I'm interested in the practical utility of ethical virtue.
That might be a way of thinking about it.
There's a way you're hypothetically
supposed to behave and a way you're not supposed to behave.
And it's easy for that to degenerate into a kind of rulebound finger-wagging.
And that's not helpful. I don't think, because...
Genuine ethical virtue is a source of...
It's the only source of resilience and strength that you have.
And it's also the place, as far as I can tell,
that the meaning that allows you to set yourself against suffering resides.
People talk about life and its meaning,
and they say, well, life is meaningless, but people never mean that because
if you're in pain or you're terrified, you're overwhelmed with meaning.
It's just not the kind of meaning you
want, and it's not a reality you can talk yourself out of easily.
And that's particularly true of pain, but it can also be true of anxiety.
And so the question is, is there a reliable source of meaning
that you can set against that?
And what's its nature? If so?
And so, here's a way of conceptualizing it to some degree.
So I'm currently in a rather remote
location In Northern Ontario, and one of the advantages to being here is
that I can go out on my dock at night and I can look up and see the night sky.
And when you see the night sky,
when it's pitch black, you are face to face with something as
near to the infinite as we can face in a prosaic day to day setting.
And so there's an experience that goes along with that.
And the experience is one of awe and wonder.
And awe is a very interesting emotion.
Let's say, it's unbelievably ancient from a biological perspective.
So if you feel awe, Your hair might stand up on end.
Sometimes you get that feeling chills running down your back,
say, when you're listening to music that you particularly enjoy.
And that's a variant of the reflex that prey animals have.
When they see a predator, their hair stands on end so that they look bigger.
Now, of course, they don't know that.
So part of that feeling of awe is tied to our ancient mammalian heritage.
It's a variation of the response we had to a predator.
We're facing something much greater than ourselves.
But there's more to it if you think it
through, because when you face the night sky, for example, or you face something,
you confront something that fills you with wonder and awe.
There's also a call to action that's sort of implicit in it.
And maybe you think, well,
the wolf is calling to the rabbit to be better at defending itself, in some sense,
to be a better rabbit, because otherwise, man, you're going to be eaten by the wolf.
And when you look up in the night sky,
to the night sky and you feel awe, there's a call there.
It's part of that experience to imitate that great thing that you perceive.
Now, you might say, well, how can you imitate the infinite cosmos since, well...
Obviously, that's a very complicated question, but...
You're a very complicated thing.
And God only knows what it means for you
to imitate the infinite when you apprehend it.
In some sense, that's the fundamental question of life.
How do we adapt ourselves to the infinite complexity that surrounds us?
What must we become?!
Well,
you don't merely think that through.
I mean, you don't, I don't. Human beings in general don't.
We puzzle it out and we use all sorts of information to do that.
And some of these more primordial experiences that are outside the domain
of strict rationality, nonetheless point is in an ethical direction.
The ethic would be you could... Should and could be more than you are.
Well, then the question is, how do you bring that to Earth?
How does that look when you try to embody it day to day?
Well, I would say, and these are obviously not my ideas.
They're very old ideas.
Well, maybe you ally yourself with truth, to the degree that you can.
Maybe you pursue beauty, maybe you pursue the love that attaches
you appropriately to other people, et cetera, et cetera.
And you do that because...
Well, I think you do it because, life is very, very difficult.
I was talking to my wife the other day,
and she's become very interested in Christianity, and she was talking about
a set of mysteries that are part of the Catholic ritual.
And one of the mysteries is Christ's
bearing of his cross, and someone helps him.
I'm not speaking about this religiously.
I'm speaking about it practically and psychologically.
It's a remarkable story because it implies that human existence,
like our subjugation to vulnerability, which is exemplified in that story,
to be rejected by the crowd, to be betrayed, to be killed,
that subjugation is so difficult that even God himself needed help.
And so the question is that and like I said, I'm not speaking religiously.
I'm looking at the story in some sense as a psychologist.
Like, what does that imply when you're
being called to be more than you are, and you have to attend to that very
carefully because life is extraordinarily difficult.
And to manage it in a manner that makes it acceptable or perhaps more than
acceptable, you have to be everything you could be.
So that's not exactly strength, right?
It's way more than that.
Strength is a way into it.
It's a specific virtue.
It's a way into the discussion of what constitutes the ideal.
One of the things I've been wrestling
with because I've talked to and thought very deeply about materialist atheism
and reductive materialism, I believe there are genuine flaws
with that perspective, really significant in some sense, irreparable flaws.
