The American Philosopher Inspects Our Way of Life

(Graphic: "consume" by ~Ghost City)

by Don Robertson, The American Philosopher

1/27/07

It would be easy enough just to make a statement, our way of life is immoral. However in light of the discovery of the moral imperative of life, I intend here to explain exactly why our way of life is immoral. But let me not just count the ways.

Ours is a society wholly focused upon the scientific wonders made possible since The Enlightenment. If one takes the time to read a good sized sampling of autobiographies and histories written over the last few hundred years, it becomes amazingly clear just how enthralled humanity has been with the great ages of discovery, the industrial revolution, the automotive age through the digital age. Periodicals containing advertisements also demonstrate how innovation and scientific know-how has reached a fever-pitched crescendo for describing what everyone in our society has for so long craved, Modernism.

In our Post-Modernist world the backfires and broken bolts of Modernism have overtaken us.

The taint and the putrid stench of Modernism seems to have demanded a desperate Existentialism more than several times beginning long before the Fifties when rightful nuclear paranoia hit worse than the any fear of Hitler or Hirohito, the Sixties when Vietnam and Watergate amply demonstrated electoral politics to be the failure we all generally accept it to be today, the Eighties when the nihilism of Disco and Rust Belt decline was typified by the Bee Gees "Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Staying alive..." in the John Travolta movie "Saturday Night Fever" (1977), and the Dot-Com bust of 2000 when even the greatest swindle and the greatest sting in history was legitimized by a complacent and wholly complicit government whose major players profited handsomely due to the lemming-gullibility of two entire generations.

The Boomers and their parents were taken to the cleaners and mugged by Wall Street and Washington D.C. insiders who profited from the debacle.

And things have not gotten better since, if we discount The Simpsons. It is easy to discount Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggy and Sideshow Bob. Unlike you and me, they are cartoon characters, less Sideshow who is Kelsey Grammer.

It seemed nothing could redeem humanity's faith in itself.

Today, due to the discovery of the moral imperative of life, we are all born again anew, and we should rejoice.

I've debated about saying this in print for the last several months, and I have decided I am going to say it. The discovery of the moral imperative of life is the greatest discovery in the history of humanity. It gives us all a goal, something to live for and something to work towards.

Plenty of my online acquaintances with whom I have corresponded about the moral imperative have told me how utterly narcissistic I sound about the moral imperative. You needn't bother, but you may if you please. I am not so proud criticism will harm my estimation of myself. I have delusions of grandeur, surely. But I go to great lengths to cultivate those delusions for their positive effect on my work. I am just a writer of philosophy. I am not defending any kind of reputation here. I answer to no man, less my editor who needs me, I think, and my wife whom I need, I know.

I have come to my startling and rather narcissist conclusion that the discovery of the moral imperative is the most important discovery in the history of the world by a process of eliminating other competing great discoveries.

It was a simple process of elimination that led me to determine the moral imperative is the greatest discovery in the history of mankind. Crick and Watson discovered DNA, which of course gave us genetic engineering, FrankenFood and who knows what else. Planck and Heisenberg gave us Quantum Mechanics, which was only half a discovery. Einstein gave us Relativity Theory, which led to the A-Bomb. Fulton discovered the steam boat, which led to even greater human destruction from battleships. Fleming discovered Penicillin, which gave us superbugs. Columbus discovered America, but with the Indians he holds no fame. Newton discovered gravity, which led to better ballistics and calculable cannonball trajectories. Copernicus discovered the sun, which seems a scant, even an idle discovery, too easy to rank very high. Pythagoras discovered Pi, but everyone is still trying to figure out exactly what Pi really is.

So you see, the discovery of the moral imperative of life is indeed the greatest discovery in the history of the world. There are only two other discoveries that can possibly even hold a candle to the discovery of the moral imperative. Those are the similar discoveries made by Adam and Eve, when they found out what the other was intended for, and really every generation makes that discovery in due course.

I am not an academic. I am not a genius, and as difficult as that must be, I would not want to be a genius. I just happened to get very lucky in life, and that is all. I am as regular a guy as you will ever meet. Sure, I am a little quirky. And, I've grown to be lactose intolerant to an intolerable fault. But despite this, my wife and I spent thirty-eight years madly in love, and enjoying life as it came along.

After ten years we had a son, and then another, two absolutely wonderful experiences, the most wonderful experience possible. It took the better part of 25 years to raise two sons, and we enjoyed every minute of it. And then life seemed to come to a complete standstill. My wife went back to work, and I closed my business in the high tech industry. We sold the farm. And after a lifelong interest in cosmology and theoretical physics, someone wrote to me about an on line work of mine, and told me I was writing "great metaphysics."

I was set aback. I had had a single philosophy course, but I honestly thought metaphysics was a dirty word with eleven letters. Some still do. To make a long story short, I started reading philosophy, Durant, Matson, Russell, Kant, Sartre, Nietzsche, Bergson and so many others too, literally hundreds of books, as it was all I read for a time. And then because I couldn't find any more worthwhile philosophy books, I started reading history, and Twain. I found philosophy everywhere in everything I read.

One day my wife and I stopped into a bookstore in Camden on the bay. The bookstore was full of incense and New Age works of all kinds, especially Zen and who could know what else. Not my bag of interest really, but interesting nonetheless.

