Karma, Chameleon

SILVIA: What, angry, Sir Thurio?  Do you change color?
VALENTINE: Give him leave, madam; he is a kind of chameleon.
THURIO: That hath more mind to feed on your blood than live in your air.

--William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona

In exploring ethical behavior, the next pattern of conflict is the Chameleon.  Specifically, what I call the Chameleon is that behavior that occurs when one is upholding the ethical standards of a surrounding, foreign environment while going against one's own upbringing.  Like the Conformist and the Rebel, the Chameleon is a complicated condition with no easy answers.

A Chameleon can be something as innocent as trying to fit in, or it can be as sinister as using a difference of culture to exploit it.  The Bhopal disaster, for instance, was a direct result of corporate negligence--the company Union Carbide operating in India to exploit cheap labor and substandard safety conditions.

Not all fitting in is bad, as discussed more thoroughly in the posts on the Conformist.  But there is a subtle distinction between operating within one's own background and outside of it.  In the latter, there is an acknowledged, separate community of ethical standards.  You can think of the two ethical systems in terms of a Venn diagram.  In the area of intersection, the Conformist and the Chameleon are one and the same.  Where they diverge is slightly more complex.  The Chameleon is the specific case where one operates outside of one's own background ethics but still within the ethics of a surrounding (but foreign) community.  A good example may be smoking pot in Amsterdam, or Tobias Schneebaum's anthropophage experiences in Keep the River on Your Right.

Like it or not, we carry our cultural ethical upbringing with us.  It is a bias that is difficult to shed.  When we step out of our ethical comfort zones, we do so at a risk.  Sometimes we discover that our own cultural assumptions and biases are incorrect, and that there are other ways of thinking about things that feel "superior."  In other cases, we feel as if there are "backwards" or difficult to understand behaviors, which make us feel that our own culture is "superior."

Though we may want human rights to be universal, there are significant cultural hurdles.  The so-called "prime directive" in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek is a futuristic version of Westphalian sovereignty--that which establishes the boundaries of nation states and allows non-interference in other cultures.  And yet, the world of today is linked at the speed of the Internet and globalization.

If we ignore our own cultural values, we can find ourselves in uncomfortable or dangerous situations.  If we project them, we can find ourselves at risk of insulting the culture we are in.  It is a very fine line, based on the value of mutual respect.

The Prisoner and the Rebel

Like the Conformist, the theme of the Rebel has been explored at great length in the allegorical TV show "The Prisoner."  During a 1977 interview (original link, currently dead) with Warner Troyer, the series' star and creator, Patrick McGoohan explains a bit of the meaning behind the show:

Troyer: For the Village, what was the purpose, the goal?
McGoohan: I think it's going on every day all around us. I had to sign in to get into this joint!
Troyer: (Uh-huh) Downstairs, yeah.
Troyer: Made you angry, too? (Chuckle.)
McGoohan: Slightly, yeah. Pass-keys and, you know, let's go down to the basement and all this. That's Prisonership as far as I'm concerned,and that makes me mad! And that makes me rebel! And that's what the Prisoner was doing, was rebelling against that type of thing!
Troyer: But can you, in everyday life, summon the will and the energy to rebel every time any indignity occurs?
McGoohan: You can't, otherwise you go crazy! You have to live with it. That's what makes us prisoners! You can't totally rebel, otherwise you have to go live on your own, on a desert island. It's as simple as that.

In the final episode, "Fall Out," another young member of the Village, Number 48 (played by Alexis Kanner), is on trial for the simple rebellion of "youth."  Without revealing too much about the controversial ending of the series, we are confronted with the reality that too much rebellion is perhaps as difficult as too much conformity.  Number 6, when asked to address the assembly, can only mutter "I feel..." before he is interrupted by everyone else speaking simultaneously.  The apocalyptic destruction of the Village itself is a vision of the consequences of unchecked rebellion.  In the TV interview, McGoohan says:

McGoohan: I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself, and that goes with oneself, a two-handed pair with oneself and progress. I think we're gonna take good care of this planet shortly. They're making bigger and better bombs, faster planes, and all this stuff one day, I hate to say it, there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn't been used and that thing is gonna be used unless...I don't know how we're gonna stop it, no[w] it's too late, I think.

These themes are nothing new, though technology has made the stakes much higher.  The movement of Romanticism, placing an emphasis on the aesthetic experience, regardless of the consequences, led to a darker counter-Romanticist movement.  Quite possibly, the most famous or archetypal example of this movement is Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein.  The warning is stark: with every new technology (or, in Spider-Man's case, super-power), there are consequences.  Responsibility has to evolve in tandem.  Who can resist the lure of the Ring of Gyges?  Can it be tamed, like Boromir and other characters wish (in vain), in Lord of the Rings?  Or does all new power have to be thrust into the fires of Mount Doom, never to be used again?  Like the Invisible Man, will we all simply go mad with its power?


If the Rebel is thrust into the center of these questions, the consequences can be truly disastrous.  And yet, the Rebel is usually at the center of progress in the first place.  Imagine if we all thought the same thoughts, behaved the same way, and reacted the same way to everything we encountered.  Like the Parable of the Roast, we would never recognize an inefficiency, let alone seek out a way to improve it.  It was only the questioning of the Church's spiritual monopoly and earthly authority during the Renaissance that led to the Enlightenment (in contrast to Pope Benedict XVI's view of history), resulting in a new age of science and technology.  J. Robert Oppenheimer's innovations into the atomic bomb resulted in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which led him to reverse his personal stance and lobby against its future use.

