beautiful metaphors. But science does not have any answers for values and morality.
The German philosopher Nietzsche, in his ruthless criticism of Western culture, understood that science was rendering the ancient value systems into fairy tales but that it was doing so without creating a new morality. He sought to remedy this loss with his own ideas, most of which seem either laughable or abhorrent.
And that brings us back to my question. The challenges we face as a culture are no longer the old, now comfortingly practical obstacles like how to farm, or prosper at a small business, or, more darkly in our past, how to usurp land from Indigenous people. Our challenges are largely moral questions, many of them focused on economic justice. Is it right that some Americans can afford to sightsee in space while others cannot afford to get their teeth fixed?
We have the technological ability to provide for everyone and choose not to. Science got us here, but science can’t solve this problem. In the years since Nietzsche announced the death of God, the fruits of science have exponentially increased our material wealth but have added only marginally to our morality. The scientific method will not yield an answer to the question posed in the paragraph above.
Before science miraculously transformed our understanding of the natural world, the presumption by most people was that the underlying structure of human existence was somehow governed by a deity with a strong sense of right and wrong. We were willing to kill each over disagreements in our beliefs about this deity’s values, and, of course, we were willing to be hypocrites with respect to our own beliefs when it was profitable to do so.
Then science flipped the script. Most people now understand the world as it is described to them by science — cause and effect without a moral component.
Even as they hold to tatters from the old moral system, for most people morality is no longer the presumed underpinning of our existence. This is why we respond to plagues with research and vaccines rather than by trying to make the plague go away by atoning for perceived moral transgressions with animal sacrifices. But this doesn’t mean that we don’t need values.
Distributing the vast wealth made possible by science requires values. So why have we made the choice to let some people be incredibly rich while others are incredibly needy?
We changed the world with science but we haven’t changed ourselves. It is a new world, as Nietzsche understood, with vast new riches (although these were still a little in the future when Nietzsche died), the same old poverty, and a value system whose foundation has been dismantled by science.
We’ve adapted to the new reality by taking money as a value system around which we structure our society. But running a society purely for profit and efficiency, however productive of material wealth, is abdication of morality, and even on its own economic terms it is self-destructive, as we just experienced with the supply chain breakdown.
People will always be greedy for money and the inequality will never disappear, but the ratio of deprivation to excess matters. At some point, it gets so ridiculous it will ruin everything either through revolution or self-destruction.
The market doesn’t care if one person has all the money and all the houses, so there has to be a moral basis for deciding how many empty houses billionaires can own while others are homeless.
What is the basis for saying it is wrong that some people can ride into space for fun while other people live with constant dental pain? It is a moral question, not an economic one. The suffering of unfortunate and weak people probably wouldn’t have been a problem for Nietzsche and his morality, but he had a point nonetheless.
The stories handed down from the ancients have lost their credibility as a basis for morality. We need to create a new value system adapted to the modern world.