So, for example,
the reductive materialist atheist types, people like Richard Dawkins,
who I have great respect for, by the way, they're wrestling with a reduced version
of the devil they're attempting to conquer.
They treat religious propositions, first of all,
as if the domain of the religious is nothing but a set of propositions about
the structure of reality in the same way that a scientific theory.
And then having made that initial move,
which is often not noticed by the people who are being engaged within the argument,
once that move is accepted, it's easy to push all that aside as
superstitious nonsense, because as a set of scientific propositions, it's lacking.
But that isn't what it is at all.
It's not that at all.
Or if it is, that it's that only peripherally.
And so then we can go deeper and we can
think, well, where do we see these calls to an expanded ethic?
Where do we experience that?
Not where do we think about it?
Where do we experience it while you experience it?
When you listen to great music,
music speaks of the hierarchy of patterns, in some sense that characterize the world.
And music tends to make you move
and sometimes in unison with other people as well.
And people love that. They love music.
It's not rational.
It's underneath rationality.
Deep immersement in music borders on the religious, psychologically speaking.
I'm trying to explain these sorts of things to people...
And beautiful architecture.
You think about all the people who go visit Europe,and what they go to see.
They go to see beauty.
They're called to make a pilgrimage to architectural beauty.
They don't know why.
Well, part of it is, well,
look what we're capable of, experience what we're capable of.
Well, then you see that, and you think, well...
Why did that all come about? That beauty?
What is it aiming at? What is it pointing at?
Well, these are serious questions.
They're not... You can't just brush them away
with an argument that makes the entire domain of religious experience a form
of primitive, explicit propositions about the structure of reality.
That isn't what it is.
It's hardly that at all.
Dance is the same thing in some ways.
You move to the music and the music is reflecting the patterns of reality.
And to move to the music is to act out the proposition that you should be
harmoniously related in your movement and your utterances.
When you sing to the pattern structures of existence...
It's like, well, who can deny that?
And then, look what happens if you do deny that?!
Well, then, and you stop listening to music and you stop dancing.
Well, really, you want to stop doing that?
No, you want to do that all the time.
You want to spend every second doing that.
And so I'm trying to understand all that and to try to communicate it to people.
It's crucially important.
How should you see the world?
What lens should you look at the world through, and how should you act?
Okay, you have to answer those questions.
Those are questions of value.
Now, you could conjecture that science can
provide answers to those questions, but that is by no means obvious.
So, serious philosophers of science have disputes about that very topic.
I mean, someone like Sam Harris has proposed that we can derive a set
of universal values objectively, but many serious thinkers don't presume that.
Stephen Jay Gould,
who was a Marxist evolutionary biologist, a very famous one.
He (I believe it was Gould who) formulated the two magisterium theory.
There's a domain of objective inquiry
and there's a domain of values.
And they're actually separate.
Science, you think science strives to be value free.
Now, it can't entirely do that, because scientists have to choose what they're
going to investigate and they do that from within the frame of a value structure.
But hypothetically in its ideal,
science is value free, and that means it doesn't rank order,
its objects, in any way that would guide you when you're interacting with them.
If you decide how to do something, Then maybe you could use the scientific
method to figure out how to do it more efficiently.
But there's still that first decision.
And then if you look to science to provide your values and science can't do that,
Then what happens is that science gets hijacked, say, by ideology or by politics
or even by religion, for that matter, and invisibly or visibly or explicitly.
And that's not a good thing, not if they're actually separate.
And then if they are separate, Then we have a question, don't we?
From where do we derive our values validly?
And if you say there are no valid values, well, then that's nihilistic.
It's confusing because what do you do then?
Nothing is more important than everything is equally unimportant.
Well, that's...
If you really believe that and you acted out that's virtually indistinguishable
from being clinically depressed and paralyzed, let's say, by anxiety,
I mean, you could say, well, the universe is so brutal and it's
fundamental reality that if you saw it in its unvarnished...
If you saw it unvarnished, you would become depressed and terrified.
You could make that claim and that's
actually an accurate way of viewing the world.
But that's a pretty hopeless idea.
It isn't helpful to people and you
shouldn't jump to the conclusion that it's true.
So we have to have a serious conversation about this.
Where do we derive?
From where do we validly derive our values?
And so I've spent my whole life trying to understand that, and partly because I
was terrified into pursuing that question, because part of the way people derive
their values sometimes is by falling prey to totalitarian ideologies.
And then what happens? Well, millions of people die?
Or we start a war and maybe a thermonuclear war?
This isn't an optional... This exercise isn't optional...