Richard Powers in "The Best Ideas of the Millenium" concluded that:

"The greatest idea of the last 1,000 years has

granted us ascendance over matter by asking

not how things ought to be but how things

are. We have given ourselves to finding out

not what we should do with the world, but

what we can make the world do. The greatest

idea of the next thousand years must make up

the difference, returning subtlety and richness

and morals and lightness of spirit to the long

human experiment, if any part of it is to

survive."

It is true that one of the two best ideas of the last millennium has done as he said. As Powers noted in the article it has only been in the last three hundred years, indeed, mainly in the last tenth of our millennium that our empirical experimentation has borne full fruit. That idea has been around for most of the millennium, slowly festering and fostering a revolution that only now is reaching a climax in our time.

But there has been a collateral idea that slowly grew in the recesses of the last three centuries of the millennium, which is only now, on the doorstep of the new millennium, reaching a climax that will fulfill the second need to which Richard Powers referred: "...finding out what we should do with the world. .... ..., returning subtlety and richness and morals and lightness of spirit to the long human experiment,...."

In the last millennium we made the methodological distinction between discovering what is and what ought, and we followed the newly adopted method of discovering what is to its experimental conclusions, and have come to the point of being able to make the world largely as we want it to be. We could likewise make it largely as we ought to want it to be and ought to make it to be-if we could reach the methodological conclusions that were adequate to that task. And such ideas have been evolving to ever greater clarity and practicality throughout our millennium.

But, as Billie Joel sang: "We we didn't start the fire! It was always burning from when time began." So we will briefly glimpse back, mainly through the last three centuries, to find the roots of the arguments that are coming home to roost, upon which we can rest our renewed quest. This quasi-historical illustration of the rise of moral consciousness is not an attempt to argue for the historical truth of an historical exegesis. To avoid getting distracted by historical and scholarly concerns (I leave such tasks to others), it suffices for my purposes for you to understand that I am recounting ideas which I derived from the sources alluded to. That is preferred to having people accuse me of having stolen ideas to appear to be creating an original argument instead of a mere recounting of a growing idea that has already in our own millennia supplied a secular justification for moral and political obligation, albeit one constantly ignored in our popular culture and media..

In the last millennium before the "Christian" era, Plato has presented Socrates as having discovered two essential ideas that would have led to a vastly different world had they not been ignored and forgotten:

First, Socrates suggests in the Euthyphro the epistemological nightmare of infinite regression we are caught in if we make the claim that what is of value in behavior is of value because it is the will of God. In short, you couldn't know what was of value because you could never know what was the God whose commands could do a Captain Piccard and say: "Make it so!" The reason is that the distinguishing characteristic of God, as opposed to an omniscient and omnipotent alternative, is that God is good, benevolent, or exhibits the greatest value/s. Since we would have to know what was of value before we could recognize a God to order it, we couldn't know what was the will of God, and hence, the good, the valuable, etc. unless we first knew that. However, in that case there would be no need for God to order it. So whatever is good, if we know it, can not be said to be good because it is the will of god (although it may be the will of God because it is good or vice versa-although vice may not have anything to do with it).

Such arguments against traditional piety earned Socrates his barbaric society's drink of highest regard and reward, hemlock. For they recognized that such thought would destroy traditional religion supporting and supported by the state. In the ensuing millennium, the Christian church recognized the danger to piety and control of the masses in such free thought, and suppressed such enlightened thought throughout the dark ages, books burnt or rotting, locked in underground vaults in the Vatican, only retrieved from other suppression by Moslem scholars.

Second, Socrates was shown in the Republic to show the nonsense of the claim that might makes right. Force does not establish values. Things are not good because they are the will of the most powerful any more than they are because they are the will of the most powerful "god" (whether or not "He" happened to be good). Obviously, Aristotle did not get Alexander to buy Socrates' arguments because Alexander pursued the course of might makes right to its final tragedy in that millennium. Nor did the rulers of Rome listen to the handwriting on the parchments within the walls of Alexandria's and Rome's libraries.

Indeed, each of the powers that raised up to rule the world during Plato's and Caesar's millennia conveniently failed to recognize the fact that might can not make right any more than the word of God can set moral values. For, short of first knowing what is good, we can never what is god, and short of knowing what is good, we would have no grounds for recognizing that it is not might that makes right. But we know what is good. What we need to do is to complete the exegesis of how we know that.

