The position of a barge up ahead indicated his boat was getting too far over on the New York City side of the river. He brought his bow back a few degrees so as to stay out of any oncoming traffic. On the big expanse of water before him he saw a barge being pushed from behind by a tug-boat. The barge had pipes along the top that meant it was probably carrying oil or chemicals. It was heading toward him and although he figured there was no danger of collision he set a course anyway that would give it an even wider separation.
The banks of this sea were far away but he could see that the buildings and shore installations were metropolitan. No hills rose back of them, only a dull industrial haze. He looked at his watch. Three-thirty. A couple of hours of sunlight yet. It looked like they would get to Nyack before dark. This boat had really made time today. All the hurricane flood water on top of the tides on top of the natural river current had done it.
Anyway that was the answer to Rigel’s question. Phædrus could relax now. Rigel was just pushing a narrow tradition-bound socio-biological code of morals which it was certain he didn’t understand himself.
As Phædrus had gotten into them he had seen that the isolation of these static moral codes was important. They were really little moral empires all their own, as separate from one another as the static levels whose conflicts they resolved:
First, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of biological life over inanimate nature. Second, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of the social order over biological life — conventional morals — proscriptions against drugs, murder, adultery, theft and the like. Third, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of the intellectual order over the social order — democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Finally there’s a fourth Dynamic morality which isn’t a code. He supposed you could call it a code of Art or something like that, but art is usually thought of as such a frill that that title undercuts its importance. The morality of the brujo in Zuni — that was Dynamic morality.
What was emerging was that the static patterns that hold one level of organization together are often the same patterns that another level of organization must fight to maintain its own existence. Morality is not a simple set of rules. It’s a very complex struggle of conflicting patterns of values. This conflict is the residue of evolution. As new patterns evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems.
It’s out of this struggle between conflicting static patterns that the concepts of good and evil arise. Thus, the evil of disease which the doctor is absolutely morally committed to stop is not an evil at all within the germ’s lower static pattern of morality. The germ is making a moral effort to stave off its own destruction by lower-level inorganic forces of evil.
Phædrus thought that most other quarrels in values can be traced to evolutionary causes and that this tracing can sometimes provide both a rational basis for classification of the quarrels and a rational solution. The structuring of morality into evolutionary levels suddenly gives shape to all kinds of blurred and confused moral ideas that are floating around in our present cultural heritage. Vice is an example. In an evolutionary morality the meaning of vice is quite clear. Vice is a conflict between biological quality and social quality. Things like sex and booze and drugs and tobacco have a high biological quality, that is, they feel good, but are harmful for social reasons. They take all your money. They break up your family. They threaten the stability of the community.
Like the stuff Rigel was throwing at him this morning, the old Victorian morality. That was entirely within that one code — the social code. Phædrus thought that code was good enough as far as it went, but it really didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t know its origins and it didn’t know its own destinations, and not knowing them it had to be exactly what it was: hopelessly static, hopelessly stupid, a form of evil in itself.
Evil… If he’d called it that one-hundred-and-fifty years ago he might have gotten himself into some real trouble. People got mad back then when you challenged their social institutions, and they tended to take reprisals. He might have gotten himself ostracized as some kind of a social menace. And if he’d said it six-hundred years ago he might have been burned at the stake.
But today it’s hardly a risk. It’s more of a cheap shot. Everybody thinks those Victorian moral codes are stupid and evil, or old-fashioned at least, except maybe a few religious fundamentalists and ultra-right-wingers and ignorant uneducated people like that. That’s why Rigel’s sermon this morning seemed so peculiar. Usually people like Rigel do their sermonizing in favor of whatever they know is popular. That way they’re safe. Didn’t he know all that stuff went out years ago? Where was he during the revolution of the sixties?
Where has he been during this whole century? That’s what this whole century’s been about, this struggle between intellectual and social patterns. That’s the theme song of the twentieth century. Is society going to dominate intellect or is intellect going to dominate society? And if society wins, what’s going to be left of intellect? And if intellect wins what’s going to be left of society? That was the thing that this evolutionary morality brought out clearer than anything else. Intellect is not an extension of society any more than society is an extension of biology. Intellect is going its own way, and in doing so is at war with society, seeking to subjugate society, to put society under lock and key. An evolutionary morality says it is moral for intellect to do so, but it also contains a warning: just as a society that weakens its people’s physical health endangers its own stability, so does an intellectual pattern that weakens and destroys the health of its social base also endanger its own stability.
Better to say has endangered. It’s already happened. This has been a century of fantastic intellectual growth and fantastic social destruction. The only question is how long this process can keep on.
After a while Phædrus could see the moorings ahead at the Nyack Yacht Club, just where Rigel said they would be. They were about done sailing for the day. As the boat drew closer he throttled the engine down and unlashed the boat hook from the deck.
Lila’s face appeared again in the hatchway.
It startled him for a moment. She was real, after all. All this theoretical thought about this advanced metaphysical abstraction called Lila, and here, before him, was what it was all about.
Her hair was combed and a cardigan sweater covered all but the O-V of her T-shirt.
I feel a little better now, she said.
She didn’t look better. Her face had been changed with cosmetics into something worse… a kind of a mask. Skin white with powder. Alien black eyebrows perjured by her blond hair. A menacing death’s-door eye-shadow.
He saw that some of the mooring floats ahead had red and white markings that looked like they were meant for guests. He throttled the engine down and turned the boat in a wide arc so as to approach the outermost one. When he reckoned that the boat had just about enough momentum to reach it by itself he shifted to neutral, grabbed the boat hook and went forward to pick up the mooring float. It was just light enough to see the float. In a half-hour it would be dark.