I feel

Parable of the Roast

Another example of the dangerous side of the Conformist can be illustrated in a hand-me-down tale that I like to call "The Parable of the Roast."  I have heard several variants of this tale, so do not be surprised if it sounds familiar.

A young mother is preparing a roast for dinner.  Her daughter asks her, "mommy, why do you cut the ends off the roast before sticking it into the oven?"  The mother is flabbergasted.  "Gee, I don't know why, but my mother always did it that way."  They decide to ask the little girl's grandmother.  "Grandmother, in preparing a roast, why do we cut off the ends before sticking it into the oven?"  "I don't know," the grandmother replies, "but my mother always did it that way."  They decide to ask the venerable great-grandmother.  "Great-grandmother, why do we cut off the ends of the roast before putting it into the oven?"  "I don't know why you cut off the ends of your roasts," she replies, "but in my day, we had much smaller ovens and had to cut the ends off in order for it to fit."

The TV show "The Prisoner" shows how the Conformist and the dangers of a conformist society can lead to destructive behavior, as featured prominently in the excellent episode "A Change of Mind."

The Conformist

"Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away;
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air."

In the 1960's, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a now famous experiment.  The motivation behind the experiment was to test the limits of conformity, though it led to a more serious discussion of the ethics of deception in psychology experiments.  Subjects were told to administer electric shocks to a (unreal) patient who is taking a test.  The results were that 65% of the subjects (ages 26 to 40) administered shocks that they knew were fatal.

"You'd better watch out!
There may be dogs about"

In another experiment, psychologist Solomon Asch found that 75% of subjects would give an incorrect answer in a test if it was acknowledged by a larger group as the "correct" one.

"I looked over Jordan, and I've seen
Things are not what they seem."

As a young student on the streets of Boston, I would watch in horror as pedestrians would cross an intersection against the light, simply because another person in front of them did so--sometimes putting themselves in considerable danger without even paying much attention.  I began to wonder, are people sheep, as George Orwell has generally suggested?  And if so, is the controversial "Nuremburg Defense" ethically valid? 

"That's what you get for pretending the danger's not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel."

And yet, some element of conformity is in all of us.  Most of us don't wear clown suits to work because it would attract unwanted attention.  Even for the freethinking individual, there are some aspects of our lives that we surrender to the overwhelming herd.

"What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes."

It takes a great deal of social energy not to conform.  And yet, clearly a great deal of unethical behavior can arise from accepting the status quo.  In a previous post, I presented the hypothetical Culture 1 as a culture that tolerates lying.  And yet, lying is widely regarded as unethical behavior.  Still, there are real world cultures that tolerate certain kinds of lying and consider it unwise not to lie.  Do we have the right to criticize that behavior as unethical?

"Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is not a bad dream."

Spider-Man's famous mantra "with great power comes great responsibility" and his tragic origin demonstrate that some level of awareness and participation in ethics is required of all of us--especially by those who wield the most power.

And yet, a certain level of compassion is also required for judging those who do conform.

Lyrics: Pink Floyd, "Sheep"

Nihilism and Nature

When praying mantises mate, the female bites off the head of the male and consumes him.  Some research has shown that this may even be a strategy that helps with fertilization.  While the late Stephen Jay Gould considers sexual cannibalism to be statistically insignificant in prevalence in nature, one cannot ignore that it is an existing pattern.  If nature is defined by its least common denominator, everything about it is as brutally violent as violence can be.

So how does one consider the end of the slippery slope in nature, where violence is an end to itself?

I recall one conversation I had with a family member.  "Everything has a purpose in nature," that family member said.  "Everything...except war.  War serves no purpose whatsoever."

Had I been a bit more enlightened, I would have recognized that the family member was baiting me.  "War does serve a purpose," I said.  "It happens in nature."  Suddenly I was Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and George W. Bush all rolled into one.  I was looked upon with such horror and incredulity.  I am an evil man, evidently, simply because I think war has a purpose.  Many species of animals go to war.  Ants.  Chimpanzees.  And, of course, humans.  Even at the time of this discussion, I identified as a humanist and anti-war.  What I failed to realize was that the discussion was baited as to leave no room to distinguish between what has a purpose in nature and what has a utility for humanist ends--a linguistic trap.

Simple, black-and-white terms leave little room for the gray area known as real life.  Unfortunately, it is much easier to follow simple black-and-white rules most of the time than to channel individual thought all of the time.  Structure and order, simplicity and anti-intellectualism are ways in which the Conformist (discussed later) lives in harmony within the surrounding environment and conserves energy.

Moral relativism, in the slippery slope, leads to some of the following possibilities:

1. Nihilism: "every man for himself, and God against all."
2. Humanism: humans as ends to themselves.
3. A point of stasis: an evolving, codified set of practical ethics based on science and prevailing views.

None of these seem particularly dictatorial; nor are these results mutually exclusive.  In fact, one can go so far as to believe them all at the same time.

Equal vs. Equitable

The tenets of many human -isms begin with a simple feel-good statement: all humans are created equal.  But, as George Orwell has infamously pointed out, this degenerates into "some animals are more equal than others."