IT was these two ideas, that God is the author of the good, and, alternatively, that might makes right, that came front and center during the last half of our millennia and it was the belated disillusionment with each of them that finally gave birth to the recognition of the true nature of human values that was born in the turmoil leading to the American Revolution. That was a recognition that was woven into the fabric of American state constitutions and, finally, became the source of American political values in our Constitutional revolution, as it was becoming recognized to be the source of secular morality in our increasingly secular society.

Just how the principle of morality and morally justified government evolved is much less important than the final recognition that underlying all value and rights, moral and political, is a mythical social compact that expresses the logical state of Law in which all men are participants, will we or nil we, by virtue of our rational and animal human nature that logically creates morality on the principle of equality and the nature of the rational human animal with its natural and acculturated motives for life, liberty and happiness. But the realization of this source of morality which was recognized as the source of our social contracts such as the Constitution, which attempt to emulate that moral law, was based on ideas developing long before even Hobbes, who is generally credited with taking the first major step.

The Magna Carta contract between the noblemen and the king from early in the thirteenth century suggested the idea that a contract which legitimatizes government. This was to be to posterity more important than any of the specific agreements, even the principle of no taxation without representation used in our Revolution, there established. It was the historical reality of a contract as the basis of government which suggested the myth of the social contract as the source of political rights later for men like Hobbes and Locke, which prepared the way for the expression of the mythical contract to stand for the moral state of law logically requiring our membership whether we agree or not to its obligations. Hobbes used the conception of a mythical social contract as the basis for a philosophy of law and government. This was a primary step toward the myth of the social compact underlying morality and government accepted by our forefathers.

Hobbes' recognized that the principle that might makes "right" (repudiated so effectively in the Republic) underlies the state of nature wherein it is impossible for people to achieve their goals given them by their natures, our search for life, liberty and happiness. As long as there were an ongoing struggle for might to give some ruling element or other advantages, there would always be reason for new combinations and machinations of the out of power and those on the fringes of power whereby they could constantly destroy the chance for the fulfillment of the natural goals of all. Even the most powerful must be insecure in the world where might makes right. It leads to lives of even the most powerful that are mean, nasty and short, or words to that effect.

Such a self-defeating principle of behavior is irrational. Given man's rationality and his natural motives to seek life, liberty and happiness, he is logically required by his nature to repudiate that principle and seek an alternative that will allow for the maximal attainment of those goals. Reason dictates that we take steps to stop the warfare of the state of nature: While reason requires that we deny the principle underlying the warfare of the state of nature (might makes right), Hobbes tried a half-way measure. Hobbes thought that the alternative of an absolute ruler whose subjects have no moral right to rebel is preferable to the state of nature. This required the implicit appeal to the will of god to justify the powers that be.

So Hobbes sought to justify the traditional monarchy with implicit traditional theistic conceptions. Thus the accepted both discredited bases for moral and political order. Such a system imbues a ruler with sufficient power and his subjects with sufficient obligation that for the sake of a vestige of life, liberty and happiness for at least the ruler, all further striving for power in the state of nature is kept under an iron heel. Once the ruler of this system of government had been agreed to by a social contract that expresses the will of god that the power that exists is justified, it would not be subject to change by force. It was as if almost any alternative to the self-destructive warfare of the state nature was rationally required in people seeking life, liberty and happiness by their natures, even when there was little hope that a government would facilitate those ends, and it required an appeal to the will of god to justify it..

However, if one contract was better than the state of nature, various other contracts might be even more preferable. Locke "suggested" a form of social contract to justify a rebellion that would subject the crown to the will of the people, much as the corporations then planting the colonies were founded on contracts or compacts. Just as the terms of such contracts could be negotiated and varied with the will of the stockholders and the company, he saw all possible governments in terms of the myth of the social contract or compact that operates on established principles acceptable to the members of the company.

