The Myth of the Moral Higher Ground

Moralisers make a fundamental error when condemning those whose behaviour or expressed value system falls short of their own standard. It is an unavoidable error since it is based on a notion for which we have no direct evidence; it is something human society has assumed to be true based on religious preconceptions.

 

The concept of free will is not clearly understood by many, who seem to think it is a God-given ability, that it exists independently of any social or cultural conditioning and that all humans have equal capacity and ability in this regard.

 

The first assumption is that free will is God-given and of course a prerequisite assumption would be that there exists an entity such as God, and that it exists within the confines of our own ability to define such an entity. Assumptions and Faith are close cousins, since they both regard something to be true without any reference to reality. They are inevitably dangerous to the practice of knowledge for that reason, and should be avoided as the basis for understanding of any sort. Any reasonable person must demand evidence for the existence of any proposition.

 

This leads me to the next assumption – that ‘free will’ exists independently of any social or cultural conditioning. We would have to find an ability that somehow transcends the associations of colour, religion, sex, nation, species and their concomitant prejudices, not to mention the personal needs of ego and social pressures. That these associations and needs influence our choices  is undeniable, and how we would go about isolating this ‘free’ component is not readily apparent. Since it already an abstract concept rather than an observable, measurable phenomenon, we already commit reification when attempting to analyse this tenuous idea.

 

But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is a capability few possess. Given the degree to which most people remain associated with the cultural and religious beliefs that they are introduced to (indoctrinated in?) as children, and given the degree of partisanship most people display with regard to their nation, local sports team, familial pursuits and other cultural icons, ‘free will’ seems to be the exception, not the rule. The emotional hysteria that accompanies an International sports event is a case in point, when people demonstrate their affiliations with all sorts of predictable and definitively conditioned behaviours, from the wearing of identity clothing, to waving of banners, to chanting and singing. The modern version of the war cry, if not as destructive, is no less primitive. Left to make their own choices, the majority will copy each other, and these associations were all derived, in most cases, without conscious application to a decision problem, but by the associations of proximity and social interaction.

 

In the world of the Arts and even in Literature, the absence of selective, considered choice is evident. Most people’s musical preferences are derived from what they have grown accustomed to and their favourites ‘selected’ by association with emotional experiences. If they are not introduced to a given genre of music, it is unlikely they will develop an appreciation for the form, with the result that their own limited range is both conditioned and prejudiced.  The quality of the music itself never enters the frame. Best-sellers get there by virtue of buy-in from a social collective, not because they contain quality writing. In both the Arts and Literature, it is ignorance and narrow social selection that drive the numbers – the influence of peers, the zeitgeist and the social aspirations of consumers unquestionable. The issue of quality remains the ambit of precious few.

 

In Democratic countries, we say that people have the right to vote independently. Whether they have the ability to do so is debatable, given that they are bombarded with propaganda and misinformation and given that most of them do not have the first understanding of the issues.

 

It is this difference in ability that leads me to the last assumption: that all humans have equal capacity and ability to make decisions. More importantly, since we are talking about morals, we would have to show that all humans have the same capacity and ability to make moral choices. Since moral choices are inevitably more complex than simple ones like which car to buy, which music to listen to, or which book to read, which itself may have a moral component, it stands to reason that the mental ability to weigh up moral dilemmas, to process general rules in application to specific circumstances, and to consider the global effect of a local action, firstly require a wider knowledge base, and secondly a mental ability to process all of this in an integrated fashion. Given the ignorance and intelligence of most humans, it is surely self-evident that it is completely impossible that this capacity is equal in all humans.

 

It becomes entirely rational, then, not to expect the moral choices made by the ignorant and unintelligent majority to correlate with those made by knowledgeable and intelligent people. It is simply an unrealistic expectation. We could, of course, moralise concerning those who wilfully remain ignorant and those who have the mental capacity to understand but still insist on making choices and behaving in ways we find deplorable.

 

But to expect the great majority to do so is to behave immorally ourselves. They need our education and upliftment, not our condemnation.

 

The Great Escape

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”, said Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract. And try as we might, with every effort we make, we move from one form of prison to another, always confined in some way or another inevitably bound by some form, whether physically, financially, emotionally, and a whole host of other means life has at it’s disposal to enslave us. I have for many years been conscious of the fact that freedom was the most important word in my dictionary. It is said that in every living thing there is the spirit to be free – I needed no convincing that the ultimate state was freedom, and I sought it at every juncture…

My first prison was family, the bars composed of the expectations that my earliest cohesive group had of me. If I moved outside of those expectations, I was swiftly castigated – “that’s not the way we do things’ – and the bars

Opportunism Costs

In 1969, in his ‘brutally objective’ look at the human animal, The Human Zoo, Desmond Morris wrote:

“We have, in our relentless social progress, gloriously unleashed our powerful inventive, exploratory urges. They are a basic part of our biological inheritance. There is nothing artificial or unnatural about them. They provide us with our great strength as well as our great weaknesses. What I am trying to show is the increasing price we have to pay for indulging them and the ingenious ways in which we contrive to meet that price, no matter how steep that price becomes. The stakes are rising all the time, the game becoming more risky, the casualties more startling, the pace more breathless. But despite the hazards

No winter lasts forever

As I awoke this morning to the stillness of the farm, my family all still soundly asleep, there was a song running in my head that I have not heard in a long long time.

