Essays In Civilisation and Belief

By Ross Fardon

 

Ross Fardon writes essays like none you have read: The life convictions of a practitioner who has considered the world's great scholars. What works, what is true, what lasts? He published nothing till his 70's, as too young to know things. <

• Language: English
• Publisher: STAMPA GLOBAL
• Release date: Jul 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951585723

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Copyright © 2020 by Ross Fardon.

However, without further permission, parts of the book may be copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial use, so long as attributed, and wording and figures not altered, and amounting to less than 5,000 words in all.

ISBN:    Paperback:    978-1-951585-71-6

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To learn about other books and essays by Ross Fardon, visit Rossfardonauthor.com. You may download individual essays free from that site.

CONTENTS

ETHICS

CIVILISATION, NOT WESTERN CIVILISATION

BELIEF

OLD AGE AND DEATH

HEAVEN, HELL AND HOPE

SUFI TAXI-DRIVER

ETHICS

Principles For Good living.

This is a crucial part of the Civilisation Package.

See my books Science Christianity and the Will-to-Good, ESSENTIAL Leadership and Management

Ethics are the will-to-good, to truth, to beauty and to joy in action.

Folks, this essay is meant to supplement and in many cases, to replace libraries of intricate philosophical, psychological, mythical and imaginative ethical writing. All those big words. And glory be, it sounds much simpler and truer. Practical things that work are often simple – outside of quantum technology, anyway.

This is real work-tested ethics, over 80 years in many lands. The ethics of the best people are even simpler – do our best and look after people. Sweat, nous and kindness. I guarantee that this has defined good people for 200,000 years. Try it.

The most important thing is that our ethics are in our natures, deriving from instincts of social animals: Curiosity, enterprise, anguish and laughter, belonging and fellowship and security, the needs for cooperation and looking after our own. Our evils derive from the other social animal instincts: Racism against groups different from us, and the desire for status and power, all backed by primitive willingness to be cunning and violent, cruel, in pursuit of our aims. We would not be here if not for our instincts for survival, power and domination. However, since Homo sapiens won out, instinctive racism, greed, status-seeking and powerlust have been great tragedies – on balance. Greed and powerlust have done good too.

The bases of our ethics long predate the great religions. People have not come to terms with Darwin over the last 150 years, showing that everything in humanity is a long climb towards understanding, and that most that is good and bad in us derives from ourselves, not from any godly interventions. Or godly inventions. All gods have been human inventions.

These are the convictions of a manager and historian who believes that civilisation depends on the will-to-good plus management. This is not ethics to be muddled around the corridors of bright university people, resulting in almost all writing on ethics. They are an outcry to affirm effective people - and balance.

Perhaps the toughest balancing is that between balanced people who have to keep families, clans and civilisations on the rails, and the breakout of discoverers, artists, scientists and entrepreneurs. Their lack of balance is there to see every week in the views of the ideas people, but their minds and successes are necessary.

Ethics are principles that make for good or happiness - the will-to-good. Morals, virtues and ethics are aspects of the same thing. Ethics could be called applied virtue or morals, virtue is ethical living. Honesty is a moral, a virtue and an ethic. We will not bother with the differences in terms.

Ah, our drive is happiness; what is it? Mystics acclaim their ultimate happiness, peace or nirvana. To others, the epiphany of good or happiness is serving others or loving relationships. To others, it is the height of achievement. To others, the relief from pain. To others, music or the perfect wave. To each his own, so long as it also helps or does not hinder others; achievement must be additive, not greedy or denigrating others.

We know that happiness is not just a result but an attitude, depending on genetics, body chemistry, upbringing and health, our state of mind and expectations and acceptance. Happiness can be cultivated. But whatever, ethics are the principles to help fulfil our hopes and potential and those of everyone we deal with.

More people than ever are healthy and prosperous but lost in the tumult of commerce, change and different beliefs; blame and acceptance have shifted mightily in a generation. Our societies are highly experimental and emerging from ages of more stable religion and ignorance as well as ingrained wisdom and natural balances.

We evolved in simple clans, at home with but overwhelmed by all living things and the weather, the fears and delights of nature, and the wonder of heavens above. Hope sustained us through thick and thin. Now the natural world of most of us is wholly artificial mega-cities; no stars. Local family and community nous here, is being submerged below biggering mistake-ridden government and business management from somewhere else. The ethic of self-reliance is kept alive by tradespeople and go-getters, but increasingly resented amid the wave of socialism, the reliance on handouts. Most of those handouts are in a justified cause, but it breeds takers at high and low levels. The more complex society is, the easier for takers and connivers – Catch 22.

Profligate consumerism is now the drive of most people of the world, even many poorer people. If our Green longings for a simpler world prevailed, or frugality became a virtue again, the world economic system would collapse. A pandemic lock-down?

Nothing is more crucial, starting with lost young people, than stepping aside from the clamour sometimes, and asserting the universal natural bases of the best ethics. We affirm goodness from any source.

We have brief effective principles like the ancient Golden Rule, Do unto others as you would that they to you should do; or Jesus’ Love one another, or the inscription on Muslim academies in Spain, that humanity depends on four things: Learning, justice, prayer and valour. How wise was that, back then! (It was too static. It omitted curiosity, enterprise, discovery and will-to-good. That’s why Islam was surpassed.) Or the unstated ethic of billions of people, Do our best and look after each other. That has made the modern world, our rich inheritance. But we have to say a bit more, as things are not going well, and many good people are beaten.

It has taken eighty years of experience and study, trial and error and reform, to decide what should be in this short essay, and what not. It has all been tried in subsistence Third World and in glossy city towers, in families, clans, and public and private enterprise big and small, amid honesty and deceit, success and bitter failures.