So when the British government moved to tax and rule the colonies without their participation which had traditionally been involved, all the elements were in place for a final insight that may have come from David Hume's latter writings on the relations of ideas such as exist in logic and mathematics. Even without the Euthyphro it would have been clear to our forefathers that God could not be the author of all value including government, for by the theory of the divine right of kings, including the king who was the head of their church on earth, if God's will were the source of moral and political legitimacy, they were on the wrong side of His Will by all current and past standards. They appeared to seek to return to the state of nature, to employ power against the settled order, to embrace the principle of might makes right unless they could find some third alternative to principles of divine right and might makes right. The obvious choice was to follow and modify Locke a little and go back to where Hobbes had taken a wrong turn.

If might does not make right, perhaps the opposite does. The opposite of favoritism for power is equality for all. So by definition, they realized that if Might does not Makes Right (~MMR) then Equality Makes Right (EMR). Thus, EMR is necessary, for equality is merely the state in which no man nor his will is preferred because of his power. MMR implied the state of nature. EMR (Equality) will provide the state of moral law. The state of nature implies the necessity of misery for man. The state of moral law implies the opposite. Instead of constant warfare, if all men were equal, society would exist in peace and harmony in which all men have an equal chance to successfully achieve their goals of life, liberty and happiness. Other men would not have a be unfairly taking advantage of their fellow man-if they all lived according to the standard.

These obviously are notdescriptions of what must happen in reality. Given free will to refuse reason, and the occasional aberrant monster that does not breed according to his rational kind, man may, indeed, does, in fact reject the requirements of his rational and animal natures. The logical requirements of what man would have to do for the world to be a place of equality where men could achieve their natural goals of L,L&H (implied by man's reason applied to his natural and acculturated motivations) exist whether or not men choose to live in accord with their own nature. They form the moral necessity for our natures. They do not assure the moral conformity of our actions. Since we are all rational beings by conception, and we all have the motives to achieve those goals in reality, and there is no way to achieve those under the state of nature or any state based on the principle of might makes right, or any alternative that justifies rule by power, therefore it is only reasonable and hence necessary for a reasonable animal, that we agree to such a logically preferable arrangement as the state of equality!

Our forefathers expressed this vision in terms of a mythical social compact. The colonists had no actual historical social contract or compact founded on the principle of equality. They had to settle for expressing this logical state in terms of a mythical state of a social contract that did not exist in the real world. Many people have misunderstood our forefathers' conception of our social compact. They criticize our forefathers for having imagined something that never existed historically. That mythical state merely expressed the logical state that justifies morality, law and order. They never thought it had existed historically except as it existed eternally, as logically implied..

This state of moral and social law had always existed as a logical requirement, and the moral obligations involved therein were as real as logical implications from the time of the first rational man with human motivations for life, liberty, and happiness entered a world where those could not be achieved as long as might made right. Rather, they were asserting that the state of law existed logically from the nature of man as a rational animal which seeks LL&H and knows that that is not achievable by any form of morals or government not based on equality.

So, being rational animals, we are logically required by the conception of our natures as rational to agree to a system of morals and government based on the equality of all rational beings whether we will so or not. What we ought to do, we ought to do regardless of whether we do it or not, just as we ought to conclude that 2 + 2 =s 4 when we figure out our payments whether or not we will to. We do not go from what is in reality to what ought in fact, but from what is in conception to what ought to be in reality.

Our forefathers seem to have recognized that this is what is required of us by a logical implication from our natures as both rational and as having animal and acculturated motives to seek LL&H, although they also seem to have recognized that the equal opportunity for happiness for each individual is conditional on individual characteristics and situations. True, human beings have a will which they can set against their reason, or which by natural malfunction may be likewise aberrant. However, and this is the key, although we can go against our true natures, our true natures, nonetheless, are logically bound to imply that we should engage in rational behavior. This normative sense of what should be, of what we should do, or have the right to do, has the sense of logical necessity implied by the conception of man as a rational, acculturated animal.

True, we find that this underlying compact implied by human nature is not new in human history, but has existed as a logical implication of human nature throughout the existence of human beings. It has remained, unconsciously, a bedrock convention underlying our moral conceptions that have become encoded in our moral language, which we learn as moral conceptions with our mother's milk, but which also give us moral intuition based on our linguistic intuition of the proper application of terms such as fairness and good and responsibility and obligation.

It is the logical relations of ideas about what we are and must seek to the extent we fulfill our natures, that give our moral conceptions their normative nature. As my mother used to tell me when I asked why I should do what I was told: "Act like a human being." A human being would always act fairly for that is treating people equally with concern for their individual characteristics. Anything less is uncivilized. Sure, it is within our power to act like something less. But would anyone want to (if they really understood the implications).

