This is the twenty third Chapter from the online book: Living Ethics: The Way of Wholeness. See: 1) How Should We Live? 2) Ethics and Civilization 3) Worldview and Ethics 4) Self View and Ethics 5) World as System 6) The Material Cosmos 7) Biological Systems 8) Human Systems 9) Psyche as System 10) The Collective Unconscious 11) The Collective Conscious 12) Emerging From Chaos 13) The Emerging Worldview 14) The Psychological Problem 15) Approaches to Natural Ethics 16) Good, Ethics, and Evil 17) Reverence for Life and Natural Ethic 18) The Ethical Field 19) MetaEthics 20) Comparative Ethics 21) The Ethical Model 22) Ethics and the Individual
Donivan Bessinger, MD
How should we live?
The search for the answer to Socrates’ question has taken us from the writings of ancient philosophers to the research laboratories of modern physics and biology. We have considered the works of many discoverers, and have made discoveries as diverse as fossils carefully scraped from eroded earthen banks, and dreams patiently analyzed while listening to troubled people. After more than twenty-five centuries of discoveries since Confucius and Heraclitus, mankind is discovering again the vision of the wholeness of natural creation held by ancients. Again we quote The Doctrine of the Steadfast Mean:
All things are nourished together without their injuring one another. The courses of the seasons, and of the sun and moon, are pursued without any collision among them. The smaller energies are like river currents; the greater energies are seen in mighty transformations. It is this which makes heaven and earth so great. (1)
How should we live? How can we translate the ancient vision of the wholeness of the unconscious natural world into a vision of wholeness in the conscious world in which we live?
Is it a utopia that we seek? Is a utopia possible? Or even desirable?
The usual idea of utopia is the idea of some sort of perfected society. Taken in its usual sense, the utopian society must be perfected through constraints which are usually externally conceived and imposed. Another problem with the idea of perfected society is that perfection implies completion. Perfection means an end to the development process, an end to change, and indeed an end to process itself.
Life is a process requiring change. Life requires striving. It is a process with a goal, at the minimum, the goal of survival. The concept of utopia requires contemplation of a state contrary to biological truth. In that sense of perfected society, utopia is contrary to life.
Yet it is useful to contemplate the goal of a well-ordered society. In that sense, the perfect society would be such society as would result from the maximum fulfillment of its individuals. Fulfillment must not be conceived in any sense of blind selfishness, however, but in the sense of the barrier-free self, in which consciousness and unconsciousness are integrated.
“Utopian” society is better thought of as a society of wholeness, in which individuals reach to discover the fullness of life, in full respect of other life and of the fund of knowledge and the pursuit of truth. For utopia to exist as a social concept, it must first exist as an individual concept, describing the individual’s sense of harmony of self with others.
However, as the natural ethic of reverence for life draws us toward individual wholeness, it also inevitably draws us to seek wholeness for society. That society, as we have argued, is now one society, one global civilization. Under the ethic of reverence for life, each of us lives under an imperative to seek civilization’s survival and development as we concurrently seek our own.
In some respects, history can be seen as the competition of groups seeking an imperialistic hegemony over the ideas or territories of others. All of us are prone to build empires of financial, political, ideological, or psychological authority. The reductionistic worldview of positivism, which sees the parts not the whole, gives rise to competitive philosophies. Such a view of life process mistakes the “survival of the fittest” and “law of the jungle.” It construes the world as hostile and survival as a code which justifies spreading power over others for the sake of self above all else.
By contrast, the systems worldview does not see life’s challenge as aggressive dominance of the “fittest” over the weak, but (as Dobzhansky points out) as survival of the fit. (2) The “law of the jungle” is the law of equilibrium, not hostile but neutral. Life seeks its balance in an interlocking web of lives and processes. The fit survive through finding equilibrium with all other life. Reverence for life yields a code, not of imperialism, but of imperativism, always reaching out to help meet the needs of life. Schweitzer:
In no way does reverence for life allow the individual to give up interest in the world. It is unceasingly compelling him to be concerned about all the life that is round about him, and to feel himself responsible for it. Whenever life whose development we can influence is in question, our concern with it, and our responsibility for it, are not satisfied by our maintaining and furthering its existence as such; they demand that we shall try to raise it to its highest value in every respect. (3)
The first imperative for reverence for life in civilization is to seek to make ethics real at all levels of society. The systems worldview outlined here harmonizes knowledge from many fields, and offers an outline of general concepts which should be a part of the knowledge base of every individual. It makes clear that all knowledge is a part of the humanities. Further, these humanities must not be kept forever separate, each isolated in its own department. It is critical to the development of ethical society that teaching must foster an understanding of the interactive and interlocking nature of knowledge, so that we may comprehend the true nature of nature.
