Originally Posted by
Brian Rush
This is not the first time that technology has outpaced morality. We are undergoing a transformation similar in both nature and magnitude to what our ancestors went through when they adopted farming and built the first civilizations. Then, too, they had a set of values and institutions that worked perfectly well for a pre-civilized, hunter-forager human community, but proved inadequate for the numbers, complexity, and way of life that farming entailed.
Science offers no moral lessons. The Ten Commandments give very clear instructions on how to live as a monotheist with some morals. The prohibitions against murder, theft, perjury, envy, fraudulent oath-taking, and disloyalty to parents are essential to the smooth operation of a healthy society. The requirement of a Sabbath is as much a prohibition of working to exhaustion as it is giving a day to a specific God. Prohibitions against having other gods, against creating graven images as idols, and against worshiping those idols define the Mosaic community and its descendants as monotheists. I question whether it is possible to be a polytheist and have a consistent moral philosophy or have a rational approach to science unless one pushes aside the multiple gods. Before someone suggests Buddhism -- Buddhism seems to to treat any Divinity as irrelevant. Science can tell us that if we put carbon and nitrogen together with a triple bond and connect the fourth bond of several carbon atoms with iron atoms in a certain way we can make a very good and safe ink. It can also tell us that that carbon-nitrogen bond when so weakly connected to other atoms creates an easily-released ion that when ingested or inhaled by a vertebrate quickly puts an end to respiration. Science cannot tell us that it is wrong force people for whom a political leader has great enmity to breathe cyanide compounds. "Thou shalt not kill!" is the simplest method of deciding whether to murder or not murder people.
Technology is also amoral. The same video technology that allows one to view something so magnificent as a full recording of The Magic Flute or such harmless drivel as reruns of Gilligan's Island (aesthetics have rarely been a moral issue) can also play back child pornography. We fault the persons who make the play-by-play of child sexual abuse and those who buy such inexcusable stuff.
Where technology changes things is when it offers a new form of power that offers both more capacity to get things done -- and dangers. So it is even with the technology (the printing press) that neatly divides the modern from the pre-modern; the same printing press that can yield the score of the string quintet of Franz Schubert can also offer Mein Kampf. So it was with electrical power and motor vehicles. With contraception, the new technology takes away some of the consequences of behavior that people used to avoid by avoiding sex. We know what some of the more obvious consequences are. Of course it is terribly immoral to fornicate in such a way that the sex can lead to a pregnancy that leaves an unwelcome child likely to be abandoned or abused even if kept. But to fornicate without the risk of such happening? Such isn't so clearly immoral. A community inculcates a moral compass as a norm to be adhered to with few ill consequences or it commits economic or even military suicide. Nazi Germany died of its own immorality even more than from superior force; contrast the benign Finnish Republic that ended up on the same side. Moral law is real even if it needs no God as its enforcer.
Why? Because an agricultural community is a settled community, with the potential for much larger numbers living in a given land area, able to free a larger percentage of the population from the work of food production, and in sharper conflict with its neighbors. That kind of life was no more suited to our genes than what we have today. And yet our ancestors were able to adapt to it and create social and political structures and values regimes that worked. We may not much LIKE those values and institutions from today's perspective, but they worked.
Much of what was horrifically immoral in a hunter-gatherer society and in turn an early agrarian society remains terribly immoral. Life us precious or it is meaningless. Suicide rates in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were astronomical. Where scarcity remains a reality (and there always will remain scarcity for some items) security of property is a necessity for enticing people to do what creates, preserves, and gives meaning to wealth that creates the means of survival for many. Jury trials depend upon the credibility of witnesses; convictions based upon outright lies are travesties of justice that tear at the credibility of the legal system. People who exploit the gullibility of the devout to fleece such people are obvious abominations. It is best that there be some certitude that the elderly will get support from able-bodied people. Working people to exhaustion was one way to waste assets in the ante-bellum South... but in Hitlerland such was an effective way in which to destroy "inconvenient" people.
On the way, institutions and values different from pre-civilized life but also different from what ultimately became the classical civilized paradigm (as I term it) were temporarily adopted. Communal farming was tried repeatedly. Various types of republic or democracy were created in a number of places. Tribal governments replaced the informal governing structures of pre-civilized life, before ultimately giving way to aristocratic monarchy which was the universal form. We can see in the New World at the time the Europeans arrived a snapshot of the transition from pre-civilized to classical civilized life. A few tribes in the Amazon, California, the Arctic, and the Pacific Northwest still lived a full-fledged pre-civilized life by foraging and hunting. Most of the peoples of North America were in one stage or another of transition, practicing farming but not yet gathered in cities, and governed by values and institutions betwixt and between. The civilized peoples of Mexico and Central America and also the Inca had developed the classical paradigm full-on, complete with kings, nobles, slaves, state religion, and written language.
Technology, culture, and social organization give people means of doing more things, doing them better, or doing them on a bigger scale. Such is true even in a society so sick as the Roman Empire. The Romans weren't far from full-blown modernity. Just imagine them with some of the critical inventions of modernity -- the printing press, and the mechanical reaper. Of course they had some nasty superstitions and some questionable entertainments.
I have toyed with alternative history. I wonder at times what America would be like had the Vikings been successful in colonizing the New World (a hint: the topography of the eastern half of North America has peculiar resemblances to Russia, most notably some long rivers), if the Aztecs had met French or Irish priests instead of Spanish priests, if the Chinese had reached the New World before the West or had met the Norse in the Great Plains (a hint: the site of San Francisco would be a Chinese "town" with a Chinese name rarely translated from "Golden Gate" instead of having a Chinatown)... but for such an effort to have any coherence it takes some understanding of the basic laws of human reality.
We are, and have been since about the 15th century (through all the modern saeculum, in other words), undergoing a similar transition, and it isn't complete yet. Exactly where we're going remains to be seen. But unless we actually destroy ourselves and either become extinct or revert to a pre-civilized existence, we will not proceed in the "wrong direction." It's impossible to do that very far; such things are self-correcting.
Civilization has its attractions. It is much more entertaining than barbarity. It's hard to imagine anyone not being in awe of the contents of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I question whether one can listen to the Eighth Symphony of Bruckner without amazement. There is only so much bear-baiting that anyone could tolerate.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters