1. If you think you’re fat, you probably are. Don’t ask us.
2. Learn to work the toilet seat: if it’s up put it down.
3. Don’t cut your hair. Ever.
4. Birthdays, Valentines, and Anniversaries are not quests to see
   if he can find the perfect present, again!
5. If you ask a question you don’t want an answer to, expect an
   answer you don’t want to hear.
6. Sometimes, he’s not thinking about you. Live with it.
7. Don’t ask him what he’s thinking about unless you are prepared
   to discuss such topics as the shotgun formation and monster trucks.
8. Get rid of your cat. And no, it’s not different, it’s just like
   every other cat.
9. Dogs are better than ANY cats. Period.
10. Sunday = Sports. It’s like the full moon or the changing of the
    tides. Let it be.
11. Shopping is not sport.
12. Anything you wear is fine. Really.
13. You have enough clothes.
14. You have too many shoes.
15. Crying is blackmail. Use it if you must, but don’t expect us to
    like it.
16. Your brother is an idiot, your ex-boyfriend is an idiot and
    your Dad probably is too.
17. Ask for what you want. Subtle hints don’t work.
18. No, he doesn’t know what day it is. He never will. Mark
    anniversaries on a calendar.
19. Yes, pissing standing up is more difficult than peeing from
    point blank range. We’re bound to miss sometimes.
20. Most guys own two to three pairs of shoes-what makes you think
    we’d be any good at choosing which pair, out of thirty, would look good
    with your dress?
21. Yes and No are perfectly acceptable answers.
22. A headache that lasts for 17 months is a problem. See a doctor.
23. Your Mom DOESN’T have to be our best friend.
24. Foreign films are best left to foreigners.
25. Check your own oil.
26. Don’t give us 50 rules when 25 will do.
28. It is neither in your best interest nor ours to take the quiz
    together.
29. Anything we said 6 or 8 months ago is inadmissible in an
    argument. All comments become null and void after 7 days.
31. If something we said can be interpreted two ways, and one of
    the ways makes you sad and angry, we meant the other one.
32. Let us ogle. If we don’t look at other women, how can we know
    what we’re missing by being with you.
34. You can either ask us to do something OR tell us how you want
    it done – not both.
35. Whenever possible, please say whatever you have to say during
    commercials.
36. Christopher Columbus didn’t need directions, and neither do we.
38. Consider Golf a mini-vacation from you. We need it, just like
    you do.

• Damn, it’s great to be a man
• Your last name stays put
• The garage is all yours
• Wedding plans take care of themselves
• Chocolate is just another snack
• You can wear a white t-shirt to a water park
• Car mechanics tell you the truth
• You don’t give a crap if nobody notices your new haircut
• The world is your urinal
• You never have to drive to another gas station because this one’s just too icky
• Same work – more pay
• Wrinkles add character
• Wedding dress $5000: Tux rental $100
• People never stare at your chest when you’re talking to them
• The occasional well-rendered belch is practically expected
• New shoes don’t cut, blister or mangle your feet
• One mood – all the time
• Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds
• A two week vacation requires only one suitcase
• You can open all your own jars
• Dry cleaners and hair stylists don’t rob you blind
• You can kill your own food
• You get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness
• Your underwear is $8.95 for a three-pack
• If you are 34 and single, nobody notices
• Everything on your face stays its original color
• You can quietly enjoy a car ride from the passenger’s seat
• Three pairs of shoes are more than enough
• You don’t have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt
• You are unable to see the wrinkles in your clothes
• The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe decades
• You don’t have to shave below your neck
• Your belly hides your big hips
• One wallet, one pair of shoes, one color all seasons
• You can do your nails with a pocketknife
• You have freedom of choice concerning growing a mustache
• You can do Christmas shopping for 25 relatives December 24th, in 45 minutes
• it’s Great to be a Man!!!

1. Even though a guy has 50% more brute strength than a girl, she is able to withstand higher temperatures than he can.

    

2. A girl has a larger stomach, kidneys, liver, and appendix than a guy, but she has smaller lungs, thus giving her less breathing capacity than a guy. 
3. The right hemisphere of guys’ brains are better developed, therefore they are more visual, mathematic, exploring, more sex oriented, and commit most violent crime. Girls, though, have the left hemisphere more developed and are therefore more verbal, communicative, sensitive, and more prone to phobias and depression. 
4. Guys use restrooms solely for biological reasons — to drain their bladder. Girls, on the other hand, use restrooms as social lounges. Guys will never speak a word or make eye contact with others they don’t know there. But girls who’ve never even met will, by the time they’re finished, leave laughing out loud together like old friends. 
5. When the restaurant check comes, each of the guys will throw big bills out on the table to supposedly pay for the tab. When the check comes for the girls, each will get out her calculator to verify the total and figure her down-to-the-penny part. 
6. All week, a girl will thoughtfully make an extensive list of things to purchase at the store and when she arrives, she walks directly from item to item, comparing prices and coupons. When the frig is empty and starting to grow things, a guy will just show up at the closest store and start cruising up and down every aisle, throwing in his basket anything that looks appealing. Even though his cart is jam-packed, he will try to butt in the 10 items-or-less checkout line. 
7. A guy has five items in his bathroom — a razor, shaving cream, a bar of soap, a toothbrush, and towel from Holiday Inn. The average number of items in a typical girl’s bathroom is reported to be as high as 437, the majority of which a guy couldn’t even tell what they are or used for. 
8. When a girl says she will be ready in five minutes, she’s using the same meaning of time as when a guy says the football game has just five minutes left to play. Neither the guy nor the girl is counting time-outs, commercials, or replays! 
9. A girl believes that visitors will be impressed by a clean house. A guy believes the visitors will be impressed by his large stereo. 
10. Guys don’t decorate their handwriting, they just chicken-scratch. Girls will pull out their scented, color coordinated stationary and use ridiculously large circles, hearts, and loops to finish off their “i’s”, “p’s”, and “g’s.” It is a real hassle to read a letter from a girl. Even when she is dumping a guy, she’ll finish it off with a smiley face at the end! 
11. If a girl is out driving and she finds herself in unfamiliar surroundings, she will stop at a gas station and ask for directions. Guys, of course, consider this to be a sign of weakness. A guy will never stop and ask for directions. They will drive in a circle for hours, all the while saying things like, “Looks like I’ve found a new way to get there,” and, “I know I’m in the neighborhood. I recognize that Ace hardware store.” 
12. With the exception of female bodybuilders who call each other names like “Ultimate Pecs” and “Big Turk,” women disdain the use of nicknames. If Amber, Suzanne, Katherine, and Natalie get together for lunch, they will call each other Amber, Suzanne, Katherine, and Natalie. But if Mike, Dave, Rob, and Aron go out on the town, they will affectionately refer to each other as Bullet-Head, Godzilla, Peanut-Brain, and Yard-Dart. 
13. A girl worries about the future until she gets a husband, while a guy never worries about the future until he gets a wife. 
14. A girl marries a guy expecting him to change, but he usually doesn’t. A guy marries a girl thinking she will always be the same — and, of course, she isn’t. 
15. Girls love cats. Guys say they love cats, but when girls aren’t looking, they kick cats.

————————————————————

J. Christian Gillin, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, conducts research on sleep, chronobiology and mood disorders. He supplies the following answer.

The easy experimental answer to this question is 264 hours (about 11 days). In 1965, Randy Gardner, a 17-year-old high school student, set this apparent world-record for a science fair. Several other normal research subjects have remained awake for eight to 10 days in carefully monitored experiments. None of these individuals experienced serious medical, neurological, physiological or psychiatric problems. On the other hand, all of them showed progressive and significant deficits in concentration, motivation, perception and other higher mental processes as the duration of sleep deprivation increased. Nevertheless, all experimental subjects recovered to relative normality within one or two nights of recovery sleep. Other anecdotal reports describe soldiers staying awake for four days in battle, or unmedicated patients with mania going without sleep for three to four days.

The more difficult answer to this question revolves around the definition of “awake.” As mentioned above, prolonged sleep deprivation in normal subjects induces altered states of consciousness (often described as “microsleep”), numerous brief episodes of overwhelming sleep, and loss of cognitive and motor functions. We all know about the dangerous, drowsy driver, and we have heard about sleep-deprived British pilots who crashed their planes (having fallen asleep) while flying home from the war zone during World War II. Randy Gardner was “awake” but basically cognitively dysfunctional at the end of his ordeal.

In the case of rats, however, continuous sleep deprivation for about two weeks or more inevitably caused death in experiments conducted in Allan Rechtschaffen¿s sleep laboratory at the University of Chicago. Two animals lived on a rotating disc over a pool of water, separated by a fixed wall. Brainwaves were recorded continuously into a computer program that almost instantaneously recognized the onset of sleep. When the experimental rat fell asleep, the disc was rotated to keep it awake by bumping it against the wall and threatening to push the animal into the water. Control rats could sleep when the experimental rat was awake but were moved equally whenever the experimental rat started to sleep. The cause of death was not proven but was associated with whole body hypermetabolism.

In certain rare human medical disorders, the question of how long people can remain awake raises other surprising answers, and more questions. Morvan¿s fibrillary chorea or Morvan¿s syndrome is characterized by muscle twitching, pain, excessive sweating, weight loss, periodic hallucinations, and severe loss of sleep (agrypnia). Michel Jouvet and his colleagues in Lyon, France, studied a 27-year-old man with this disorder and found he had virtually no sleep over a period of several months. During that time he did not feel sleepy or tired and did not show any disorders of mood, memory, or anxiety. Nevertheless, nearly every night between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m., he experienced a 20 to 60-minute period of auditory, visual, olfactory, and somesthetic (sense of touch) hallucinations, as well as pain and vasoconstriction in his fingers and toes. In recent investigations, Morvan¿s Syndrome has been attributed to serum antibodies directed against specific potassium (K⁺) channels in cell and nerve membranes.

Another rare disorder, Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI), is an autosomal dominate disease that is invariably fatal after about six to 30 months without sleep. FFI is probably misnamed because death results from multiple organ failure rather than sleep deprivation. The pathological processes include degeneration of the thalamus and other brain areas, over-activity of the sympathetic nervous system, hypertension, fever, tremors, stupor, weight loss, and disruption of the body’s endocrine systems. FFI belongs to a class of infectious prion diseases that include Mad Cow Disease.

To return to the original question, “How long can humans stay awake?” the ultimate answer remains unclear. Despite the rat studies in Chicago, I am unaware of any reports that sleep deprivation per se has killed any human (excluding accidents and so forth). Indeed, the U.S. Department of Defense has offered research funding for the goal of sustaining a fully awake, fully functional “24/7″ soldier, sailor, or airman. Future warriors will face intense, around-the-clock fighting for weeks at a time. Will bioengineering eventually produce genetically-cloned soldiers and citizens with a variant of Morvan¿s syndrome who need no sleep but remain effective and happy? I hope not. A good night¿s sleep is one of life¿s blessings. As Coleridge wrote years ago, “Oh sleep! It is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole,” and Wilse Webb, a prominent sleep researcher, more recently called sleep the gentle tyrant: It can be delayed but not defeated.

This law doesn’t apply to most things. If you say that a stone or a tree ought to be a certain way, this is at best a manner of speaking. It’s really shorthand for something like: it would be convenient for me (or for people in general) if this tree were a certain size or this rock were a certain shape. But from the pont of view of the (lower-case) laws of nature, a “bad” tree and a “good” tree follow the laws equally.

Here we could quibble with Lewis. As the word “nature” (or its Greek or Latin equivalents) was used during much of the history of science and philosophy, the nature of a tree, for example, involved what was typical for a tree. Thus, certain freakish kinds of growth would count as unnatural. But while this is both true and broadly relevant to Lewis’s remarks, there is no point in making a fuss about it because when it comes to science as we now think of it, Lewis is quite right. A tree that acts untypically for a tree is still, we assume, acting under broader laws of nature that would explain its departure from the norm.

