This morning, while walking across the UC Davis campus toward the Hydrology lab (where I’ve been filtering water samples from the Lake Tahoe region), I saw a series of strange fliers. The fliers were obviously in response to the anti-war fliers which I had seen posted on the campus last week. The fliers I saw last week, however, at least had the advantage of appealing to a certain nostalgic mindset: "Come join the anti-war movement!" they proclaimed. At least one flier proclaimed that it was posted by a group calling themselves, "Students for the Truth".

The fliers I saw this morning, though, were completely opposed to the first set of fliers, ideologically. They each addressed a different aspect of the anti-war movement. "Terrorists are evil!" one proclaimed, along with a paragraph explaining why it is the American duty to "Strike back now, and hard!" It supported its thesis with a quote from Adam Smith: "Mercy to the evil is injustice to the weak" (or something like that — I’m afraid I don’t have the flier with me, though I was tempted to take a copy for fun). Another one, espousing the need to hide information about what we’re doing and blasting those folks who think that we ought to know what our government is doing in Afghanistan, quotes Thomas Jefferson: "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." There was a third flier, but I didn’t read that one as closely.

The strangest thing about these fliers was the fact that the creator, trying to support their conservative thesis about the value of liberty vs. security, chose to include other quotes on the bottom of the fliers, in huge block letters. On the first, the one about the need to "Strike back", was the phrase, "War is peace". On the flier espousing the need to keep government actions secret, was the phrase, "Ignorance is strength". And on the third, which I unfortunately did not read very carefully, was the quote, "Freedom is slavery".

I don’t know if the author of the fliers caught the irony, or if it was intentional. However, these quotes, which are unattributed on the fliers, are slogans espoused by the tyrannical oligarchical government which rules the world in George Orwell’s 1984. I really hope that the irony was intentional; the other possibilities I can imagine are that the creator of these fliers honestly wants an oligarchical government in place ruled by Big Brother; or they were just too woefully ignorant to know where the quotes had originally come from.

The fliers proclaimed that they were, "Brought to you by the Students for Rational Thought."

It’s this dichotomy of truth vs. reason that I found very intriguing. I’ve been obsessing for some time about the ability of human beings and human civilization to overcome its baser and more emotional and irrational impulses to build a society of wise scholars and true citizens. I’ve known, ever since I started studying philosophy in college, that human reason is generally a slippery and unreliable thing, unless it has some sort of empirical basis to start from. In fact, I think one of the great triumphs of modern human scientific investigation is its understanding that reason itself cannot be thoroughly trusted, and that understanding needs to be supplemented by empirical observations. Of course, even in scientific pursuits, you will still find your thought processes boiling down to certain irreducible assumptions that you just can’t burn away. Modern scientific investigations can do a pretty good job of digging through those irreducible assumptions, but no other endeavor is very good at it.

In non-scientific endeavors, the irreducible assumptions will usually come down to mere value judgements. In the book I’m reading, The Skeptical Environmentalist, for example, a number of arguments which make very good sense from a strictly utilitarian perspective would be considered absolutely horrid from a "deep ecology" perspective which insists on the inherent value of non-human lifeforms. In the clash between the forces of truth and the forces of reason on the UC Davis campus, for example, we find that one group places a higher value on the need for peace in Afghanistan, while the other finds that American withdrawal from Afghanistan is incompatible with the need for homeland security. The fliers also made clear that the forces of reason find security incompatible with the need for maintaining broad civil liberties for all who reside within the borders of the United States. Both can probably reason to their conclusions quite well, but since both start from a different set of assumptions, they will probably never reach any agreement.

So what’s the answer? There have been many attempts in the history of philosophy to boil the questions of ethics down to irreducible facts, and derive an entirely logical set of logical ethics. Such attempts at a logical positivist approach to ethics usually failed, however; and a backlash against the seeming futility of the exercise usually took the form of complete moral relativity and situationalist ethics. But I think that in an increasingly complex and interrelated world, we will find that such situationalist approaches will fail just as surely as the logical positivist approaches did.

For my own part, I remain optimistic about the future of human civilization and the human race. Regardless of whether I side with Students for Truth or Students for Reason, I respect both groups for taking an active involvement and participating actively in the dialogue. I believe that some day we will have our society of wise scholars and involved citizens (although my own estimate is that it will probably take at least a thousand years to reach that level); and I think that the slippery nature of human reason will consistently lead us in new directions and to unexpected surprises. It may be, in fact, that our inability to reduce non-scientific human endeavors to commonly shared irreducible assumptions is what contributes most to our ability to grow and develop as a species.