Does the morality of society, on the whole, improve? It would be extremely naïve to answer with a straightforward “yes”: the 20^th and 21^st centuries have seen atrocities that more than match the most reprehensible of history’s offerings. But if we adjust the timescale to one far larger than that of centuries, and imagine instead the whole of human history, present, and future, then does the situation change? Or is humanity doomed, by its very nature, to stay at roughly the same moral level?

Consider, if you will, the following thought experiment. There are two tribes, living close to each other, but oblivious of the other’s existence. The first tribe is close to modern society in ethical terms, in that they consider it immoral to kill, rape, or steal. The second tribe is the complete opposite: they consider cannibalism good, subjugation of women acceptable, and murder an understandable method of solving disputes.

Now suppose that both of these tribes begin to run low on resources, and each think that it would be desirable to expand their territory. The populations of the two tribes, as well as their military powers, are exactly equal. They slowly begin to expand their villages closer and closer to one another. This culminates in a standoff. There is a giant tree stood exactly on the newly drawn border, with an ample supply of apples for their delectation. Exactly one half of the tree hovers over each tribe’s land. Naturally, there is disagreement about who should own the tree, and for a time there is tension between the two tribes. They hold off any military action, however, mainly out of caution. As each tribe learns of the cultures and practices of the other, the tension between them mounts. The first tribe considers it despicable that the other tribe commit murder and cannibalism so readily, while their neighbours consider the fact that they don’t eat each other a sign of immense disrespect to the gods.

Assuming that they never resort to violence, and that the war between them is strictly cold, who wins the standoff?

Well, there is a probable consequence that should be considered first. While each tribe learns of the supposedly bad features of the other’s culture, it will also learn of the good. This means, first, that moral considerations that they may have previously taken for granted will become subject to questioning. Secondly it means that some members of the cannibal tribe who may have had misgivings about cannibalism will become even more uncertain about it; conversely, any equal-and-opposites in the other tribe will also experience the same phenomenon, reversed. Assuming that all people who have misgivings eventually abandon their tribe for the other one, which tribe will end up with the most people?

Clearly, the “good” tribe will. And as the population of the “bad” tribe decreases, more people within it will gradually judge that it is safe to leave, and will do so. Eventually, the tribe will be reduced to a small collective of die-hard tribesmen who, at least in terms of size, carry very little influence. Soon enough, they will die away, and the “good” tribe will have triumphed, along with their moral system. However, this conclusion is only true on the important condition that the freedoms of both thought and expression are allowed in both tribes.

Different moral systems will inevitably come into contact with one another: the only things that can stop this are pure contingencies. These aside, when they do meet, they will have to resolve any tension that arises between them. Either the stronger society (though not moral system) will win if it comes to a war, or they adjust to one another’s presence and a compromise between the two systems, if necessary, is found. The compromise, of course, is hardly ever instantaneous: it can take hundreds of years or more, and essentially involves an osmosis of peoples (the good from the bad tribe go to the good tribe, and vice versa). When the newly formed moral system meets another one, the process will repeat. Eventually, all moral systems within a “world” will have mixed and settled into that world’s moral system. This morality will be better, on average, than the vast majority of moralities that have been in the past. It won’t of necessity be the best morality possible. If that world meets another world, another compromise may be necessary, and so on. Of course, there is no necessity to the amount of worlds. This means that it is unlikely ever to reach perfection, but will merely converge towards it.

When two or more societies are in conflict, all that is needed is that most people of both societies reach a high enough level of thought-freedom, and the people in the morally inferior society will, slowly but surely, change their views to that of the superior. Eventually the inferior system, despite some possibly violent death throes, will wither away. The question arises: do people choose the moral system which is objectively better, or is it merely a choice of convenience? Perhaps these are not mutually exclusive?

Note that the theory ignores contingencies. It’s just the natural progression of morality; it doesn’t take into account the possibility of an alien race conquering us militarily, or a Sarah Palin accidentally nuking the world.