Lewis makes this point by saying that what we usually call laws of nature are not “laws” at all. What he means is that a law of nature is simply a description of what does happen. It is not a prescription about what should happen. A departure from a “law of nature” would normally be taken as evidence for revising the law – for saying that we hadn’t really given the right general description of the way the world works. But the Law of Decent Behavior (to pick one of Lewis’s descriptions) isn’t like that at all. Moral laws don’t describe what actually happens. As Lewis puts it,

You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave.) In the rest of the universe, there need not be anything but the facts. (my emphasis)

Lewis points out that this is very strange, and the strangeness of it might lead us to try to explain it away. He considers two possible ways of eliminating the strangeness.

The first is to say that moral judgments about people are ultimately no different from judgments about the goodness or badness of stones: they are judgments about what is or is not convenient for the person making the judgment. But Lewis points out that this is just wrong. I might judge two equally inonvenient situations as very different morally. In fact, if you trip me by sheer accident, I make a very different judgment than if you try but fail to trip me deliberately. In the first case, I won’t say that what happened was morally bad, however incovenient it might have been. In the second case, I will judge what you did to be morally wrong even though it didn’t cause me any real inconvenience at all.

The alternative “natural” explanation that Lewis considers is that morality is not a matter of what is good for me as an individual. Rather, it is a matter of what is good for society. But Lewis points out that if you tell someone they ought to behave decently because it is good for society, the person could well ask:

Why should I care about what’s good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?

and to answer “you ought to do what’s good for society because you ought to behave decently” is to land us right back where we started.

Now it might be pointed out that Lewis himself has given a hint of a less blatantly circular suggestion on this very point. He writes, on behalf of his opponent:

Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have real safety or happiness except in a society where one plays fair.

To argue this way would be to say that we can persuade the doubter to behave decently not because it is in his immediate interest, but because it is on his long-term interest. The reason would be equally selfish. It would simply be more sophisticated. But Lewis could surely reply that sometimes doing what is right is not even in my long-term selfish interest. After all, people sometimes literally give their lives in the service of goodness. And so Lewis’s point about the circularity of appeals to society’s good remains. Supose we have someone who cares only about his own interests, short and long-term. And suppose he sees that a certain case of “decent” behavior is neither in his short-term nor his long-term interest. Telling him he ought to behave well because it will benefit society is a bit like saying that one plays football in order to score goals, to use Lewis’s example. Benefiting society is part of behaving decently, just as scoring goals is part of playing football. This sort of reason will work only for someone who is already in the game.

What is the upshot of all this? It is that

The Moral Law… is not simply a fact about human nature, in the way that the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave.

Nonetheless, we find ourselves — most of us, anyway — unable to deny that there are laws of decent behavior; the Law of Morality is “really there.” And so, Lewis says,

It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality: …there is… a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.

This is the crucial premise for all that follows: there is a sort of reality that is not exhausted by the ordinary facts. Before we go on, then, we might want to ask if the case for this alternate sort of reality is quite as strong as Lewis believes it to be. The hard-bitten naturalist might say “no.” The observable facts are that we find ourselves with conflicting impulses. We feel an impulse to satisfy our own selfish needs and we also feel an impulse or motivation to what Lewis calls “decent behavior.” Those are the facts. Do they really call for a non-natural explanation?

Now the mere fact of conflicting impulses is not in need of any special, explanation at all. After all, our desires are complex. Sometimes they clash. I might want to go out dancing. And I might also want to stay home and watch a movie. Both impluses are real, and they conflict. But what of it? Or to return to a sort of case already discussed, I might find a conflict betwen my immediate impulse to take a nap and my longer-term desire not to have to finish up all my work in a hurry at the last minute. Once again, conflicting desires. But once again, there is no mystery calling for anything that goes beyond the realm of the natural.