Ethics can be made real. Ethics can be taught, but to gain a wider acceptance of that idea, we must build on Heraclitus’ insight that we must have a “cosmos in common” as a basis for communication and understanding. Only in the workings of life itself can we demonstrate surely and consistently a principle of ethics which creates a conscious imperative, an imperative that is in harmony with our unconscious will-to-live.
The teaching of ethics must also put high value on developing thought and inquiry as a lifestyle. The world of knowledge is rapidly changing, and must continue to do so. Finding the ethical options requires knowledge of all aspects of the situation confronted. Ethics start with good science. (4) As knowledge changes, ethical options change, though of course the principle of life’s balance and of reverence for life does not.
The teaching of ethics must also be prepared to draw supportive parallels with ethical teachings in other systems, such as religious systems. In the work presented here, we have already mentioned many such parallels, drawing from Hebrew, Christian, Oriental, and various primal sources. Reverence for life does indeed support and respect individual belief systems. However, instituting a system of public teaching of ethical principles will require making a distinction between the teaching of ethics and the teaching of religion. There is no sense in which the teaching of ethics constitutes the establishing of a religion. It is entirely appropriate to teach ethics and to draw comparative parallels. Indeed, it must be done.
In a litigious society, it is likely that dissident parents will make legal challenges to any sort of ethical teaching that is not explicitly in the language of their own belief system. Reverence for life respects those who act in that way. The worldview presented here helps understand the psychological dynamics of such protests. However, supported by the body of knowledge presented, society can confidently affirm a policy of teaching principles of ethics based on reverence for life. Society must develop the courage of its life convictions.
Another imperative for reverence for life in society is to seek to make ethics real in public policy. We have made the point that reverence for life is not political and does not presume any particular political agenda. That is true. Political realities change, or over time come to be interpreted differently. Political action must always be subject to careful analysis and subsequent evaluation.
The insights of the universal or systems worldview are especially helpful in dealing with the complexities of multi-level problems. Probabilities of outcomes at all levels must be considered, and actions must be directed toward the balance of the whole society, not toward the self-interest of an apparently isolated segment of society. Indeed, this worldview makes clear that no segment exists in isolation.
The systems worldview also makes clear that environmentalism is not a separate issue which can be isolated from other concerns on the legislative agenda. Actions directed toward the “environment” are directed toward the wrong point of focus. The focus must always be on the interrelatedness of life. All matters on the legislative agenda must be considered in terms of all life system interactions, and in terms of the interactions between life systems and geosystems.
Reverence for life also makes real the relationship between the development and fulfillment of the individual and that of society. The development of a society cannot be achieved without respect for the freedom of the individual. The political concept of human rights derives from the ethical concept of human will-to-live. While reverence for life does not specify the particulars of a government’s constitution or its legislative policies, we can confidently state that this natural life-systems ethic does not support either anarchy or totalitarianism. It supports the “middle way” of balance of all life, seeking always to act in the interests of individuals and society together.
The American experience of replacing the law of the sovereign with the law of the people hinges on a concept of checks and balances. The concept of the natural rights of man derived from an intuitive and empirical understanding of the natural order. Even though the United States Constitution well preceeded modern biological science, the founding fathers established a system which, in its essence, is organic rather than legal, for it is based on life systems principles. “Checks and balances,” after all, is a political scientist’s way of describing the feedback principle. The American system has been successful because it has embodied life principle in its central legal structures, allowing its political and judicial systems to respond organically to the needs of its people. However, we must acknowledge that where it fails to meet societal problems, it does so when rigid political doctrine and fixed legal structure become unresponsive to changing life needs.
The trend of the recent decades has been to the exaltation of individual freedom and to the denial of collective interactive responsibility. Groups representing the single interests of economic, ethnic, religious, gender, or other constituencies increasingly claim “rights” for increasingly narrowly defined categories of persons, rather than affirming the collective rights of all people as persons. An organically balanced society must recognize that all citizens must learn to participate in the whole by taking equal responsibility as persons, without regard to categories.
Individual human rights can flourish only in a fertile soil which supports collective human rights, for only when the rights of everyone are affirmed may the rights of any one individual be achieved and protected. Nor may the rights of an individual be affirmed without affirming the responsibility of each individual to the rights of all. There is an inherent interaction between right and responsibility.
