Morality and Politics (Part 2): The Solution to Conflict, Poverty, Women's Status, and Idiocy
Three important questions: What is the moral solution to conflict? What is the moral solution to poverty? What is the moral solution to the issue of women's status? And now, let's try it differently: What is the scientific solution to conflict? What is the scientific solution to poverty? What is the scientific solution to the issue of women's status? And now for the real question: Why are the first three questions clichés (which we love to adopt), and why do the last three questions seem to us like refutations (from which we recoil). What is it about morality that makes us love it and believe in it (contrary to all empirical evidence) and what is it about science that makes us dismiss its power and not believe in its capabilities (contrary to all empirical evidence)?
Does the left care more about morality than the right? In fact, the only difference between right-wing thinking and left-wing thinking is the choice of the simplistic moral model from which action is derived in a kind of Pavlovian conditioning. One might even suspect that even the goals of action are derived from the primitive moral mechanism that is readily available. The right loves negative morality, which is based on simple and harsh negative feedback, from the side of strict justice: deter, punish criminals, confront the Arabs, explain to the stupid Gentiles who don't understand, and then they will all learn their lesson. Works beautifully. And the left loves positive morality, which is based on simple and soft positive feedback, from the side of mercy: give to the poor, give to the Arabs, give to the disadvantaged, give to workers' unions, give to (any group) what they want, and then everything will be good. Works excellently. The left wants the state to be moral because it will be a state of grace, and the right wants the state to be moral because it will be a state of justice, the kind that doesn't interfere with its mercies, and is guaranteed to maintain order. So what is the meaning of morality in politics?
In fact, in almost every real problem where significant improvement has occurred in the last five hundred years - the reason was scientific-technological progress, translated into economic advantage, and not moral progress or political action. What has raised the welfare of the poor, their health, nutrition, living conditions, education, etc. by several orders of magnitude - is not socialism or capitalism, not social workers and not Christian compassion - but science. The decisive reason why capitalism won was that science worked better in it, and not because it is a morally superior system. And the reason that communism did advance Russia in its early days, and did sometimes put it in an advantageous position against the USA, was Russian science, which ultimately, not a little because of the ideology's takeover of research and suppression of intellectual freedom, but also because of the amount of talent involved - began to lag significantly behind the West. The reason Germany was defeated was the inferiority of German science compared to British-American science, which was expressed in a number of key successes, and after Hitler caused enormous damage to German academia (including giving up about 70 future Nobel Prize winners to the USA for anti-Semitic reasons) - and not because of moral superiority over Germany. But if we had listened to the public discourse in the West - we would have been sure that morality and values are what lead the world, while computer science, for example, is merely a tool: the sciences are just wagons in the moral locomotive. Goethe reversed. Values are the wagons, and research is the locomotive. The dogs bark from within the caravan itself, so what wonder is it that the caravan has been moving forward for hundreds of years, and the dogs continue to bark?
Why, for example, is there a constant statistical decrease in crime and violence all over the world? Have we become better, or have our barks helped? Is it the justice system or welfare that has advanced? Or is it simply a gradual rise in the standard of living (and perhaps also in surveillance and decoding capabilities), which stem primarily from scientific-technological progress, and any other progress has less impact - by at least an order of magnitude. Is it the capitalist economic growth on which the Western world is built, as it tends to think (because it flatters its pride), or rather scientific growth (which it attributes for some reason to a kind of force of nature)? These insights should have been trivial, after 500 years of proven success. But still science struggles with insufficient funding compared to industry, wastes its time on dealing with grants and standards, and employs at least two orders of magnitude fewer minds than what was needed for truly rapid progress, and there is no significant political movement in the world that raises the flag of scientific research as a central flag, unlike, for example, the pink or green or pirate flag. Bibi [Netanyahu] does like to boast about Israeli science and the Jewish mind - but ask the Council for Higher Education and the Planning and Budgeting Committee what he did about it (in parentheses: opening a strategic lag behind Arab countries and Iran in a variety of essential parameters, related to the quantity and quality of publications and collaborations. Yes, lag. And not just narrowing the gap. This is the great failure of his tenure. Government funding in Israel for long-term research is pitiful even in relative terms - has this ever been a headline in the news?).
The Failure of the Short Term
We can dwell on several cognitive failures that prevent effective action. For example, the feeling that science progresses at the same pace, regardless of the resources invested in it (on the contrary - the amount of resources is critical to speed), or that anyway it's something we don't understand (because we understand morality, right? Or maybe we should start to understand a little about science? For example, read Quanta? But then it will force us to really learn something). For example, the feeling that we don't know when the discovery will come, and therefore, unlike the ineffective action we promote, we cannot rely on its arrival (it's likely that if the resources invested in the Apollo program were invested in climate engineering - the solution would already exist). For example, the fear of admitting that there are people much smarter than us, who deal with things we don't understand at all, and that we can only assist them, and this is in contrast to morality, because there are no people who are much more moral than us, and in this field we do understand everything, and even know how to write about it on Facebook. The final result (political!) is that the research budget is lower by about an order and a half than what would be worthwhile for us, and what could be expected given that its efficiency is proven to be excellent - and all thanks to an extremely intelligent public discussion.
