Column: Different times, different moral rules, and human self-regard
By Charles Jeanes
“We are the cosmos made conscious, and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.”
— Professor Brian Cox
Telemachos: “We created the greatest civilization there ever was.”
Odysseus: “We violated all that’s ever been sacred between people. We lived in a world of beauty, … until we broke it.”
Penelope: “Civilization will rise again.”
– characters in the film version of The Odyssey. [Christopher Nolan, director/ scriptwriter]
Introduction: Morality, Self, and the Other
I have been thinking about our species and its “goodness.” I lean toward the view that humans incline to be kind to their fellows. But it is evident to me, as an historian of our species, that we have been too easily capable of denying the humanity of other humans.
“Who counts as human? More precisely, who counts as the kind of human to whom I owe obligations, and who, when encountered, elicits a response of care? Conversely, who lies beyond my circle of concern?
And how should I respond to them? Are they strangers to be hosted, enemies to be feared, or barbarians to be civilized or enslaved?”
https://comment.org/christian-humanism-rediscovered/?utm_campaign=Post%3A+
Who has not heard of the Golden Rule? This commandment, to treat others as one would want to be treated, emerged in what historians call The Axial Age. Today’s Arc considers this ethic from a few perspectives, historical, filmic, moral.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Axial_Age
The angels and devils of human being
I’m fascinated by the feelings I see in public expression: (1) great belief in a good future for humanity (2) great despair that we are in an age of social disintegration, spiritual darkness, and physical ruin.
I observe many who exalt Hope as a supreme human quality, and just as many who express disdain for the idea of hope as an empty emotion leading to no solutions.
From the human point of view, our planet and our human consciousness on it are the center of the universe. Many of us seem to like ourselves, knowing no other being of such wondrous accomplishment and talents. We’re “the crown of Creation.”
And yet we have misgivings about whether we are fit company for other conscious, sentient, intelligent beings — if ever they might visit us here or we meet them beyond. We seem to loathe ourselves too.
One can paraphrase a poet’s lines to refer to our species: “When it is good, it is very, very good. When it is bad, it is unconscionable, heinous, wretched, execrable.”
{ Apologies to Longfellow for my misanthrope’s license with his poem. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44650/there-was-a-little-girl }
Artists have a lot to say to us about this moment we find ourselves. In this Arc I consider {Spoilers!} two major films from the US movie industry, currently very popular in theatres.
This column is inspired by two dramatic movies of the summer, Stephen Spielberg’s Disclosure Day and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Both directors have mammoth reputations for their artistry, and never have difficulty finding investment and fascination with whatever project they work on. The two films are related in my mind this way: Spielberg gives us star-faring-extraterrestrials’ encounter with humans on planet Earth; Nolan shows us an encounter of two civilizations – Bronze-Age society in the second millennium BCE meeting “Peoples of the sea” – and both stories feature a deeply mythic Story-behind-the-story approach.
Being historically-informed, I see in these two tales a profound pattern that our species has had to understand about ourselves: what is right and good to do, when two kinds of beings meet as strangers and have to make decisions about the relationship they will have from this moment of encounter.
Will we, the center of the universe, have the “quality of goodness” we need to meet extraterrestrials? This is the question I intend readers take away from this Arc.
“Civilization-States”: the new world Order?
There is a new kind of state in geopolitics, whose outlines are taking shape. One academic calls them “Civilization-states.” The notion of civilization is contested. https://www.sylff.org/news_voices/30725/
Terence McNamee, a professor at the Montreal Institute for Global Security, has a hypothesis about the global great powers – the US, China, India, Russia, Islam – and how they intend to carve up the world into spheres; he contrasts this kind of order with the one our prime minister Carney endorsed at Davos early this year. He proposed an order of “middle powers” who say ‘No’ to the dominant hegemons — and instead create order based on ‘rules.’ [“Middle partners must act together, because if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” ]
Carney’s speech still resonates among middle powers, McNamee says. https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/01/carney-middle-powers-davos-speech McNamee prefers Carney’s approach, that nation-states of middle-power status should resist the claims of hegemony from the very large and base their independence on moral, rules-based foundations. The UN Charter or UN Declaration of Rights are such foundations. ‘Civilization-states’ prefer power as global arbitrator. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
The civilization-states are fearsome, to McNamee, for they brook no opposition to their claims to be ultimate human societies; they believe they have a right to the allegiance of those born into them. The proponents for such civilization-states insist a profound internal power is exerted over their peoples in each individual — as if people carry a genetic code to be “Western” or Chinese, Indian, or Russian. And woe to the person who would defy the norms dictated by the State in each civilization. No Russian can refuse Putin’s war, no American can refute Trump’s prejudices.
