Nassim Nicholas Taleb quote: “Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.”

“We have adopted in the modern world a sort of a relativistic ethic”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Rediscovering Lost Values http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/rediscovering_lost_values/, Sermon delivered at Detroit's Second Baptist Church (28 February 1954)
1950s
Context: We have adopted in the modern world a sort of a relativistic ethic... Most people can't stand up for their convictions, because the majority of people might not be doing it. See, everybody's not doing it, so it must be wrong. And since everybody is doing it, it must be right. So a sort of numerical interpretation of what's right. But I'm here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It's wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It's wrong in America, it's wrong in Germany, it's wrong in Russia, it's wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B. C., and it's wrong in 1954 A. D. It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong. It's wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living. No matter if everybody in Detroit is doing it, it's wrong. It always will be wrong, and it always has been wrong. It's wrong in every age and it's wrong in every nation. Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute. The God of the universe has made it so. And so long as we adopt this relative attitude toward right and wrong, we're revolting against the very laws of God himself. [... ] That attitude is destroying the soul of our culture! It's destroying our nation! The thing that we need in the world today is a group of men and women who will stand up for right and to be opposed to wrong, wherever it is. A group of people who have come to see that some things are wrong, whether they're never caught up with. And some things are right, whether nobody sees you doing them or not.

“The goal that the Obama team has is to fundamentally replace the historic America of self-reliance, independence, the work ethic, the people who go out and achieve because they spend their lifetime doing the right things. And they want to replace it with a politician-dominated redistributionist bureaucracy. Which in the essence would mean the end of America as it has been for the last 400 years.”

Newt Gingrich (1943) Professor, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2010-05-17
2010-05-17
On Beck's radio show, Gingrich says Obama admin. is trying to "end … America as it has been for the last 400 years"
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201005170030
2011-03-30
2010s

“An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 202.

“My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“The competitive ethic, which teaches children that they must advance at the expense of others, should be replaced by values of cooperation and a pursuit of excellence for its own sake.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)

“Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 22

“What the founders of modern science … had to do, was not criticize and to combat certain faulty theories, and to correct or to replace them by better ones. They had to do something quite different. They had to destroy one world and replace it by another.”

Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964) French philosopher

"Galileo to Plato" in the Journal of the History of Ideas (1957).
Context: What the founders of modern science … had to do, was not criticize and to combat certain faulty theories, and to correct or to replace them by better ones. They had to do something quite different. They had to destroy one world and replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, and a new concept of science — and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all.

“It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.”

Alice Meynell (1847–1922) English publisher, editor, writer, poet, activist

"The Colour of Life" in The Colour of Life and Other Essays on Things Seen and Heard (London: John Lane, 1896), p. 4.

“The national question is not a phantasm of capitalist modernity. Nevertheless it was capitalist modernity which imposed the national question on society. The national society replaced religious community. However, the transition to a national society needs to overcome capitalist modernity if the nation is not to remain a disguise for repressive monopolies.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Democratic Confederalism

“The national question is not a phantasm of capitalist modernity. Nevertheless it was capitalist modernity which imposed the national question on society. The national society replaced religious community. However, the transition to a national society needs to overcome capitalist modernity if the nation is not to remain a disguise for repressive monopolies.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Democratic Confederalism, p. 47

“Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese.”

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