The Ramazzini Institute
for Occupational and Environmental Health Research   

Who Are We?

Moral Questions
September 11, 2001: An Attempt To Arrest Civilization

Some clues to the answer are found in the work of Abu Zayd Abd-Ar-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, a late 14^th century Islamic scholar, an Arab of North Africa, who is claimed by historians, philosophers, economists, sociologists and anthropologists as one of their own pioneers. He also was a practitioner of Human Ecology, a biologically-modeled approach to understanding the nature of ourselves. Born in Tunis to a family of refugees from Spain, said to be imprisoned twice and constantly on the run and isolated, he managed to not only teach and at least try to influence the course of events of his own violence-filled times, he also wrote The Muqaddimah.ⁱ
     The Muqaddimah is a remarkable work in the intellectual history of history itself. Is it still being read? I found it, prior to September 11, on reserve for students in the library of nearby St. Mary’s College of Southern Maryland. Some very lucky students have a good teacher.
     Ibn Khaldun is said to be a pessimist who saw history as repetitious and cyclical. Yet his holistic approach to the place of humans in nature would seem to contradict this verdict.
     Darwin would have approved of his account of evolution. “Look at the world of creation,” he wrote.ⁱⁱ “It started out from the mineral and progressed, in an ingenious, gradual manner, to plants and animals.” Each stage, in this account, is connected, so that “the last stage of each group is fully prepared to become the first stage of the next group….[from the] world of monkeys” to man and man’s power of thinking. The result is “human social organization” or civilization, stemming from the need to find food, which requires “mutual cooperation.” ⁱⁱⁱ
     There are, of course, both optimistic and pessimistic accounts of what happened next in the development of human social organization. In the American optimistic tradition, the Jeffersonians, Daniel Boorstin reminds us, “viewed man [as] struggling among myriad other species [while] the Darwinians (if not Darwin himself) became preoccupied with man’s struggle against other creatures of his own species.” ^iv
     Writing in the most recent issue of Philosophia, the philosophical quarterly of Israel, Tibor Machan summarizes the supposed struggle within our own species, the view of Hobbes: “When scarcity and congestion reach a critical mass in the state of nature, the self-interested motivation of individuals drives them to …devise certain rules of social life…everyone gives up the ‘natural rights’…except for the right to resist being killed... [in exchange for rules that presumably would] aim for the maintenance of peace and preservation of human life.” ^v
     In contrast with this atomistic pessimism, there is another tradition, the quintessence of which is found in the view of Alan Gewirth. The rights to freedom and well-being, if we claim them for ourselves, he argues, necessarily apply to everyone else since they are derived from common human needs, i.e., they “rest on grounds that also apply to all other prospective purposive agents”. ^vi
     We may not agree on what “rights” mean, or even whether they exist. Other philosophers, such as Bernard Gert, would not claim that there are any universal moral rights, but he would regard violations of universal moral rules, such as do not kill or deprive of freedom, as equivalent to violations of rights not to be killed or deprived of freedom. ^vii
     The preservation of life and the maintenance of peace are terms of a universal state of hope for civilization that many can agree upon, surely all those who are rational, regardless of where their beliefs about human nature fall in the spectra of pessimism and optimism. Whether the necessary creative force stems from altruistic needs in the heart of an Albert Schweitzer or the self-interest of tooth-and-claw sociobiologists, can that state survive as an Open Society?
     In the vein of Ibn Khaldun, and many of his predecessor and successor evolutionists, Darwin begins an answer in the last paragraph of the last edition of The Descent of Man:
“Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”^viii
     Darwin would agree with Robert Richards on the underlying mechanism for achieving that higher destiny: “…Evolution provides the structured context of moral action: it has constituted human beings not only to be moved to act for the community good, but also to approve, endorse, and encourage others to do so.”^ix For those whose way of life leads to “differences of condition” that do not allow positive human development toward that destiny, to use a concept of Ibn Khaldun,^x then perhaps the result we observe is what Toynbee-the-younger called “arrested civilization.” Ibn Khaldun, I suspect, would agree. How else do we explain the persistence of his lifetime struggle for an idea of the good society!
     September 11 changed the dynamic of the evolutionary mechanism, by altering the volume of the need to defend with the vigor unique to free people the moral purpose that should shape the direction of human development.
     Our world is at war and the rules of engagement differ from any that have existed before. The stakes have never been higher. The very definition of who we are and - more importantly - who we will be is under attack. The outcome is far from decided. The terms of that definition are drawn not only from the American or European historical experience, the ingredients of which are the bulk of what we share, what we have in common, but the historical experience of the whole of humankind. By history, we mean not only the political experience, but the social, cultural and natural histories that have evolved dialectically and ecologically toward an open and environmentally-sound society in which technology - whether it harnesses the atom or the gene - becomes a tool for a good held in common.
     The American experience did not happen in a vacuum. Here where this is being written, we are surrounded by the vestiges of every struggle, every idea tested and kept or discarded in a shared history inseparable from the travail of those who built St. Marie’s City to worship freely , the pain of those who arrived on the slave ships docked at the foot of Solomon’s Island, died on the Patuxent to stop an enraged monarch’s depredation, or lay feverish in the Union prison on Point Lookout. Or of those who from every nation made the lines on Ellis Island, once in the shadow of the World Trade Center, all to shed the fears and restraints of arrested civilization. Yet it is also inseparable from the glad spirit of Jefferson’s nation, one that heals its own as well as the wounds of its enemies in every war it has ever fought.
     Nor is that experience separate from the ebb and flow of the revolution of 1848, a struggle that continues to sweep Europe from Belfast to Novosibirsk, and send new waves of emigrants to the shores of North America.
     The totality of the Western historical experience, I think more often than not, fails to be understood or even known, not only in the souks and refugee camps of the Middle East, but among the peoples of the West itself. In the long struggle before us, there is a danger that our shared experience may be lost, or cast out of sight, during the necessarily tumultuous and uncertain decision making of a republic of a multitude both native and new. Yet a continual return to the historic roots and goals of our increasingly global society is essential if we are to sustain the course of human evolution toward civilization.

Sheldon Wilfred Samuels

ⁱ Ibn Khaldun.The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. F. Rosenthal, trans. Abridged ed. Princeton University Press: Princeton 1967

ⁱⁱ Ibid, p75.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid, pp45-46

^iv Boorstin, DJ The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago 1993. p242

^v Machan, TR Why Agreement Isn’t Enough. Philosophia, 28,1-4. June 2001, pp269-281.

^vi Gewirth, A. The Community of Rights . The University of Chicago Press: Chicago 1996. pp25-26.

^vii Gert, B. Personal communication. See Gert’s Morality: Its Nature and Justification. Oxford: New York 1998.

^viii Darwin, C The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man. Modern Library edition 1948 printing, p920

^ix Richards, RJ Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago 1987, p622. See his defense of Gewirth’s system, especially of criticism by Alasdair MacIntyre of Gewirth’s Principle of Generic Consistency , pp599-628.

^x Ibn Khaldun. Op.cit. p91