Folks, I hate to be the bearer of bad news.  We were not created equal.  There is a reason why Michael Jordan plays basketball well and I don't.  Some people are smarter than others.  Some have more musical talent.  And so on.  There is not even an implied parity in nature.  Just because somebody is good at math, it doesn't mean they suck at sports.  Some people are superior in every way (physically, mentally, etc.) than other people.  Some people, for example, are born severely physically and mentally challenged.

Now before we start to go down the slippery slope of Darwin to Nietzsche down into the Third Reich, this inequality is no basis for an unfair treatment based on an existing condition.  In the eyes of an objective judge, we would all like to be given a fair shake.  Civil rights, for instance, is rooted in equal treatment regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender, or religion (to name a few categories).  We would like to see this courtesy extended to most other aspects of appearance (well, maybe not to personal hygiene--I'd hate to see a National Association for the Advancement of the Smelly).

I bring up this point not because I am a language nerd, but because the distinction is important when dealing with some limitations in Immanuel Kant's first formulation.  If I am comfortable in a world that tolerates stealing but punishes lies severely, while you come from a world where lies are acceptable but stealing is intolerable, it does not mean that we have "incorrect" or "inconsistent" moral systems.  It means that we have different cultural values.  What is troubling to one person is not going to be the same thing to someone else.  If we call the culture that tolerates stealing "Culture A" and the culture that tolerates lying "Culture 1," let's examine some of the possibilities of what happens when they interact:

1. Within the domain of Culture 1 (tolerates lying, not stealing), someone from Culture 1 lies. 
2. Within the domain of Culture 1, someone from Culture 1 steals.
3. Within the domain of Culture A (tolerates stealing, not lying), someone from Culture 1 steals.
4. Within the domain of Culture A, someone from Culture 1 lies.

Ignoring the reciprocal scenarios as mirror images of these four cases, let's take a look at them in more detail.

In the first case, you have someone operating consistently within their own culture.  In the second case, we have a person rebelling against their own culture.  In the third case, we have someone assimilating themselves into a foreign culture.  Finally, in the last case, we have someone upholding their own culture against the prevailing attitude of the foreign culture.  I call these scenarios "the Conformist", "the Rebel", "the Chameleon", and "the Ugly American."  Each case has its own set of issues, which I will delve into further.  In the search for Universal Human Rights, these scenarios emerge not only from geographically isolated peoples, but in the melting pot of the United States with its emphasis on individuality, between individuals.

As mentioned in previous posts, Pope Benedict XVI's condemnation of Western individuality as a "Dictatorship of Relativism" shows a lack of respect and understanding.   It also shows a lack of appreciation of the benefits it has long brought the world--benefits he claims were sprung from Christianity.  Although this demonstrates a clash of two different systems of values, he also has a valid point that I will also delve into further: fear and moral nihilism.  Hyper-individual cultures could ostensibly lead to complete anarchy, where every individual is allowed to set the moral and ethical standards for him or herself.  I have already demonstrated, through the Little Old Lady Experiment, just how the slippery slope argument fails to produce actual fruit.  Still, I believe I have much more ground to cover in nature's patterns, what human societies are capable of, and what leads cultures to anti-human behavior, violence, and terror.

One more about that Golden Rule thing...

Tolerance for other religions, which includes the category of non-believers as well, can only occur if there is a mutual respect for the other person's point of view.  But such a respect can only be established if the following conditions are met:

• No assumption of superiority.  This is, perhaps, the most difficult to overcome.  Herr Ratzinger, for instance, loses points when he insists that Christianity is the cause of the Enlightenment (it wasn't) or that Christian values are what exclusively hold society and families together (they aren't).  I may seem a bit of a hypocrite for being the one to point these out, but I do not do so under the assumption that Christianity is somehow inherently flawed as a religion or point of view.  It only takes a quick perusal at Veritatis Splendor, for instance, to see why its language shows a Christian-superior attitude that I do not abide.
• No recruitment drive.  It is a moral offense to try to recruit someone, whose soul or life is seen as in "dire peril" simply because they do not believe the same things that you do.  Of course, in order to even begin a recruitment drive, you have to start with an assumption of superiority in the first place.  If you want people to join your cause, lead by example, not through propaganda.  This goes for Christopher Hitchens as easily as it does for Jack Chick.  Tone it down a bit, and realize that we are all different people and that we are never going to recruit certain people to our cause, no matter how we try.
• Keep the supernatural personal, but consider that objective reality wins.  Even if you are the most die-hard atheist, you have to come to terms with the fact that the human brain is designed to pick up patterns and draw connections that may not be logical or have any rational basis.  For instance, something like this may not be easily explained by science, but perhaps it does not have to be in order for us all to draw individual, personal conclusions.  On the other hand, your personal faith is not going to help you overcome gravity enough to enable you to jump from the top of a skyscraper, nor would it help you argue your way out of a parking ticket.  There is a concrete universe with concrete laws, and human ethical systems that exist outside of the realm of personal faith.
• In the gray zone of ethical dilemmas, consider compassion for existing fellow human beings who have equal rights as the primary objective.  If possible, err on the side of caution.  But consider the difference between equal and equitable, as discussed in detail later.  The biological definition of human life not a single, easily explained binary state, and it is less than compassionate to condemn others for seeing it differently than you.  To the converse, one who is biologically human according to all science is an ethical end.

