Beyond Nature and Nurture

 What exists beyond Nature and Nurture?

I am fairly sure that I am about to lose a few readers at this point.  Because, if we want to find an answer to the question “Why should I care for the other?” and the material explanations (nature and nurture) are insufficient, we are going to have to talk about non-material things.  Call this spirituality or religion, it is something that many of my friends and colleagues don’t feel comfortable talking about.
    I never intended to be a religious person, and I certainly was not brought up that way.  But I made decisions early in my career that pointed me in the direction of using my professional skills towards meaningful ends.  And, as I taught others to do the same, I wondered why.  I began to walk a path towards religion when I realized that my urge to care was not completely explainable or understandable within the limits of nature and nurture.  It was clear to me, as I tried to argue in earlier postings, that some values transcended biology and culture.  Some values were fundamental to all human beings.  I adopted what the intellectual historian, William Barrett, called “the religious hypothesis” – that there exists meaning to life.
    We should note early in this discussion that I am not talking about Religion, with a “capital R.”  “Capital R” Religion is an organized approach to the pursuit of meaning, usually with a set of common beliefs, common practices and structured institutions through which groups of people seek out that meaning in relatively defined ways and share it with each other.
    No, “small r” religion is the simple acceptance that there are some values, some meaning, that transcend the material world, that are not dependent on nature and nurture.  It is faith in Transcendence, in a ground for these transcendent values.  If we choose to populate Transcendence with a set of beliefs and organize our approach to those beliefs, we enter into Religion.  But before there was Religion, there was religion. 
    I believe that this is what is most commonly meant by using the term “spirituality.”  And I adopted that term a number of years ago.  But since then, the baggage that comes with the label of “spirituality” is no longer worth the freight costs. 
    “Small r” religion is the simple belief that there is a source of meaning to our lives that is not an expression of our genes or of our culture.  And, therefore, these transcendent values are applicable to the affairs of all humans.  You and I can bond over our experience of this faith in Transcendence, but be quite split over what we believe those values to be and whether or how to “worship” them.  But that disagreement takes place in the context of Religion, not religion.

But How Do We Know?

    Assuming, for the moment, that you, the Reader, are comfortable with rejecting Materialism and accepting the notion of Transcendence, then you and I share a common perspective, that there exists meaning to our lives.  But what is that meaning?  How do we lead a life of Goodness?  And how do we know what is Good?  And can we be sure? 
    I once had a conversation with someone who was a lawyer for large financial concerns, what today we call “private equity,” but at the time we called “corporate raiders.”  I stated that I thought what I did for a living was morally superior to what he did for a living.  He was insulted, which is not a surprising response.  (I wish I had thought about that before I made my statement.)  But I believed that teaching people to shape a society that is healthier is morally superior to helping rich people make even more money, often at the expense of working people.  I continue to believe that today.  But where do I get off saying such a thing?
    It would be easier to live moral lives, lives of Goodness, if we were given a Rulebook.  To justify such a claim as I made, you might open the “Rulebook” and simply point to the appropriate Rule. 

    “Rule 756/3.  Academic work is morally superior to work in the private sector.”

Although that would support my claim, it is an absurd overstatement.  Maybe we could find a more subtle rule on another page of the Rulebook:

    “Rule 1003/11.  Teaching people to become members of a helping profession is morally superior to providing litigation services to people who are merely trying to make money, regardless of the impact on the worklife of others.” 

You can see how a Rulebook that was really complete would be really, really big.  And I’ll bet your intuition tells you that even a really, really big Rulebook couldn’t cover every moral judgment we are asked to make.  There will never be a Rulebook sufficient to help us live lives of Goodness and caring. 
    Yet, how much we want there to be rules!  We want there to be a perfect way of addressing our uncertainties, reducing them to specific formulae, the use of which fully informs our decision making.  But, as David Ehrenfeld argued in The Arrogance of Humanism, our belief in our ability to find perfect solutions to our physical and our social problems, what Ehrenfeld defined as “humanism,” is illusory. 
    (Some language ambiguity here:  “Humanism” has many useful definitions.  It can mean a desire to put human welfare above profit.  In philosophy, it can refer to a group of 14th Century scholars whose work defined much of what we think of as “the Renaissance.” [Encyclopedia Britannica] It is often paired as “ethical humanism” to deny a transcendent source of meaning.  We will use it differently.)