P.S. The existence of terrorism may actually be a sign that world morality is improving. How? Terrorists must confine themselves to small, radicalised groups, constantly hiding for their lives, cowering hypocritically under the protections of good nations-because it has become difficult to hold their views in an “official”, or state capacity. Under my theory, eventually the majority of the terrorist “tribe” will begin to appreciate this protection, and convert accordingly to the ways of their host countries.

When an extremely strange series of events takes place in reality, a quite natural reaction is to comment that “you couldn’t make it up”. If it is truly strange, it is unlikely that someone would have made it up (simply statistically speaking), but it is certain that someone could have made it up. After all, most strange occurrences are the results of human thought and action, and fiction is no less (in fact even more) the product of these things.

Perhaps, then, we should ask: “what do we mean by strangeness?” It seems certain that this is different for reality than for fiction. Perhaps strangeness is simply the feeling that arises when we perceive that something has gone beyond its “natural bounds”. Reality is bounded by many laws—of physics, of psychology—and so if something appears to go beyond these bounds it will give the feeling of strangeness. But the bounds of fiction are much harder to gauge. Ostensibly they are at the whim of the author, and so can be absolutely anything. There are of course the rules that come from narrative convention, but most readers will be aware of a wide enough variety that nothing in this regard will be surprising, at least not surprising enough to engender the feeling of strangeness.

I would submit that the overriding boundary of fiction is that, for the most part, we just don’t believe it. If fiction can make us believe (however different the nature of this belief is to that of real things), then it creates the feeling of strangeness. Reality is the opposite: if it makes us doubt, if it makes us think that it’s a fiction, then it has become strange.

There is also this: it is impossible to believe that everything is an illusion.  “Everything” here means all that you think you know. In that case, the thought “everything is an illusion” is an illusion, and that thought is an illusion, and so on ad infinitum. An infinite regress of illusions is impossible. A similar problem arises with truth. If everything is true, then the thought “everything is an illusion” is also true. And, as Democritus says of Protagoras’ “man is the measure of all things”, if everything is true, then among truths is the thought that not everything is true. So neither “everything is true” nor “everything is an illusion” are correct.

But it may be objected that saying “everything is an illusion” is not quite the same as saying “nothing is true”. However, presumably the thought “nothing is true” is meant to be true, therefore negating itself. Maybe it depends on what exactly is meant by “nothing is true”. If it is taken to mean that “nothing that I know, apart from this thought, is true” then that seems to be perfectly acceptable; but it is logically impossible to make a generalisation out of it, because that would mean that “it is true that nothing can be known which is true”—again a logical contradiction.

The only weakness I can see in the above is that a distinction needs to be drawn between two kinds of thought: that is, thoughts about the nature and truth of things, and thoughts about the nature and truth of truth. The former might be said to be an epistemic judgement, and the latter a metaepistemic judgement. But is a metaepistemic judgement internal or external? That is, does it concern doubt, or does it concern truth as a thing utterly independent of any observers? If this is a useful distinction to make, it would certainly merit further exploration.

This idea has been the overriding theme of the presidential race so far. Hillary Clinton insisted that she had more of it than Obama, though how she would have changed her tack when facing McCain, had she claimed the Democratic presidential nomination, is anybody’s guess. She clearly favours Obama over McCain: assuming this is genuine (and, despite the nature of party politics there is no reason not to think so), this is a tacit acknowledgement that experience is not the be all and end all, and that intellect and ideas are important after all.

McCain insists that he has more experience than Obama, but the question is, how important is experience in and of itself? Obama must have reflected on this pickle himself, and concluded that it wasn’t very much, except as a useful disarming tool; but it would be impolitic of him to express this publicly as he would draw jeers of “elitism” from the hungry media crowds. To take a hypothetical example: imagine an unintelligent person who is born into a privileged family with political connections, which he uses to embark upon a mildly successful political career. During the course of this career, he meets many politicians, engages in many debates, sees what goes on behind the scenes, becomes suitably cynical, and is able to put on a good political mask. By any standard, he would have had a lot of experience. But would this mean anything? He is unintelligent, and therefore gleans very little of substance from all these things. Of course, in this extreme example, experience would be meaningless.