Since it was abundantly clear that there was no historical social contract with which our forefathers could have been tempted to associate with this underlying social compact, they could not have conceived of anyone criticizing them for making historical claims. They made logical claims wrapped in a mythical expression. They knew clearly that our people had never come together to form such a compact. However, eventually, some of them were to seek to embody their principles of morality and political obligations based on equality that they understood to form the social compact that underlay their Declaration of Independence, into a true social contract that emulates such principles.

For nearly a decade during and after the Revolution, our people created a wide variety of state constitutions that more or less emulated that underlying compact that justified their morals and their laws. Eventually, many of them agreed to emulate, for a national government, the underlying social compact that gives us our moral conceptions and ideas of moral and political right and wrong. Some had never understood.Still others, during those ten years, some colonists had ignored and forgotten the fact that the moral conceptions that underlay our Declaration were based on the social compact implied by the equality and natures of all members. So when it came time to create the Constitution, many compromises had to be made. Equality was limited to less than half of the citizens. However, the vestiges of the original conceptions remained.

During the ensuing two centuries, the loss of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason to a world where our best minds were caught up in the scientific revolution to determine what is and what can be, by default our intellectuals allowed the direction of what should be to revert to the two old pretenders to the throne, the churches who have constantly been more than glad to usurp our secular moral consciousness promoted by our linguistic and ensuing moral intuitions into service to their theocratic claims.

Where the control of politics in accord with morality has so obviously failed that vast majorities were forced for the sake of survival to rise up against the power of the theocratic edicts that departed from true morality based on equality, their leaders likewise misconstrued the credit to their political power. It was not so much a question of moral justification as it was of merely having the power to do what the people had the power to do. And when a minority without sufficient power sought support from others, instead of appealing to the forgotten ideals of our social compact and the equality underlying it, they appealed to endorsements of proper forms of conduct by religious institutions-such as in the original abolitionists, women's suffrage and even the civil rights struggle.

How quickly we forgot that Prohibition had been supported by the theocratic principles-and the status quo-and that Johnny Reb had received as much spiritual and moral sustenance and guidance as had the eyes which had seem the power and the glory! In recent years liberal apologists have lamented their lost moral grounds for political action, as Gitlan in the The Twilight of Common Dreams-because they did not realize the true source of the moral justification of political action. They fell into the Roussean tradition which saw the justification of political action in the general will, which ultimately is a form of might makes right. It has no moral authority and imposes no limits on the majority and protects no rights of the powerless minority. Having given up the moral high ground, their resort to the power principle is no more persuasive at the end of this millennium that is the alternative resort to the God principle by the reactionaries. They are both intellectually defunct.

As Powers said:

"We have given ourselves to finding out

not what we should do with the world, but

what we can make the world do. The greatest

idea of the next thousand years must make up

the difference, returning subtlety and richness

and morals and lightness of spirit to the long

human experiment, if any part of it is to

survive."

We had that idea generated and only briefly popularized in our millennium. But just as it took centuries to get the idea of empirical experimentalism into practice that is now culminating in the great promise and threat of our millennium, the idea to counterbalance that, the idea that equality underlies morality, has been born, and now that intellectuals have accepted the death of liberalism on the basis of the power of the majority, they must be willing to re-examine and adopt the idea that good government is a contract among equals that protects the lives of all or none and protects the maximal liberties possible equally to all individuals and gives all equally a real and effective opportunity to attain the maximal happiness possible for each and all. Its moral authority comes from being the best approximation we can devise of the underlying social compact of which we are signatories, will we or nil we, by virtue of our human nature as rational animals with motivations and individual situations in which our rights and responsibilities apply.

Yes, the subtlety and richness arise in the protection of rights and the provision of opportunities for happiness that attend to the individual conditions and characteristics whic determine how what will give an equal opportunity for happiness to two different individuals may be very different. But in any case, we have a guidebook to the justification of rights and obligations. We have a basis for morality. That, even more than the scientific method, will be our greatest gift to the new millennium. That is the starting point that we must assure the new millennium will propagate until all men understand and live by it as we have achieved such universalization of the empirical experimental ideal.