Inherent Morality (again)

There is no moral value inherent in man. There are certain basic instincts which are close to being universal, but there is nothing that could qualify as morality which is common to all, or the great majority of, people or even to all societies and social groups. The moral universal does not exist.

We* value our own lives and instinctively protect them. We more or less instinctively protect those close to us emotionally, or those with whom we can identify an emotional link. But we do not, even instinctively, value all human life, and intellectually we allow so many exceptions that the common conception of a fundamental sense of the value of human life is reduced to nothing.

There is no absolute right and wrong, designed to apply to our actions, to be found within us and discovered by all of us. There is a desire for a moral code, as there is an innate ability and desire to communicate by language, but, as with language, the way it is manifested is largely arbitrary, and is a result of the interactions of the members of the society we are born into over many generations.

A moral code is like language in many ways: it doesn’t matter very much how it is manifested, what matters is that it exists and we can understand it. It varies quite unpredictably with time and place, and is largely incomprehensible to those outside the time and place to which it belongs. Everyone speaks their own version but large numbers of people share enough of it to understand each other and to feel their membership of the group that is defined by it.

What is right and what is wrong is an invention of our minds. We need that invention, for reasons that may have to do with the need to reconcile our ability to analyse our own minds with our instincts and limitations. But it is something we make for ourselves. (Like God.) These needs, or instincts, or ideas, can easily be taken advantage of, manipulated consciously, by individuals and organisations, and indeed they are, but they are used because they exist, not invented for the purpose.

Moral relativism is a term which is in itself a moral judgement. The right and the wrong we believe in are not necessarily- are not usually- our own inventions, we borrow them from others, we find them and accept them, gratefully, or unquestioningly, or we have them forced upon us, or we derive them from our own experience or intellectual consideration, or we do not even notice we have them until they are brought into question by someone or something.

It is possible for people who believe themselves to be good to believe in the fundamental goodness of things which others would find utterly abhorrent and indefensible. This is an observable truth. Female genital mutilation, for example (which is one of the things which got me started on these thoughts) is still carried out because many of the people involved, doubtless including many of the mothers, some of the practitioners and some of the girls themselves, believe it is right, and they do it because they believe it is right. It is not a conspiracy of evil men against women, it is primarily a conspiracy of the human mind against itself, and it is only one of many, though it perhaps causes more harm than most. To recognise that it is usual done because those involved believe it to be right, doesn’t stop me from declaring it to be wrong.

We must denounce what we believe to be wrong because otherwise we can have no morality, and we need it. I can call female genital mutilation not only wrong, but evil, by which term I presumably mean not only that I would not do it myself, but also that I would very much like everyone else not to do it as well. But there are people who not think it is wrong. There are people who believe it to be right, morally necessary and a superior course of action. There are people who believe they must kill their daughters if they ‘dishonour’ them in some way. Many of those involved, including, on most occasions, those who carry it out, the parents of those who suffer it, and sometimes, I don’t doubt, the victims themselves, believe that it is better to do it than to not it.  These are widely extended practices, and they exist because enough people believe they are right to keep the belief alive in the general moral sense of the society.

*We refers to humans in general.

Chilling Memories

Beautiful perhaps. A beauty experienced, not just observed. English beauty. Isolation. Flowers and trees blooming. The English country doing what it does . Outside time. Outside the rest of life. Green and lovely. Looking from the window- I liked a high room with a good view so I could see the woods as the sun came up in the morning. The trees shading the flowers beneath them, which gives them more colour and more contrast.

I startled a deer in the deepest part of the wood one morning. We startled each other. It vanished in a moment, crashing through the undergrowth.

They were ways of avoiding the things we were supposed to do. I took my axe and went off alone all day to chop up fallen trees into disposable lumps. I could do it. Alone among the fallen timber, and with the strength and energy to turn it into logs you could pick up with one hand. It felt good. Primitive. And it was very slow. Time didn’t matter then. 

