Sam Harris is one of my intellectual beacons. His books and articles expand my awareness and sparkle with wit and spit. Sam received his BA in philosophy from my mother Church of Stanford and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA where he studied the molecular science of belief. I would love to have been there when he and Norman Cousins possibly met. Beautiful sparks would have arisen.
My reference now is his book The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values(1) written in 2000. This book is on my short list of important references. I use it to energize my effort to define aging and thereby propose the human potential. My whole professional goal is to deepen our individual and collective understanding of our human existence. Like Harris I seek to use science as a bastion for belief. One of my basic claims is that we live in a magic time when fate has been replaced by choice. This is Sam's claim as well. Fate and Faith have been banished to obscurity because of the scientific knowledge which is newly ours. I make this claim because of our new deep understanding of the machinery of life. I make this important claim because we now know how long we can live and importantly what the shaping determinants of this potential are. To me this is one of the most iridescent moments in human history.
I cite Carl Sagan's recital of this moment:
Had we are born 50 years earlier we would have wondered, pondered, speculated about these issues, but we could have done nothing about them. Had we been born 50 years later the answers would, I think, already have been in. Our children will have been taught the answers before most of them will have had an opportunity even to formulate the questions.
By far the most exciting, satisfying, and exhilarated time to be alive is a time in which we pass from ignorance to knowledge on these fundamental issues, the age where we begin in wonder and end in understanding.
In all of the four billion year history of life on our planet, in all of the 4 million year history of the human family there is only one generation privileged to live through that unique transitional moment. That generation is ours. (2)
I am very bushy tailed about the immense new keys to wisdom that just now generated. Our grandparents, even our parents did not know how long we could live nor the shaping elements thereof. Now we do. Geriatric medicine has provided us with one of the central answers to the Oracle's commandment to "know ourselves". We now know ourselves. This equips us with grand responsibility. We have a new magic franchise.
I hope that Sam is right in his prediction that science will lead to moral grounding. If we all could agree on the reach of this new knowledge the world will pretty quickly become a better place, which comes close to being the universal dream.
I hope that the Moral Imperative is, for the first time, within reach.
References.
1)Harris S. Moral Imperative; How Science can Determine Human Values 2000 Simon and Schuster, NY.
2) Sagan C. Broca's Brain Reflections on the Romance of Science 1996 Mass Market Paperback, NY.