How should people who wish to live ethical lives judge the religious, political and economic situation of the world and how should they act in these three great spheres of contemporary culture? In this chapter I explore some answers by briefly reviewing those three great aspects of contemporary culture, next giving an interpretation of ethics based on the process perspective of Alfred North Whitehead and others, and then applying that ethic to the religious, political and economic situation as I understand it. In the last part of the chapter I offer some brief comments about ethics and the common good.

What follows is not exegetically close to or bound by the thought and idiom of Whitehead or any other process thinker. What I do attempt is to be faithful to the fundamentals of the ideas that stem chiefly from Whitehead’s understanding of things, honoring its spirit if not always its letter, and freely joining to it convergent ideas and expressions from my own earlier research before I began to study process thought (Prozesky 1984).

None of us, of course, is an expert on the details of global reality. But we can try to understand its main features, and it is in any case important to develop the skill of thinking globally by venturing interpretations of the state of the planet and inviting critical responses to them—which is what I am now about to do— if only because at least four key aspects of the world around us are already global in their effect: communications, information, the environmental crisis and the power of the transnational corporations. Planetary humanity is thus now a real prospect, and we need to prepare our minds, our values and our institutions for its advent.

Turning first to religion, I want to portray the situation world-wide and in South Africa as one of strained diversity and moral ambivalence which cries out for some possibility of resolution. The diversity needs no further comment, for we all know that the world is home to many kinds of religions. What is not so well understood, at least outside the ranks of those who study the different faiths, is that the diversity is most striking in four of the facets or dimensions of religion: doctrine, ritual, custom and organization, and least evident—significantly—in the core ethical values of the various faiths.

What this amounts to is a planet deeply divided by what many think of as the world’s greatest social and personal good, its religions. It is just a fact that although Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Africanists, Christians, Humanists and virtually all other kinds of believers all agree that compassionate service and honesty of life are essential to the upright life, religions mostly create personal and cultural identities not out of their ethical values, but out of their different metaphysical doctrines, their specific rituals, their exclusive places of gathering and uses of spiritual power, and their endlessly varied customs. Catholics genuflect or cross themselves, Muslims touch the ground with their foreheads, Buddhists announce their Threefold Refuge, and nearly all feel distinctly out of place in other people’s sacred spaces.

As a result, there is not much spiritual kinship or friendship on this planet, though there is now, in the main, mercifully less of the murderous hostilities and spiritual imperialism that once characterized the borderlands of religions, and in liberal democracies the norm is now to treat the religions more or less equally before the law. But the fact remains that religions worldwide as they presently exist and understand themselves are far better at dividing humanity than at uniting it. All who take seriously the ideal of working for the common good and who think globally must surely feel deep concern at this state of affairs, especially if by personal conviction they count themselves among the ranks of believers. One test of the mettle of process thought and any other kind, for that matter, is what light it can shed on this troubling religious reality and what ethical action it can inspire to help alleviate it.

What next can be said about the spheres of politics and of economic matters, which I shall discuss together because of their close connection? Not being an expert in these fields, I offer only from a layperson’s perspective of a set of impression based mainly on long experience of living in Southern Africa and on what I glean from educational and media sources and many personal visits about other parts of the world, presented as a set of impressions.

The first one is that an irreversible feature of our times is the passion of people everywhere for equality of status before equitable laws, for fair opportunities in life, for the same respectful treatment and basic civil liberties, for material well-being, self-expression and peace. The second is that so far as political economy is concerned, there simply is—in painful contrast to the desire of people everywhere—again no such thing as the common good. Instead there is a highly incomplete process of democratization, even in its historical heartlands, and grotesque economic imbalances with mind-boggling levels of luxury for the few, contrasting starkly with mass abject poverty.

I think it is especially important for any of us who live, work and think in first-world communities—the anglophone ones perhaps most of all—to be very clear about the huge gap between the aspirations of people everywhere for basic equality, rights, opportunities and material well-being, and the realities of the situation: while we feast, they dream and curse. What is good in our world is not common and what is common is not good, but very, very bad: empty stomachs, diseased bodies, ill-fed minds, frustrated dreams, all of them experienced within visual reach of television screens parading the luxuries enjoyed by the fortunate—or ruthless—minority. We who think of three good meals a day, a sixteen-year education and late-model cars as necessities need to understand that we are the living symbols of a set of heavily fortified pockets of affluence and self-indulgence for the few surrounded by a world of want and anger for the many.

