SA: Dr George Armstrong, congratulations on your 100th birthday! And congratulations too on receiving the Man of the Century award for your achievements over the past 21st century!
GA: Thank you very much.
SA: Before we start to discuss the state of the world, would you first like to tell us something about your life, for those of our readers who have not been watching the Man of the Century awards?
GA: Certainly. I was brought up in England, in Northumberland, not far from the country house at Cragside where my celebrated ancestor once demonstrated the world's first use of hydroelectric power to run electric lights.
SA: Your famous ancestor. That couldn't be Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon, could it?
GA: Not unless he was 159 years old when he flew to the Moon! No, I'm not related to him, not that I know. I was thinking of my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Sir William Armstrong, later Lord Armstrong, the Victorian scientist, engineer and industrialist. He invented the breech-loading gun, and was one of the pioneers of the electric light revolution in the last quarter of the 19th century. Cragside was the shop window for his new technologies of light, power and hydraulics.
SA: Thank you. That house is of course still run by the National Trust. Please go on.
GA: Yes, and it was in many ways the inspiration for my first great triumph, the opening of the first Lunar View settlement to the public in 2041.
SA: Perhaps we should remind our readers where Lunar View is situated.
GA: Certainly. It's on the shore of Mare Serenitatis -- that's on the Moon, of course. As I said, it was opened to the public in 2041, and now receives several thousand visitors annually for one-week lunar adventure holidays. But it was a real battle to get it started. Even as late as the 2020s, there still existed a notion that the Moon, and indeed everywhere in space -- except Earth itself -- should be somehow reserved as a temple of pure scientific contemplation, never to be sullied by the grubby paws of commerce. It was the solar power revolution that put an end to that paralysing ideology, thank goodness. After years of complaining that the world needed a source of industrial power which did not pollute with either carbon dioxide emissions or radioactive waste, people woke up to the fact that there was more than enough clean, sustainable power coming from the Sun. Once the satellites to harvest this power in space and beam it down to Earth were in production, that created the necessary infrastructure to extend the space tourism business from low Earth orbit all the way out to the Moon. And then of course the influx of money into lunar development was of enormous benefit to science, in terms of both lunar geology and studies of biological adaptation to a low-gravity environment.
SA: Since then, your interests have moved further afield, haven't they.
GA: Mars was always the obvious next step. But on Mars we serve a different kind of customer. A visit to the Moon can be relatively brief, and can be made all year round. In terms of commitment of time, it's very similar to, say, an American or European spending a fortnight in the Far East, or an Australian spending a fortnight in Europe. Naturally it'll always be more expensive to visit the Moon, but the costs are slowly coming down. Mars, on the other hand, requires a commitment of at least three years of one's life. So our clientele on the Mars run consists of permanent immigrants, or of those who intend to devote at least three Earth years to the experience. Fortunately the resources for living on Mars are all available locally, whereas on the Moon they have to be imported, mostly from near-Earth asteroids, using the supply line set up originally for the power satellite industry. Of course the study of martian geology and biology has benefited enormously from our commercial ventures. Many scientists have been able to spend a year or two there, people who would never have been able to qualify as national astronauts in the old sense.
SA: But at the start of the century, there were fears, weren't there, that astronauts would fatally contaminate the martian biosphere, and perhaps even export some deadly disease bacterium to Earth. What happened to those fears?
GA: The age when I was born was obsessed with all kinds of fears. There was a whole industry devoted to predicting the imminent downfall of humanity by some catastrophe or other. I think the children of my generation, born around the time of the millennium, reacted strongly against that. In spirit, people of my age are closer to my celebrated Victorian ancestor than we are to our parents, who believed that if we were not wiped out by industrial pollution or technological hubris, we would turn ourselves into ever more rapacious machines which would cause the total destruction of Earth's biosphere. Actually the opposite has happened: we are creating healthy new biospheres on the Moon and Mars, just as the engineers and businessmen of Victorian England created intercontinental empires of wealth on Earth. As for the martian organisms, it turned out that they were so different from us, after several billion years of divergent evolution, that neither posed any threat to the other. For them to invade Earth, or for us to wipe out their martian strongholds, we would have to have been rather similar -- as similar as Europeans and pre-Columbian American Indians, say, or as similar as placental mammals and marsupials.
SA: If Mars is so much more exciting for both science and business, why do you prefer nowadays to live on the Moon?
