Monday, March 8, 2010
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
"Certain hierarchs of the
Catholic Church in Latin America used prayer as an anesthesia to put the people
to sleep. When they cannot dominate us with law, then comes prayer, and when
they can't humiliate or dominate us with prayer, then comes the gun."
Evo Morales, President of Bolivia (July 13, 2009)
"The single most important quality needed to resist
evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy is possible only through reflection,
self-determination and the courage not to cooperate."
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) German philosopher
Why do political leaders seem to be lying most of the
time? Why is uncontrolled greed so prevalent in corporate rooms? Why do wicked
men wage wars of aggression and become indifferent to the killing of innocent
people? Why does materialism seem to trump everything else? Why do we have the
uneasy feeling that our society is going in the wrong direction? The very fact
that we have to raise such questions may be a sign of the times.
Indeed, when the stench of moral decay becomes
overwhelming, bad things inevitably follow. Historically, it can be shown that
when the moral environment in a society is deteriorating, problems tend to pile
up.
We are presently living in one of those times,
characterized by deep and entrenched political corruption, by routine abuse of
power and disregard for the rule of law in high places, and by unchecked greed,
fraud and deception in the economic sphere. The results are all there to see:
Severe and prolonged economic and financial crises, rising social inequalities
and social injustice, increasing intolerance toward individual choices, the
disregard for environmental decay, the rise of religious absolutism, a return
to whimsical wars of aggression (or of pre-emptive wars), to blind terrorism
and to the repugnant use of torture, and even to genocide and to blatant war
crimes. These are all indicators that our civilization has lost its moral
compass.
With all these throwbacks to an
unpalatable past, it is not surprising there is a resurgence of interest
nowadays for questions of morality and of ethics.
The contradiction between modern
problems, new scientific knowledge and the inadequacy of our prevalent source
of morality or of ethics, which are mainly religion-based, has led a humanist
like me to write a book, “The
Code for GLOBAL ETHICS, Ten Humanist Principles”, [ISBN: 978-1616141721] prefaced
by Dr. Paul Kurtz and published this year by Prometheus Books. The book is a
down-to-earth discussion of ten basic humanist principles for our new global
context.
Why such a renewed interest in the
moral dimension of things? —First, partly because many of our problems
and threats are not only severe but they have also become global in nature.
—Second, the fact that we seem to be unable to solve our global problems
might also be because our scientific and technological progress is advancing
much faster than our moral progress, with the consequence that problems arise
faster than our moral ability to face them and to solve them. —And third,
this is also partly due to the fact that the old religion-based rules of
morality are of little help in solving these new problems, basically because
they belong to the past and because, unfortunately, they have not incorporated
new scientific knowledge.
Indeed, humans' vision of
themselves in the Universe has been forever altered by three fundamental
scientific breakthroughs:
- Galileo's proof, in 1632, that the Earth and humans were
not the center of the Universe, as supposedly holy books have proclaimed.
- Darwin's
discovery, in 1859,
(“On the Origin of Species”) that humans are not some god-like
creatures unique among all species, destined to live forever, but are rather
the outcome of a very long natural biological evolution.
- And, the Watson-Crick-Wilkins-Franklin's
discovery, in 1953, of the structure of the double helix DNA molecule (Deoxyribo
Nucleic Acid) in each of the 46 chromosomes in human cells, and the
devastating knowledge that humans share more than 95 percent of the same
genes with chimpanzees.
I would add, also, that ongoing
research about how the human brain functions has cast new light on how some
phenomena, such as different thoughts, including religious thoughts, are
generated in different zones of the brain.
Therefore, nobody can claim anymore that the Earth is
the center of the Universe; nobody can claim that humans are unique in the
scale of things; and nobody can claim that the human body and the human mind
are two unrelated entities. This knowledge has tremendous consequences for our
moral stance.
My best hope is that we will avoid falling back into
an age of obscurantism and of decadence, and that we will be able to build a
truly humanist civilization for the future.
______
***N.B. : Conference by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
“Economic Bubbles and Financial Crises” at the Renaissance Academy
(Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU)), Yacht Club, Marco Island, Florida,
Friday, March 19, 2010 (239-434-4737).
Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com.
*****The French version of the book is now available. See:
www.lecodepouruneethiqueglobale.com/
or on Amazon.
Register to be alerted when the English
version is available by sending the word “Code” to bigpictureworld@yahoo.com
Please visit the book site at:
www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/
_____________________________________
Posted, Friday, January 22, 2010, at 5:30 am
Email to a friend:
http://www.TheNewAmericanEmpire.com/tremblay=1121
or,
http://www.thecodeforglobalethics.com/pb/wp_26f7a0c1/wp_26f7a0c1.html
Send contact, comments or commercial reproduction
requests (in English or in French) to:
N.B.: Messages may
be published in our weblog, unless you request otherwise.
Please register to receive free alerts on new postings
of articles.
Send an email with the word "subscribe" to:
bigpictureworld@yahoo.com
To unregister, send an email with the word "unsubscribe"
to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com
The
above is presented for educational purposes only.
© 2009 by
Big Picture World Syndicate, Inc.