In 1963, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama for leading a civil rights protest march without a permit. Following his arrest, he was criticized by eight moderate, white clergymen for activities that they saw as ‘unwise’ and ‘untimely’. This prompted King to respond in writing with what would later come to be known as the seminal, ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail’. Part of King’s response in his letter was an answer to the white clergy’s unease over his ‘willingness to break laws’. King addressed the seeming paradox of organizing an ‘unlawful’ march to advocate for the implementation of desegregation laws by raising the notion of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ laws. King would write that, ‘a just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law’.
King would continue by referencing the Christian theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Drawing from Aquinas, King would write, ‘an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust’. King would go on to give more pragmatic or practical examples of the difference between ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ laws. Yet the foundation of the moral philosophy underpinning his arguments remained the same. In the realm of morality, the final arbiter of what was right, true, and good, was King’s notion of ‘God’. A God that contained an inherent and eternal goodness; that radiated throughout the reality we experience.
In the 1960’s, this religious underpinning for moral arguments worked well for King and the civil rights movement as whole. It worked because American society at the time was metaphysically aligned with King’s religion. ‘Metaphysically aligned’ meaning that the cultural upheaval and change of the 1960’s hadn’t taken hold yet. The old culture and traditions that contained impactful religious belief were still around. This meant that whether it was the President in the Oval Office, or a bus driver in Chicago; a moral appeal based in Christian metaphysics was recognized as being ‘true’. The idea that God was casting final judgment on the actions and laws of humankind was as true as the sun rising every morning, or winter changing into spring.
Yet King’s appeals, while rooted in Christianity, seemed to work for another reason. They worked because they were just ‘right’. Right in an intuitive human sense, separate from any religious underpinning. Even back then, I suspect many Amercians who were not blinded by tribal hatred would have acknowledged that it is simply wrong to deny a group of people equal rights based on their skin color. They would have known in an inherent, almost unconscious manner that turning fire hoses on peaceful protestors violated some unseen moral truth. At the end of the day, they wouldn’t need a moral appeal to God, or even a legal argument invoking Constitutional rights. At a certain level of human intuition, they knew that what was right was ‘right’, and what was wrong was ‘wrong’.
In our present day, we seem to rely heavily on this basic human intuition reading of morality. With the fading of religion as an overarching metaphysical force, and the advent of liquid modernity and the metamodern hypergraph; a broadly agreed upon foundation for moral judgments is nowhere to be found. There are still plenty of individuals who use religion as the source of their moral philosophy. Though unlike Martin Luther King Jr., these folks tend to use religion as an empty facade to simply justify their personal biases or tribal impulses. In lieu of religion, there are others who look to the written law for moral guidance. Whether that means the Constitution, state laws, or Supreme Court decisions. Yet these legal formulations can never be seen as ‘foundational’ moral truths. For they are secondary products of moral or political philosophy.
For many (especially younger), liberal leaning individuals, it seems that the basic human intuition reading of morality has risen to a dominant position. When dealing with the moral issues of the day (police brutality, women’s reproductive rights, indigenous reconciliation, etc); many on the left loudly advocate for noble and correct positions. Yet through no fault of their own, their moral judgments have no ‘first cause’. This is to say that a moral judgment that is derived from a liberal political philosophy, while it might be correct, is drawing from a well of secondary causes. Remember for Martin Luther King Jr., his moral philosophy could be drilled all the way down to the first cause, which for him was, ‘God’.
Yet almost sixty years after King’s ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail’, it is not feasible or practical to attempt to root a universal moral philosophy in the Christian religion. The time of liquid modernity or the metamodern hypergraph is not one where a single religious view can (or should) be used as a first cause for a moral philosophy that covers all of humanity. This then begs the question, what could be used as a first cause for moral reasoning in our current times? What could we point to when we advocate for economic justice, minority rights, or freedom for those that suffer under dictatorship? What foundational axiom could we point to when we intuitively feel something is right and good? In my view, the first cause for a modern universal moral philosophy is consciousness itself.
It cannot be argued that consciousness is not a universal quality across human kind. The ‘lights are on’ for all of us so to speak. And of course this raises all the perpetually maddening questions about consciousness. What does it mean for the ‘lights to be on’? Why do we experience anything at all? How does consciousness relate to the rest of the universe, or quantum mechanics? For the issue at hand I believe we can set aside these weighty questions and focus on a single, seemingly certain aspect of consciousness. The fact that the reality you and I experience is dependent on the nature of human consciousness. In fact not only is our reality dependent on it, one might say our consciousness ‘creates’ it.