After all, why does the paradox occur, according to which precisely during wars, and precisely the hardest of them, scientific progress is accelerated several times over? World War II gave us, for example, atom splitting, the computer, radar, the jet engine, antibiotics, missiles and modern cryptography - a partial list. Is war good for science and creativity, as sometimes claimed, or is it the allocation of resources? And if so, why not allocate these resources in peacetime as well? After all, why is science in the USA the world leader? Are Americans smarter or do they simply invest more money? And what is the share of science in the technological power and wealth of the USA compared to the share of rampant capitalism? (Hint: comparison to Europe and Japan). Why do we always hear in the media about envy of the economy and standard of living of a superpower, and not hear about envy of its science? Maybe because scientists are more intelligent than us, and that hurts our pride? When was the last time a demonstration was held in the Western world for allocating resources to research on any important topic? And if so, what system of incentives do politicians, mostly cynical and particularly short-sighted creatures, have to invest in research? The result is not surprising: severe under-funding relative to efficiency, and not by tens of percent but by hundreds and even thousands of percent in certain fields.
Science for Peace
Even our local Palestinian issue, seemingly unsolvable, could benefit greatly from appropriate scientific investment. Investment in military research is often short-term or short-sighted (despite the existence of DARPA and MAFAT [Israeli Directorate of Defense Research & Development]), and similar in its characteristics to investment in industrial research. If there is a need to mobilize state resources for a national project that will reduce the Palestinian problem, it would be better to invest the money in projects such as: a. Effective non-lethal weapons against civilians. b. A total surveillance regime that is not built on checkpoints and human friction, and will allow freer movement (for example: biometric identification and automatic car identification, on a large scale). c. Clean elimination without killing other involved parties (for example, through control of birds - there are such studies! - and biological weapons). In general, the more science advances, the more remote containment of the threat will be possible, less friction, the human dimension of the conflict will gradually diminish by itself (like the general human dimension in our world), the material living conditions of the Palestinians will rise (like any other population in the world), and slowly, over several decades, even without a political solution, the conflict will gradually fade.
What we are seeing in the last ten years is an example of how a technological-scientific effort gradually contains the conflict, with quite a few leaks and setbacks, but the trend is clear. The slow transformation of the conflict from human to technological is not only happening on the Israeli side, which is obvious, but also on the other side, with all the gap between suicide bombings and missiles. The more the interface between the sides becomes more technological, distant, and alienated - the emotional engine of the conflict will fade, and the enemy will become abstract. Simple humanity does not bring closer and help peace - but war. Human morality, as seen by both sides, in the dynamics of victimization of negative feedback loops - is the emotional fuel that fuels the conflict, while technology cools it.
Similarly, who is responsible for ending Israel's great wars with its neighbors is not the peace process, or another political process, but the technological process in which Israel's initial scientific advantage was translated into an overwhelming technological advantage, which only gradually grew. Political processes are often by-products of technology, and not vice versa. But where is public attention (and money) directed? To politics. While technology is like a god that solves the conflict for us, we all believe in it, most of us even participate in its rituals, and not a few of us are its priests, but it will never occur to us that the most effective action we have to do in the long term - is to invest aggressively in scientific-technological research aimed at gradually reducing the conflict. What are we good at? Crying out in protest. We will never hear a politician from the right or left who promises following an attack or killing of innocents to increase the resources directed to relevant scientific-technological research, unlike the defense budget, of which a tiny part is invested in basic research. What do we hear? Moral preaching, and calls for ineffective moral action.
Science for Sex
Is feminism, as a moral-political movement, responsible for improving women's status and the sexual revolution, or perhaps the pill, the washing machine, the dishwasher, and other inventions that greatly eased housework? And if we want to improve the status of women, or the status of LGBT people, should we invest our best money and effort in moral education, or perhaps in scientific development that researches sexuality and improves it (an almost completely unfunded research field), or in fertility research to improve it? After all, if women no longer had a biological clock, due to the elimination of menopause, the pressure to have children, to choose a partner relatively quickly (even if less suitable) and to postpone a career would be mostly eliminated. If homosexuals (and women!) could bring children in an artificial incubator - the improvement in their lives would be dramatic. And if all housework was done by robots, and we would never have to arrange anything in our homes again, or if it was possible to buy an educational robot doll that would play with children and watch over them - the improvement in family life would be enormous. All these achievements and many others are far from being science fiction, and the more they are funded, the faster they will happen (sometimes the gap is several decades (!) with appropriate funding. The Apollo program is a prominent but by no means unique example - without state funding we still wouldn't be landing a person on the moon). But when have we heard in the feminist movement a call for scientific action instead of moral action? Moral science - is science fiction.
If science had better cracked the mechanism of matchmaking, and produced more suitable couples, sour relationships would gradually become rarer and rarer. The digital dating market is also changing the courtship interaction and rapidly moving it from the real world to the digital, and is set to greatly reduce phenomena such as sexual harassment, and create completely new problems, which will certainly feed a whole generation of sexual moralists of various kinds, until their replacement by new problems of course, and not because of moral development - but because of technological development. But despite their enormous impact on our lives of matchmaking and sex mechanisms, only tiny research budgets (certainly in relation to their significance) are directed to basic research of these phenomena, which are perhaps the central component of happiness in human life, and therefore technology also lags behind in them compared to other fields. In practice, the field is completely abandoned to short-term applications for short-term profit purposes, with dramatic social impact. Would anyone be willing to abandon their health to profit-driven drug companies, without basic scientific research? Why is our happiness not funded, and there will never be a politician who will propose to fund it? Because the state is allowed to be paternalistic only if it's moral. And moral = good. Isn't it? In our time, happiness has long since ceased to be the good, and morality has turned from a way for society to take control of the individual's selfish evil inclination, to the individual's evil inclination, which feeds on his own moral ego, in order to take control of society. Therefore, we must oppose the moral construction in politics, and return morality to its natural proper place - philosophy. Because today - morality is the evil inclination.
Continued in Part 3: From the Morality of Intentions and the Morality of Purposes to the Morality of Means