McCain is not this hypothetical example. But he claims to be a man of experience, and a man of substance. It seems to me, that if one truly is a man of substance, one should not keep reminding others that one is a man of experience. It is little more than an insecurity smokescreen. A true man of substance would not have to consciously describe himself as anything, but would let his policies and his actions be the true narrator. It is also a cynical tactic that, far from showing his sincerity, tends actually to show his falsity, and his desperation. Knowing that his experience is a selling point to many Americans, it is a mere word he has to use, an advertising jingle. Therefore it is also an insult to the electorate. Can they not judge for themselves the extent, nature, and importance of his experience without constant reminders?

All this implies that the suicidal person gives a certain amount of reasonably logical thought to their decision. This is not always true, but if the act itself occurs in a moment of utter despair, or pure irrationality, then surely we can have neither optimism nor pessimism. In that case, even though we can say that the action itself is not one or the other, the person overall is more likely to be an optimist, since an optimist is more likely to be an idealist, and an idealist is less likely to be able to handle eventualities turning out far from ideal.

On another note, it has occurred to me that if to be an optimist is to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds, then a theist, assuming that he believes in heaven and that heaven is a possible world, must be a pessimist, despite his apparent optimism about going to heaven.

Surely nobody would say that democracy is the best system imaginable. Assuming a utopian system impossible, quite a few would suppose that it is the best possible system in practice. However, there is hardly a consensus on what constitutes democracy; it lists representative and liberal, Islamic and Christian, constitutional, grassroots, and even totalitarian democracies among its congregation. So newer, better kinds of democracy are certainly imaginable, if not necessarily practicable.

Most adherents and propagators of democracy would surely agree that a fundamental principle on which it always must be based is that the people are to be trusted to choose the best candidate, and thus make the best decision for the country. We know that this is rarely guaranteed, partly because there is no sure way to make everyone make the right decision. This is an innate, and unavoidable, aspect of democracy. But if the system could lean towards replicating the free market economy—that is, grow an Invisible Hand that caused people, even when voting selfishly, to unintentionally benefit the country—then we may have a better form of democracy. There may be an innate difficulty in the idea: in economics, there is at least one principle universally agreed upon, which is that more money is better than less money. If each person succeeds in making more money for himself, everyone succeeds in improving the economy as a whole. However, there is no such universally accepted principle in politics, and perhaps then the analogy must fail.

Capitalism naturally provides incentive for people and businesses to perform well, but democracy provides no such incentive with regard to voting. For every voter who marks his ballot paper with the best of intentions for the country, there will be another who votes for purely personal reasons. That whole category should not be vilified (it consists of the majority of people), but among their ranks are likely to be those who vote for racist reasons, for reasons of misplaced party loyalty, or generally with unsavoury or ignorant intentions. And of those who vote for the country’s well-being with sincerity, there is no guarantee that they are truly able to judge that correctly. No one can reasonably expect that all voters should or could be gifted political and economic analysts, but it surely is within reason to expect them to have a good understanding of the subject, generally speaking and regarding current events, otherwise they are not even able to make a merely honest decision.

To achieve a genuine Invisible Hand democracy, a sort of cosmic process of a system that by its nature produces the best results, may be an ideal, and it may be an impossible one. Therefore the following idea is not a blueprint for the thing itself, but rather a possible stepping stone towards it.

Meritocratic Democracy

The idea behind this system is simply that some votes have more value than others. The value of your vote can be judged in one of these ways:

1. You have to take a test to show how much you know about the political climate. Obviously you don’t have to be an expert, but you have to know enough to justify giving you such a responsibility.