My third impression concerns the relation between those who are rich and powerful and those who are poor and weak. The have-nots are coming for the haves, and they will keep coming until there are no more haves and have-nots. This is now the daily reality of life in our own country, but we can see it just as clearly elsewhere, with Mexican people crossing into adjacent parts of the USA, central Europeans doing so in Germany, and so on. My fourth impression, therefore, is that the world is now living with the results of two massive failures, at least when measured by the norms of human equality and inclusive well-being: the obvious failure of communism and the less obvious failure of liberal capitalism because of its manifest inability to alleviate the poverty of such vast numbers of people. This in turn gives rise to my fifth impression concerning political economy: we now need—in the words of the title of a recent book by a colleague of mine—to move beyond both Marx and the Market (Nurnberger 1998). What light can the ethical perspective set forth in this chapter shed on this need and on the action it requires? To find out, let us turn now to that ethical perspective, informed as it is by some important themes in the process tradition.

Although it is often tedious and pedantic to preface a discussion with definitions, sometimes it is necessary in order to avoid misunderstandings. Discussions of ethics are a case in point. Let me therefore declare my meanings. By ‘ethics’ I have in mind that which answers three questions: firstly, what should we understand by the words right and wrong, good and evil: secondly, how should we live if we would give effect to the good and deny the evil: and thirdly, why should we do so? I assume that most people would agree that, in general terms, giving effect to what is good means assigning to the interests of others an importance at least equal to our own, as Peter Singer has proposed (Singer: 1995). Explaining just why anybody would want to do so is perhaps the greatest task now facing ethics, and it is above all here that I believe that the process perspective has the potential to make a significant contribution to the common good.

What then does the process philosophical tradition understand by the key ethical concept of the good? The answer is as follows, as students of the tradition know: firstly, moral goodness is that which fosters the enjoyment of experience as fully as possible by all. In words that I personally prefer, moral goodness is the maximizing of inclusive well-being. This leads to the answer to the second question about the nature of the ethical: if we want to bring about the good we should do all we can to foster inclusive well-being and help it be as richly enjoyable as possible for all. Things are however much more complex when we turn to my third question about the nature of the ethical, namely just why we should live in ways that maximize well-being, but the short answer is this: we should be ethical because, given the nature of things, there is no more rational way to live wisely and well, which is what we all want anyway.

To explain this answer I must now deal with the way process thought understands the nature of things and above all how it understands human existence. This is seen as a flow of creative, inner-related, valorizing agencies manifesting both novelty and stability, adventure and order, a reality evident to us in our conscious experience, but, according to process thought, characteristic not just of human beings but of all that is real. This, of course, means that process thought sees moral values as grounded not only in our human reality, but in the bedrock of the way things are. If that is the case, then moral values are as deeply anchored as it is possible to be.

In most of the process literature known to me, the themes of creativity and inner or essential relatedness receive the greatest emphasis. To my mind it is necessary to give special attention to what I have called valorizing agency if we want to develop the ethic that is latent in the process worldview. What I have in mind by this expression is the way human beings—and all else according to process thought—exemplify a special kind of agency. This is not just creative and not just essentially related to other actualities, but additionally involves the judging of experience for the satisfaction or dissatisfaction, enjoyment or aversion it yields, a judging that is, I think, rooted in our power to sense. Then we select for further enactment that which experience shows is likely to yield the former rather than the latter. I would say that this is what gives direction to our creative agency by discerning and assigning values to things, selecting what is positively valued for realization, and thereby acting like a behavioral steering mechanism.

As I reflect on my own experience, I sense this enables me to react to, and move from, the settled past as it enters into and is received by my own life towards a future—preferred because of the greater overall well-being I wish to foster.

By means of these ideas—creative, inner-related, valorizing agency without absence of order—the process perspective believes we can best discern the grain of reality and thus also what kinds of action are likely to prove fruitful by going with that grain and what kinds are likely to fail because they do not. To live in ways that express as fully as possible this set of related characteristics is therefore to live realistically and with some prospect of productive existence. When all of them are expressed harmoniously in our lives, then life is ethical because it is productive of, and instantiates, the common good.

