Let me first assure my readers here, I've admired Bill Gates since he first came out on top in his dealings with IBM. I owned a dual floppy IBM PC as one of my first computers. I did not write this article as a pie in the face of Bill Gates. I know some people think that there should be higher corporate taxes, and some, even think appropriate a 100% tax on inheritance targeting the likes of Bill Gates, arguing everyone should start out life on an equal footing.
They would give Bill Gates' money to the government. That's an argument I would never make, because government doesn't know how to provide anything but bureaucracy, mediocrity and war, here given in no particular order of hideousness.
I'm not writing here to trash Bill and Melinda either, and my sarcasm and satire are employed merely as literary tools to keep the readers' minds attentive. In my own life I've moved on, and found superior knowledge than that which drives the Gates' Foundation. I have Quixotically been studying philosophy.
In 2006 I discovered the moral imperative of life.
At 56 then, such a discovery was something of a shock to my system, but it has given me some not unwarranted self assurance knowing I have done something that will likely exceed in value to the world all the good Bill and Melinda will be able to accomplish despite their Carnegie-like resources. The Foundation is simply misguided because the founders are unaware of the moral imperative of life.
In this sense, Bill and Melinda Gates, like every human on the planet, are barbarians, uncivilized and prone to making horrifically barbaric mistakes. For despite their good intentions, without knowledge of the moral imperative of life, it is impossible for the Foundation to exert the free will of Bill and Melinda Gates.
Of course, I could be wrong about the significance of my discovery. Though for me, Bill and Melinda seem to have fallen into the tawdry trap of secular humanist ideals so common and so dominant in our quite nearly profane culture. As I have examined of it, the moral imperative of life seems absolute. Someone may come up with an exception, but I have yet to hear of any moral exemption to its rule.
Secular humanism is the expression of the current philosophic step on an historic path from the Enlightenment when Scholasticism gave way to Utilitarianisms. The Utilitarians due to their cataclysmic failures morphed into a secular humanist menagerie of a combination of everything that came before, the Golden Rule, the Rights of Man, and the Empirical Methodologies, seeking a kinder, gentler and more modern world into which the empiricists have been thrusting us, regardless and come what may.
These secular humanist ideas have driven humans into a modernist, technological, industrialized and digitized future that edges humanity ever closer to that cliff the current Scholastics, who incidentally never really went away and still carry a copy of Saint Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, want us to believe is the Apocalypse and the Second Coming on the horizon.
Secular humanists of course deny the inevitability of any apocalypse. Their chosen weapon to ward off the nightmare under the historic bed of prophecy is technology, which is handy, embracable, and apparently capable of wondrous accomplishments, if mostly highlighted by bright, shiny objects of curiosity for the easily entertained and far too easily distracted.
Secular humanists believe the future will look like The Jetsons, Star Trek, and even Star Wars. Secular humanists are technologists generally. This is their Utopian dream, an ultra-modern world where war, disease and space itself have been conquered, heading out as if on a voyage of Star Trek, Space...the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Spaceship Enterprise. It's five-year mission: To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's goals are stated thus: Bringing Innovations in Health and Learning to the Global Community, Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to reduce inequities and improve lives around the world. From a secular humanist point of view, no doubt there can be no dissenters here.
The Foundations guiding principles are: 1) This is a family foundation driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family. 2) Philanthropy plays an important but limited role. 3) Science and technology have great potential to improve lives around the world. 4) We are funders and shapers�we rely on others to act and implement. 5) Our focus is clear�and limited�and prioritizes some of the most neglected issues. 6) We identify a specific point of intervention and apply our efforts against a theory of change. 7) We take risks, make big bets, and move with urgency. We are in it for the long haul. 8) We advocate�vigorously but responsibly�in our areas of focus. 9) We must be humble and mindful in our actions and words. We seek and heed the counsel of outside voices. 10) We treat our grantees as valued partners, and we treat the ultimate beneficiaries of our work with respect. 11) Delivering results with the resources we have been given is of the utmost importance�and we seek and share information about those results. 12) We demand ethical behavior of ourselves. 13) We treat each other as valued colleagues. 14) Meeting our mission�to increase opportunity and equity for those most in need�requires great stewardship of the money we have available. 15) We leave room for growth and change.
Of course a very heavy dose of Mother Teresa is apparently central to justify the ridiculously impossible expense of all the technological paraphernalia, and a college degree for everyone on the planet is thrown in to satiate the financial needs and the self-promotional pleas of the those who aren't able, teach education lobby. In this clearly secular humanist view, education is apparently as good as wholesome food, clean air and clean water.