GA: I like to see planet Earth in the sky. From the Moon, it's not so close that you can make out any more than the roughest outlines of the continents with the naked eye, and even those outlines are mostly obscured with shining white clouds. But it is close enough that you have a general impression of a living world, an oasis of organic blue and white set against the lifeless browns and greys of the Moon, or the harsh black, silver and gold of the universe. From Mars, Earth is only a bright star, very similar to Venus seen from Earth, and you can't actually see what you're looking at unless you use a telescope. On the Moon you know you're still close to the mother planet, but you're also on the frontier. Of course Mars is the main frontier attraction at the moment, with immigration from Earth now running at about a thousand people at every two-year launch opportunity (half of them are carried by one or another of my space transport companies). But the Moon is still a frontier, too. Mars gives you all you need to live; you just have to use local materials more intelligently than our ancestors did on Earth. But the Moon is much harsher: its local resources have to be heavily supplemented from outside. So while Mars is largely self-sufficient, the Moon is inevitably an outward-looking place. It needs to be in order for life here to be possible at all.
SA: Now that our readers know about your life's work and your achievements, I wonder if we might move on to consider wider issues? As you know, the leaders of all the world's major religions have recently joined forces to condemn the medical treatment which you and thousands of other extremely wealthy people are receiving. They describe it as the ultimate moral cowardice. How do you feel about that?
GA: Since I will live longer than any of them -- several centuries longer, barring accidents -- I think I will have the last laugh.
SA: But what about "moral cowardice"? Is it not really that you are afraid to die? Afraid of having to account for your life to some supernatural authority? Afraid of meeting God?
GA: If that supposed supernatural authority existed, it would be by definition impossible to escape. Certainly, I'll agree it exists in the sense of a popular but rather outmoded model of the world, or as a mythological expression of deeply felt emotions. But in reality, God is neither supernatural, nor an authority, any more than Father Christmas, or the gods of ancient Greece and Rome.
SA: But many have argued that, without God, it is not possible to have stable moral values. They see the present age as one of moral anarchy, in which values such as toleration, democracy and freedom try to impose order, but inevitably fail, because they have no foundation in permanent, enduring truth. If God does not exist, surely it is necessary to invent him? Even when living on the Moon?
GA: Not in the least. You suffer from a total misconception of what moral values are. The traditional religions have taught you that they are founded on the word of an intelligent, anthropomorphic, alien being, who happens to exist eternally, and so the fundamental moral values must also be eternally unchanging. But why should they be? Society has changed radically over the past few hundred years. Why should its values remain stagnant? Do you think we should have the same rules about, for example, the treatment of slaves as were common in pre-industrial societies?
SA: The argument, if I understand it, is that society may change, but human nature does not.
GA: Another piece of religious dogma. Would you expect the same standards of behaviour from a pre-human hominid ape, a stone-age hunter-gatherer, a villager living on subsistence agriculture, an illiterate pre-industrial city-dweller, a citizen of a pre-information-age nation state, and one of today's cosmopolitans, who has seen his or her home planet floating in the depths of the cosmos? Society evolves, and moral standards must evolve in parallel.
SA: So you agree that there is moral anarchy?
GA: Of course not! I would say that absolute good and evil are dead -- thank goodness! -- but in their place we are guided by absolute better and worse. Whatever your social situation, there is a way to improve laws and standards of behaviour, for the health and growth of your society, and a way to degrade them. Where your religious friends talk of stable moral values, I talk of a stultifying stagnation; where they see instability and anarchy, I see creative dynamism. But my concept of society is progressive; theirs is of an attempt to achieve and maintain an imagined perfect society which, in the real world, cannot exist.
SA: It sounds as if you are advocating moral relativism.
GA: You're being deliberately provocative, aren't you! "Moral relativism" is the name of the doctrine that no moral standard is better or worse than any other. I stand for the opposite view: that they can be compared on a scale of worse, towards one end of the spectrum, and better, towards the other. I deny that the spectrum has definite ends: there is no absolute good and no absolute evil -- these are figments of the religious imagination, and do endless harm. For if you believe in good and evil, then you can sanctify your own cause and demonise your opponents, and in that sort of atmosphere, compromise becomes impossible. Who would like to admit they've compromised with the Devil? So conflicts become impossible to resolve. Far better to allow that even the worst of insane criminals -- a Hitler, a Stalin -- has some share in our common humanity, and that even the most revered idol may have faults. Also, we need to recognise that progress from a worse moral state to a better one can only come in parallel with many other kinds of progress: in technology, economic growth, political institutions, and so on. Observe, for example, how it only became possible to abolish slavery once industrialisation had started.
SA: What, then, do you call your system of ethics?
GA: "Evolutionary ethics". You have to understand that ethics, moral values -- whatever we call them -- are no more and no less than the software that runs social groups. They are the rules which determine how political power and material resources are distributed. There is nothing mystical about them, nothing spiritual or other-worldly. Naturally, these rules are subject to the same general evolutionary processes which are found in biology and history. So for example a society with a belief in human equality is able to harness the creative talents of its members much more efficiently than one which dogmatically relegates substantial minorities -- women, Jews, Blacks, shudras, kulaks, whoever it may be -- to inferior status. Other things being equal -- such as access to natural resources or population size -- the freer society must outperform the restrictive one and eventually dominate it, and this has been the experience of history.