State of Organized Religion in the United States

There is usually a back and forth in the general trend in general, but my friend Kingtycoon shared an interesting article on the current state which indicates a decline in organized religion in the United States.

If any religion ceases to match human social needs, it ceases to be relevant.  Nevertheless, there are still other contributing factors to church attendance: the increasing isolation of the nuclear family, the formulation of other social communities, and, well, let's face it: church is boring.

All that aside, that crisis is for the churches to resolve.  They can no longer hold folks hostage with social or emotional blackmail, when perfectly acceptable social outlets exist elsewhere.  Openly advocating creationism or intelligent design, for instance, has put some sects at odds with science that has existed for over a hundred and fifty years.  Corruption, child molestation, and inequality within the clerical structure have caused divisions from within.  It should be no wonder that the younger generation looks elsewhere for spiritual guidance.

Again, I want to reiterate my own ethics here: I do not advocate against or in favor of any particular set of personal spiritual beliefs or deity.  However, I do want ethical progress to improve from both within and without organized religion.

An Ethical Dilemma

"Ethics," complains Caspar at the beginning of the Coen Brothers' movie Miller's Crossing.  "It's a wrong situation.  It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from a fixed fight.  Now if you can't trust a fix, what can you trust?"  The irony is comical.  Later, Caspar's contradiction catches up with him.  "Bluepoint sayin' we should double-cross you.  You double-cross once, where's it all end?  An interesting ethical question."  Caspar is a man caught in his own web of hypocrisy: a violation of Kant's first formulation.

 In the same film, the main character Tom represents the voice of ethical enlightenment (according to Kant).  In the world of gritty Chicago gangsters, Tom takes responsibility for his actions.  He insists on settling his own debt when it would be easier to accept a handout.  He admits to his boss that he has been sleeping with his girlfriend, Verna, putting himself at considerable risk.  And he treats Bernie as a human end to himself, though it comes back to bite him later (fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me).

And yet, surely none of us want to live a world of corruption, murder, and back-stabbing.  There is something deeply profound about Tom's hat floating away from him in a dream.  He yearns, perhaps, for a world in which people are ethically consistent; and yet, that world eludes him, and he is forced to treat a human being not as an end.  "Look into your heart," he is begged by Bernie.  "What heart?" Tom is forced to answer.

My sister, upon reading the start of this blog, has pointed out something missing that I have not yet gotten to: the role of judgment.  There is no moral right or wrong without judgment.  When Tom murders Bernie in Miller's Crossing, is the act justified?  We all may have different individual answers, and we all have to concur that the answer is complex, and not just a simple matter of a single act of violence.

It would not be right, or even feasible, to assume that one moral viewpoint can be used to address all complex moral situations.  The search for Universal Law seems fleeting--much like Tom's hat in Miller's Crossing.  And yet, still we have plenty of counterexamples of unquestionably immoral behavior.

Judgment is a process, not a simple set of rules.  It cannot be boiled down to a simple set of rules (ten commandments, one golden rule, etc.).  It has to built up based on practical, relevant social factors.  It has to be fair (not blind), and it has to consider individuals' human rights.

Humanism as a Positive End

In my previous post, I outlined a basis for moral action, based on a rather simplified alteration of Kant's first formulation.  I believe something similar happens to us all on an unconscious level.  We may return a lost item because it feels right to make the world a better place.  Like I've stated, I also believe that feeling comes from our evolution as a species and is codified in our DNA.  And yet, clearly there are still fundamental differences between what different people see as right and wrong in so many ways.

Take, for example, some of the issues relevant to our time: abortion and homosexuality.  I pick these to because 1) as previously mentioned, Ratzinger sees them both as morally wrong, 2) Western countries see them as largely morally defensible, and 3) science has, at least in part, been responsible for a shift in these values.  I will explore both of them in more detail later, but in the meantime I use them to illustrate how differing moral viewpoints can come about even in response to our gut instincts about what feels right.

What feels right is only a starting point.  Our DNA, our bestial natures, and our historical legacies are also only starting points.  Again, we have to consider that reshaping our attitudes is necessary when we have access to new information.  We also have to consider that we may still have immoral or amoral instincts, muscles that feel a need to flex even if we no longer (currently) need them.  Just because we have a gene for cannibalism, it doesn't mean we need to resort to it unless we are truly pressed for survival.

By contrast, no self-respecting deity would throw human beings into a world where adaptive nature is important, but restrict us from making necessary adaptations through difficult, if not impossible, sets of rules.  The food taboos of Kashrut or haram / halal, for instance, would suddenly cease to become relevant if pork were all that we had available to eat.  Conversely, if pork were all we had available to eat for a while, then other food resources were made available again, some people would choose to revert to the old taboos while others would retain it in their diet.  Some of the ones who had chosen to revert to the old taboos may even retain a feeling of guilt or shame for that period of time.

The tenets of Secular Humanism include:

• Building a better world.
• Fulfillment, growth, and creativity.
• A search for an objective truth.
• A commitment to ethics.
• Focus on this life as an immediate primary concern, not on an afterlife.
• Scientific method, observation, and empirical facts triumph over beliefs and gut feelings.