In every sense, secular humanism is also a desperate and reactionary movement against the nihilism of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and all the existentialists who reacted almost violently against Scholasticism as it was debased by the empiricisms of the scientific. It is all a very neat little philosophic package, where science reigns supreme, if it were only a cogent path toward human truth.
The pseudo-philosophy of these pseudo-philosophers actually devotes time developing logical arguments to prove and disprove the existence of god. Thus distracting the audience at the county fair of human understanding, the empiricists have snatched the mantel of human truth, all the while knowing logic itself is little more than a cheap card trick, a novelty of extravagant deception, and a curiosity for which the mind has a great, but all too often undue, affinity.
The secular humanists are correct in their assertion that life is good, or at least it is for some of us as they see it in a typically centrist fashion. They'd like to make it better for everyone in the populist sense of the Rights of Man to be perfected by unfettered scientific persuasion of reality regardless of the odds against such an endeavor. Unfortunately for the secular humanists, happy, well fed, and well educated citizens with lots of technology toys have a propensity to re-adopt nihilist attitudes and debase human existence by their greed and almost total unconnectedness to the world upon which life must continue to exist.
Due to increased efficiencies possible and perfected by empirical methodologists of capitalism and free trade, a credo adopted like an orphan by the secular humanists, over population abounds right along with constant, and even increasing abject poverty. The greater masses that toil below are generally, or at least tentatively, allowing these professed humanist do-gooders, to lead.
Respect for the gimmie-gimmie-gimmie world declines, all trashing it as they do, while the secular humanists merrily placate the world better with hype, and, shiny object by pointless shiny object, given to the extent they can for a very reasonable discount price, all the while, causing far greater degradation of the world as a whole every poisonous trash pile, and, every dangerously gambling technological step along the haphazard way into the unplanned sludge of modernity.
Perhaps this is one of those occasions when the insignificance of the accuser should negate the magnitude of the accusation, for I am not particularly erudite, academic, or prone to geniusness. I am much more like the heir to the Oscar Myer hotdog fortune, as I am only someone who got lucky when I happened to discover the moral imperative of life. It is however, aimed true at humanity, in spite of the lackluster of the message bearer. So, regardless of my own undeservedness of such a great honor, here it is:
The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.
Simply put, no one has the right to steal, gamble or cumulatively degrade the future for all those who might follow us into this world. No one, not even the world's richest man and his wife have that right.
Unfortunately for secular humanists who think theirs is the true path, there are serious conflicts between the moral imperative, reality and the views of secular humanists, which are generally the views of Bill and Melinda Gates as expressed by the goals of their Foundation.
Aside from the fact that from Bill Gates' alma mater, Harvard, also graduated Ted Kaczynski, education is a dangerous thing too, which is what made Ted so dangerous, even as he lived more than modestly in his shack. We should all be eternally thankful Ted was not a bio-engineering student at Harvard for obvious, if wholly unaddressed and mostly unconsidered reasons.
Feeding populations seems to lead to unreasonable population growth, but this has long been known to be a problem. It is nonetheless still a problem.
Empirical science, the great feeder of these masses, as it piles its waste and dangerous inventions to the rafters is also the biggest gambling addict on the planet, continually wagering the future of mankind hoping to win scientific praise for being first, or at least for being the most thoroughly profitable, as was the case with MicroSoft Corporation. But, the current leader, the medical ventures empirical game funded by government and not uncoincidentally the Foundation are some of the worst of a myriad of humanity's future-gambling, empirical morality offenders on the planet.
I have addressed the problems with the empirical science of medicine already in an article entitled, A Challenge to Medical Ethics. I offer a brief summation of those arguments thus: Medical science and practice gambles the future of humanity with a wholesale disregard of the moral consequence of every such gamble.
The Foundation's efforts, fed and misguided by an immorally reckless secular humanism has grub-staked the medical end of humanity's future-gambling empiricists to the tune of billions of dollars with a feel-good-about-it reckless abandon inappropriately given towards the consequences of either medicine's success or failure in eradicating malaria, tuberculosis and either curing or creating vaccinating technologies for HIV-AIDS, three of the main goals of the Foundation. These goals are being striven for regardless of the intrinsic dangers inherent to the development of these medical technologies and their unintended byproducts.
