"Precisely. If we have no commonly agreed criterion for measuring length, we will never agree about how much land is yours, and how much is mine, or how to cut lengths of wood when we build a house. There would be chaos. We would fight over the land, and the houses would fall down. Throughout history, we have always tried to agree on a common way to measure length. Are you with me, once more, on this little journey of the mind?"
"I'm still with you," I replied, laughing, and wondering where the mafia don's argument was taking me.
"Well, after the revolution in France, the scientists and government officials decided to put some sense into the system of measuring and weighing things. They introduced a decimal system based on a unit of length that they called the metre, from the Greek word metron, which has the meaning of a measure."
"Okay..."
"And the first way they decided to measure the length of a metre was to make it one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the North Pole. But their calculations were based on the idea that the Earth was a perfect sphere, and the Earth, as we now know, is not a perfect sphere. They had to abandon that way of measuring a metre, and they decided, instead, to call it the distance between two very fine lines on a bar of platinum iridium alloy." "Platinum..."
"Iridium. Yes. But platinum-iridium alloy bars decay and shrink, very slowly-even though they are very hard-and the unit of measure was constantly changing. In more recent times, scientists realised that the platinum-iridium bar they had been using as a measure would be a very different size in, say, a thousand years, than it is today."
"And... that was a problem?"
"Not for the building of houses and bridges," Khaderbhai said, taking my point more seriously than I'd intended it to be.
"But not nearly accurate enough for the scientists," I offered, more soberly.
"No. They wanted an unchanging criterion against which to measure all other things. And after a few other attempts, using different techniques, the international standard measure for a metre was fixed, only last year, as the distance that a photon of light travels in a vacuum during, roughly, one three-hundred-thousandth of a second. Now, of course, this begs the question of how it came to be that a second is agreed upon as a measure of time. It is an equally fascinating story-I can tell it to you, if you would like, before we continue with the point about the metre?"
"I'm... happy to stay with the metre right now," I demurred, laughing again in spite of myself.
"Very well. I think that you can see my point here-we avoid chaos, in building houses and dividing land and so forth, by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of length. We call it a metre and, after many attempts, we decide upon a way to establish the length of that basic unit. In the same way, we can only avoid chaos in the world of human affairs by having an agreed standard for the measure of a unit of morality."
"I'm with you."
"At the moment, most of our ways of defining the unit of morality are similar in their intentions, but they differ in their details. So the priests of one nation bless their soldiers as they march to war, and the imams of another country bless their soldiers as they march out to meet them. And everybody who is involved in the killing, says that he has God on his side. There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of the others." "And you're putting the physics of the universe up as a kind of platinum-iridium bar?"
"Well, I do think that our definition is closer, in its precision, to the photon-second measure than it is to the platinum-iridium bar, but the point is essentially correct. I think that when we look for an objective way to measure good and evil, a way that all people can accept as reasonable, we can do no better than to study the way that the universe works, and its nature-the quality that defines the entire history of it-the fact that it is constantly moving towards greater complexity. We can do no better than to use the nature of the universe itself.
And all the holy texts, from all the great religions, tell us to do this. The Holy Koran, for example, is often telling us, instructing us, to study the planets and the stars to find truth and meaning."
"I still have to ask the question, why use this fact about the tendency toward complexity, and not some other fact? Isn't it still arbitrary? Isn't it still a matter of choice as to which fact you choose to use as the basis for your morality? I'm not trying to be obtuse here-I really think it still seems quite arbitrary."
