Professor Francis Harry Compton Crick was a British physicist, molecular biologist and neuroscientist, most noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. Crick suggests in his The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul that a person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atom, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them. He argued that traditional conceptualizations of the soul as a non-material being must be replaced by the materialistic understanding of how the brain produces mind; that religions can be wrong about scientific matters, and that part of what science does is to confront the errors that exist within religious traditions.
Beyond Good and Evil
Even the most elementary understanding of science makes it clear that human perception is a construct. The blue of the sky, the deep red of a morning sunrise, the human voice, even the glass of water you drink, none are as they appear. Francis Crick describes the brain as a conscious, perceptive, and thinking organ. Yet what you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there. Your brain makes the best interpretation it can, combines the information, and settles on the most plausible interpretation. This allows the brain to guess a complete picture.
Envision an experiment. Two people are shown an identical, large, and intricate painting, each being in different rooms. The two people are not aware of each other. The first is told to look at the picture for one minute. The second person is confronted with the same picture, but it has been covered with sixty, one inch square pieces of paper so the painting cannot be seen. As the second person watches, each square is removed for one second and then replaced. This continues until each square of paper has been removed and then replaced. The person only saw one inch of the painting at a time. You then ask each person what the picture was of and to describe it in detail. Both have seen the entire picture. But each will have a different interpretation. The second person might not know what the picture was, but might be better able to describe certain pieces of detailed information. It is somewhat analogous to one not being able to see the trees for the forest, the other not being able to see the forest for the trees.
It becomes evident then that you can be taught to see, hear, smell, and feel what others want you to see, hear, smell, and feel in an effort to make their construct yours. This has myriad implications. One, of course, is the modern move to secular morality vs. tradition morality. Europe has become almost wholly secular; some other countries are following, and America is making great strides toward the notion of a self-evident morality as well.
Philosopher Bryan Magee says that “human behavior makes the most sense when it is explained in terms of beliefs and desires, not in terms of volts and grams.” To him, we understand ourselves not so much through science but through our interrelations, our culture, our value systems, and possibly our totems as described by Emile Durkheim. And we differentiate ourselves by these attributes over those of plants or animals.
My “unified continuum”, however, is constructed of past and present experience as well as my expectations of the future. We are made up of atoms and molecules, but they move at our will in a holistic way.
One can speculate whether morality is an illusion. That we “ought” implies that we “can”, which implies, at least, a certain amount of free will. Yet, is morality a construct as well? Kant showed us that the material world is not the only world there is, and that there is a higher domain we rely on in every free choice we make. That “there is a ghost in the machine, which we may for convenience term the soul.”
To an extent these are micro observations of humanity. But there is as well a macro behavior. As atoms and molecules move in a continuum that describes each of us as “I”, we as a people move as well to describe the continuum of a society whose culture was at least partially static.
What is good and evil, and what is beyond either? Our culture has been lead by the rule of law and by the conditions of morality as set in stone in the Ten Commandments. These written rules have presided over morality for much of Western civilization for centuries and for America for the better part of two hundred years. This is swiftly becoming an extinct description. A new morality is being taught and nurtured, particularly among our youth, many of whom are now adults.
The rules that governed our individual behavior and that of society are no longer in vogue. The new morality is being claimed by the secular ethic of the future. “The culture wars in America, involving issues like abortion, divorce, and homosexual marriage, can be largely understood as a clash between traditional morality and secular morality.”
“The new source of morality is no longer the external code but the inner heart.” Does this not provide cover for autonomy and self-fulfillment; does this not provide cover for selfish and irresponsible behavior?
The neo and ultra left are deeply imbued with this new morality. It has taken over American government, our universities, our corporations, and our institutions. It is beyond traditional morality. And it is beyond good and evil. It is the appeal of unbelief. It is gaining the power to remake society in its own construct.
Our brain tries to unravel the consequences of what appears to be the ever decreasing value of the dollar, spiraling unemployment, the apparent corruption within the government and corporate America, and our own tenuous situation amidst a left wing enclave of secular morality. As the forest around us begins to burn, our philosophical musings begin to seem less important than does the simple idea of survival.
As a nation we are certainly spiraling downward. Has this any real meaning in the overall scheme of things? We might abhor the idea of our savings being sacrificed to the hungry politicos; we might shudder at the idea of being simply another third world country; we might even suffer a suicidal depression at the thought of the abject poverty of our children. If we listen to the positive lectures by such evangelists as Joel Osteen, we might even find a silver lining in our own demise. If we are only beings whose perception cannot even perceive the real “us”, do those sacrificed in the ovens of Buchenwald make any real difference?
Are these simply the perceptions of Francis Crick with which our minds make the best interpretation? Is morality simply a construct of one’s own personality and inner feeling, or is there something more about a social contract that one must hold on to? Why is the sky blue? Why is Obama making changes that threaten our quality of life?
Life can be made easy or difficult. Is our morality that of Job wherein mankind simply does not have enough knowledge to explain why things happen the way they do? Do life’s hardships chisel a perception of morality?
As a practical matter we are obliged to forgo these elevated intellectual matters and fight simply for our survival and as well that of a society and culture that is not beyond good and evil, but rejoices in the rules by which it was forged. Fight with tooth and clay for the survival of our traditional cultural morality, if not for yourself, then for your children and their children.
If you revel in exploring “self”, you must also explore the consequences that self indulgence brings to what was once a glorious nation, whose prosperity and culture was the envy of the world. For what other reason did everyone want to move here and virtually no reasonable person wanted to leave?
Force Majeure is not a defense to denial.
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