University of California professor Donald Hoffman is one of the most prominent ‘consciousness centric’ thinkers of the day. ‘Consciousness centric’ meaning Hoffman’s theory of everything, his theory of what lies at the true foundation of reality, is consciousness based. Hoffman likes to use the phrase, ‘spacetime is doomed’ as a reference to a growing scientific consensus that the physics surrounding space and time are not the base level building blocks of reality they were once assumed to be. This new scientific terrain has opened the door for exciting new theories about what lies beyond spacetime. Hoffman’s theory on how consciousness might relate to what is fundamental to our physical existence is bold and interesting. Yet in reference to this writing about a potential first cause for universal morality, it’s Hoffman’s description of how our consciousness evolved to define our reality which is important.
In describing the reality we experience via our conscious perception, Hoffman says that, ‘whatever reality is, it is not what you see. What you see is just an adaptive fiction’. While profound in its implications, Hoffman’s statement seems rather obvious when one begins to ponder it. You or I can only visually perceive a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum. We cannot perceive radio waves, gamma waves, or ultraviolet light. Our hearing is limited to a range of certain frequencies, while our vision allows us to only see a certain distance. In addition to the physical limitations of our perceptual systems, there are the deterministically embedded ‘essences’ our consciousness maps onto reality as well.
‘Essences’ meaning certain judgements about objects or aspects of our reality that have been programmed into us via evolution. An example of this would be if you were hiking in the woods and a snake suddenly slithered across your trail. You would immediately freeze, and act with a heightened sense of alert and trepidation. Not because you learned to fear snakes through television or school. But because over tens of thousands of years, your primitive ancestors evolved to associate snakes with ‘danger’. Yet the snake in itself is not dangerous, it is just an organism operating on its own level of evolution and consciousness. But to us humans, in the reality that is defined by our mode of consciousness, the snake is a threat to our survival.
This kind of thinking can be applied to physical phenomena as well. For example, if the temperature outside of your house dropped to -60 degrees Fahrenheit, that would be ‘too cold’ for a human being to survive over a long period of time. Yet -60 degrees Fahrenheit is not ‘too cold’ in its essence. It is just too cold for how our physical bodies have ended up through evolution. The same thing could be said for temperatures that are ‘too hot’, air that is too thin to breath, or substances that are ‘toxic’ to the human body. All of the essences that we subscribe to these things are determined by how we evolved to survive as a species. The feelings and thoughts we have about them are guides to keep us alive. They are not indicators or signals that reveal the true nature of the reality around us.
One more way to think about the ‘consciousness creates reality’ notion is to try and imagine things from the perspective of other living creatures. For example, the robust auditory system of dolphins that allows for underwater echolocation must create a completely ‘alien’ form of reality compared to our own. Or how about the Mantis shrimp which possesses the world’s most complex visual system. These tiny creatures have sixteen photoreceptors in their eyes, while we humans have only three. This allows them to see UV light, visible light, polarized light, and retain the honor as the only creature known to be able to see circularly polarized light. One could debate whether this little shrimp is ‘conscious’, yet it cannot be argued that its visual experience doesn’t create a completely different reality than the one you and I see. And just imagine for a second if we were someday able to genetically or mechanically alter our vision to trend more towards the capabilities of creatures like the Mantis shrimp. The reality we experience would change. But not because our external, objective reality had changed, but because our consciousness had been altered.
The point to all this is that it seems clear that the reality we experience is contingent on the nature of our consciousness. And in my view that means there is something inherently important and sacred about consciousness itself. Every piece of art or music. Every person or event. Every story, emotion, invention, family, or place; it all depends on human consciousness. The world we inhabit is not inherently special, it is special because our minds create it. Every single human being helps build our reality through their own consciousness. Thus each human being carries with them an inherent right to dignity, respect, and freedom. There is no hierarchy to human consciousness. That is to say, the universality of human consciousness demands that no form of human consciousness be viewed (or treated) as better than another.
In this time of liquid modernity, when traditions have melted away; religious formulations of morality seem better suited for personal reflection than broad philosophical application. In the metamodern hypergraph, moral appeals deriving from ‘God’ are just personal belief systems bouncing around untethered from the broader reality. When issues or dilemmas involving moral arguments arise, subjectivity reigns supreme amid the chaos of clashing perspectives. Frequently we know what is ‘right’, but have no real philosophical way to root our judgment. Pragmatism or utilitarianism very often rise to the occasion as ways to justify some kind of universal moral outlook. Yet in my view, if we truly want to find an axiom, or first cause for a morality that we can universally apply during liquid modernity and beyond - we need look no further than the consciousness you, and I, and every other human being has evolved to share.