The business was small enough I realized the guy behind the counter owned the store. He lived there, upstairs. So, I asked him. "What is morality?" (I knew the moral imperative by then, though I didn't know what I knew, or its importance.) He hadn't a clue what morality was. He very academically doubted morality even existed. I told him the moral imperative, but just as a statement of the morality I had personally found, for I didn't know then it was the moral imperative.

We talked more than an hour before my wife, Janie, impatiently hauled me out of there by my collar. I never got his name, nor he mine. But it seemed clear, he knew from his many years of study that I had found something very important. He perhaps knew better than I.

I ended that discussion with a bet with him that I could write a book on philosophy for kids. He said, several had been written. In my mind, I said, no. I mean a book on everything that is important about philosophy. I didn't express it because he would have said, it isn't possible.

I have asked hundreds of people since, What is morality? It seemed no one knew, though I knew what morality was in 2006. I kept telling everyone I talked to, about what morality is, and everyone agreed, just as if it had been there for them all along, even though they didn't know it.

I had read in Kant's "A Critique of Pure Reason" (1781) where he thought possibly someday, someone would be able to express a moral imperative that was categorically true with no exceptions. I had found that statement. I knew that. But I really didn't know the importance of it.

I began to write "An Illustrated Philosophy Primer for Young Readers".

It was in the course of and at the very end of that effort, I began to understand what I had found. And, I'm still finding out more every day about what I have found. Lately I've come to know it as the most important discovery in the history of humankind. It is the moral solution to the great puzzle of life. Janie thinks I am over doing it a little, as she said to me just the other day, "Don't-cha think you're over-doing it just a little?" She's the boss, but just between you and me, it is the most important discovery ever made.

Now, on to our topic here, Our Way of Life.

I'm reading H.G. Wells "The Outline of History, The Whole Story of Man" that I have mentioned here before, so I needn't tell you anything more about it other than to remind everyone, it was published in 1920 in that positive era just after the war to end all wars. (I put it down for a while to read some more Twain, "Innocents Abroad", an 1876 trip to the Holy Lands on board a "luxury" coal-fired steamship cruiser. He describes France, Italy, Greece, Morocco, Tangiers, Gibraltar, Cyprus and Egypt, and all their peoples all along the way. He actually relates riding horseback from Turkey to Palestine in 1876. It is a trip I wish I was on, despite the obvious hardships. That trip simply cannot be made today, however.)

The reason I bring the Wells' book up, is, in it Wells admiringly describes Maya art as being "[...] like nothing the old world ever produced [...]", and further he states, "It astonishes by its great plastic power and its perfection of design, but it perplexes by a grotesqueness, a sort of insane intricacy and conventionality."

This surely is also an apt description of our way of life. The parallel of the description Wells offers of Maya art is so clearly also a description of our way of life. Again, It astonishes by its great plastic power and its perfection of design, but it perplexes by a grotesqueness, a sort of insane intricacy and conventionality. This is exactly how I view our way of life after having spent just a year thinking and reflecting about the moral imperative of life.

What will ten years of thinking about the moral imperative make our way of life look like?

There is a funny thing about all of this philosophy. I can see now, how the moral imperative given to humanity at this point in time in the history of the world will alleviate much of the grotesqueness, the odd and self-defeating insane conventionality and competitiveness from which it suffers.

Here is an example:

This was how I viewed that portion of the State of the Union Address when G.W. Bush said, "Keeping America competitive begins with keeping our economy growing."

How utterly grotesque a vision that is in light of the moral imperative. How utterly grotesque a vision that is in light of our current condition! How conventionally insane! The world should be steadily working toward carefully dismantling the growth that is destroying the world. We should all be working to reduce the world's population so we can give to the future, a world that will sustain itself in plenty and without such insane competitiveness as causes war, famine, pestilence and poverty.

This is the 21st Century! If there is anything we have figured out, it is that neither technology or economy can fix anything.

The moral imperative negates much of the secular humanist idea, such as attending to everyone's want and needs. If we continue to attempt to attend to everyone's want and needs, we will destroy the planet with either technology, population growth or, war. That is just the reality of the reality of it. We are almost there now. And, if you think about it, that is why all those screeching and whining bleeding-hearts can make you pretty irritable in such short order too.

All humankind need morally do is to attend to the needs of the future world, and that is enough. The world then will no longer have to live in this grotesque conventional insanity we have today. Had Immanuel Kant given to the world the moral imperative of life before he died in 1804, we would be living with its benefits today. By his ignorance and his omission he bequeathed to us Hegel, who in turn bequeathed to us the Second World War.

There is no point is doing philosophy, if it isn't done well.

Life is good. Be thankful humanity has lived as long as it has without destroying the world for a want of morality to steer it clear of that calamity. Having a clear comprehension of morality is the only basis for a civilized civilization, which is what philosophers have been trying so desperately to get across all along.

The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.

Hold on a second, okay? I'm getting a call in from The Hague! Yes. Yes. Okay. All right. I'll tell them. That is something new... Fair enough! Okay. Best! And yours too.

That was The Hague on the phone. If any of you sees or hears from G.W. Bush, tell him, his way of life is over. Tell him, he is going to The Hague.

And this is something new, so, listen up. Apparently there is a choice now.

Tell him, if you see him. He can have it where his head stays on, or, the other way, where it actually comes off.