Lewis would point out that all these examples involve purely selfish desires. His sorts of cases point to something different: a felt or perceived to go beyond our merely selfish desires. But the naturalist will point out that we find forms of altruistic behvior in the animal kingdom. Indeed, evolutionary blologists have given them plenty of attention over the last few decades. And what they have pointed out is that in many cases an evolutionary explanation seems possible. Evolutionary fitness is a matter of having characteristics that tend to get your genes passed on to the next generation. Doing things that benefit your children or even your nieces and nephews or even members of your group can sometimes have this effect indirectly. And it wouldn’t be too surprising if a mechanism that evolved in small, close-knit groups would tend to lead to more generally “decent” behavior as society grew larger and more complicated.

The trouble with this, Lewis might reply, is that even if it has a large element of truth to it, it doesn’t fully explain morality. My sense that I have a moral obligation to people who will not be able to benefit me is not just an instinctive impulse. It is a considered judgment. Even though evolution might give me a tendency to think this way, it has clearly also given me a tendency to look out for my own purely selfish good. My judgement that decent behavior matters even when it won’t do me any special good can’t be accounted for by an evolutionary just-so story.

As armchair scientists, we are in no position to resolve this conflict by ourselves. Lewis’s point that the moral law is not merely natural is plausible enough that we might as well grant it and see what he does with it. And what he does is to use it to argue in favor of one broad “world-view” and against another.

As Lewis sees it, there are two broad views that people have held about the universe. One is what he calls materialism. This is the view that ultimately, all there is is matter obeying the laws of nature. The fact that we are here at all is really just a sort of fluke outcome of matter blindly doing what matter does. The other view, which he calls the religious view, is that what lies behind nature is much more like a mind than like anything else.

How can the conflict between these two views be resolved? Lewis insists that it can’t be a matter of doing science. Science deals with what is — with what is actual. Scientific experiments are descriptions of actual events and particular places and times. Scientific laws are generalizatins about the actual behavior of things. It is no insult to science to say that it can’t do what it wan’s intended to do. And what it can’t do is tell us if there is anything behind the actual appearances and behaviors of things.

Once again, the naturalist is likely to protest. And there are at least two lines of protest open here. One is that science very often does try to tell us about what is behind the ordinary appearances. No one has ever seen an electron. But science infers the existence of electrons from the the things we can see — from the bits of behavior of matter that we can actually observe. The second point is that the “laws of nature” aren’t simply descriptions of how things actually behave; Lewis is wrong about that. At best, laws of nature tell us how things behave “other things being equal” — i.e., in the absence of interfering forces. In the laboratory we can sometimes come close to isolating just the factors that enter into the law itself, but we never fully succeed, and so for most any interesting laws of nature, we never simply see them displayed. Laws of nature are descriptions of idealized cases. But even though they go beyond the actual, we aren’t thereby lead to abandon what Lewis calls materialism. (We may be for other reasons, but not for this reason.) And it might be argued that if science can tell us about the otherwise invisible and ideal in general, it isn’t obvious why science can’t resolve the question of whether there is a God.

In truth, science is unlikely ever to resolve the question. All the same, it is hard to see why, given the sorts of arguments often presented for belief in God, science should be irrelevant. Leaving aside the ontological argument, typical arguments for God’s existence have a clear resemblance to scientific arguments: they begin with statements about what we find in the world and end with a proposed “best explanation” of these facts.

Still, Lewis has a couple of relies that he can make. One is this:

Supposing science ever became complete enough so thag it knew every single thing in teh whole universe. Is it not plain that the questiuons, “Why is there a universe?” “Why does it go on as it does?” “Has it any meaning?” would remain just as they were?

In other words, there are questions about the universe “all told” that seem by their very nature beyond the scope of science. And Lewis even tells us, in effect, why this is so.

We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would not be one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it.

Lewis’s point is more far-reaching than it may appear to be. Consider electrons. We can’t observe them. but they are, nonetheless, facts of the universe. They don’t lie “behind” the universe; they are part of it. What Lewis is pointing out is that religion deals with “ultimate questions,” to borrow a phrase from the theologian Paul Tillich. No mere fact about the universe, no matter how exotic or exalted, would count as answering an ultimate question.