As a next step in this discussion I want now further to unpack the core characteristics of reality, starting with creativity. What else will be the case if creativity is the universal of universals characterizing matters of fact, as Whitehead once said? A whole string of items comes to mind: a creative universe is a universe of freely chosen action yielding novelty, freshness and plenty of surprises; it is a universe with in-built grounds for hope because nothing can forever be cornered or shackled; it is a universe that defies absolute predictions and refuses to be controlled except in smallish ways for shortish periods; it invigorates and invites adventure; and it produces endless diversity and personal distinctiveness through all those wonderful nuances of creativity that enable each of us to be special, unique and precious. It is a universe that refuses to march in lockstep, a constant joy to the Leonardos in us and an invincible nemesis for the Hitlers.

With an eye to the religious, political and economic state of society, I need to comment further on some of these hallmarks of a creative universe. For one thing, in such a universe things will always be amenable to some measure of transformation. And for another, power is always; not evenly shared, since some clearly have more than others, but shared none the less, so that ours would be a universe that excludes the extremes of absolute power and absolute powerlessness.

Essential or inner relatedness means that reality is holistic, to use the term invented by a famous fellow South African of Whitehead’s vintage, General Jan Smuts (Smuts 1926; Beukes 1994: 18). It is thus indeed a universe—a single, all-inclusive whole in which nothing can in any ultimate sense be an outsider. If conservatism is finally a futile attempt to defy the creative process of reality, then apartheid in all its forms, for all its demonic creativity, is just as much a futile attempt to resist the embrace of a cohesive universe. With an eye on politics and economics, let me add two further points: firstly, ours is a world where the flourishing of one is inextricably linked to the flourishing of others, and in the end to the flourishing of all others because, according to the process worldview, reality is none other than the ensemble of all things in their inner-connected advance into novelty. Furthermore, while the creative power that we all share enables us to be distinctive individuals, the holistic nature of reality makes the universe just as surely a social reality. Indeed, only in a social universe can distinctiveness and thus individuality have any meaning or scope.

Turning now to the orderly side of reality, let us remind ourselves that for all their marvelous ability to yield freshness and novelty, the processes that constantly shape and reshape the universe happen alongside a welcome measure of stability, continuity, predictability and resistance to change, giving scope to efforts aimed at conserving things whose loss we wish to avoid. Reality thus balances its habit of summoning us to episodes of risk-taking and adventure with times of relative settledness and security, thereby also offering us scope to develop the wisdom that knows when it is time to seek out the quiet corners of life and when it is time to stride out boldly towards the horizon.

What transforms the process worldview from an ontology into an ethic—or better still an aesthetic ethic—is its inclusion of the theme of the enjoyment of experience, which I prefer to speak of as the valorizing of experience in quest for maximum well-being. Because this too is fundamental to the way of things, the creative power we all share has a tendency to seek out and prolong that which gives enjoyment and to minimize or remove that which brings pain, and it thus has a decisive influence on what kinds of action and intention will have prominence. And since reality is simultaneously an inner-related whole, this valorizing power must ultimately be a shared endeavor to foster the common good; anything less yields lives and cultures in which sectional or selfish pursuits of well-being generate harm and pain for others, and hence also give rise to creative steps on their part to thwart the source of their dissatisfaction. It is easy to see that this will tend in the long run especially to lower the harvest of enjoyment for the selfish person or community.

The moral rule that emerges here is this: well-being can only be maximal—as we all want it to be—when it is fully inclusive and thus ethical. From this central value two others immediately follow: truthfulness and effective action. Without the former there will no correct discerning of what yields enjoyment and what does not, so that we can now identify a second moral rule: without truthfulness there can be no true and lasting well-being, not even for the selfish. As for effective action, its moral value will surely be obvious, for without effective action, well-being can only be spoken and thought about, not brought about, as we all want it to be.

I therefore draw the conclusion that a world that corresponds to this interpretation of the process worldview will be a world which by its very nature favors—in the long term—the pursuit of moral value and above all of the supreme value of the greatest well-being for all including nature. By its implicit inclusion of what I call valorizing agency in all things, an inclusion more hinted at and logically entailed, so far as I can see, than clearly foregrounded, the process worldview provides a powerful answer to the third of my three questions about the nature of ethics: why should we live in ways that actively promote the maximum enjoyment of experience by all? Why should we pursue the greatest possible inclusive well-being and not just our own? By holding before us our togetherness with all else and our innate way of differentially valuing all that we experience, process thought shows that using our creative power to pursue selfishly our own personal interests is sure in the long run to be self-defeating because of the resistance and at times conflict it will produce. By contrast, promoting the common good has real and long-term prospects of success and durability, and thus of that deeper satisfaction which we all seem to want by nature. In a world where education and longevity are increasing, I would say the prospects of this being understood and taken to heart are better than ever before.

