Consider that in many ways we have become the master of nature AND have also become the slave of two things we build with our own hands: the machine and technology. With all of our knowledge of matter, machines and technology we seem to be ignorant with regard to the most important and fundamental questions of human existence: Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we choosing to go? Why are we choosing to go there?
The Enlightenment offered us two guides to help us engage these fundamental questions: Revelation and Reason. Today we seem to be without the guidance that both provide. We are left with a relativistic position which proposes that value judgments and moral/ethical norms are exclusively matters of taste and arbitrary preference. Yet, we cannot live without values and norms and so our relativism makes us easy prey for irrational value systems and self-serving norms.
The demands of powerful organizations including the ‘State,’ our desire for our leaders to give us easy answers and their unwillingness to name the ‘King’s clothes’ that we are wearing [that life is truly complex and there are few problems to be solved and many, many, many more paradoxes to be embraced, polarities to be engaged and dilemmas to be held/dissolved/resolved], plus our slavery to machines and technology, and our lust for material success become the sources for the norms that guide us and the values that support us.
Are we — you, me, us — to leave it at that? Are we simply to consent to relativism and turn our backs on revelation and reason? Are we going to choose to believe that the choices between freedom and slavery, between love and hate, between truth and falsehood, between integrity and opportunism, between life and death, are simply the results of so many subjective preferences?
There are at least two alternatives, Revelation and Reason. Both are sticky wickets — Revelation continues to be the stickiest of the wickets, for me anyway, Reason, a bit less so. So, I will focus a bit on Reason.
Given our understanding of history we ‘know’ that valid ethical and moral norms can be formed by our reason. We humans are capable of discerning and making value judgments as valid as all other judgments rooted in reason. All of the great humanistic traditions in the West provided us with deep tap roots for value systems that support our ‘freedom/autonomy’ and ‘reason.’ These systems tell us that in order to know what is good or bad for man one has to know the nature of man.
We cannot begin to ‘know’ ourselves as human beings unless we look at ourselves ‘holistically’. This includes our need to intentionally and purposefully search to find ‘answers’ to the fundamental questions I listed earlier and it also includes our need to discern/discover the values and norms according to which we ought to live.
Consider that the values and norms that we need to guide us as human beings can be found within our human nature; that these norms are rooted in our inherent qualities and that their violation results in violence that we do to ourselves and to others. We are, by nature, living paradoxes. We are good and evil, we are virtue and vice, we are light and darkness AND we have choice. But we can only choose wisely if we ‘know’ who we are.
Consider that any organized collection of human beings is also a living paradox. One trap we fall into is that we believe that a person, a collective, a community, a race, a nation, a religion is either inherently good or inherently evil. The beauty of this is that it makes life simple. If we accept that we are, in these many guises, truly paradoxes then it all becomes quite complex indeed.
Gentle reader, what are your responses to these fundamental questions: Who am I? Who are You? Who are We? Why are we here? Where are we choosing to go? Why are we choosing to go there? In reflecting and responding to these questions, what guides your search – Revelation, Reason or…?
Searcher-Seeker 