But then, what hope is there that we can get any purchase at all on such questions?

Lewis notes that

Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing ou language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge form us, would never get the slightest idea that we have this moral law.

But we aren’t restricted to this “objective” or “external” perspective. In the case of oursleves, and other humans, we have an insider’s view. And this is the key, according to Lewis. If there is a “controlling power outside the universe,

it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe… The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way.

The argument, then, comes down to this: we find ourselves, as it were, being commanded or instructed to act in a certain way. The best explanation for this is a mind — or something like a mind — behind the universe,

becuase after all, the only other things we know is matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions

Now in fact, this isn’t true at all. I’m a bit of matter, after all. And I’ve been known to give instructions from time to time. But then, I’m matter organized in the sort of way that gives rise to minds.

We could speculate about whether the matter of the universe entire is organized into some sort of cosmic mind. Some people find this idea attractive but in this context I think it would distract us from the more important point. The reason I feel bound by the moral law is not because I have the sense that some being is commanding me. And suppose there were. The whole point about morality is that it never simply reduces to the facts, even facts as extraordinary as the commands of a comic Mind. If a cosmic Mind commanded me to kill the first-born children in all of the families in my neighborhood, it would be my moral duty to disobey the command. The nature of morality is such that it always makes sense to ask whether a command is morally acceptable, no matter who issues the command. And this is directly relevant to the sort of argument that Lewis is offering. Lewis started out with the idea that there is more to morality that any mere fact. And he is right. But that includes facts about the commands of a cosmic Mind. So the sort of explanation Lewis offers for our moral sense is the wrong sort. If it were correct, then morality would, after all, have a factual explanation. The explanation would be extraordinay in one sense, but in another sense it would rob morality of its moral quality.

This is related to a point that we discussed in class. The moral law, assuming there is one, is independent even of the will of God. And so God can hardly be invoked as an explanation for morality and the moral sense.

So where does this leave Lewis’s argument? Is it simply destroyed?

That’s a bit hard to say. Lewis’s starting point was that there is more to reality than, as it were, “factual” reality. And although the point is not beyond debate, the existence of the moral law does seem to provide a reason for believing that reality is larger than material reality. Indeed, Lewis hints at another reason for believing the same thing, though he doesn’t really seem aware of the nature of the hint. It is in the passage in which he talks about someone who studies Man from the outside, with no grasp of our language. The point is that someone who didn’t know our language would miss much, if not all of the meaning in our behavior. And insofar as they attributed any meaning to it at all, it would be because they were familiar with meaningfulness “from the inside” — from their own standpoint. But the fact of meaning in the universe is a fact that is not easy to understand from a purely materialist point of view.

I say “not easy” because I don’t think we are in a position to say “impossible.” But somehow we manage to mean and somehow, thereby, things we do have meaning. This is at least as puzzling as the fact of morality. And notice that explaining it by referene to the meanings in a cosmic mind would only push the mystery back one step further, just as explaining morality by the dictates of a cosmic Mind would only push that mystery back one step further. But this puts us on the threshhold of something like a religious Mystery: anything that could straightforwardly explain such puzzling facts would automatially be disqualified from having real religious interest. Whatever God might be, it seems, God is not the Great Cosmic Explainer. Lewis seems to get halfway to grasping this point, but he nonetheless gets only halfway.

© Copyright Allen Stairs, 1998. All rights reserved.

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’ – ‘That’s my seat, I was there first’ – ‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’ – ‘Why should you shove in first?’ – ‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’ – ‘Come on, you promised.’ People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the ‘laws of nature’ we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong ‘the Law of Nature’, they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law – with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.

We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised. If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to – whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties don’t matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong – in other words, if there is no Law of Nature – what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money – the one you have almost forgotten – came when you were very hard-up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done – well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it – and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently. The truth is, we believe in decency so much – we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so – that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.