These principles that can be upheld independent of ones own personal religious or spiritual stance, without requiring any surrender or change of belief.  We all have gut feelings.  Even scientific method is useless without the ability to formulate a hypothesis--hypotheses can only be formed from a place of curiosity, creativity, and intuition.  Conversely, any religious stance can be pro-human or anti-human.  Today, fundamentalist Islam, Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, and many other major world religions are on a precipice, having taken a decidedly anti-humanist stance.  In Western culture, capitalism has become the wolf that is devouring its own young.  It is time to adopt our values to a pro-human agenda, lest we perpetuate the suffering that exists today.

Positive and Negative

I've deliberately tried to stay within the realm of relatively "easy to follow."  Compare and contrast with the nuances between positivism, antipositivism, logical positivism, rationalism, constructive empiricism, scientific realism, and postpositivism.  Within the realm of logical and rational philosophical discussion, there is even argument about how to argue.  For the majority of us who are not academics, philosophy seems unapproachable unless you have devoted years of study and have received a PhD. in a field that is going to guarantee eternal unemployment.

And yet, philosophy and ethics are at the center of all of our own personal experiences.

I am not an anti-intellectual and would encourage more, rather than less, reading about all of the above subjects.  However, I do believe that most of us lack practical ethics that be easily explained and rationalized.  It is no wonder that we rely on religious texts as a backup.  We do not need to justify our actions if we can claim it has already been said in print by an unquestionable authority, or if we can rely on a religious leader's selective interpretation of something in print.

In going back to Immanuel Kant's first formulation, here's how I think it can be constructively rephrased in a way that can appeal to intellectuals and practical people alike.

Imagine, even if you don't believe it, that you have unlimited free will.  You can choose to act morally or immorally according to your own inner compass.  Imagine that there is absolute moral relativism, and anything goes.

Now imagine that there are two possible worlds out there.  In one world, everyone acts like selfish animals.  We are beasts, fighting each other for survival.  We murder, steal, rape, pillage.  Nature shows that such scenarios do exist--when resources are low, or when there is the perception that resources are low, even if they are not.

Next, imagine that in the other world, people respect each other.  They hesitate before killing, stealing, littering, etc.  People generally treat each other kindly.  They cooperate in order to share resources, rather than hoard.  We are all caretakers of our environment, stewards in making our own existence sustainable and happy.  We live long, healthy lives.

Now assume that you are confronted with a moral choice: be moral, or don't.  Each time you make an immoral choice, you are moving the universe closer to the first universe.  Each time you make a constructive choice, you move the universe closer to the second.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility...

BBC News ran an article about superheroes and philosophy.  The intersection of pop culture and ethical progress is an interesting one, but it really shouldn't be any surprise that comic books, in particular, are closely tied (I also recommend the book Superheroes and Philosophy to anyone who may be further interested in the subject).  Comic books:

• Have long-standing geek appeal.
• Are closely tied to myth.
• Have been written by philosophically-minded writers.

These days, even the president of the United States is a comic book nerd.

I know this is a slight digression from the topic at hand, but I wanted to give everyone fair warning if I start to use comic books, Coen Brothers movies, or other pop culture elements in some of my posts.

"With great power comes great responsibility
Is the catch phrase of old Uncle Ben.
And in case you missed it, they'll say the line
Again and again and again."

--"Weird Al" Yankovic, "Ode to a Superhero"

The Little Old Lady Experiment

According to Herr Ratzinger, faith and hope are exactly the same thing.  In other words, Christianity specifically, and Catholicism in particular, has the monopoly on hope:

"Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were 'without hope and without God in the world' (Eph 2:12). Of course he knew they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths. Notwithstanding their gods, they were 'without God' and consequently found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recidimus (How quickly we fall back from nothing to nothing)."

While he's rewriting history, he may as well go a bit further:

"From the beginning, Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the Logos, as the religion according to reason...It has always defined men, all men without distinction, as creatures and images of God, proclaiming for them...the same dignity. In this connection, the Enlightenment is of Christian origin and it is no accident that it was born precisely and exclusively in the realm of the Christian faith" [alexander drummer (29 July 2005). "Address on Christianity as the Religion according to Reason"].

So Christianity is now setting itself up as the religion of reason and the cause of the Enlightenment (wait--don't we use Arabic numerals, just to name one rather glaring counterexample).  Don't non-Christians have any say in this?  How would Galileo have felt about it?

The word preposterous has an interesting origin: putting what is normally first (pre) backwards (post).  As an adjective, I think it describes Benedict XVI's encyclical rather well.

So, all you other faiths of the world: please tell me there is some concept of hope that does not rely on the existence of a Christian deity.

I am going to demonstrate, through a rather crude hypothetical experiment, how hope requires no deity at all, but rather is an intrinsic part of human nature.  I call it the "Little Old Lady Experiment."

In today's world, it is hard not to be cynical.  We assume the worst about other people.  We even expect it.  But, really, just how common is evil?  Sure, we all have our dark sides, but haven't you ever wondered, what percentage of the human population is really out to get you?

Let's start by assuming the worst of everyone.  In order to test this hypothesis, we perform an interesting social experiment.  Let's assume that you can perform the same experiment using a cultural equivalent, just in case you feel there may be a cultural bias to the experiment itself.  Start with a little old lady, or the cultural equivalent of a little old lady.  Now let's imagine the worst neighborhood we can imagine: again, the same culture as the little old lady.  Put her there in the worst hour of the day, say, for example, the middle of the night.  Now, surrounded by random street people in that neighborhood, have her drop her purse.