I awoke each morning and looked out of the window. On occasions I saw women gathering herbs for the kitchen. There was a tennis court and a croquet lawn, which could have been used but it seemed wrong to use them, too civilized. It was meant to feel rough and wild.

The house was very old, very big, and designed for comfort and pleasure. All the beauty of the land was visible from the windows of the rooms, because if we can, we live in beauty, and the erstwhile owner could

Bells I was charged with ringing. They meant something that wasn't really anything. Post breakfast cigarette on the terrace. With chat and views of the park. Walking the paths through the wood, crossing a stream, hearing only insects and the chirping of birds. Thinking the thoughts that you can think at those moments. Outside life and outside time.

General Strike

The far-left Mafias which masquerade as trade unions here were out in force this morning. Flags waved, horns blared, whistles sounded, and some chap with quite a good voice shouted the usual nonsense through a sound system that had been specifically designed for you to be heard clearly without shouting.

Despite my habit of eating babies, I believe in freedom of association as one of the basic things that defines a free society, one in which it is possible to live and to experience respect for your humanity. Not only do I defend the right of trade unions to exist, I think they are a good thing, or they would be if they did what they claim to do. The right to strike is a much more complex matter, but I also believe that, subject to certain conditions, the collective withdrawal of labour can be a legitimate tool of negotiation.

The two major leftwing union, Comisiones Obreras and UGT have called a general strike for the 29^th of March. This is not a labour dispute, but a political protest. They have been preparing it since they realized the left would lose the general election, and it was always perfectly predictable that they would act in the first few months of the new government, whatever it did and whatever the results.

They have called the ‘strike’ without a ballot, of course. How could they hold a ballot when they claim to speak for all of us? They have, unilaterally and without consultation, called for a day of protest simply because they have to be seen to do something to justify the large salaries their leaders pay themselves. They have suffered years of frustration at not being taking seriously by governments and the media and now they have a chance to act. They are the leaders of a (supposedly though not in practice) private organization whose membership consists of a small fraction of the population, and in any case the decision was taken without asking the membership. Anyone else in that position would be laughed at if they declared that the entire nature must stop work on a particular day under threat of violence. Or locked up. But Méndez and Toxo get invited onto the TV to shout and order the rest of us around.

The unions are not very interested in their own members, except that they need to keep the numbers up in order to increase the payments they get from the long-suffering taxpayer, and that means telling the members what they want to hear. They are not interested at all in the unemployed, except as a weapon to throw at the government; otherwise they would not instinctively oppose every attempt to make it easier and cheaper to hire people and invest in new business.

The question is not whether this sort of strike should be legal, nor whether the government’s policies are good or bad for Spain. But is the strike itself a good thing, in some way? It will not achieve the aims that are being claimed for it. It won’t achieve anything at all because the government will (quite rightly) ignore it and carry on. It won’t bother the union leaders because they aren’t trying to reach the government. Their message is for the television and the activists.

Those who wish to protest should be free to do so. Those who wish to protest by withdrawing their labour are also free to do so and that is probably as it should be. But the price of a protest that will achieve nothing is many thousands of people losing a day’s pay, and for the great majority who are not interested in the protest it will mean an atmosphere of open hostility and sporadic violence as they try to go about their business.

Here in my small city these things are usually quite civilized, but in many of the bigger cities the leaders will pump up the strikers with a sense of the injustice they are suffering, will make sure they know who the enemy is, and will send them out on the streets where they will smash things and attack people. That is what will happen, because it’s what always happens, and the unions will not accept any responsibility for it, because they never do, even though they know it will happen and that they have caused it themselves.

When the union leaders talk about defending the rights of workers, they ignore the fact that those ‘rights’ are paid for with other people’s money, and that the more secure their own job is, the higher unemployment is likely to climb. We all see our own point of view most clearly, but to make it into a virtue, and use it to put words in the mouths of millions of people who have never asked you to represent them, is not something we should accept as normal.