Since Marx and Lenin, world economic doctrine has been polarized between purist doctrines of capitalism and communism. The dramatically sudden collapse of communist systems in Europe attests that individual freedom and initiative may not be forfeited to central planning, nor may freedom of expression and worship forever be systematically denied if a human system is to survive. In the wake of that demonstration, many are declaiming the ultimate “victory” of capitalism.
In the United States, the two poles of economic and political opinion are set closer together than on the world scale. In general, these positions cluster around the flags of the two major political parties, one “standard bearer” emphasizing public sector solutions, and the other, private sector initiative. Too often, however, these flags are marched forward by communities of fixed doctrine in the service of partisan power, rather than in organic response to the needs of the people.
The collapse of European communism and of the cold war brings us to a major crossroads of world order. However, the increasing problems of American society underscore that we must also rethink our domestic order, and revive our understanding of free society as organic society. The polarizations and the alienations which have threatened to overcome us at all levels, economic and environmental, urban and rural, social and individual, must be broken down and overcome, being reconciled by a new grasp of an ancient worldview of wholeness.
At the very least, an organic view of society requires that its people be adequately provided with nutrition, housing, education and medical care. We usually construe these as individual human needs or “rights”. The organic view of society points to these as societal needs as well. The society is not healthy if its people are not healthy. When people are not adequately provided for, the system becomes unstable and its survival is threatened. Since there are both individual and social dimensions to providing these basics, we cannot solve the problems through doctrines which place individual needs in opposition to collective needs.
The world is now too complex to be served by the simplistically rigid political and economic doctrines of the past. Our headiness at seeing the success of our system as victorious over communism must not lead us to blindly pursue unfettered unregulated capitalism. Strong and vigorous and successful as our system is, capital must serve people, not vice versa.
We do well to consider the organic view, that systems are self-regulating only within a certain range of conditions. External “treatments” must be offered to promote healing of the system when normal tolerances are exceeded. In the economic sphere, concentrations of capital become concentrations of power, which, like the complex of psychologic theory, tends toward autonomy. Like a cancer, such a complex subsumes more and more energy into its own control, weakening the function of the whole.
There are many implications for modern society of the organic view of life. Though this is not the place for a full study of an organic theory of government, it is appropriate to comment briefly. As populations increase and economic and technologic complexity increase, the role of government must be reconsidered.
An organic view leads to the conclusion that both private and public sectors must be strong. There will always tension between them, but they must always be responsive to each other. Just as there is a balance of power among the arms of government, so must there be a balance between the representative government and its people.
The private sector must be the economic engine. In system terms, it must be both energy generator and processor, but energy alone does not make a system. There must be an integrating regulating function which operates in service of the whole. That is the role properly served by government, but it is effective and integrating only when the bureaucracies do not themselves become autonomous complexes unresponsive to the needs of the whole organism.
We face a complicated future, which requires us to adhere to a new way of thinking about life at all levels. Whether the organism is the nation-state in its internal affairs, or the global community of nation-states, neither can operate as a healthy organism unless we honor the natural ethic of reverence for life.
In Philosophy of Civilization, Schweitzer included a chapter entitled “The civilizing power of reverence for life.” There, it is clear that he had a great and confident vision for the applicability of ethical principles at national and international levels. Ethics must be central to any concept of new world order.
The objection is raised that, according to all experience, the state cannot exist by relying merely on truth, justice, and ethical considerations, but in the last resort has to take refuge in opportunism. … It is refuted by the dreary results. We have therefore the right to declare the opposite course to be true wisdom, and to say that true power for the state as for the individual is to be found in spirituality and ethical conduct. The state lives by the confidence of those who belong to it; it lives by the confidence felt in it by other states. Opportunist policy may have temporary successes to record, but in the long run it assuredly ends in failure.
Thus ethical world- and life-affirmation demands of the modern state that it shall aspire to making itself an ethical and spiritual personality. It presses this obstinately upon the state … . The wisdom of tomorrow has a different tone from that of yesterday. (5)
Copyright 2000 by Donivan Bessinger. All rights reserved.
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More by Donivan Bessinger, MD
References:
(1) “ALL THINGS ARE NOURISHED TOGETHER”—” The Doctrine of the Steadfast Mean”. Portable World Bible. R. O. Ballou, editor. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. p 514.
(2) SURVIVAL OF THE FIT—Theodosius Dobzhanzky. Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962. p 133.
(3) “IN NO WAY DOES REVERENCE FOR LIFE”—Schweitzer. PC, p 330.
(4) ETHICS, GOOD SCIENCE—It is of course also obvious that good science must be based on “good ethics”. Experiments improperly done and information falsified do not yield “science”.
(5) “THE OBJECTION IS RAISED”—Schweitzer. PC, p 342 f.