SA: That's certainly a novel justification of liberty.
GA: It's not novel at all. Another obvious example concerns attitudes to wealth. A country whose value system identifies material wealth as the divinely justified reward for conscientious hard work is bound to enrich itself faster than one which teaches its citizens the fatalistic attitude that wealth comes and goes according to the unpredictable whims of the gods, or condemns wealth as something that can only be obtained by one person if that person steals from others. So the Protestant work ethic is more than a divine command. It is a piece of social software which benefits its society relative to those which have not adopted it. It is like a beneficial mutation in some creature's DNA: the right adaptation at the right time can multiply a society's influence, creativity and longevity; the same adaptation in different circumstances or a different adaptation can hold society back, even destroy it.
SA: You make it sound as if there are no moral decisions to be made by real people any more.
GA: Only because I have not yet given you a full account of evolutionary ethics.
SA: So how do I decide a moral dilemma? What about abortion? The death penalty? Religious toleration? Rights versus duties?
GA: What do you think? You weigh up the pros and cons -- legal, cultural, financial, emotional, social -- and decide. Just as everybody else in history has had to do. If you happen to believe in an omnipotent but rather bad-tempered intelligent alien being looking over your shoulder, you will naturally take that factor into account as well. But I don't recommend it. It only confuses things.
SA: In other words, every man for himself or herself. So you are advocating moral anarchy!
GA: If you had been listening to me, instead of enjoying the free malt whisky which my company has imported at considerable expense, you would not have jumped to that conclusion. I explained earlier how the phrase "moral anarchy" was an abuse of the idea of evolutionary ethics, and I shall do so again. Here we have, say, a pregnant woman who does not want to carry the foetus that is growing in her womb. Or we have a convicted murderer, and a call for him to pay for his victim's life with his own. Or a priest accusing a novelist of blasphemy, and being accused in turn of frustrating the right to free speech. Or an unemployed person demanding welfare from the state but offering nothing in return. In all these cases the law as it stands takes a certain position. There is a weight of history and precedent, but also widespread cultural feelings of what is fair and just. In a civilised society the law should have the last word. But the law can be changed. Should we change it? How do we decide? We decide by employing a mixture of trial and error, intuition, reasoned common sense, and compromise. This mixture of forces, exercised by a wide variety of politicians, lawyers, media commentators, affected parties and disinterested campaigners, is not a recipe for discovering theological truth (whatever that may be). But it is a practical formula for keeping the law in touch with people's beliefs and perceptions, and allowing the law to evolve in parallel with the wider culture. This applies both to very homogeneous societies, and to the very cosmopolitan ones in Earth's capitals and on the Moon and Mars.
SA: Religious believers have often derided atheists, secularists, Enlightenment thinkers, call them what you will, for the fact that their trumpeting of democracy, liberty, tolerance and so on seems to conceal the desperation that results from a lack of belief in anything at all. Your emphasis on compromise in translating moral values into law puts you right in the line of fire, I'm afraid. You would allow the Catholic, who is against all abortion, to compromise with the materialist, who sees nothing wrong with abortion up to say eight months, and fix an arbitrary dividing-line at four months, which neither party would defend. Then as the stock of the Catholic Church versus that of the faculties of materialist philosophy rose and fell against one another, you would move that arbitrary point, at which the foetus becomes an individual baby and a legal entity distinct from its mother, forwards or backwards to reflect the overall social consensus. Surely the religious point of view is right when it accuses you of a totally unprincipled choice of the easiest path?
GA: Firstly, let us not forget that our own species, and every other species that existed up until a few years ago, is the biological product of exactly what you describe: an unprincipled choice of the easiest path. It is a general evolutionary pattern. So to a certain extent I accept the charge. A pure reductionist materialist would have to stop there. But I am not one of them. You see, I do believe in something, beyond mere pragmatism.
SA: What is that?
GA: Consider my life's work. It is obvious: the Creative Evolution of the living universe.
SA: Are you saying you believe in the theory of evolution?
GA: Not exactly. Biological evolution is a part of science. But the philosophy of Creative Evolution is a general recognition of the creative power of the universe, and the evolutionary way in which it displays that power. It does so on several levels: cosmic evolution, in which a vast cloud of gas forms itself into stars and galaxies; galactic evolution, in which planetary systems form; biological evolution on an earthlike world; cultural evolution of an intelligent species such as our own; and astronautical evolution, where complex, conscious life, having evolved from very simple forms on one unique planet, uses technology to extend its domain and its conscious awareness throughout the Galaxy.
SA: Are you saying that science tells us the purpose of existence?