That’s why it is not good enough to say, ‘the government is wrong, we are entitled to protest and if it doesn’t work, at least we didn’t just sit back and do nothing’. It will be a purely symbolic act, but with serious consequences for many people.

God

Arguing about God on Internet forums is a largely pointless activity, guaranteed to lead to annoyance and frustration, and one I don’t usually dabble in. But the other day I got caught up in such a discussion over at Longrider’s blog. I made the mistake of trying to make two points at once, or rather, one observation which I didn’t expect to be contentious as the lead-in to another which was no more than a question, though a difficult one to express, and to understand.

There were two commenters who attempted to engage. The first did so intelligently, but he didn’t quite seem to grasp the point of what I was asking, and in any case he retired early on the not unreasonable grounds that he’d had this sort of argument before and they never got anywhere. I intend to follow his example after this post. The second was a weird creature who interlaced references to irrelevant people and concepts with random abuse in block capitals. Both signs of a less than towering intellect, so that wasn’t going very far either. Then our host on the blog stepped in and asked us politely to return to the topic, from which we had strayed to some extent. Politely, we obliged.

The observation I made, which I thought uncontentious, was that Richard Dawkins is a militant atheist. He is frequently bombastic, importunate and rude, dragging the stupidity of believers into places it wasn’t invited. Although he has a sharp intellect and an extensive knowledge of his field, which is itself broad, not everything he says in defence of his beliefs is filtered through that intellect. Some of it much more primal. It seems to me a perfectly reasonable use of the word militant. Not only that, but a criticism of his dialectic style was given in the original post, albeit tangentially, and I originally commented to defend him from a misconception that had arisen.

The question I asked was, in essence, the following:

The idea that there exists, or should exist, some power, creative, guiding, saving, explaining, is present in the human mind. This idea usually conceives, implicitly or explicitly, that this power is outside the mind itself. At the very least, almost everyone seeks some kind of moral order, both personal and social, and recognises that it is good that there should be such a thing. Most people seek, or imagine, something more than that, that there life has meaning, and not uncommonly, that that meaning, that purpose, that moral order, is created, or actively imposed, from outside man.

This is not an invention of ‘organised religion’; the fact that large and powerful organizations can exist which take advantage of it merely proves how important that perception is to us.

This is why it is important to explore the question, because ‘god’ undoubtedly exists in the human mind, and is an important part of what we are. Where, then, does it come from? Is it a product of the way the human mind is constructed, does it arise within the mind, as a result, perhaps, of our ability to recognise and reflect on our mortality, but not to understand it or to change it? Is it just a by-product of what we are?

It’s quite possible that one day it can be fully explained through a much more complete understanding of the nature of the mind and the genetics behind it. Not explained away, or some plausible story constructed, but actually explained, by identifying the physiological mechanism that brings it into being. But not yet. We are a very, very long way from being able to explain it properly.

There is another possibility, that it actually does reflect something outside ourselves, that thing we sometimes call god.

The question I asked was, has Richard Dawkins given a convincing explanation of why this last hypothesis is the least parsimonious?

I could have put it in other ways. Has he proved to his own intellectual satisfaction that this last possibility is not true? It isn’t quite the same question, though it’s close enough, and I wish I had asked it that way, because although the question is difficult to frame, there is in fact a simple answer: no, he hasn’t.

His book, The God Delusion, is an attempt to address precisely the question I asked, as I originally asked it. He sets out to consider what causes the sense of a greater, guiding power to arise within mankind, and to take such an important personal and social role, and he considers the possibility, naturally enough, that it could be because there is something outside us which has placed knowledge of itself within us, or that we are capable of identifying. Does he show, at least to his own satisfaction, that it can’t be true? In fact he doesn’t, not completely, and he recognises this fact, although he does conclude that it is very unlikely indeed.