2. You have to justify your vote. Justification doesn’t have to be in-depth, it simply has to be a proper reason. So, if someone votes for the BNP and justifies it by saying “I hate immigrants”, their vote would have less value because it’s not a real reason. Voters will also have to show some knowledge of the policies of the parties they’re not voting for, as otherwise there would be no reason to suspect that their chosen party is any better than the others.

Now of course, there are likely to be many who will rebel against the idea of a test, and it goes without saying that the logistics of such an enterprise are difficult at the very least. However, the benefits might outweigh the costs as follows: there will be some who won’t be averse to taking the test when told that it is a short and painless thing, and that the value of their vote will increase; though there will be less voters, each vote will be worth more for the country, since it is more likely to be well-considered. The seemingly simpler idea of asking for justification for one’s vote has the advantage that it becomes less likely that people will be able to justify voting for plainly bad parties, such as the BNP. But a complication arises in the question of how justifications can be objectively judged. This would seem to entail the creation (or amendment) of a constitution, with legislation designed specifically with the system in mind, and this is not a simple, short term solution.

The value of the vote in this system can be thought of as the political equivalent of capital in the free market. People should, if the system is to work, desire a higher value vote for its own ends. Presently, many people think voting is useless because their vote doesn’t make a difference. And despite the protestations of the well-intentioned that that is true only if everyone thought like that, their individual vote actually is negligible (which is part of the point of democracy). If they could change the value of their vote, it is more likely to make a difference. This may have the effect of weeding out the indifferent and apathetic, and encouraging the truly enthusiastic to make better decisions.

One difficulty with the economic-political analogy here is that, if we are to take it to its logical extreme within the context of the Invisible Hand idea, it should then be possible for someone resourceful enough to accrue vastly more vote-power than the majority of others. Only then would the idea of voting-power be a true incentive in the sense analogous to capital in capitalism. But this would be absurd, not to mention impossible within the system, because the only way someone could become “vote-rich” would be to take thousands of tests. Given that that obviously wouldn’t be allowed, and that there must be imposed a reasonable limit on the value of each vote, the Hand is not quite invisible yet, though it is gradually becoming a little more translucent.

As far as I am able to see, there are only two positions one can adopt in answer to this. They are: “truth exists” and “truth does not exist”. One cannot say “truth sometimes exists”, because that means that it does. Nor can one say “truth is subjective”, because there are otherwise no true standards by which we can measure its validity. Saying “maybe truth exists” is neither here nor there.

The problem with the question “does truth exist?” is that it can only be answered within a framework that assumes the existence of truth. If one says “truth exists”, what they are really saying is “truly, truth exists”, and when someone says “truth does not exist”, what they are really saying is “truly, truth does not exist”, or “truth has a truth-value of zero”, a contradiction not just of terms but of logic. If this point is answered by saying, “how do I know that logic is true?”, we can see that the disbeliever of truth has it all ahead of them: if one does not believe in truth, one does not believe in logic, and, of necessity, nothing can be believed. We must concede that truth exists if we are to do or think anything. The exact nature of this truth is another matter, but truth undoubtedly exists.

Now of course, if a politician just happens to be naturally constituted in such a way that they actually are the polar opposite of the currently-hated politician, without need of styling, then there is very little they can do to protect themselves from the accusation that they are pretending. After all, the only way to truly prove their genuineness is for us to step inside their minds (unfortunately an impossible proposition, but one that might save a lot of time and money). However, it surely must have crossed the minds of at least some American voters that what Obama is offering is not that radical or new, and that it only seems to be so because it seems to stand in contrast to what the Bush administration stood for. Hope, equality, opportunity for all, change—these are all values that America was built on, and that therefore it would be absurd for any potential president not to stand for. What Obama has successfully done so far (and what he will most likely continue to successfully do until he becomes president) is give the persuasive illusion that he really does genuinely stand for these things. This is largely an aesthetic skill: it lies in his rhetoric of hope, so much more convincing as it is than any of his rivals’; it lies in his gait, his manner, his style, his confidence (as contrasted with the desperation of the ghastly Mrs. Clinton), and his image—inspiringly but somewhat cornily represented in The Audacity of Hope.