This might seem a tangent to my topic. It isn’t. Civilization is the word we use to talk about our moralities. Is there any value that is universal in all human civilization? This is a question for philosophers, and when Carney upholds the liberal international order he imagines was in place from 1945 to 2020, he is upholding a Western idea of moral order. The Golden Rule might seem universal. We do not know that as fact.
This philosophical puzzle complicates my imagined future encounter when homo sapiens meet extraterrestrial Others. As an historian, I trust we can use our own human Past as a clue to what might eventuate on that fateful “disclosure day” when we meet Them.
When superior force encounters The Other: We and They
What, in your informed opinion, is the right way for a civilization of great power – let us say, Europeans in the modern era – to relate to a culture or cultures of lesser power, let us say, the indigenous people of the New World around 1500, or 1800, CE? What is the moral path? You no doubt have an opinion on this history. Canada is quite seriously torn on the issue of Reconciliation with natives, and their rights.
An historian has to insist that there is nothing to be gained by judging the Past by the moral measures of the Present. What’s done is done, and the humans of the Past were our own relatives, doing as we do: the best they knew how in their particular circumstances. If the Europeans who colonized Canada were racist and applied policies that do not meet today’s high standard for moral conduct, the point of studying them is not to make oneself feel superior. History is NOT a morality tale.
The point of historical empathy is to understand how people in the past who thought of themselves as moral beings, could be inhumane. They were not evil people. They were doing the best they could, as we do.
I know from my studies of how the Greek and Romans viewed the Celtic people they absorbed into an empire, and how the English viewed the Irish, Scots, and Welsh Celts later in history, that “civilizers” do not intend to let the weaker folks exercise cultural freedom. The subjugated do what they must to have peace. Always, the imperial folk demand change from the subjugated people.
Change in the culture of a weaker people to some degree is always the policy of the strong, for the strong will decide which cultural facets must change and which can be tolerated.
I have no patience with an assumption of guilt and shame by modern Canadians of European extraction, like my family, who accept that their ancestors were moral cretins for their racialist and colonial attitudes. Further, I reject any suggestion that other cultures/ peoples/ civilizations would have conducted themselves with much higher moral standards if they had been in the historic role of Europeans after Columbus. It is entirely hypothetical. Would Aztecs or Incans have been better overlords in Spain than the Spaniards in Mexico? Would Mongols or Japanese have ruled Europe with 21st century moral precepts? Such questions waste your time.
Odysseus and the Fall of Civilization
“What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if…one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn’t possibly be there anymore. What if…when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night? We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that’s ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire. Including his home. What if he knew, that very night, as he walked through fires, anarchy, and pain—and in a daze of sweaty celebrations that follow—what if he knew exactly what he’d done? … One man’s idea. One man’s trick to break Zeus’s law forever. We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.”
Penelope: You? are the people from the sea?
Odysseus: Yes, my queen. The breaking of Zeus’s law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn’t bear to see the ruins of what he’d done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.”
This speech by Odysseus is the crux of Nolan’s film. “Zeus’s Law” is not the Golden Rule; rather it states that one must greet a stranger, a guest, with “hospitality right;” he should be well-treated. The reason for this rule of xenia is that any stranger might be a god, so it is merely smart to not offend a god – the reason is not because it is Good-in-itself to treat others so.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/xenia-sociology
https://www.centerws.com/newsletter/on-the-xenos-covenant
In Nolan’s filmic version of the Homeric tale, Odysseus at the end of his journey has come to a moral realization: Troy was destroyed by the Greeks in an act of disregard of Zeus’s Law, and now the Bronze Age of civilized humans will Fall. The historical basis for Nolan’s poetic license in this speech from Odysseus – this is NOT what Homer (the ancient author of the Odyssey) has recorded – is that ‘The Peoples of the Sea’ did lay waste to Mycenean Greece and the Hittite empire, among others, c. 1200 BCE.] So Nolan is using history to warn us now about war, hatred, and collapse.
The war on Troy broke the moral law, and collapse followed: Nolan, not Homer.
Important historical note: the Bronze Age – the age of the Trojan War, and the conquests by the Peoples of the Sea – is an epoch centuries before the Axial Age. The Golden Rule was not universal at this time. The moral preceptors of the Axial era had not yet been born, had not yet taught us the higher morality of empathy.
https://www.thecollector.com/ancient-sea-peoples-mediterranean-bronze-age/
Human Goodness in the lens of film-makers
Spielberg has a similar take on our species as Nolan does. Spielberg’s noble scientist, Hugo Wakefield, tells the evil Noah – captor and torturer of ETs – that the aliens regard human empathy and compassion as stupendous qualities that evolution has bestowed on our species.