The ten-times longer essays on ethics, from Aristotle through Spinoza and GE Moore to the good but too academic Sam Harris or the disturbing Peter Singer now, have never been convincing enough. There are caveats to every statement about humanity, but more than another long argument, we need short declarations of what is true and works. By long journeying to learn short ways.

Meanwhile, many claim there are no universal values, which is nonsense.

Edmund Burke was the great advocate of ancestral and immemorial beliefs and virtues, including religion, to hold society together. He was before the industrial revolution and Darwin, and was half-right. Post Darwin, and after a world of study of peoples, minds and instincts, we outbid Burke to found our ethics on human basics that have persisted from cave clans – a few hundred thousand years. There, humanism and ethics were everyday clan-life, not philosophising and big words. They should still be.

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Ethics are the best of humanism or utilitarianism: Study and principles for achieving the happiness of the largest number of human beings in life on Earth. And we do not try to define happiness or good too particularly in general, which is a proven futile effort. So we annoy some religious and philosophical groups. Ethical endeavour takes complex study to achieve the best for each group and all they affect: Consider on one hand the conundrums between Amazon tribes, developers from Rio, and travelling anthropologists. On the other hand, whether Facebook is ethical. Medical ethics? Voluntary euthanasia? Can I bring you a coffee?

We start where Kant finished. He said that there is one absolute good, goodwill. But goodwill has come to mean less than he intended, just generous feelings towards others, which oft go astray. We need to strengthen this attitude mightily.

As to love: Love works wonders, but is often misguided. We are plagued by charlatans and silly people who claim to act out of love. And will-to-good is a better description than love for what should drive curiosity, science, technology and innovation, education, scholarship, government, finance, business, management, trade, diplomacy, just war, engineering, sport and the arts. The best Jews were wiser than Jesus’ love one another regarding such things.

For those who would praise the Judeo-Christian Ethic, please study what the Judeos and Christians actually taught and did; before humanism of the last four centuries in the West overcame rabbis, theologians and the Vatican. Read of Old Testament law and prophets, the Inquisition, witch burning, religious wars, the cursing of Spinoza, and the Index condemning most great books of the world. European Christians killed around 300,000 Jews in the 19th century before the Nazis started. The Judeo-Christian Ethic is the product you get from humanism plus the Love one another of the Bible, after humanism had demolished all the bad teachings in the Bible. True. I deal with the diverse Christian beliefs in Science Christianity and the Will-to-Good, and with the Judeo-Christian Ethic in Civilisation.

There is an elegant emblem of the will-to-good:

The qualities of most people, policies and situations are pretty ordinary, the bulge in the bell-curve of humanity. Then there are the wonderful people and situations, and on the other side, all the bad and sad people and situations. The will-to-good at the high end makes great discoverers, artists, entrepreneurs and reformers. Improving at the bottom end saves murders and mayhem. In the middle of the bell curve, moving the majority a little to the better prevents wars, saves billions of dollars and the hopes of peoples. The further out on either good or bad extremes a person is, the more likely is stress in relations with ordinary people.

The will-to-good is that great driver of every thought and action of humanity to better and best, from family to the world. Now we are talking. It studies present reality and makes it better, with no limits, forever . And of course we make mistakes.

Humanity is complex, so we need long lists to encompass the virtues. The will-to-good encompasses perhaps the greatest virtue-package, curiosity with honesty and enterprise, which has made so much good; then love of people and freedoms, respect, integrity, proper pride, duty, honour, love of justice and fairness, kindness, compassion, generosity, graciousness, cooperation, loyalty, faithfulness, gratitude, courage, resilience, endurance or steadfastness, confidence, hard work, toughness, self-knowledge, self-reliance, self-control or discipline, a sense of humour, common sense, lack of hubris, balance, temperance or moderation, good manners and politeness. Let me repeat graciousness.

On the big scale, it encompasses Churchill’s dictums:

In War: Resolution,

In Defeat: Defiance,

In Victory: Magnanimity

In Peace: Good Will.

The will-to-good is an attitude that demands commitment and hard work, and the ways and means to do good. The saying, where there’s a will, there’s a way, applies only with much ability, experience and commitment, and for those who have the means. The yearning of poor people is because despite the will, there is no way. Oh my friends, work for the poor people on the left of that bell curve, and in more ways than handouts.

Never forget for a day that in Western society an IQ of 80 is close to incapacity. And 10% of people have an IQ of 80 or below, 2.5 million in Australia, 6 million in the UK, 33 million in the USA. The only chance for these people lies in good-will from all, charity and benevolent government.

Tolerance can be good or bad. At the huge level of secular tolerant society, it is one of the great boons in history. It is needed when dealing with our frail humanity, allowing that the other person might be right, and limiting blame and shame. But civilisation depends on intolerance of error, evil or mediocrity and waste. Balance.

To the surprise of many, will-to-good supersedes the wonderful virtues of humility and forgiveness. We want honest knowledge of self and others, confidence, leadership and commitment more than humility and meekness, so we substitute lack of hubris.

We have a higher mode than forgiveness for personal hurt. Our confident concern is in turning all situations to the best, we ignore opportunities to feel personal hurt. Why waste time and energy? We are the springtime, and spring does not forgive winter, it replenishes the Earth. Or we are the beautiful sunny Downs Syndrome people. Forgiveness of debts depends on our capacity and the debtor’s likely reaction. Forgiveness of nations for their great evils is a matter of national interest – do what is best now, in trade and cooperation for the good of our people and others.

There are libraries of heart-warming books on the subjects, but tolerance, humility and forgiveness are largely irrelevant to the best people. They