Where would one find an ethical power that would question the unquestionable or absolutized? Ontology seeks to formulate the details of the structure of being, and no imperative flows from mere description, as even Kant discovered, although Heidegger’s idea of ethics being grounded in Sorge (“care”) natural to Dasein, comes close. Science’s primary end is discovery of phenomenal connections and causes, even though it values human life. Other than this general posture, science’s primary ethic is simply one of honestly pursuing its defined projects and sharing reasonable discoveries or testable hypotheses in the interest of the welfare of the worlds’ citizens’ and their fragile lives.
But even with science’s discovery of the relativity of life in general, some peoples’ familiarity with old religious absolutes make them feel at loose ends when it comes to any sense of morality or of creating flourishing human relations. For science to speak of our universe being 13+ billion years old, or to postulate the possibility of other universes, or to speak of our exponentially expanding universe, or of the long evolution of various species even seems to cause some people to despair of any ethical orientation. Especially is this so among those who have heard metaphysics from the ancient world propagated as the truth for all time, that, for example, are even still dating the first humans only in 4004 BCE, a truth upon which Absolute God built His ethical commands. But that dating, centuries ago, was completely unscientific, derived from a bishop’s uninformed attempt to distill dates by comparing temporal periods mentioned only in the Bible, which, as a mixture of crude history, folktale, and mythology, never was scientifically credible.
The Absolute often rears its head in internecine divisions within a single religion, for example, as primitivism and progressivism have squared off, or the literal, uncritical approach and the critical approach to sacred scriptures have created rancid divisions within historical religions. In a similar fashion, it has made many political institutions almost incapable of doing anything more than simply being a frustrated spectator of historical forces over which those “in control” seem to have no control. Cynicism, oversimplified clichés and slogans, blatant stereotypes and grotesque caricatures are often easier responses than a fair and reasoned examination of the relevant factors or claims, especially in days of such an explosion of knowledge but simultaneously an impatience with any explanation requiring more than two sentences. The Absolute can even be reduced to the implication within a “tweet.”
Promises of “unity” or “security,” which might compete with the absolutism of a religion, quickly reveal their authors’ own vested interests. Economic power and distribution finally exert more influence on human culture, for better and for worse, than any egalitarian, humanitarian, or other noble unifying ideals. But then, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of capitalism is easily discovered to be not really “invisible” after all. It is visible to the discerning, barely below the surface, honoring a small minority of people’s vested interests, as well as all of its ugly traits of creating classes in society through primogeniture or entails or perpetuities that would be self-perpetuating, or creating an aristocracy or oligarchy, which so many of the U.S. Founding Fathers wanted to prevent.
If property in a very broad sense, was given a prominent place in the New Nation through the influence of John Locke, the Puritans’ Calvinistic need to be able to read their abundant production as an indication of their being among God’s “elect” was gradually transformed more into success by sheer production and/or success by symbols of acquisition by the latter part of the twentieth century. The focus on profits made the handicapped or marginalized people less visible. Laws were manipulated to decrease government regulation. Inequality, which had concerned Jefferson while he was in France, which he and others saw as stemming primarily from a dense population, was not at that time a threat to the United States. But two centuries later it is reality around the world.
So “capitalism” is not an obvious, eternally unambiguous good for the masses or varied species that inhabit the earth for all time, any more than was the utopian communistic vision of Karl Marx, which lost much of its credibility in the indefinite prolongation of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States that brought on the demise of the former’s status as a world power. Both economic ideologies have often revealed as much absolutism as any religion (though with less myth and supranatural claims), so although they may have an economic appeal, their lack of consistent ethics are often obvious in their arbitrary manipulation of the distribution of wealth and their vested decisions of culture’s (or, more likely, the leaders’) priorities. Deeply vested interests and powers keep these structures in place in various countries, financing elections, as they shape the rest of the civilized world in their tension, seldom admitting they neither are purely Marxist nor purely capitalistic, and they even befriend a specific religion to swell their ranks and provide more weight for their legitimacy through the antiquity to their claims.
Thus, the alleged reasonableness of such ideologies often reveals an even deeper grounding in “unreason.”13 But a closer look reveals the same split within most specific religions, between the reasonable and unreasonable, the fairly probable and logical, and the questionable presuppositions or “dumbing down.” Criticism by the learned outstrips the masses, and as Western cultural critic, Jacques Barzun observed that many realize the present Western culture has exhausted its possibilities under the present configurations of ideas, especially in its valuations, resulting in “decadence.”14 Or, in philosopher Richard Rorty’s terms, the culture’s “final vocabulary” has reached its limitations as a tool for relating to our present needs and understandings. There remains a choice of either finding new tangents from our present, meaning new vocabularies and unique combinations of ideas or even new ideas, without thinking they must serve some higher purpose15 —or its opposite, described by Barzun, as malaise or boredom. But these learned voices have little effect on the huge religious institutions with their presumed Absolutes, undergirded with power.
The advances in technical knowledge in our world seem to have outstripped human knowledge of, if not also deep concern for, each other. Science has supplied to technology the ability to harness powers before which humans used to grovel helplessly. Human life has been extended significantly by modern medicines, and human labor is being progressively replaced by automated or robotic labor, even by artificial intelligence. Many nations have joined the industrialized countries in co-operatively addressing the world’s most challenging issues and problems, and the comforts of human existence have become potentially more universal if still lagging behind what it should have realized in fact. But there is more to life than externals, as the Dalai Lama has emphasized; even the “inner” person that must be nourished so it will provide an equilibrium and contentment—which seems to be needed not only by those who are the marginalized in societies, but especially by those who find themselves not completely satisfied with their positions of external privilege and extreme wealth. In the affluent United States, deaths by opioids, gun deaths, and car accidents continue to slaughter more than 110,000 residents each year, a horrendous statistic not changed by “thoughts and prayers.” Racial preference changes immigration policy to inhumane practices in a nation among the “most religious” in the world.
The newest technological toys or “things” or hyped forms of superficial amusement can only distract from a consciousness of lack of meaning for so long. It was theologian Paul Tillich’s explicit quest for meaning in a meaningless world that gained him such a following in the mid-twentieth century. But theologian Dorothee Soelle sensed that the situation in pockets of the capitalistic world was potent cynicism, even what she called “structures of cynicism,”16 far beyond