It is time now to apply this ethic to the three great facets of contemporary society covered in this chapter. If we let our lives be shaped by such an ethic of creative cooperation, how would we judge and act in relation to them at this time? I want to approach this matter by means of the key points in a process-based theory of culture, according to which every part of culture (including its beliefs about how to find or create truthful depictions of reality) is artefactual and no part is pre-given. Every part is more or less provisional and thus amenable to transformation in quest of enhanced, inclusive well-being, with no part being cast in concrete or sacrosanct. Thus, the cultures that merit the support of ethical people are those that are maximally inclusive, combining the greatest scope for personal creativity, fulfillment and hence diversity that is compatible with the same scope for all others and with the orderliness that is also ingredient in the richest well-being.

Let me comment first on the political and economic situation of society in the light of this process-based view of culture. It should be clear that the ethic contained in this chapter cannot but render a largely negative verdict on that situation because its inequalities of both political and economic power fall so far short of the common good. The problem is not with the democratic ideal of equally empowering all the adult members of society, for that is exactly what a process ethic would approve. The problem is the minimal progress the world has made towards that goal, and I want to contend that this is caused by a number of factors. One of them is bad education. A world where knowledge has become the primary form of and means to wealth is a world where the quality of education, in its broadest sense covering the whole person-making process, is a key determinant of who prospers and who does not. We really do need new forms of mass education which will give all of us the ability to understand the nature and sources of our dehumanization and a sound grasp of the huge potential of the kind of informed, co-operative creativity that can help things take a turn for the better.

Along with bad education there is the problem of a global economic system that is, so far as I can see, inherently incapable of pursuing maximum well-being for all, judging by the evidence of mass poverty or at least economic hardship and severe environmental damage in a world that has been far more extensively and deeply affected by the pursuit of personal profit than by socialism—which only arose because of outrage at the degradations produced by that pursuit. And let me add that the litmus test of the current form of market economy is not the affluent first world, but the places on whose resources that affluence has been to a large extent built: Africa and parts of Latin America. It is simply untrue that affluent neighborhoods are built only by the creative initiative and hard work of enterprising individuals; they are at least as much built on the labor and resources of marginalized people and places. So, if you want the truth about the merits of liberal capitalism, go to Soweto in South Africa or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

Given its insistence on the reality of holistic inter-connectedness and on the shared nature of creative power, and given the economic distortions all around us, I cannot see how a process ethic could possibly regard liberal capitalism and its idea of market sovereignty as the last word, as though human nature itself were such as to frustrate all other ways of organizing the production and distribution of scarce goods. I think this has opened up a truly historic opportunity for a new kind of ethic. This must combine personal creativity and enterprise with an equal emphasis on the social nature of reality. It must put its conceptual and practical resources into the task of reshaping the world economy into something more workable and equitable than both communism and capitalism, as the extremely important work of John Cobb and Herman Daly is showing. (Daly and Cobb, 1994) For a start, it would help if we recognized that the market has taken over from the God of classical theism as the world’s current icon of absolute power.

I said above that there are a number of factors preventing the world from advancing as it could towards the common good. One remains to be discussed, and that is religion. What does the ethic outlined in this chapter have to say about this great facet of human culture? What does it applaud as good and what must it oppose as evil?

To my mind it is quite clear that there must be a mixed verdict on religion, some of it being seen as ethical and some not, and the criterion to be used is also clear: good religion is religion which gives maximum scope for intensities of fulfilled experience marked by creative diversity and which fosters and justifies spiritual convergence. If all power is shared power, then all saving power is also shared. I cannot help feeling, as I review what mostly seems to happen inside many of our religious institutions, that they are doing an excellent job of blinding many believers to this truth by inculcating in them a spirituality of subservience and isolation.