Then Hugo draws his arguable conclusion: “The rejection of this understanding is leading to our extinction.”
Humans risk extinction by rejecting our finest quality, love of others. This is Spielberg’s mythos for 2026. Like Nolan, he is opining on morals and human qualities.
Zeus’s Law, xenia, is the law that Odysseus broke at Troy, he tells his wife, in Nolan’s re-telling, equating this with the Golden Rule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenia_(Greek) Nolan is editing true history for his modern audiences.
Spielberg and Nolan, working completely in the dark from what the other was doing, have arrived at similar conclusions: compassion and empathy – The Golden Rule. These peculiarly human qualities are what will save us.
Just this week, a post popped up on my Facebook feed, pertinent to this topic of human moral behavior. Susan Sontag, respected American theorist of culture and society, said this: “10% of any population is cruel, no matter what. 10% is merciful, no matter what. And the remaining 80% can be moved in either direction.”
Sontag has no final word on morals by any means, but she makes a necessary observation — there is a lot of latitude in human morality when it comes to attitude toward The Other. To ignore others’ pain is not difficult for us. We can turn a blind eye, and history is a record of humans doing precisely that.
https://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/a-moral-place-in-the-world
Individual Virtue in a Mass of Mediocre Morality
Nolan recently said in an interview, “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.”
In the words of Spielberg’s character, Hugo, the quality of empathy in individual humans is what astonishes the aliens and leads them to feel in awe of our species. Spielberg plays to the popular notion of individuals who are CHOSEN ONES; his two heroes are selected as young children by the ETs to possess unique spectacular gifts so that they may bring the Truth to our planet – and prevent WW Three also!
Whenever one feels disgusted with our species and horrible and repellent facets of our natures, one might take refuge in this reflection: “Yes, we do such things, but we’re capable of love, empathy, and compassion, so we ought to feel we deserve our place as the center of the cosmos.”
Do you, reader, forgive our species its manifold atrocities with this defense: “Yes, human beings are capable of all manner of heinous behavior. But, the beauty and virtue of their finest individuals excuses the horrors in their history, in the mass” ?
Individual humans of wondrous purity are the stuff of countless legends, myths, and religious texts. The Buddha, the Christ, the Prophet, and so forth, were humans of surpassing excellence. They were our highest manifestation of virtue, preceptors of the most exalted values for our species. If any individuals can be said to stand for the best in human being, it must be they.
If we had to put forward just a few of our species to represent us in some cosmic forum of sentient life -drawn from across the universe and across Time – it would be individuals such as we imagine these were.
From our own, Western tradition, from the book called The Bible by Christians or the Torah by Jews, I propose two intriguing examples of good human being.
Around 3,000 years ago a human wrote a tale to describe The God who created all, YHWH, repenting to it/her/him self that the human species, and other life, had been created. In the book of Genesis, one reads: “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. … So the LORD said, ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created — and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground — for I regret that I have made them.”
From Christian theology, I perceive that humans 2,000 years ago could imagine and theorize that one very pure human, Jesus, could save the species from “eternal damnation” by dying as a sacrificial substitution – sacrificed to the same God as nearly destroyed life during Noah’s flood. This is theology with moral intention.
What do I learn from these biblical narratives? I see into a mind from three millennia ago; 3,000 years before our time, a human could look at the world around it, a world at the western edge of Asia, and lament that humans were evil. The author wrote this story, depicting God sorrowing over the “thoughts of the human heart” and the wickedness of the species. God feels. And the feeling is, “I regret that I have made them.”
Does anyone else besides me feel empathy with the authors of the texts? To me in 2026, human prospects are bleak. The Torah-text author and I share a perspective.
The Conclusion: Do you believe in Consequential (karmic) Justice?
These two biblical stories say, in a narrative form, that the goodness of a very tiny number of humans – Noah; Jesus – can be weighed against the moral turpitude of most of us, and redeem us from extinction.
I offer these thoughts to my readers to entertain their own conclusions on the future of our species in light of being a Good form of life. But of course, goodness may have absolutely nothing to do with our fate. I am quite acculturated to a story of Justice in the universe, but that’s just me. Readers might have no such fixation as I do on the notion that there is such a thing as deserving or not deserving consequences.
Intellectually, my mind can grasp this: “Moral Goodness” in what we humans do is just as likely to have NO relevance to the issue of extinction. Whether we disappear – or continue until we become an interstellar species – is in no way a result of our being “worthy and deserving” of such ends… Emotionally? My heart demands accountability!