How often, do you think, somebody will say: "hey, lady, you dropped your purse"?

Think about it hard enough, and I think you will find that the answers will probably surprise you.  Deep down you know that most of the time somebody, even the person you may think the worst of, will be compelled to do the right thing.

I would someday like to see this social experiment actually conducted.  But in the meantime, I will rely on similar experiments for data.  In Freakonomics, a bagel salesman modeled a business by knowing that customers will be honest 80 to 90 percent of the time.

In other words, hope isn't just a phenomenon that is tied to belief in a deity.  There is something within all of us that generally wants to do the right thing most of the time.  Biologically, we are all social creatures. We all want to be successful, and are programmed to try to be beneficial more often than not.  If anything, it feels alien to get something for nothing, or to take advantage of a helpless person or situation.  It feels sadistic to take advantage, and we all feel guilty when we do.  And when we do something immoral, we immediately seek approval from other human beings in order to justify it, out of insecurity.

I would argue that altruism is not motivated by personal choice, but is hardwired in our DNA.

No, You Kant (Yes, You Kan)

I consider Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals to be one of the most difficult books, if not the most difficult book, that I have ever read.  It is significantly shorter than either Finnegans Wake or Gödel, Escher, Bach, yet somehow it seems far more dense in its content.  It is riddled with "a priori" and "a posteriori" statements that require multiple readings in order to parse, let a lone follow.  In fact, it is so dense as to almost prove unreadable--making it far easier to read, for example, a scholar's summary.  The only danger with doing so, however, is that it is subject to that scholar's interpretation.  Nevertheless, I should like to point out the "good bits" with my own selective, somewhat non-scholarly filter (wikipedia).

The first formulation, or "Formula of Universal Law," basically says, start with a maxim that you want to test for moral value.  Examine the maxim in a hypothetical world where it happens.  Imagine yourself on the receiving end (or as any other participant) in that maxim.  If there are inconsistencies in moral values, then the behavior is not acceptable.  If it is consistent, it is moral.  In some sense, this is a more secular version of the so-called "Golden Rule" (which is itself not entirely dissimilar from Hammurabi's Code).  Reciprocity and consistency: what is good for you is good for everyone, and vice-versa.

The second and third formulations say something that is, in my opinion, far more important.  Without them, it is very easy to find significant flaws in the first formulation.  These formulations say that the ends to not justify the means, but that human beings are ends to themselves, and all rational, thinking individuals are ends of the universe.  In the previously mentioned Veritatis Splendor (paragraph 72), Pope John Paul II claims that this is a long held Catholic Church position, though it emanates from Divine Law rather than reason, while Joseph Ratzinger calls Kant's philosophy a "self-limitation of reason" that is responsible for totalitarianism and ecological disaster.  How easy it is to revise history and claim credit for it, considering that Kant's philosophy was developed in opposition to the long-held Catholic position.

Regardless of where the second and third formulations actually originated (Kant's work shows it can be proven through secular means, the Catholic popes say Divine Law, while I think it comes from human nature, survival, and DNA--more on this later), there is something that intrinsically "feels good" about them and is relatively consistent with practically moral value systems.  It is not sufficient that one ends up with good results if the intentions of those results are not.  In other words, Dick Cheney, beware (here and here), since there is yet to be a consistent moral system that fits any litmus test that would condone your behavior (there is a reason Niccolò Machiavelli's work is infamous).

Let's go back to the first formulation.  It is a bit weak.  If one or more people decide that anthropophagy is perfectly acceptable in their vision of the universe, it is at odds with the rest of us.  The second and third propositions aren't exactly helpful, either.  For example, the Korowai tribe of Papua New Guinea is still believed to engage in anthropophagy, though those reports may have been exaggerated.  If, for example, necro-cannibalism is still practiced by an aboriginal tribe (meaning that the sacrifice has died and consented to be eaten upon death), is that practice at odds with Natural Law or human rights?  If you start to make enough exceptions, then the slippery slope that Pope John Paul II warns against becomes the natural state of the world.

Another problem with the first formulation is its converse: if something is inconsistent, does that automatically make it immoral?  An inconsistency (e.g., "do as I say, not as I do") may be seen as a "Universal Hypocrisy" in light of that first formulation, and yet, no harm may be intended nor come from it.  Even within one's own behavior may be wholly inconsistent.  Walt Whitman says, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."  I think this is a beautiful sentiment, and yet, I do not think I am immoral simply because it resonates with me.

Fortunately, philosophy does not have to end with Immanuel Kant, or even the likes of Catholic Popes whose agenda represents a moral regression.

Boldly, I am going to attempt to reframe the first formulation in an entirely different way.  I plan to deal with both of its flaws individually.  The first I will deal with in an "incremental" approach towards a humanist paradise (in this world, not the next one), while for the second I will examine the difference between equality and what I term equitability (the real word is actually equitableness).

Because God Said So

The rules for moral and ethical conduct are not truly handed down to us by our parents, our priests, or our teachers.  They do not come codified in any book.  And they are never the literal, spoken word of any deity.  As human beings, we don't do things because God told us to do them (unless, of course, your interpretation is that God is our collective unconscious).

