For background, I’ll make these three claims without trying to justify them:
- Human beings don’t come together just to be together or for any other sentimental reason; human beings come together to do things and because they are dependent upon each other, perhaps as a result of doing things together.
- Most moral behavior is learned within the context of a specific set of communities of various types and scales (such as nation and town, parish or local community, and Christianity as a whole) and is manifested in response to particular cues; members of different morally well-ordered communities may come into conflict over specific issues (even one so simple as: should retail prices be set high and negotiated or set at some `fair’ and non-negotiable price?).
- Individual moral behavior does not readily generate small-group moral behavior and has little obvious effect on large-group moral behavior.
That last claim tells us we have a deep chasm to bridge. Let’s try to at least produce a conceptual design of that bridge by stealing some sophisticated ideas from abstract regions of modern mathematics—though the first stages of this design will involve mathematics not nearly sophisticated enough to produce a real bridge.
We should always remember that individual human beings are, for the most part thought not the totality, the building blocks of all human communal being. Thus it is that we must always qualify the third point above; individual moral behavior `first’ creates communal moral behavior which then guides further development of individual moral behavior. Communal moral behavior, indeed communal human being, reflects also principles of order which are part of our world and which we know in specifics only as it emerges. Those principles can be derived from more abstract possibilities which can be understood in terms of modern abstract mathematics.
The American physicist John Wheeler once summarized general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, by saying that matter tells space how to shape itself and space then tells matter how to move. Maybe we can play around with this metaphor. In prior years, I expressed the stolen and re-used idea as:
Human beings tell moral space how to shape itself and moral space then tells human beings how to move through life—how to act.
Now, I’m more likely to claim:
Individual human moral actors tell their communities how to shape themselves and those communities then tell individual human beings how to move through life—how to act.
Remember these processes aren’t fully controlled by the human will; they reflect abstract principles of order which we don’t understand very well at all. We need to work toward such an understanding.
We can see readily that the processes which bring order to human being, individual and communal, are recursive processes which begin, back in the mists of time, as a bootstrapping of sorts. Human moral order has its beginning in the processes of self-organization which brought about some sorts of complex chemicals (perhaps early forms of DNA or RNA), the precursors of life. From there, we move by nasty processes and cooperative processes through cells and colonies of cells and organisms of multiple cells and societies of organisms. The problem at hand is: how to develop a disciplined body of words and concepts to describe human being and its acts, individual and communal, in all of its complexity?
This is a problem I’m dealing with in a book I’m writing. It’s not a problem to be solved in the way of a high school algebra problem, but rather a problem of developing concepts and terms to deal with dynamic processes in a population of complex entities. Nor am I claiming that it is possible to develop a fully quantitative, closed-form answer to: “What is the meaning of life?” Even as a Christian who believes in absolute truths, I see life as a process to be described and understood as it happens because life is ultimately something God shares with us and something we can learn to share with God. Non-Christians should be able to easily translate this into their own terms.
I’ll provide a simple statement of the a first stage in understanding human being. I apologize in advance for not using good mathematical typesetting; that better formatting will be provided, along with somewhat crude graphics, in the LaTeX versions of this essay when added to the collection, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2015. The better formatting will also show up in the book with the tentative title: The Shape of Reality.
Imagine a manifold, U, which represents, is a model of, some well-ordered community. The `points’, x, of U, are actually themselves complex individuals in that community. Those points can be mapped to a manifold, V. Think of V as a Euclidean or Cartesian n-dimensional coordinate system for now. The points of V are themselves descriptions of complex states of being (think: x(1), x(2),…,x(n)).
We can give our imaginations a bit of free-play—without going beyond the freedoms which are allowed by modern, abstract mathematics. In particular, we can think of the second manifold—V, as having an x(1) which involves a fully quantitative description of some aspect of individual human being while x(7) is a partially ordered and qualitative description of, for example, a woman’s goodness or saintliness. Another variable, say x(99), might represent a characteristic set by a `random’ (that is—factual) process.
Now, let’s add a little to the basic model. I spoke of mapping points, individuals, from the global manifold, communities, to a manifold which provides some description of the actual state of being for individuals. That is, for an x belonging to U, f(x) is a well-defined `point’ (which will actually be some more or less complex set) on V. This f() is a mapping in the intuitive sense and not a function which grinds up numbers and outputs one or more numbers. (In a more sophisticated model, that well-defined point of f(x) would be a region of states of being over which an individual’s characteristics roam; that is, even if a woman is on a clear trajectory toward goodness, she might regress a little at times.) It’s best, for both reasons of the underlying being and also for better use of the mathematical concepts, if there is a well-behaved inverse function going from V back to U. Let’s designate this as g(f(x)), partly for typesetting reasons but mostly because it might not be exactly an inverse but only `approximately’ due to uncertainties in the state of being and also possible uncertainties in the `location’ of that individual in the community.
So, let us think of the real being of a community and underlying individuals. How does this system ever come into being? Can we think of a poorly ordered group of individuals and a mapping, g(y), where y is approximately f(x) and allows a bootstrapping of a community? Or do we think of U as already existing as a result of ancient evolutionary events which we may or may not ever be able to reconstruct? That would leave the bootstrapping process to specialists and allow us to work with the current world of individuals and communities. For now, it’s probably best to think of U and V as both already existing, realizing that both communities and individuals are the result of ongoing dynamical processes.
There is much to be explored in this effort to bring some discipline to our understanding of human being, discipline which works with rather than suppressing the richness and complexity of concrete human being, individual and communal. Moreover, there is the complication that I already know there are more powerful and more flexible ways of combining individuals into communities or breaking up communities into individuals. I don’t have a good handle for now on those ways and, in any case, see great advantages in working toward more powerful ways of thought as a process of climbing a long stairway by aiming at one landing after another. If you know as much or more of mathematics as I currently do: think of these more powerful ways as drawn from algebraic topology and category theory and other abstractions of abstractions of…
So it is that my next post will discuss the problems of seeing moral order as arising in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes which can be very nasty indeed. But those processes at their nastiest lead to some sort of order. How can moral order arise from forms of order based upon a struggle to eat before being eaten or to reproduce faster than your neighbor? I won’t have any good answers, but I’ll try to produce some insights which might lead to a good understanding in a year or maybe a century.