If the process worldview is sound, so that all power is indeed shared power, then there are no such things as a final revelation, a savior who alone can save, an infallible pope or a single, exclusively true religion or scripture, any more than there is a deity who has all the power. Instead, we should expect and support religious diversity and ongoing transformation so long as they enable people to grow creatively and richly into their own prophetic, messianic and indeed salvific, divine potential, partnered by the same growth in all others. From a process ethical standpoint, religious pluralism as such is therefore not only an inevitable and permanent feature of the spiritual dimension of reality, but also a profound moral good; what must be transformed and transcended are the dogmas and powers that make it an uneasy and strained reality by trying to chain the inexhaustible richness of the divine to this or that cultural and historical ghetto.

Let me end this chapter by offering some brief suggestions about the perspective outlined above and the common good. As will be clear, I believe that we have here a worldview which is also a powerful and workable ethic. If carried out it can yield conditions and experiences of truth, beauty and goodness for all of a quality that has not and will not, to my mind, come from any other philosophy upon which we might pin our hopes. Inherent in it is a persuasive argument that what is truly good must also be common and all-embracing.

Unfortunately this potential will remain just that—potential—so long as the process perspective retains its present confinement. There was a time when the mainstream of culture expressed itself theologically and philosophically, but those days are over except perhaps in parts of North America. Out there in the world of secular academia, of politics and business, very few have ever heard of Whitehead and even fewer are going to read his works. But my own experience of introducing students and others to a non-technical version of basic process ideas and an applied process ethic leaves me quite sure that many people for whom philosophical and theological orientations are sterile will respond eagerly and even with passion to the process perspective, provided it is made accessible and shown to be relevant to the world of practical experience, as it is. At the same time I think that we who espouse process values and beliefs are nowhere nearly forthright enough in acting as critics of the immoral features of our world, most notably in relation to such aspects of religion, the economy and education as I have indicated above.

So I end this chapter with a call for an adventure of cooperative, prophetic creativity in which the lure of a life that journeys bravely and companionably towards ever richer enjoyments of shared experience and ever greater inclusive well-being, extends the process experience from the secrecies of Whiteheadian idiom, metaphysical over-elaboration and perhaps above all from the idea that religion is mainly where salvation happens. As William Temple, that great Archbishop of Canterbury once said, "It is a mistake to suppose that God is solely, or even mainly, concerned with religion."

Beukes, Piet. The Religious Smuts. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1994.

Cobb, John B. Jr. A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965.

. Sustaining the Common Good. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1984.

and Griffin, David Ray. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Belfast: Christian Journals Limited, 1977.

Daly, Herman E. and Cobb, John B. Jr. For the Common Good. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989 (1994).

Geering, Lloyd. Creating the New Ethic. Wellington, New Zealand: St Andrew’s Trust, 1991.

Goheen, John. "Whitehead’s Theory of Value" in Paul Arthur Schilpp," The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. La Salle: Open Court, 1951, 437-59.

Gray, James R. Process Ethics. Lanham, New York, and London: University Press of America, 1983.

Hartshorne, Charles. "Beyond enlightened self-interest. A metaphysics of ethics," in Ethics, 84:3, April 1974, 201-216.

Kopas, Jane. "Whitehead’s view of creaturehood and its religious implications," in Process Studies, vol. 12, 1982, 101-110.

Nurnberger, Klaus. Beyond Marx and Market: Outcomes of a Century of Economic Experimentation. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 1998; London and New York, Zed Books Ltd, 1998.

Prozesky, Martin. Religion and Ultimate Well-Being: An Explanatory Theory. London: Macmillan, and New York, St Martin’s Press, 1984.

. "Ethics in Process Perspective," South African Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming, October 1998).

Sherburne, Donald W. A Whiteheadian Aesthetic: Some Implications of Whitehead’s Metaphysical Speculation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961; Arcon Books, 1970.

Schroeder, W. Widdick. "Evolution, Human Values and Religious Experience," in Zygon , vol.17, no. 3, September 1982, 267-91.

Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. 2nd ed. Cambridge: C.U.P., 1995.

Smuts, Jan C. Holism and Evolution. London: Macmillan, 1926.

Spencer, John. "Ethics in Whitehead’s Thought," unpublished typescript dated August 15, 1980. Center for Process Studies.

. "Whitehead as a basis for a social ethic," in The Unitarian Universalist Christian, no date, pp. 44-54.

Whitehead, A.N. Adventures of Ideas. London: Free Press, 1933 (1967)

. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, 1938 (1968).

. Process and Reality. Corrected edition. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Wieman, H.N. The Source of Human Good. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1946 (1964).