In the first draft of this post I wrote that I imagined Dawkins, privately, to be completely convinced of his position, despite the minimal reservation he expresses in the book. But, oddly enough, right on cue, comes this debate, in which he states his position as that of an agnostic, almost but not quite convinced intellectually that there is no sentient creator, but unable to rule it out entirely. The last little bit is belief. It reveals a greater intellectual honesty than I have seen him bring to these discussions before, and is precisely what I was wondering about. Those who claim that ‘Dawkins has proved there is no god’, are talking through their hats, and have themselves failed to understand his arguments and where they lead.

He rejects any attempt to consider god as an old boy on a cloud with a beard and a set of scales, or any variation thereof, because once you posit an omnipotent being that can arbitrarily change reality or our perception of it, it all comes down to how much that being wants to be noticed. Human reason cannot detect such a being. It isn’t the only concept that can be, or has been, posited, that is more or less defined to in such a way as to lie outside the scope of our reason, but it is probably the only one that actually matters. Some people find the idea obviously preposterous, others feel they have actually experienced him. But there’s no point arguing about it intellectually.

He doesn’t consider the god of the creationists either because it isn’t worth arguing about. Creationism is not an intellectual position, it’s just a belief, and one which, unlike the old man on the cloud, is now easily refutable by observation, at least to the extent that it attempts to justify itself by reason.

The god of most believers is not accessible to scientific enquiry and genuinely curious atheists/agnostics know this. The moral systems derived from those beliefs are a matter of debate, ultimately inconclusive and often circular, but productive nonetheless, and necessary. The concepts and limits of right and wrong are defined and redefined constantly by a continuous social negotiation, and if you don’t contribute others will decide what you should and shouldn’t do (even more than they do now). Insofar as the actions of believers have consequences for other people they will be judged in the same way as actions derived from any other source of will or motivation.

Arthur C. Clarke postulated the existence of a china teapot orbiting the moon. The details don’t matter much, the point was to show that there are intrinsically implausible things, things that are almost certain not to exist, but whose non-existence we cannot directly prove. But the difference between the teapot and god is that it is not in the nature of man to imagine there to be a teapot orbiting the moon, or to make spontaneous psychological investment in the existence of that teapot. Clarke’s teapot doesn’t matter to us. God does. We would really like to know whether he is out there, what he is, and what we need to do about it. And as yet, although many people have answered the question to their own psychological satisfaction, and many have not, intellectually there is still no completely definitive answer.

The purpose of this post was to explain the question I’m trying to ask. Inevitably (because I’m me) I have ended up rambling about other things which seemed relevant or appeared to shed some light, but the post is intended as an intellectual enquiry, not a defence of any theological position.

What is it We love When We Love

Every part of the person we love changes, but we still love them. So what is it we love?

Everything about the person we speak of loving changes over time. Every cell in our body is replaced over a period which depends on which source you refer to, but there appears to be no doubt that any given person’s body contains none of the molecules it did some years ago. The few cell types which change over longer periods are not involved in inspiring love.

 

But the slow mutation of tissue is the least of the tricks the world can play on our sense of identity. The person we love can become a physically different person in very immediate, perceptible, tangible ways, as a recent of severe illness, serious accident or by fire, for example, and we don’t necessarily cease to love. A father might discover that his daughter was in fact sired by a passing vacuum cleaner salesmen, but he will still love her, even though that love was initially based on their shared genes.

Emotionally and psychologically a person can experience, again through illness, accident or the degeneracy of age, perhaps, changes so profound that they become, literally, a different person. We love this new person. In some cases there is no consciousness left, and so we love the non-person. We love the dead, who are nothing. When their mind has ceased to work, their senses have stopped perceiving and their body has been dissolved among the five elements, we still love them

In other words, there exist a number of ways in which whatever we imagine led us to love the person in the first place, can be completely destroyed, and yet we do not cease to love.

 We create love within ourselves. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real, but it doesn’t seem to reflect any external reality.