We do what we feel is right because of our needs and our nature.

One may choose to obey a particular interpretation of moral conduct as transliterated in a specific book or set of books.  Yet, the more restrictive the interpretation, the less its umbrella covers the breadth of human experience and desire.  A falling out with one's faith is inevitable in any situation where those rules are in conflict with one's nature.  And nature, one way or another, always wins.

If the power of human imagination can create the concept of the Trinity to resolve textual paradoxes, how can it not fathom a creator that speaks through natural forces rather than in texts--and choose to reinterpret those text under a more natural (and scientific) set of rules?

Rather than call specific religious institutions and spiritual leaders on the carpet, I would instead challenge them to adapt to human needs rather than stay at odds with them.  This means accepting certain things they would have previously felt as "wrong" only because it is spelled out as such in a text somewhere, or because it is something that is "wrong" for them, personally--but not universally wrong for all human beings at all times.

Our conscience warns us when we do things that are out of step with our own nature.  There is a different reaction, almost a "fight or flight" instinct, that kicks in when we do things that are in conflict with our social environment.  Both are powerful forces and very natural instincts.  The latter encourages us to move on to a social group that is more in line with our values, but the former puts us at odds with ourselves.  Often a self-directed conflict ends in suicide.  The number of suicide-related casualties due to religious or other social peer pressure is inestimable (the CDC puts this rate at around 4,500 teen suicides per year in the United States, with over 100,000 teen suicide attempts).  Is it any wonder that the majority of such casualties occur during and around puberty, when we are suddenly aware of the pressures to behave one way but our natures direct us otherwise?

The Beginning, and End of Moral Relativism

I have called moral relativism a "straw man."  And I believe it is.

People who would identify as moral relativists are at a disadvantage: there are things that they themselves would have a hard time being able to justify doing.  We all have things that make us uncomfortable.  My last post, for example, about anthropophagy, is something that I would have a hard time justifying.  Maybe, if by some freak accident, I was trapped and forced to, my biological programming would take over...but I am thankful that I have not been there, in such a dark place.

I consider myself a pacifist and a humanist.  Even still, I do not doubt that my biological hard-wiring is there.  Should the need arise, I would not hesitate to protect myself.  But, again, I am thankful that my circumstances have been fortunate.

Murder, war, death: these are all part of nature.  We are genetically programmed to survive and adapt.  But there is a difference between having these dormant traits and acting upon them when they are no longer required.

Where moral relativism ends is where complex societies begin.  Once we have domesticated animals, planted crops, have sources of fresh water, access to shelter, etc., the need to flex those war muscles approaches zero.  We start to "feel" that murder and war is wrong because we no longer have those needs, in much the same way that cannibalism now "feels" wrong.

Universal human rights, Natural Law, or whatever labels you choose to give them, are those properties that emerge once we start to have our needs addressed.  No one can deny that they exist because they, too, are part of our genetic programming.  Something "feels wrong" for a reason--notably because those traits, if unchecked, can lead to destructive consequences.  And sometimes what "feels wrong" flies in the face of common sense or consistent ethical behavior.

Anthropophagy

In Discovery Channel's series Planet Earth, a tribe of chimpanzees is gathering.  Their purpose?  To attack a rival tribe of chimpanzees.  Gathering up sticks to use as weapons, they ambush the rival tribe.  It is a slaughter.  When the carnage is complete, the tribe consumes the flesh of its victims.  The narrator's voice, Sigourney Weaver, says something to the effect of, "no one knows why they do this..."

I am reminded immediately of Tobias Schneebaum's memoir Keep the River on Your Right.  In it, young Mr. Schneebaum loses himself in the forests of South America.  Finding himself among a tribe of indigenous people, he gains their acceptance, then integrates with them.  Before long, he finds himself attacking a village, slaughtering the men, kidnapping the women, then consuming the flesh of his victims.

Opponents of moral relativism point out that certain things feel wrong to us.  Sometimes cannibalism (or, as a pre-colonial word, anthropophagy) is used as a counterexample to provoke an emotional reaction against it.  Murder is a far more frequently used counterexample.  However, murder is far more widespread and more generally condoned in some form or other in almost any society.  By contrast, anthropophagy is extremely rare.  It is also far more difficult to come up with any justification for it.  Personally, the idea puts me off my lunch.  It is the stuff of horror movies.

Is our revulsion, our negative reaction to it, something that is intrinsic to human nature?  Is anthropophagy simply an aberrant act, performed by a few sociopaths, or people who are "not right in the head?"  Is the revulsion I feel merely a Western-centric attitude?

When the Donner-Reed Party crossed the Sierra Nevada Mountains and became trapped by the snow, at least nineteen, but probably more, of its members were eaten in order to survive.  Some of them were probably killed exclusively for the purpose of being eaten.  Notably, these people were not eaten solely by the male members of the party, but, more frequently, by the women and children.  Interestingly, it was the women and children above age 6 who were the most adaptable and able to survive.

Scientific research has confirmed that we carry a gene that could have only served one purpose: protection against a prion that is present in human brain tissue.  Like it or not, our ancestors were cannibals.  And we carry those genes, too, meaning that, yes, from nature's standpoint, we are cannibals, too.