These are all perfectly fine qualities, and ones that will undoubtedly stay with him during his (nearly assured) tenure as president. But charm aside, we are still in the honeymoon period between Obama and the American people. Honeymooning necessitates a marriage, and marriages in politics more so than in life come—at the very least—with disagreements. In life, marriages end either in divorce or in death; in politics, the end is invariably divorce. The question is, then, what possible reason could there be for America to divorce such a charming man?

The answer must lie somewhere in the inevitability of the political machine, a machine which, as it turns so relentlessly and indifferently, catches all politicians in its spindles and gears. We surely cannot be so cynical as to suppose that most politicians enter into their chosen careers solely for the money, for there are many more lucrative paths for them to take. I suspect that most do genuinely hope to improve the world, and it is just that some succumb to simple pragmatics in the hopes of acquiring the power that will ultimately allow them to enact their good intentions. “Simple pragmatics”, however, is just the alluring face of the machine that, after tempting the unwitting politician, ensnares him, and never lets him out until he sees the necessity of lying, and then becomes desensitised to it. By this I don’t mean gargantuan and stupid lies (here I’m thinking of Hillary Clinton’s under-fire-in-Bosnia incident), but merely small and pragmatic ones. And as we all know of lies, they have a tendency to snowball until, at the very best, your sheen of respectability is lost, and at worst, you are essentially forced out of office (here I’m thinking of Hillary Clinton’s husband). The point is this: it appears to be an innate fact of the system that lies are inevitable, and impossible to avoid. Nothing here is innate in the politician, but in the environment he finds himself in, and in the specific kind of pressure put upon him. Consider how all political underlings (by this I mean all those who are not the presidents or prime ministers of this world) must, almost of necessity, side with the views of their party leaders. Whenever they disagree passionately with their leaders, as was the case with Robin Cook and Tony Blair on Iraq, they feel impelled to announce their resignations. Often, they are much admired for their supposed bravery, but is it not really cowardice? To leave politics, the arena in which you hoped to change the world for the better, over a disagreement, however large? I pose the question not rhetorically, but because I do not know the answer. The opposite is much more common of course, and is certainly cowardly—pragmatic, but cowardly. I cannot count the amount of times I have seen Labour politicians squirming their ways out of uncomfortable interview positions when confronted with the question of Iraq. Conservatives, of course, lie just as often, but because they are the opposition party, and not directly culpable for the war, theirs are comfortable and confident lies, just as disingenuous, and in fact condemning the government for their obvious disingenuousness—for the most part, just because it is obvious. So the politicians on the attack lie because it is easy to, and those on the defence lie because they have to.

I do not mean to suggest that Barack Obama has anything but the best intentions, though I am sure the same can be said of John McCain. I merely posit that Obama has set himself an extremely difficult task with his emphasis on “change we can believe in”. Apart from the phrase seeming to smack of the populist, really the only change he means is that of undoing what everyone accuses Bush of having done, and “undoing” is not the same as “change”. Regarding the Iraq war, Obama proposes removing American troops, ignoring completely the fact that this is likely to worsen the situation there. Regarding climate change and American dependence on oil, Obama proposes investing in new energy sources; this is appealing insofar as it is the opposite of the current administration’s policy, but at the same time so obvious that a child could have thought of it. What if these ambitious plans, along with many others, fail? Why then Obama will find himself firmly in the spindles and gears of the machine—the very machine that he proposes to change. One can only hope that he doesn’t fail, however; but it is exactly this hope, rather than objective analysis, that is likely to win him the presidency.