When Inna and I visited Tiger Kingdom in Phuket, I mentioned to her that I’d never known that tigers have white spots on the back of their ears, and wondered what the heck that was about. I didn’t ask the keepers, and never learned the reason until a couple days ago, when I came across this photograph of a tiger bending low to get a drink of water.

Look carefully, and you’ll see something truly remarkable. Those white spots on her ears look remarkably like a pair of angry eyes. And if you extend that illusion, you will see the ladder of black stripes on top of her skull suddenly transform into the wrinkles along the muzzle of an angry beast, and the pointed white spots above her eyes become a fearsome set of bared fangs!

So while the real tiger is bending low in a vulnerable position, the pattern of coloring on her fur projects the illusion of a fierce and angry predator. It’s an amazing adaptation, made even more effective because the illusory tiger’s features are more pronounced—and therefore more prominent—than the real ones!

When I first saw this, I thought, “Wow, nature is pretty amazing to craft something that sophisticated from spontaneous natural selection. But then I took a step back, asking myself how could the mechanics of evolution possibly produce this? Tigers are an apex predator with little need for such camouflage; they have absolutely no predators except other tigers and man, and humans haven’t held mastery over tigers long enough to have that dramatic an impact on their evolution. So how could natural selection have produced such a coloring trait?

To be honest, I have no idea, which makes it that much more astonishing an illusion.

Every day, modern science progresses forward, making us a more technically advanced society. But when was the last time you heard about a major ethical breakthrough? We’re a 21st century people living with ethics that almost exclusively derive from the Middle Ages, biblical time, and the ancient Greeks.

Since the Industrial Revolution, individual occupations have gotten increasingly specialized. We now have farmers who only know how to grow soybeans, doctors who only know how to treat foot problems, and teachers whose only subject is ancient Chinese art. This increased specialization allows us to develop very advanced domain knowledge which would be unavailable to us if everyone was a generalist.

However, essentially no one has focused on and undertaken that same degree of specialization in ethics. There’s no financial incentive to study ethics. We, as a society, have decided that ethical development isn’t worth the investment, so we haven’t shown any real progress in morality since the Middle Ages, and our outlook on life shows a decidedly feudal flavor. For that same reason, there’s no one to turn to who can serve as ethical mentors, guides, or leaders for individuals who want to cultivate an ethical life.

The biggest questions of the day—abortion, stem cell research, cloning, human rights—are all ethical questions, and modern society, lacking a modern ethical framework, has no effective way of addressing them.

Some people look at our ethics in a very functional way. Our deep valuing of children, fairness, and compassion can be thought of as an evolutionary advantage: they helped ensure that our species survived.

One might well ask whether continuing our ethical development would be a further evolutionary advantage. Would we face man-made threats like acts of terror, environmental disaster, genocide, and nuclear destruction if our ethical development hadn’t been arrested prematurely?

Morality might seem pretty old-fashioned in these modern times, but at the same time, even the most cursory glance at our society shows the problems associated with the disregard of the ethical component of life.

I’m not advocating a proscriptive ethics mandated by an elite. We went through that in the feudal period, and it’s not appropriate for a modern, educated society. On the other hand, the problems associated with subjective and/or situational ethics are obvious. What’s needed is a concerted effort to explore our values and their implications, under the guidance of wise, open-minded, ethically literate leadership.

I want to take the opportunity to recommend the May 2005 issue of Shambala Sun to people. While the balance of the magazine is interesting and of value, but I feel that two articles are of particular value to me and most of the people I know.

One is an interview with Sam Harris, author of the recent bestseller “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”. Not being particularly saturated by mass media, I knew nothing of his book before reading this interview, but find Harris’ argument eminently reasonable. It seems like he has come from a decidedly secular, scientific upbringing. He derides any religion based upon a supposedly irrefutable, static text, and points out the inherent problems such beliefs pose for a world full of immensely powerful and deadly weapons. A pertinent citation from his book:

Technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences—and hence our religious beliefs—antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia—because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

He then specifically addresses the need to formulate a modern set of ethics that aren’t derived from ancient religious dogma.

Harris is undoubtedly controversial, and his recommendations radical. On the other hand, he is expressing what many Americans have innately felt, whether they left Christendom for agnosticism, paganism, Buddhism, or atheism. The bottom line is that the three Old Testament religions are primitive, divisive, and any literalist interpretation of them will perpetuate the religious conflicts of the past two millennia, albeit now with weapons that make humanity’s worst nightmares look like cotton candy and rosebuds. But enough of Harris; let’s look at something more positive.

The other article, “Searching for the Heart of Compassion”, was written by Marc Ian Barasch, author of “Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness”. Again, I don’t know if this one’s widely known, but I found the article exceptionally interesting, and have the book on order at the BPL.

Barasch is an engaging writer who is trying to develop the kind of compassion espoused by Buddhist practitioners everywhere. However, he’s also an average guy who struggles to overcome the egocentrism and selfishness inherent in modern American culture. His writing is simultaneously approachable and illuminating, and I’m really looking forward to his book.

One of his assertions is that “our obsession with seamless self-contentment (’What I love about Subway is it’s all about me!’) has occluded our ability to love each other”. He also pointed out the contradiction of Thomas Aquinas’ observation that “No one becomes compassionate unless he suffers” with our effort “to secure happiness by fortifying ourselves against imperfection”.

Barasch also levels some criticism against the modern image of Buddhism and meditation as a quest for higher consciousness, citing a Buddhist lama who asserted that “Spiritual practice is not just about feeling peaceful and happy, but being willing to give up your own comfort to help someone else”.

He calls upon many sources, and eventually gets around to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s particularly insightful observation that even justice is only “love correcting that which revolts against love”.

Unfortunately, I can’t do justice to either article, but I thought that both might be of interest to people, because both directly address themselves to the immense, unseen questionmark regarding the roles religion, spirituality, morality, and ethics play in this modern, scientific, skeptical, secular American society.

We can no longer afford to blithely ignore the immense threat that religion poses for our planet, nor the pain and suffering caused by our failure to create a modern ethical structure to replace it. I find it heartening that these two articles—and the two popular books that they relate to—are good first steps in beginning a long-needed discussion about the roles of religion and ethics in the modern world.