When I was a youngster, I was introduced to the music of John Denver by a friend, and this song was one I particularly enjoyed. It was called “Summer” and it spoke of appreciation for life and being thankful just for being here. Life was so much simpler then, and it was a time of fun and laughter, punctuated with heartbreak that never seemed to hold me back, just brief pauses in the headlong rush that is life at nineteen.

“Do you care what’s happening around you, do your senses know the changes when they come?”

Change has never been a problem for me; I have welcomed it, always ready for

On being Educated…

What does it mean to say one is ‘educated’? One definition says that it is ‘the ability to profit from experience’. Is this to say that we cannot learn vicariously, from another’s experience, or is it not necessarily our own experience that is required? If this is true, then it is not necessary for everyone to have experience, just knowledge of the experience of others, which we may refer to as knowing about someone else’s experience, or having information in relation to it.

But is it enough to have information about an event or thing or person in one’s memory which may be regurgitated at a moment’s notice, to know about something? If so, then a computer is ‘educated’, and a great deal more than any human, since it can recall (if programmed accordingly, of course) much more information and with greater accuracy than any human. Surely to be educated is a great deal more

Is Belief what we’re fighting for?

Once upon a time, there lived Believers. It was important to Believers to Believe. And so they did. Of course, the First Difficult Thing was that they didn’t all have the same Beliefs.

Before I explain why this was Difficult, it’s important to explain what Beliefs were. Beliefs were ideas about Being, and yet the Beliefs that Believers Believed were not the Being part, they were Symbols of it. Very much like the shadows that are made when a Being gets in the way of the light, they were like Being but weren’t Being; rather they were an approximation or representation of Being.

The Believers subscribed so strongly to their Beliefs that they eventually lost sight of Being, and here’s why the First Difficult Thing was Difficult: Everyone saw the same Being, but called it by different names, and they believed that their different names made the Being different. This couldn’t possibly Be, but it was difficult to see that once you Believed in a certain Description. It was equally difficult to see how others could have another Description, since they Believed that there could only be one Description of Being. Naturally, this caused some problems, because,

The Symbols, the Sum and the Substance

That humans are self-important needs no supporting argument. Uncle Frank always used to say that egocentrism was unavoidable and at the time I hated that idea; it invalidated the foundations of my ontological reality at the time and placed me squarely in the middle of the existential vacuum: a universe where my perspective was always prejudiced by this thing called Me.

I began to think about the nature of Me and over many years of reading and personal contemplation I understood that there were really many ‘Me’s’: There was Personal Me, the identity that was determined by my Self, which included the dynamics of my personality (the things I did), my inner space (feelings and thoughts, beliefs and values) , and the physical reality of the body I lived within.

Then there was National Me, the aspect of me that had a sense of belonging to a Nation. Of course, I had had no choice in the matter. But I was subject to it’s laws, exposed to and took part in it’s customs, spoke it’s language, and used it’s infrastructure, and so in a sense, I belonged. Whether or not this stretched beyond the pragmatic reality was not something I was convinced about.

In addition there was Religious Me, the part of me that had a sense of

Everything’s gonna be alright

It’s probably the most common song lyric. Of course, I don’t know whether statistically that is true, but it appears so often that it seems to be an assumption shared by many, embodied in such trite affirmations as “Everything happens for a reason” and “Everything works out for the best”, New Age mottos that slip off the tongue with all the ease of a Universal Truth, and seem to be accepted with alacrity, particularly by those who have lived in a comfort zone their entire life.

They’re also trotted out by ‘positive’ people with that irritating condescending attitude, who speak to you from a lofty ‘spiritual higher ground’ as if such a place is known to exist, with a wisdom that ‘passes all understanding’. Or comprehension, or even just a hint of intelligence…

What these statements mean is that things will get better, and of course we hope so.

The Species who would be King

Humans rule Planet Earth. Much like a King who is ‘master of all he surveys’, the human dominance of the third rock from the sun is complete.

And yet the human monarch is not content. His desire for control has yielded circumstances which now threaten the lives of all denizens, and the changes to the living system brought about by humanity have often not been benign. You may be opposed to the use of the male gender to typify humanity, but dominance is a typical male characteristic, as opposed to the inherent nurturance of the female of the species. There are exceptions on both sides, but the principle is sound as a rule of thumb, because when women do get into positions of power, they seem to behave much like men, almost like men have set the ideal. The need for control is part of the problem, a cancer deep inside the human condition, fraught with insecurities that drive human behaviour towards larger and larger security blankets, these provided at the expense of other humans and the living environment. By now, one would think that intelligent creatures would have learnt

The Secret: Positive Thinking’s New Clothes

No doubt, you will have heard of The Secret. If you haven’t, Google it and check out the video.The Secret’s claim is quite simple – you can have whatever you want, just visualise it, and it’s yours. Apparently, we create our reality with our intentions – our thoughts cause things to happen, not just within ourselves, but in our external reality too.

It doesn’t take much to see that this is really karma and positive thinking with new clothes – only here you no longer need to DO any good, you just have to THINK it. Self-directedness just became moral – after all, if the Universe supports it, it must be right?

Except that the new clothes don’t fit. And the ‘lack of fitness’ I speak about is the relationship these ideas have to reality. They simply do not, in fact cannot, work in the real world.