The question Bill and Melinda raise is, Wouldn't it be wonderful?
Here, Bill and Melinda have not thought through the answer to that question, and they have instead left it a rhetorical statement of their mission.
If you step back though, take a deep breath, and consider what it is the Foundation is up to, it sounds so much like the prologue to an episode of Star Trek. It is easy to envision the resulting problems this well-groomed and tightly uniformed spaceship crew will encounter in this one-hour fantasy voyage.
First of all, malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS have their highest concentrations in South and South East Asia, Africa, and, Central and South America, what are generally the most overly populated and under developed regions of the world. These diseases exist there because there is a niche for them within these highly populated masses living as they will on the edge of possible sustenance for the size of their populations. If this pathogen niche is vacated by the efforts of the Foundation, it will no doubt be filled by other pathogens, because no vacant niche in nature exists for long without being filled.
The effect of rising populations caused by effecting even a partial remedy would accelerate the filling of this pathogenic void by something else. More likely however, as the history of medical triumphs shows, there isn't likely to be a cure created in any case, but instead a series of temporary fixes in an escalating war on these pathogens, temporary fixes that will produce within these pathogens a mutational counter offensive that will eventually make them all the more virulent and even more deadly. When attacked, pathogens generally mutate towards more deadliness in human populations in part because this deadliness is what eventually closes the niche-opportunity provided by a temporary absence of the mediated pathogen.
In the mean time, the Foundation will have spent tens of billions of dollars in the medical industry, an industry whose dangerously future-gambling empirical techniques and technologies are presently coming into view as a wholesale net negative inflicted upon the greater human condition. Medicine as it is practiced is not ethical on its own terms, let alone moral under the brightly illuminating light of the moral imperative of life.
Simply put, medicine as it is being practiced is far more likely to either kill off humanity or make life immensely more miserable in these regions, than it is likely to cure these diseases.
So you see, Bill and Melinda Gates' dream of tropical paradises where disease has been eradicated generally cannot be realized without tackling the much bigger issues of over population and the misuse of, and deification of technology, food production technologies that cause over population, but also especially medical technologies that chase pathogens into ever greater virulence.
Actually making life better for those who will come into the world after we all have left, Bill and Melinda included, is tougher than merely taking a secular humanist approach and throwing money into a wishing well where bright, and exceedingly anxious medical professionals are willing to take it knowing no matter how fast or how much money is thrown into the well, their efforts will end up an immoral net negative for humanity.
Every doctor and medical student knows, hospitals are incubative breeding grounds for some of the worst modern pathogens killing human populations today. Even the guy who washes the floors and linens knows this reality all too well to deny it.
One thing in life is sure, we're all leaving what we've made of the world to those who will follow us in the future, if they're able to follow us.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will doubtless fail in its mission because even with the great depth of knowledge and education guiding it, human nature is such, that those who are advising Bill and Melinda are "yes" men and women, each of whom have their own priorities, career ambitions and frivolous needs wholly unconnected to making the world a better place.
Most of humanity's problems today have been driven to their present extremes by the application of empirical methodologies, and the solution isn't to do more, the solution is to do less before nothing more can be done but surrender to the Scholastics' last ditch hope of an utterly dreamful vision of the apocalypse and a Second Coming that will surely be needed to bail us out of the mess being created.
And honestly, having been a life long supporter of Bill Gates and his meteoric rise to power, and his eventual coronation as the world's richest man, I am disappointed he is expending his money so poorly, misguided by history's pseudo-philosophers and ignorant of the more important lessons of history he apparently has not learned.
In this sense Bill and Melinda Gates' war they are waging is as futile a compromise of the future as is George W. Bush's war on terror. Both will only make matters much worse for the future of humanity. The lesson in both cases, is, if you don't understand the problem, and you refuse to try and understand the problem, no matter how good it makes you feel to try and address the problem, you're only going to end up making matters worse.
Such acquiescence to the selfish-now beliefs, as are those minds set by the ideas of secular humanists, must lead only to disasters for the future far greater than any malady we face today. That is our history. It will otherwise be the future. Until and unless we reach deep into our moral selves and see our obligations to the future as paramount in our morality, I know we all are a people that will never rise to civilization. Thus, we too are quietly destined never to be free, or to embrace any real freedoms, for only moral acts are made of the free will. We all would have it always moral, were we only to know how.
And, now we do know exactly how.
The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
--------------------------------------------------------