Veritatis Splendor

Pope John Paul II left Catholicism with a dangerous legacy.  No, it wasn't just AIDS, though he is partially responsible for that epidemic, too.  It was a holy writ, or encyclical called Veritatus Splendor.

I would not be writing about it in such hostile terms if not for his successor, one Joseph Ratzinger, or Pope Benedict XVI.  Here's what the German-born inquisitor has to say:


"Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism  which, recognising nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own ego." (original source http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2005/june/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20050606_convegno-famiglia_en.html).

This sounds rather innocuous so far.  I mean, moral relativism = wrong, selfishness = wrong.  It would be easy to dismiss moral relativism as a bogeyman or straw man and just nod about the selfishness part.  But he goes on:

"The various forms of the dissolution of matrimony today, like free unions, trial marriages and going up to pseudo-matrimonies by people of the same sex, are rather expressions of an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man...from here it becomes all the more clear how contrary it is to human love, to the profound vocation of man and woman, to systematically close their union to the gift of life, and even worse to suppress or tamper with the life that is born." (http://www1.wsvn.com/news/articles/world/DBB1185/)

In other words, he uses the moral relativism argument to push an agenda: namely, the agenda of Catholicism and spiritual monopoly.  In The Grand Inquisitor Manual, Jonathan Kirsch shows how the fundamentals of Catholicism have not changed.

The argument of moral relativism vs. the concept of Natural Law or universal human law is a very old debate.

Is there such a thing as universal human law, or Natural Law?  Are our morals entirely subjective?  Are morals only relevant within a specific cultural context?  What is ethical behavior?

In the next few posts, I will explore a few of these points.  As you can see, I differ greatly from Mr. Ratzinger.  If there is anything that is dangerous and contrary to the human condition, it is a monopoly of ideas.  Beware of anyone who comes to you and says, "the only way is like this."

About the Title

Werner Herzog once said that the state of the natural world was one of "chaos, hostility, and murder."  In a sense, he is paraphrasing Mr. Thomas Hobbes' sentiment that life is "poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  Dr. Samuel Johnson says, "he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

The natural state of human beings is not always pleasant.  In fact, our genetic programming frequently proves quite to the contrary.  Still, I cannot fathom that we are not born from a masochistic concept such as original sin.  I like to think that our genetic code is there for a reason, and that reason is keyed to survival, not metaphysical punishment.

I believe that why we are depends largely on what we are.  If we can understand what we are and how we got there, then we can make conscious choices about where we are and where we should go.  Science has been making very significant strides in this department, thanks largely to the Human Genome Project.

Still, there are those forces out there who oppose this sort of enlightenment, and would end proponents of science.  The list of martyrs includes Galileo Galilei, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, Mikolaj Kopernik, and even Charles Darwin--all persecuted, suppressed, and feared for simply discovering certain truths that were already there, only because those truths flew in the face of words already written and deemed sacred, immutable, or unquestionable.

No institution, group, clan, or confederacy should need to fear knowledge.  The tighter any orthodoxy clings to a fiction, the easier its constituency is squeezed out of its grasp.  Information wants to be free.

More (an introduction)

In Michael Ruse's most excellent introduction to Bertrand Russell's Religion and Science (Oxford University Press, 1961), he outlines four main philosophical viewpoints.  One is an "opposition" or "warfare" between religion and science.  Another is a separation between the two, insisting that "how" and "why" are different fundamental types of questions.  A third viewpoint is that of a dialogue between the two.  Finally, the last he outlines is an integration between religion and science.

Now we are in the 21st century.

In some areas of the world, religious fundamentalism is on the rise.  In other areas, people are increasingly identifying more as spiritual than religious.  Mainstream atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have adopted a hard-line anti-religious stance.

In the meantime, technology is advancing, advancing, advancing.  We are consuming far more than we produce, overpopulating, and living longer lives than before.  Our impact on the environment is severe.  And yet, somehow, even though our natural disasters can count lives in the hundreds of thousands, we are troubled with war, famine, and pestilence--all of which feel as if they can be avoided if humans somehow learned how to cooperate rather than compete.

Long ago, a friend of mine once said of me that I have a "sick and twisted sense of morality."  And yet, he meant it as a compliment in one of the nicest ways.  By pointing out that my ethics were consistent, not harmful to anyone, and unique, he held up a mirror that I long needed to look at.

As an atheist, I've been treated by hard-line believers as somehow morally deficient.  As a result, I've gone from alienation and depression to combative bitterness to acceptance and pity.

I have been asked recently if I was an idealist.  My response was that I have a hard time being an -ist of any type.  Because I am human, my opinions have changed over time, sometimes in contradictory ways.  But because I am a thinker, I have allowed myself to change, because the human body of knowledge has also changed.

I think that one of the things that troubles me most is that moral and ethical progress hasn't caught up to where it needs to be.  Secular humanists haven't seemed to "get it" that 1) human beings are superstitious by nature, 2) demeaning superstition is an anti-humanist attitude, and 3) religion gives people a conduit to community that atheists lack (and by "community," I mean that in a very physical sense, not in the virtual, online sense).

What This Blog Is All About

This is decidedly not a "look at me" sort of blog.  It is a conduit into how I think, how I have unconsciously defined my own ethics, how I can live with myself and my choices every day, and how I hope other people can learn what to do, and not to do.

Ethics, philosophy, religion, all the hard stuff.